Abstract
How did the rowdy crowds of Shakespeare’s time turn into the silent seated audiences we know today? This chapter describes the nineteenth century campaigns by western practitioners to retrain spectators into a new mode of quiet receptivity. By forcing audiences to pay attention differently, cultural commentators believed that they could forge a better society for everyone—and yet succeeded instead in widening social divisions. By examining a range of theories about the ‘aesthetic state’ and exploring the ‘culture and civilisation’ movement, this chapter demonstrates how the vision of audiences as quiet recipients of great art is imbricated in a history of white supremacism and anti-working-class prejudice.
Keywords
- Audience attention
- Aesthetic state
- Cultural value
- Civilisation
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Notes
- 1.
For a range of reflections on the democratising power of making art (as opposed to watching/receiving it), see e.g. Jeffers and Moriarty (2017).
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Sedgman, K. (2018). Audience Attention and Aesthetic Experience. In: The Reasonable Audience. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99166-5_3
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