{"id":1972,"date":"2018-02-10T19:10:18","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T19:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1972"},"modified":"2021-01-13T14:57:30","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T14:57:30","slug":"laura-gascoigne-the-experience-economy-january-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1972","title":{"rendered":"Laura Gascoigne: The Experience Economy &#8211; January 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Laura Gascoigne <br><em>January\/February 2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The buzz of anticipation in the COL Ballroom in Davenport Iowa is audible, the audience murmurating like a flock of starlings; then the first twangs of an electric guitar tuning up, followed by a smoky voice: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to ask one question before we start: Are y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all experienced?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yeah!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d roars the crowd, unleashing a 10-minute guitar solo of yowls, howls, skitterings, screeches and kerrangs. August 1968. How experienced was Hendrix? He was 25.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know whose idea it was to call the band The Jimi Hendrix Experience \u00e2\u20ac\u201c you can bet it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Jimi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but they were ahead of the economic curve. It would be a generation before America woke up to potential value of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthe experience economy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, identified in 1998 by B Joseph Pine II and James H Gilmore in a ground-breaking article in Harvard Business Review: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Commodities are fungible (no, me neither), goods tangible, services intangible, and experiences memorable.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Their italics.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Economic trickle-down effects, like leaks, always debouch in the wrong places and the experience economy has now seeped into the art gallery, where the trickle is threatening to become a flood. One of the first to open the stopcock has been Tate Modern with its immersive Turbine Hall installations, the most memorable to date being Olafur Eliasson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Weather Project, which reportedly drew over two million visitors in 2003. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t remember it, not for the reason I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve forgotten the 1960s but because I was never actually there. Which made me doubly keen not to miss In Real Life, Tate Modern\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s latest show by the Danish-Icelandic artist who \u00e2\u20ac\u0153puts experience at the centre of his art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eliasson really understands this game: his exhibition ticks all Pine and Gilmore\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s boxes, beginning with its theme: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153An effective theme,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d they recommend, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153is concise and compelling.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Where the Hard Rock Caf\u00c3\u00a9 has rock music and Planet Hollywood has Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eliasson has climate change. His show was swarming with Gen Zedders taking selfies of their coloured silhouettes cast on the wall by a row of lighting gels, or dancing in rainbow mist falling from the ceiling. There was something for everyone: for the sober-minded, a wall of before-and-after shots of shrinking glaciers; for the frivolous, a spiral mirror tunnel in which to admire their kaleidoscopic reflections; for the mystically inclined, a longer tunnel of radiant fog that made me feel I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d died and gone to heaven. As fog art goes, the experience was feet-in-front-of-your-face ahead of Gormley\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s miserable pea-souper at the Hayward in 2007. So top marks all round. But at \u00c2\u00a318 a ticket?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When you own a press pass you forget how the other half lives, but I looked this up and then, for comparison, I looked up the prices of other London visitor experiences: London Sea Life Aquarium \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00c2\u00a322; London Dungeon \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00c2\u00a324; Jack the Ripper Walking Tour \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00c2\u00a319 for two (you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d look suspicious going alone); The Slide at the ArcelorMittal Orbit \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00c2\u00a333 for two; The London Bridge Experience \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00c2\u00a336 for two (now half-price, and bring your own narwhal horn); Save Humanity: Cocktail Infused Escape Room for Two at the Grid \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00c2\u00a360, for which you get to play with AI tools, do crazy puzzles and try to defeat an evil corporation (while enriching the one that dreamt this nonsense up).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">OK, the Eliasson experience offers something these don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t: a sense of satisfaction at being on the right side of ice age history. But face it, this is a competition art can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t win. True, Gormley\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s golden-ager adventure playground at the RA was heaving when I went, mostly with bewildered biddies navigating the energised spaces, negotiating the slabworks (I so prefer slobworks) and gawping in disbelief at a roomful of muddy water describing itself as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a kind of primordial soup of matter, space and time\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Gormley\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153invasion of the inside by the outside\u00e2\u20ac\u009d may be a novelty worth \u00c2\u00a322 to Londoners while the Thames Barrier holds up, though probably not to residents of Tewkesbury where primordial soup is free at the point of delivery. There was a tunnel here too, a dark cuboid cloaca which I chose \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to navigate around the outside\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as I feared it might get clogged with costive biddies and Dyno-Rod might have to be called to flush us out. Such are the risks of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153embodied experiences in art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, as they are now known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Still, one can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t object to contemporary art installations being sold as visitor experiences, because if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not then what is the point of them? The trouble starts when the experience concept is applied to displays of traditional art. The National Gallery has ventured down this path with its immersive extravaganza Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece, entered through a sort of Alpine pass constructed of mirror blocks prompting visitors to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153explore a landscape populated by the ideas of Leonardo as he set about painting the Virgin of the Rocks\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. The pass gives access to a mock-up of a conservator\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s workshop with a projected image of the painting\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s underdrawing; a chiaroscuro room where you can fiddle with dimmer switches to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcrelight\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 a photographic tableau of a seated model dressed as the Virgin; and an \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcimagined chapel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 where you can view the actual panel in a variety of different projected settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All of this for \u00c2\u00a318 standard admission. If the show was almost empty on a Tuesday afternoon, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because it breaks Pine and Gilmore\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cardinal rule: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Before a company can charge admission, it must design an experience that customers judge to be worth the price.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d A cocktail infusion might have helped. As it was, the best bits were the quotes from Leonardo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s notebooks reflected in the mirror blocks of the mountain pass: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153So we can say the earth has a vegetative spirit, and that its flesh is the soil, its bones are the arrangement and connections between stones which form mountains, its cartilage is the tufa rock, its blood the veins of water.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Match that for eco-sentiment, Olafur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How memorable are these experiences? I had to go through my photographs before writing this to remind myself. True, no damage was done by the Leonardo experience if you discount the hit to the wallet of having to pay for what is normally free \u00e2\u20ac\u201c visitors do eventually get to see the painting. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not always the case with Dulwich Picture Gallery\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s old master experience Rembrandt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Light, for which \u00e2\u20ac\u201c to highlight the theatricality of Rembrandt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s art \u00e2\u20ac\u201c cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (of Star Wars and Mars Attacks! fame) has been commissioned to design atmospheric lighting. For the night paintings, his lighting notes prescribe \u00e2\u20ac\u0153darkness contrasted with a soft, warm light, recreating the feeling of Rembrandt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s candlelit studio\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c with a consequent reduction in visibility. Meanwhile the spotlight on Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb is programmed to fade and brighten \u00e2\u20ac\u0153emulating the dawn breaking over Jerusalem\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Oy vey! Gilding and lilies come to mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Experiences, like goods and services, have to meet a customer need,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d suggest Pine and Gilmore. Does Rembrandt really need help with his chiaroscuro? In one of his few recorded remarks, he advised a patron: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hang this piece in a strong light\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. No, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only one way to experience paintings, and that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s by looking.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Laura Gascoigne January\/February 2019 The buzz of anticipation in the COL Ballroom in Davenport Iowa is audible, the audience murmurating like a flock of starlings; then the first twangs of an electric guitar tuning up, followed by a smoky voice: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to ask one question before we start: Are y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all experienced?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yeah!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d roars the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[742,75],"class_list":["post-1972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1972"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1973,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972\/revisions\/1973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}