How to kidnap an audience

Summary

A 2022 talk to Swedish culture-makers in which writer Dougald Hine asks whether we’re “so well trained as consumers of culture” that even powerful art leaves us unchanged. Shock won’t help: “it’s a bankrupt currency”. Better to model cultural events on the weekly service than the wedding, a gathering people keep returning to, where repetition brings “a deepening into trust”.

Rationale

Wedding or weekly service is a comparison we’d like tested: our imagined portfolio sets “intensive short-term interventions” beside “practices that are sustained over years”. Hine has picked his side.