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INTERVIEW
WITH PIERRE
By
Alan Brown
Friday night I arrived at JFK around 9:30 p.m., returning
from a week of research and meetings in California. After
fetching my bag, I rendezvoused with the car service I had ordered
for the trip back to the office and eventually home. A friendly,
dark skinned man greeted me warmly. His name was Pierre, and
he quickly ascertained my feeble condition and loaded the various
bags into the trunk and we were off. I usually enjoy these
brief chauffer-driven moments to catch up on reading (or snoozing),
but after spending a week conducting focus groups on museum participation
in the Bay Area, and after staring into the brilliant night sky
at 35,000 feet for a good four hours or so, my mind was filled with
questions about artistic engagement, creativity, and connections
with the arts infrastructures that we toil to support. Something
possessed me to seize the moment, so I dove into a freewheeling
depth interview on cultural participation with the gentleman at
the wheel. With appropriate introductions and consent, we
were off to the cultural participation races, so to speak, careening
through stories about cultural experiences and value systems far
more labyrinthine than the highway system we were negotiating.
Pierre was born in Haiti and moved to the New York area about 20
years ago. His English is flush with Caribbean elegance and
he told me that he also speaks Creole, understands French, and is
studying Spanish. He was quite articulate, wholly engaged
in the discussion, and at times passionate to the point of pounding
on the steering wheel to underscore his beliefs about the value
of culture. I didn't ask his age, but guess that he's around
40. He lives in Norwalk with his wife and two children, a
boy of 7 years and a girl in high school. He works very long
hours as a driver for Teddy's Limo Service, sometimes 18 or 19 hours
a day, to support his family.
I began by asking him if he considers himself to be an artist in
any way. "No," he said, "But my brother likes
to paint." We rattled through all the behavioral questions
- never been to a museum. Never been to a stage play or a
Broadway show. No opera. When I asked him if he'd ever been
to a dance performance, I could see his face light up in the rear
view mirror. Yes, almost every weekend, he said, excitedly,
and then described how much he loves going out to the Latin dance
clubs where he practices dancing to salsa and meringue. He's
a soccer player, and identifies with the athleticism of social dancing,
which is clearly a meaningful creative outlet for him. But
he's never been to the ballet, and doesn't know anything about what
we call modern dance.
Jazz music is his first love, classic jazz, as he calls it, and
he could name a number of his favorite jazz artists. "But
I like all kinds of music." At home, he has about 100
tapes and CDs, mostly jazz and pop. His primary connection
to the multitude of musical genres, though, is through the radio
in his car, which he listens to sometimes 12 or more hours a day.
He surfs the radio waves purposefully and listens to just about
every style of music that's out there. He easily ticked off
a list of different styles of music that he listens to on the radio,
from classical to rap. His approach to the radio listening
experience is not at all chancy, but rather purposeful in that he
methodically seeks out different kinds of music that he's NOT familiar
with, so that he can be exposed to new sounds. Pierre values
the unfamiliar, probably much more so your typical BAM subscriber,
although he's never been to a theater. His daughter studied
violin in the public schools, and he described attending school
orchestra concerts as a proud father. He is no stranger to
classical music, although he's never heard of the New York Philharmonic.
With some resignation in his voice, he recounted how his daughter
stopped playing the violin so that she could let her fingernails
grow - surrendering a nascent interest in classical music to the
fleeting demands of adolescent glamour.
If offered a free ticket to the Metropolitan Opera, he would definitely
go, "If I could get the time off work," but he would bring
his young son, not his wife, who doesn't speak English too well,
and wouldn't enjoy it (spousal discordance in spades). Then
he told me about his wife, and how she really hasn't acculturated
to the U.S. and prefers to stay at home.
After we'd pretty much covered all of the performing arts, I launched
into the visual arts and asked him what's on the walls at home.
There are four framed photographs, one of Martin Luther King, one
of Malcolm X, and the other two I can't remember. The picture
of Malcolm X is actually a poster or lithograph of a painting of
Malcolm X that he bought in New Haven, so he has collected art.
He described these images as symbols of pride and expressions of
dignity from which he and his family draw inspiration on a daily
basis. He also told me how he likes the patterns of color
on the dishes that his family uses for eating.
Then the pay dirt question - "of all the cultural activities
that you know about, what would you most like to do, if you had
the time?" He said, "Isn't there a museum in Central
Park, up around 81st Street on the east side?" That's
where he'd like to take his son. He has no idea what it's
called (the Metropolitan Museum of Art) or what's inside, but he
wants that experience for himself and his son, mostly because his
son likes to draw things, and he wants to encourage that.
The other place he would like to take his son is the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space
Museum. That's Fine Art and Naval History, side by side at
the top of Pierre's cultural docket.
I pressed him on his own creative outlets, and with a little coaxing
he confessed to a real passion for cooking, which he clearly values
as a form of creative expression. Recipes are for the unimaginative,
he said in a jambalaya of words, and suggested that the REAL joy
of cooking is not knowing what you're making until it's done.
Pierre is an active, even gregarious cultural citizen who is utterly
disconnected with the non-profit arts infrastructure. His
daughter connected to art through the public school system in Norwalk.
Commercial radio is his lifeline for music, and he understands the
art of movement through social dancing. There's an acquired
taste for jazz, yet he's never been to a jazz concert. This
man deeply values many forms of art and appreciates a wide range
of artistic expression as essential to quality of life, including
architecture. He believes that children will grow up to be
better people if they take art classes in school. Without
saying so directly, he told me that he wants to learn a lot more
about how art happens.
Ironically, Pierre would not qualify as a marketing "prospect"
in any of our studies. He has never bought a ticket to a performing
arts event, nor visited a museum. But in his own way, he is
passionately engaged in art.
More than ever, I am convinced that we need to find new ways of
measuring artistic engagement and new ways of describing the complexities
of how people relate to the full range of art forms, and how these
relationships evolve and interrelate.
By the time we pulled up to the office, Pierre had been through
my cultural car wash, but nevertheless thanked me for the conversation.
Even though he is a limo driver, he thinks that there is room for
creativity in his job, mostly by learning things from people that
he drives around. For a tip, I gave him what amounted to a
focus group incentive, which seemed appropriate under the circumstances.
With the vast amount of quantitative data passing under our noses
these days, I found a sort of refuge in the deeply personal reflections
offered by Pierre.
I challenge
you, as colleagues, to use these kinds of "intimate moments with
strangers" as opportunities to explore cultural engagement.
And I invite you to share your insights with us at Audience Insight.