“The best art is not made of audiences; it is made with them”.
This is the thread that stitches together a series of portraits by Dominic Dromgoole, who served as artistic director of the Globe Theatre from 2006 to 2016.
His fourth book, Astonish Me! First Nights That Changed the World, provides an idiosyncratic account of several opening nights that proved influential in changing how artists view their artforms and altering how we conceptualise the role of the audience in constituting the artist’s work.
In 22 colourful vignettes, ranging from antiquity to the present day, from the creative ebullience of 1950s Greenwich Village to the pinnacle of Noh drama in 17th-century Kyoto, and from the opening night of Handel’s sublime masterwork, The Messiah, in Dublin in 1742 to Beyoncé's performance at Coachella in 2018, Dromgoole argues that the role of the audience is integral to the process of artistic production.
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The artist works with an audience perpetually in view, aiming to confound or placate their assumptions; deciding whether to replicate a popular style, rejuvenate an outmoded paradigm, or forge their own, depending invariably on the reception of an audience. The work of art is not the production of a solitary “genius”, no matter how frequently this cliche is reiterated. It is a communal exercise in which those “who give witness” are as important as the artist in determining the life and reception of an artwork, if not more so.
“When a group of Parisian snobs crowded into a room in the Salon des Refusés to bark with laughter at Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, they were part of a pattern of confrontation and reaction, which defined the total work.”
As we return to galleries and theatres in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the dialectical bond between artist and audience becomes all the clearer for having been interrupted: “To look at art beside others was to recall how we open each other’s eyes wider. It took a dearth to remind us how gathering together squeezes extra life and meaning into art”. Written with verve and wit, though a wit that may frequently leave one exasperated, Astonish Me! encourages us to reflect not only on the communality of art but to appreciate its invaluable social utility.
