Further Links Contact Us Search Help

Syllabus | Exams | Websites | Glossary | Assessment | Teachers

Visual Arts

Home > Visual Arts > Course Content > Conceptual Framework > Audience

Audience

Visual Arts Stage 6 Syllabus

Students should learn about:

The role and value of the audience as a body of critical consumers. The concept of audience includes art critics and art historians as well as teachers, students, entrepreneurs, patrons and other members of the public. Audiences for works change over time and bring different meaning to artworks, artists and interpretations of the world.

Consider the statements Audiences for works change over time and (audiences) bring different meaning to artworks, artists and interpretations of the world.

In relation to the intentional and functional relations between audience and artist, artworld and artwork, you should anticipate audience responses to your own works and to your own practice.

The concept audience can be evaluated historically or critically.

Consider the following ideas about audience in relation to the syllabus statement, Audiences for works change over time.

Many artworks belong so distinctly to the confines of a particular world in which they were created, that for the most part, they are not regarded by people who are “outside” that world. The audience is specific with a knowledge and interest reflecting a specific world. Such audiences would be art historians, art critics and art collectors whose interests are particular as are those of some teachers and students. The portraits of Frans Hals from Holland in the seventeenth century attracted specific audiences.

Some paintings and sculptures escape the confines of a tradition, context and conventions that initially give them significance. They become known and appreciated by a universal audience. These works have become part of a common knowledge that the whole culture takes for granted as great works of art. They are regarded outside their time and place. Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is an example of this. Everyone is an audience for this artwork.

‘Audience’, to us, is a different concept to what it was in Van Gogh and Rembrandt portrits for example, in the Middle Ages. Then, a largely illiterate audience understood art through an oral tradition. They viewed and “read” the stained glass windows of the medieval cathedrals as a means of learning the Christian way of life.

Nowadays the audience is mass educated; they have mass communication, mass tourism, mass advertising and are continuously and relentlessly exposed to images.

Because of massive social change and mechanical and electronic reproduction of images and text, the contemporary audience is familiar with images of the past as part of everyday life. This exposure to mass images does not, of course, make them an audience of consumers in the artworld.

The more popular the artwork the more cultural meaning is brought to it by the audience. There are many cultural contexts that audiences belong to or are part of. Audiences respond in different ways. Audiences expect change.

Artworks can have multiple audiences. A curator may construct an exhibition to represent a point of view to an audience. But the viewers coming to that exhibition have many different backgrounds and experiences and may form different interpretations. Some responses by audiences are shared but others will be individual responses.

You need to understand how this changes over time and how different audiences have their own experiences which are culture-bound and therefore bring different meanings to their responses.

Margaret Marsh, Visual arts teacher