All projects: Gel, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Bit Literacy
How to turn a rarified experience into a hit
If you want your creation to be more popular, then make it something that more people want to experience.
Here's how an artist and two musicians did it:
• How to get people to see your art show. From the WSJ:
"When you do a gallery show, there's all the excitement of opening night, but if you go back a few days later, it's like a dust bowl. No one's coming to see the art," says Chris Pennington, a Minneapolis artist whose little-seen oeuvre includes a sculpture made from frozen water balloons.Mr. Pennington and several friends created a hole for an artist-designed miniature golf course sponsored by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2008. The course was wildly popular, helping touch off the current craze. Museum staff say the summer-long installation drew 40,000 visitors, 45% of whom said it was their first visit to the museum in years.
• How Alice Cooper launched a breakout hit. From NPR:
Zappa saw Alice Cooper as a bizarre comedy act, but the band's first two albums tanked. Then, producer Bob Ezrin came in and took a song that was originally called "I'm Edgy" and turned it into the commercial pop hit "I'm Eighteen.""He kept dumbing it down until it was a three-minute anthem for every kid that was 18 and an outcast," Cooper says.
• How Girl Talk's Greg Gillis went from sparsely-attended avant-garde performances to sellout pop crowds. From the NYT:
[In his early performances] he might have three people watching in the dark with their arms crossed. In a space like that -- playing to an art crowd -- it occurred to Gillis that going pop would be a "good joke." ... But by 2006, people were starting to take seriously what had started as Gillis's avant-pop joke. ... Girl Talk was suddenly headlining the Mercury Lounge in New York.Where the hipster says "no, no, no" to everything, pre-emptively, Gillis twists the screw a perverse turn further. "I want to like everything until I'm convinced why not. ... What it comes down to is being a fan of all this music. I just thought that it could all share one roof and be this really interesting mess."
(See also this interview on how Gillis came up with the name Girl Talk: "I came from a more experimental background and there were some very overly serious, borderline academic type electronic musicians. I wanted to pick a name that they would be embarrassed to play with.")
Girl Talk is a hip hop DJ with a sampler who uses the term "pop music" to make his stuff more appealing to the white people who make up his audience. I think he's great at what he does but to me a lot of it is just repackaging things that have exsted in hip hop culture for decades.
James, I think you've got Mark's point, and the point behind all these articles and their subjects' success, right there in your ostensibly critical comment:
"...he's great at what he does..." and
"...make[s] his stuff more appealing to ...his audience."
That is, he's all about good customer experience.