Works Are Made For Audiences

The fourth foundational assumption we will consider: works are made for an audience.
After a work is completed, everyone becomes its audience (even its maker), experiencing the work aesthetically, not creatively. We may even say a work is incomplete unless there are people to experience it.
To reach audiences, the artist builds a bridge between themself and an audience; the work is the bridge. Like any bridge, we want a strong spanning structure. If the work is not well conceived or executed, we, as an audience, will find something else to hold us.
Choreographer, Twyla Tharp (1941-) observed, “Everyone who presents his or her work to the public eventually realizes that there is a quasi-legal transaction between artist and audience.”[i] Tharp observed the “quasi-legal transaction” is two sided. The first side: an artist presents their work to an audience, who is guided through a work by the way the maker arranges its elements. The other side of the agreement is how an audience connects with a work’s experience. When the public comes across works, they expect the "what" offered is believably composed; the audience responds to "how" the what is presented. If artists do not express works believably, they have not meet their side of the agreement. Audiences should keep in mind, a work’s maker expects they will take more than a few seconds at trying to understand the works; fulfilling their part of the bargain as well.
Bad works do not meet the quasi-contractual expectations of the observers; when this happens, minds may wander, lose awareness at performances, readings, and visual presentations. Good works meet (and may exceed) the “quasi-contractual” anticipations of the audience; therefore, viewers are interested, invested, and maybe engrossed with the experience.
Audiences naturally start out wanting to empathize with the artist’s works or they would not go to the art event. If we, as the audience, cannot suspend life situations, we will not focus on the work, which means we failed to meet our part of the quasi-agreement. But, to connect with the work, we let go of everything else and concentrate on the story, picture, dance, song, etc.—the work’s experience.

So, do you, as a composer of works, know how your audience responds to your offerings?
If you are of the audience, has the maker presented a vibrant engaging experience?

[i] Tharp, Twyla, with Mark Reiter, "The Creative Habit: Learn It And Use It For Life: A Practical Guide," p. 146