New kinds of experiences are popping up around the country, creating new competition for audience attention. These organizations think like start-ups. And they take many shapes, from the selfie-focused to the artist-driven. In this episode we speak with Vince Kadlubeck of Meow Wolf, Maggie Hartnick of LaPlaca Cohen, and Josette Melchor of Gray Area.
On View is a production of the Knight Foundation, hosted by Chris Barr and produced by Katie Jane Fernelius. This episode has been mixed and edited by Wilson Sayre.
AP Clip, Manish Vora: Museum of Ice Cream is truly one of the most unique experiences in the world. It is a place where adults can be kids and where kids show adults how it’s done. We really are combining elements of a contemporary art museum with the incredible tastes of the best ice cream shops in the world with truly a playground where you can act, you can sing, you can dream, and you can truly be yourself.
Chris Barr: That’s Manish Vora, co-founder of the Museum of Ice Cream, speaking to the Associated Press. You may know the pop-up space from Instagram. Or maybe you’ve visited yourself. It seems like the Museum of Ice Cream was everywhere for a while. On your social media feeds. In the New York Times. And maybe even in your carpet.
Josette Melchor: Do I like Museum of Ice Cream. No. I had those confetti sprinkles. I have them all over my house still and I keep finding them everywhere and my five year old almost tried to eat one... and they're made of plastic and I think they're disgusting and I had to take a shower immediately after I left (laughs) the Museum of Ice Cream.
Chris Barr: Josette Melchor is Executive Director and Founder of Gray Area, a non-profit art and technology center in San Francisco. Through a new project she and her colleagues are thinking about how immersive experiences might offer alternatives for digital artists, who often struggle to find a foothold in the art world.
And this is where things like the Museum of Ice Cream come in. While many are quick to write off these experiences as vapid spaces built around our worst narcissistic impulses. As Instagram experiences and brand activations that do little to create meaning in people’s lives. Or as cheap facsimiles of real cultural experiences. That all begins to sound terribly elitist. I mean, for one thing, lots of folks are visiting these places.
Josette Melchor:But I think they're they're important just because of the audience demand. I mean, if people want a place to experience an environment where they can take a picture and a sort of photo booth, why not give them that? And add sort of meaning to it.
Chris Barr: I’m Chris Barr and in this episode of On View we are thinking about a new set of experiences that are popping up around the country and creating new competition for audience attention. These are organizations that think more like start-ups than established institutions. And they take many shapes, from the selfie-focused Museum of Ice Cream and Color Factory, to art and technology experiences like Artechouse and One Dome.
We’ll speak with Vince Kadlubeck from Meow Wolf on the creation of transformational experiences. To Maggie Hartnick of LaPlaca Cohen about what consumers look for in cultural experiences. And we’ll touch base with Josette to discuss what these trend towards immersive experiences means for digital artists.
I want to look at the promises and perils of these spaces, and of the experience economy more widely. And as we do so, I hope that we can consider what museums and other cultural institutions can learn from them.
Sure, it’s easy to assume that selfie culture is what is responsible for the success of things like the Museum of Ice Cream. But it’s not just the Museum of Ice Cream that is seeing success, becoming not only part of the zeitgeist, but financially viable, too. Let’s consider Meow Wolf.
From the outside, Meow Wolf’s Santa Fe exhibit looks unassuming. Housed in a former bowling alley, you think it’s something like laser tag or an escape room. But the scale of this experience quickly reveals itself.
Vince Kadlubek: They walk down a dark hallway that's sort of like your movie theater style dark hallway and then they enter the exhibition. And their first moments inside the exhibition, they're standing in a front yard and there's grass and there's a two story Victorian house right in front of them and it's a it's a house.
I mean, it definitely is a house.
Chris Barr: That’s Vince Kadlubek.
Vince Kadlubek: CEO CO-FOUNDER OF Meow Wolf here in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Meow Wolf is an arts production company that produces immersive storytelling experiences.
Chris Barr: And what Vince calls an “immersive storytelling experience,” I might call a large scale art installation. In their Santa Fe experience, Meow Wolf has covered every inch of their 20,000 square foot space with artworks and interactive elements, which all blends together into a psychedelic wonderland that they call The House of Eternal Return. The experience starts in a suburban house with its own kind of rabbit hole.
Vince Kadlubek: And so you go inside the house and sure enough there's the living room television couch there's books, there's notes, there's photo albums, there's a family that lives in this house. And so you explore. And you might open drawers, you might go upstairs into the kid's bedroom, you might log onto their computer. But when you get to the kitchen and you open the fridge this thing that is quite recognizable, this thing that's very predictable. You've opened your fridge thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, in your life in your life. And you open it and it's not what you thought it was gonna be.
Instead of it being filled with food and drawers and all that. It's actually a long hallway that's really brightly lit like a refrigerator might be, but it's just an empty hallway that you can walk through and into who knows who knows where. And it's in that moment of opening of the fridge and in that moment of experiencing something that should be so predictable that the transformation happens. Because in that moment for a guest, if the fridge is different than what they thought the fridge should be, then the world in that moment can be different than what the world should be.
Chris Barr: We might question whether Meow Wolf’s spaces can really transorm worldview of their visitors, but it is easy to see how they are connected to a history of avant-garde art that operates around surprising juxtapositions and breaking from the everyday. From surrealism’s twists on common objects, to the installations and happenings of Fluxus artists, there’s a long history of art that prizes experience over objects. And in some ways, that’s is what Meow Wolf is trying to do.
Vince Kadlubek: Basically we like to produce spaces that people walk inside of and stories that people walk inside of.
Chris Barr: But what started as an artist collective has quickly become a multi-million dollar enterprise.
The organization has been covered by Rolling Stone Magazine and The New York Times. They’ve received tons of investment. And they’re building new experiences in Denver, Las Vegas, D.C. and Phoenix.
Meow Wolf’s success speaks to the rise of what some call the experience economy; a shift that takes us from buying and selling goods and services, to one where people pay a premium for rewarding experiences.
Vince Kadlubek: The basic nature of it was that we're as consumers we're going to move from product from product to service then beyond service we're going to experience.
Chris Barr: He says to think about the coffee bean. First the product was the bean itself, then it was beans being ground up and sold as ground coffee.
Vince Kadlubek: And then beyond the service economy you then have the experience economy which is like the coffee shop that you might go to on the on the corner because it's not necessarily just for the coffee. It's for the entire experience of going to the coffee shop.
There's one more step in that ladder which is the transformation economy. So it's even one step beyond experience. It's it's not that you even want to pay for an experience, you want to pay for a transformational experience.
Chris Barr: For an experience to be transformational, it has to provide meaning. As a participant, I need to leave the experience changed, I need to perceive perceive things differently after I leave. And this is what the arts and culture do best.
Vince Kadlubek: We just took that whole concept and we just took it to heart. And we said all we're going to do is just charge and admission into a space and we're not going to worry about selling the art. We're not going to worry about selling the product inside of the space. We're just gonna sell the experience and we're going to try to make that experience transformational.
Chris Barr: And as I think about what Meow Wolf and other s promise, there are a few qualities that are relevant to our current moment.
For one, they are escapist. In a moment full of political division and social challenges, they offer an opportunity to escape the built world as we know it and enter into fantasy.
Second, They don’t require any prerequisites. Visitors don’t need to know anything before going to a Meow Wolf experience, or to the Museum of Ice Cream. The feeling that “I don’t know enough” to go to an art museum is very real and these experiences don’t carry that baggage.
Third, these experiences are social! They’re designed to encourage people to interact with each other, both in the space and on social media.
And, finally, these experiences offer embodiment. We stare at tiny screens all day. And it’s nice to be engaged with all of your senses, to acknowledge that you exist in a body. We crave these kinds of experiences that operate at a human scale.
And some of this is reflected in data.
Maggie Hartnick is managing director at La Placa Cohen, a research and strategy firm that helps cultural organizations connect with target audiences.
Maggie Hartnick: And one of the ways that we do this is we really study cultural audiences so the shifts and patterns in cultural consumption, why people are participating in cultural activities, why they're not, how that landscape is expanding.
Chris Barr: And every three years they conduct a survey called Culture Track looking at things like how much leisure time and money people spend on cultural activities, what audiences consider a cultural activity to be, and what incentivizes them -- or discourages them -- to participate in the first place.
And when they did their survey two years ago, they discovered that people had new definitions for culture. Art experiences were still part of it. But it was also going out to eat. It was visiting a scenic area. In fact, more people were doing that than going to the opera or ballet.
For Maggie, these findings emphasized that the public has a much more democratic view of culture than those who work in the formal cultural institutions. And what people were looking for was not necessarily a good Instagram post.
Maggie Hartnick: And so we just decided to really start with the audience and ask them, “Well what what is it? What is the greatest role the culture plays in your life? What is it?” so that we can help really redefine what a cultural activity is and it really ended up centering around activities that helped foster empathy and understanding, activities that helped foster community, activities that helped educate and broaden perspectives.
Chris Barr: So people are looking for experiences that help them understand folks who are different from them. They want to have their worldview challenged and expanded. They want to connect with each other and their community.
And increasingly, they are looking beyond traditional arts organizations to do this. They are finding connection in places like restaurants, festivals, parks and mass media.
Maggie Hartnick: And I also think it's a it's about rethinking rituals. I think that the ritual of going to a museum or going to a theater. There’s portions of the population for whom that's comfortable. And there are vast swaths of the population for whom that is not comfortable
Walking into a rather intimidating space with guards and not being able to touch, sometimes, the artwork and not being able to talk at certain levels and having to stand away from them from what they're looking at. And I think everyone has to take a step back and think about that all those things are exclusionary. They're rituals that a lot of people are going to feel really uncomfortable about.
Chris Barr: And heck, I even feel uncomfortable in some of these spaces. On my last trip to New York City, three museum security guards asked me to change my behavior when I crouched or leaned against a wall to get a better look at a work of art... I’m looking at you, PS1.
Maggie Hartnick: and people have to really especially cultural organizations have to understand that audiences are kind of redefining what culture is and they're in a much broader playing field now. And I think that for some this could be a real challenge because it means a much wider competitive landscape and probably a much more necessarily collaborative landscape. But I think for many, I hope this is such an opportunity, because as opposed to thinking in silos or thinking within different disciplines, I think it's such an opportunity to think really broadly. As I said before, to really collaborate and to create really new forms and models of cultural activities that maybe audiences have never seen before. So I think it's an exciting time.
Chris Barr: But it’s not just companies that are thinking about how to shape these new experiences. Nonprofits like the Gray Area are looking at how immersive experiences might change the way that artists make and exhibit art.
Here’s Josette from earlier, she’s the one still cleaning sprinkles out of her carpet.
Josette Melchor: We're here in San Francisco at the Grand Theater in the Mission District.
Chris Barr: Gray Area’s focus is art and technology for social impact: they teach artists how to code with Processing. They have mentorship and incubator programs designed to help artists figure out how to build interactive works. And they have an old theater where they have performances and exhibitions, everything from artificial intelligence fueled performance art to 360 degree video projections.
Josette Melchor: When Gray Area started we were trying to mimic the gallery model and sell digital art as an object and that didn't really work and we became a non-profit specifically because, I successfully sold a few pieces of digital a few pieces of digital art, but artists in that at that time did not know that you need a service contract to maintain the artwork in someone's home.
Chris Barr: Since those early days, Gray Area has spent time working with digital artists to figure out new ways to build audience and revenue streams. For artists who don’t make traditional objects, the gallery system might not be the right fit. And even well-resourced art museums face challenges when collecting these works.
Josette: At this point a lot of artists don't know where to go after they've created those interactive installations. They don't have a place for them yet. So we're trying to figure that out.
Chris Barr: And that means transitioning away from the current model, which in many ways is centered around an art market, art as commodity, art as object, to one that is focused on creating and selling experiences.
Josette Melchor: So in the traditional format you have a small group of people curating a small set of objects from a small curated group of artists who have a smaller collector base that is supporting the entire system. In the new model, you have an entire room that is taken over by a larger number of artists who are self organizing and you have a much larger audience and that audience is interacting and changing the environment themselves. And they're also bringing more people and they're growing that ecosystem.
Chris Barr: And as artists work to develop these models for interactive art, they are finding themselves lumped in with a rise in other location based entertainment.
Josette Melchor: So I commute between Sacramento and San Francisco and I and all of a sudden now noticed like you know an escape room every few blocks and strip malls and stuff.
Chris Barr: In many ways, this phenomenon is not just powered by technology, but simultaneously, a response to digital culture.
Josette Melchor:The algorithms that have been created by technology companies, although they bring us together, they also take us further apart. And so I think that people and humans are trying to get back to each other and trying to connect in physical space. And so I think it's a very basic sort of human response to A.I. and algorithms that have been created by large tech companies that are infiltrating it and obscuring of the way that we engage each other in digital culture.
Chris Barr: Currently Josette and her team are working on a study of this space. They are interviewing people about immersive experiences, trying to understand the financial models and developing strategies for digital artists to bring experiences to the public. And while this space might be currently filled marketing companies and entertainment start-ups, she is hopeful that there might be more opportunities for artists to bring meaningful experiences to the public. And if we are lucky, ways to sustain their art practice.
Josette Melchor: We haven't been able to find a place for the artists that graduate from our incubator to create a sustainable revenue stream for themselves. Beyond getting a job at an ad agency and developing VR work for or Google or insert any tech company. Or deploying a project onto the Apple Store or the app store and then, you know, getting two dollars every time somebody uses your digital art piece.
Chris Barr: But the creation of large-scale immersive experiences comes with heavy start-up costs. And this might create the biggest barrier to entry for most artist-organized efforts.
Chris Barr: Do you think that with these smaller budgets folks can build experiences that can compete with these almost Disney-like experiences that are that are being created by folks like Meow Wolf?
Josette Melchor:It's definitely a difficult thing to do especially because the hardware and software costs of these projects are pretty high. I mean you have -- and I think this is one of the biggest issues -- just the access to technology hardware and spaces that can support these types of installations are few and far between.
Chris Barr: This is something for museums to consider, but it also points towards a need for new cultural spaces that are equipped to present new types of cultural experiences and the development of new business models to make those efforts sustainable.
Making something like Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return doesn’t happen without investment. And it requires ticket sales to recoup that investment. Currently, Meow Wolf’s Santa Fe location has about $15 million in annual revenue, but building it to that point took lots of fundraising.
Vince Kadlubek: So first we had to get somebody to buy a building. So that was George.
Chris Barr: George R. R. Martin. The author of Game of Thrones.
Vince Kadlubek: He bought the building. He owns it. He became our landlord. But he put three million dollars into renovating it. Then we raised another three million dollars off of debt from individuals. Basically me going to people and being like, “Here's a crazy idea. Please give us money and we might pay you back.” And we raised three million dollars off of that in order to build the house of eternal return.
Chris Barr: So that’s the initial investment to build the experience. From there they wanted to build the team and create salaried positions.
Vince Kadlubek: So we ended up selling equity in the company to investors and we raised about 10 million dollars in 2017. And then we raised another 24 million. Now probably like 28 million in 2018, through the course of the year. A few different mechanisms. Continuing to sell parts of the company, bringing on a little bit of debt, building the team and then now in 2019, we're looking to raise one hundred million.
Chris Barr: Over 130 million dollars in the course of two years. That’s a number that is on par with Knight Foundation’s annual giving across our programs in journalism, communities and the arts.
That kind of venture capital interest in an arts organization is rare. And it should make us consider the market opportunity and business case that their investors are betting on.
And that investment is allowing Meow Wolf to build spaces in three more cities, but more importantly it is helping them accomplish big goals. And for them, success happens with individual moments of wonder.
Vince Kadlubek: This is like the best, the best story is like and it happened a couple of weeks after we opened the House of Eternal Return. There's a big magical forest in the center of the exhibition with these tree houses and a bunch of colored lights, and just a really beautiful magical forest. And this like 9 year old kid walks into the forest and we see him drop to his knees and put his hands up and he says, “I've been waiting my whole life for this.” And it was this moment that was just like so perfect because we got it, you know, we captured the thing that everybody dreams of, basically.
Chris Barr: Meow Wolf may not be a museum. But it is an artist created space, that’s focused on connecting people to engaging art. And because of that, they share some common goals with museums. And they teach us a few things:
That audiences want experiences that engage all of their senses.
That culture is a social and participatory. And we can lean into that in our spaces and online.
People want real life experiences and they want them to be larger than life or at least larger than the screen of their phone.
Museums and cultural institutions already have advantages in this space. They are spaces that are larger than life, where meaning is made through experiences with amazing artwork, history, with objects. But they also now have competition now. Competition with fast-moving organizations that know how to grab attention. And we should take note of that.
Thanks for listening to On View.
This is a project of the Knight Foundation. Knight Foundation believes that great art connects people to place and to each other. You can learn more about our work at knightfoundation.org
On View is produced by Katie Fernilius.
Thanks to Wilson Sayre for help editing and mixing this episode.
I’m Chris Barr. You can find me on Twitter at @heychrisbarr. And again, thanks for listening.