Last night my daughter was baptized at the Wesley Foundation in Boulder. The Foundation is a United Methodist chapel that serves the student population mostly. What is the connection? My wife was the office manager there over a decade ago was baptized there. Eric Smith, in turn, married Paula and I in the Wesley Foundation in 1997.

Does this have anything to do with the Arts? One of the main challenges that the traditional arts seem to be having is engagement. How does an arts venue/product become relevant in a person's life? How does that art engage, nurture, and feed the consumer. How can you even get the consumer give your product a try?

Increasingly, the traditional arts, have lost audience. The institutions that serve and support arts organizations have become out of touch with today's consumer.

The arts community will complain that the general populace aren't engaging and how do we bring the audiences back to the theatre, opera, gallery, museum? How do bring value? Why aren't people engaged any longer? We can't reach them. Why don't they participate?

The nature of arts participation has changed so quickly in the last five years that many organizations/administrators don't recognize that participation is occurring.

• REVVER
• YouTube
• Flickr

These are three examples where participation in the arts runs deep.

Lessons from the Church

What I saw at Wesley, were deeply engaged young people who were playing musical instruments, singing, and using multimedia to strengthen the experience.

You'll notice that on the right of this picture there is a full band setup. On the left there is a screen--the screen had an LCD projector and an iBook being run by a young lady.

The Pastor was a young guy who rock climbs with his congregation. The service was made as accessible as it could be to anybody who was there.

• Listen to your audience
• Give them, at least a bit, of what they want
• When your audience looks at you, they should see themselves
• Alter your perceptions of what participation in the arts really means
• Find out where your targeted audience hangs out and what engages them--then seek them on that turf

Web 2.0 feeds into all of this. Young people hang out in MySpace, FaceBook, Revver, YouTube, SecondLife, and Flickr. They document large parts of their lives. They want to engage and be engaged. They want IN on the conversation, not be a passive viewer.

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