You have to be careful with this — the playwright should have a model of the “intended audience”. It is to this group he serves — not any random person off the street.

The playwright is not wrong because the play could not be understood by a man who doesn’t understand the language the play is written in. There is an expected background that allows the play to be more than a blast of noises designed to only interact with your basic senses (which would also assume the audience has those senses in the first place), and the audience can be wrong for not meeting that expectation.

Of course, the intended audience may have no relationship to the audience he will get — in this case the playwright is unreasonable, though the play may still be correct.

I would say both the audience and the playwright operate in a symbiosis; they serve one another, and they both have responsibilities in the matter.

Yes, exactly. I’ve seen the same discussion play out as “if you make a game and somebody plays it, and they don’t enjoy it, it’s your fault.” It seems as nonsensical as, “if you’re a chef and somebody doesn’t like your food, it’s your fault.” A midwesterner with a dislike for fish, who likes meat well done, could conceivably end up in a sushi restaurant.

The point of having a market of plays, games, and restaurants is that we can match producers and consumers with each other. People are going to watch movies they don’t like, eat food they hate, and watch plays that they think are boring. That doesn’t mean that we have to assign responsibility (or blame) to anybody for it! Not everybody has to like your play.

There's a large difference between a single one off not liking something and a majority not liking something.

Even with food tastes. Knowing the expected audience where you are at does count. And if you're in an area with enough people, even then you can do well with a limited portion of the population.

> There's a large difference between a single one off not liking something and a majority not liking something.

If an army of vegetarians walk into a brazilian steakhouse, and complain about the lack of food available, the story remains the same. The vegetarians are wrong for not meeting the expectations of the restaurant's intended audience. It does not matter if you have 1 vegetarian, or millions of them. The second they chose that restaurant, knowing its intended audience, and their own restrictions/preferences, they were in the wrong.

If an army of meat-loving southerners, clamoring about their love for all things flesh, walked into the same restaurant the next day -- would you suddenly turn around and claim the restaurant is now correct? The audience has spoken!

And if it were 50/50? The restaurant is simultaneously right and wrong!

It would be an act of absurdity. The audience is no singular contiguous thing; it can be shifted and manipulated into all sorts of opinions -- the majority opinion is a temporary state.

It would be just as absurd to demand that the steakhouse be made hospitable and of similar quality to both the vegetarians and the omnivores -- it is in serving these subsets of the world's preference that the provider refines their production. To serve equally to all is to provide the lowest common denominator -- something to please none, just as it offends none.

It doesn't matter that the area is full of vegetarians; should the omnivores not be granted meat because 51% of their peers refuse it? Because 67% refuse? 99% refuse? Let the market dictate it nonviable, but do not reject simply because of majority rule.

Again, I was not referring to a one off group. Or person.

But if you have a restaurant and in the course of your first year, only one person likes your food, it's probably you. I mean if you want to go into hyperbole let's go there.

I wasn’t talking about a one-off group either. Let the vegetarians come daily; they are no more correct on day 301 than they were on day 1. They can make up 1% of the restaurants visitors, or 99%; They have not been made more correct.

You could argue that the restaurant is unreasonable to not service this audience — they’re leaving money on the table — but you cannot say that the restaurant is incorrect in trying serving a particular cuisine for a particular audience.

To argue otherwise is to demand that no Chinese restaurant should exist in an American town, serving Chinese food appreciated by Chinese people, because the majority of the locality is American. If you want to argue what matters is the people who actually visit… then ignoring those incorrect visitors will eventually filter them out, leaving you with the audience actually intended (or rather the audience you deserve? Which hopefully matches your intent)

My argument is mostly, that if you don't have enough of an audience to remain open, and there is generally enough of an audience in the area of the restaurant, than it's upon you, not the (potential) customers to adapt.

Sure; I'm calling that unreasonable, but not incorrect. The market determines what is profitable, not what is good. Ultimately if you want something good to persist, you must also ensure it is profitable (or find ways around the market -- subsidies), but it not the case that profitable things are inherently good, and it is not the case that things are inherently not good because they not profitable.

So I say it is unreasonable to hold onto something good in the face of lack of profitability, unwilling to change, but it does not say anything about whether they it was produced well for the audience they intended to serve (it is simply the case that their intended audience either does not exist, or does not exist in sufficient numbers to be profitable -- or it was poorly produced for the intended audience).

I know many people who believe that the "American Chinese food" in some regions of the US is so bland and greasy not because the people making it don't know how to make good Chinese food; but because they're trying to sell Chinese food to a market of people who actively dislike everything that makes authentic ethnic Chinese cuisine distinctive; and that some watered-down tasteless glop (and I don't mean congee, lol) is the local maximum they've found for marketability in that environment.

(Of course, the global maximum — at least for someone who wants to continue to serve that particular market — would be to stop trying to sell these people Chinese food at all, if they're not going to like it. And instead, to learn to cook something where you and your target market can agree on how it should taste.)

> Of course, the global maximum — at least for someone who wants to continue to serve that particular market — would be to stop trying to sell these people Chinese food at all

It's entirely possible that those people like bland Chinese food.

They do like it more than they like Chinese food that has Chinese-food flavors in it, but even with it taken as far as it can be toward their tastes, they still don't like it as much as they like mediocre examples of other cuisines, let alone good examples of other cuisines. To go from a 3/5 to a 4/5 in the eyes of many of these markets, there's nowhere to go but to just start selling tacos or something. (Source: my Cantonese chef uncle-in-law who lives in the midwest.)

I spent most of my life in Arizona... There's some pretty garbage tacos out there... And taco bell,. Del taco and taco dons aren't good. They're ok... Not good or authentic.

So even your counter example can have the same bias.

Even when most people don't like something, all that it means is that it's niche.

But when you do have a lot of those people trying it, just to come out disappointed, then you have a communication/publicity failure.

In the English language, ungendered terms or unknown gender is identical to the masculine gender. And even in languages without this property, there is no issue referring to a hypothetical as male.

> I would say both the audience and the playwright operate in a symbiosis; they serve one another, and they both have responsibilities in the matter.

You may enjoy reading R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art. Here is a relevant excerpt:

“ Next, with regard to the arts of performance, where one man designs a work of art and another, or a group of others, executes it. Ruskin (who was not always wrong) insisted long ago that in the special case of architecture the best work demanded a genuine collaboration between designer and executants: not a relation in which the workmen simply carried out orders, but one in which they had a share in the work of designing. Ruskin did not succeed in his project of reviving English architecture, because he only saw his own idea dimly and could not think out its implications, which was better done afterwards by William Morris; but the idea he partly grasped is one application of the idea I shall try to state.

In these arts (I am especially thinking of us and drama) we must get rid, to put it briefly, of the stage-direction as developed by Mr. Bernard Shaw. When we see a play swathed and larded with these excrescences, we must rub our eyes and ask: ‘What is this? Is the author, by his own confession, so bad a writer that he cannot make his intention clear to his producer and cast without composing a commentary on his play that makes it look like an edition for use in schools? Or is it that producers and actors, when this queer old stuff was written, were such idiots that they could not put a play on unless they were told with this intolerable deal of verbiage exactly how to do it? The author’s evident anxiety to show what a sharp fellow he was makes the first alternative perhaps the more probable; but really there is no need for us to choose. Whether it was the author or the company that was chiefly to blame, we can see that such stuff (clever though the dialogue is, in its way) must have been written at a time when dramatic art in England was at its lowest ebb.’

I am only using Mr. Shaw as an example of a general tendency. The same tendency is to be seen at work in most plays of the later nineteenth century; and it is just as conspicuous in music. Compare any musical score of the late nineteenth century with any of the eighteenth (not, of course, a nineteenth-century edition), and see how it is sprinkled with expression-marks, as if the composer assumed either that he had expressed himself too obscurely for any executant to make sense of the music, or that the executants for whom he writes were half-witted. I do not say that every stage-direction in the book of a play, or every expression-mark in a musical score, is a mark of incompetence either in the author or in the performer. I dare say a certain number of them are necessary. But I do say that the attempt to make a text fool-proof by multiplying them indicates a distrust of his performers on the part of the author which must somehow be got rid of if these arts are to flourish again as they have flourished in the past. This cannot be done at a blow. It can only be done at all if we fix our eyes on the kind of result we want to achieve, and work deliberately towards it.

We must face the fact that every performer is of necessity a co-author, and develop its implications. We must have authors who are willing to admit their performers into their counsels: authors who will re-write in the theatre or concert-room as rehearsals proceed, keeping their text fluid while the producer and the actors, or conductor and orchestra, help to shape it for performance; authors who understand the business of performance so well that the text they finally produce is intelligible without stage-directions or expression-marks. We must have performers (including producers and conductors, but including also the humblest members of cast and orchestra) who take an intelligent and instructed interest in the problems of authorship, and are consequently deserving of their author’s confidence and entitled to have their say as partners in the collaboration. These two results can probably be best obtained by establishing a more or less permanent connexion between certain authors and certain groups of performers. In the theatre, a few partnerships of this kind are already in existence, and promise a future for the drama that must yield better work on both sides than was possible in the bad old days (not yet, unfortunately, at an end) when a play was hawked from manager to manager until at last, perhaps with a bribe of cash, it was accepted for performance. But the drama or music which these partnerships will produce must in certain ways be a new kind of art; and we must also, therefore, have audiences trained to accept and demand it; audiences which do not ask for the slick shop-finish of a ready-made article fed to them through a theatrical or orchestral machine, but are able to appreciate and enjoy the more vivid and sensitive quality of a performance in which the company or the orchestra are performing what they themselves have helped to compose. Such a performance will never be so amusing as the standard West-end play or the ordinary symphony concert to an after-dinner audience of the overfed rich. The audience to which it appeals must be one in search not of amusement, but of art.

This brings me to the third point at which reform is necessary: the relation between the artist, or rather the collaborative unit of artist and performers, and the audience. To deal first with the arts of performance, what is here required is that the audience should feel itself (and not only feel itself, but actually and effectively become) a partner in the work of artistic creation. In England at the present time this is recognized as a principle by Mr. Rupert Doone and his colleagues of the Group Theatre. But it is not enough merely to recognize it as a principle; and how to carry out the principle in detail is a difficult question. Mr. Doone assures his audience that they are participants and not mere spectators, and asks them to behave accordingly; but the audience are apt to be a little puzzled as to what they are expected to do. What is needed is to create small and more or less stable audiences, not like those which attend a repertory theatre or a series of subscription concerts (for it is one thing to dine frequently at a certain restaurant, and quite another to be welcomed in the kitchen), but more like that of a theatrical or musical club, where the audience are in the habit of attending not only performances but rehearsals, make friends with authors and performers, know about the aims and projects of the group to which they all alike belong, and feel themselves responsible, each in his degree, for its successes and failures. Obviously this can be done only if all parties entirely get rid of the idea that the art in question is a kind of amusement, and see it as a serious job, art proper.

With the arts of publication (notably painting and non-dramatic writing) the principle is the same, but the situation is more difficult. The promiscuous dissemination of books and paintings by the press and public exhibition creates a shapeless and anonymous audience whose collaborative function it is impossible to exploit. Out of this formless dust of humanity a painter or writer can, indeed, crystallize an audience of his own; but only when he has already made his mark. Consequently, it is no help to him just when he most needs its help, while his artistic powers are still immature. The specialist writer on learned subjects is in a happier position; he has from the first an audience of fellow specialists, whom he addresses, and from whom an echo reaches him; and only one who has written in this way for a narrow, specialized public can realize how that echo helps him with his work and gives him the confidence that comes from knowing what his public expects and thinks of him. But the non-specialist writer and the painter of pictures are to-day in a position where their public is as good as useless to them. The evils are obvious; such men are driven into a choice between commercialism and barren eccentricity. There are critics and reviewers, literary and artistic journals, which ought to be at work mitigating these evils and establishing contact between a writer or painter and the kind of audience he needs. But in practice they seldom seem to understand that this is, or should be, their function, and either they do nothing at all or they do more harm than good. The fact is becoming notorious; publishers are ceasing to be interested in the reviews their books get, and beginning to decide that they make no difference to the sales.

Unless this situation can be altered, there is a real likelihood that painting and non-dramatic literature, as forms of art, may cease to exist, their heritage being absorbed partly into various kinds of entertainment, advertisement, instruction, or propaganda, partly into other forms of art like drama and architecture, where the artist is in direct contact with his audience. Indeed, this has begun to happen already. The novel, once an important literary form, has all but disappeared, except as an amusement for the seine-literate. The easel-picture is still being painted, but only for exhibition purposes. It is not being sold. Those who can remember the interiors of the eighteen-nineties, with their densely picture-hung walls, realize that the painters of to-day are working to supply a market that no longer exists. They are not likely to go on doing it for long.‘

Extremely weird to have either opinion.

Why do you think this?

Because people write plays for a variety of reasons, not just to "serve" the audience. We might write plays to intentionally provoke the audience, to make them angry, or sad, or otherwise feel some emotion they might otherwise feel for some surprising reason. We might write a play because we were seized by a "genius" and neither personal nor social goals adequately describe the reason. Or maybe we write plays merely as an interaction in some kind of entertainment "marketplace." In reality, these two different sorts of activities are interrelated in complex ways and the foremost goal of the artist (even the foremost goal of the viewer) might change from day to day or moment to moment.

Socrates talks about this, I think. A good doctor doesn't serve the patient. A good doctor serves the patient's health and this might actively piss the patient off. Sometimes an artist is a kind of social doctor (or they may aspire to be one).

Thinking of the complex social relation between playwright and audience as driven entirely by either the ego of the artist or the ego of the audience member flattens out the roles of both to such an absurd degree that discussion of the thing in question is impossible. Hence, doing so is "weird."

[EDIT]: Thinking about this has crystalized something which has been swimming around in my brain for awhile. I think a fundamental way in which the current internet undermines human beings and produces alienation is that people fundamentally need to be met with a degree of resistance from people and serendipity from the world. When we seek out art we are, in a certain sense, seeking deliberately to be given something we don't want, explicitly. When we forage for novelty, we do not want to be served up something "curated" for us, but something which we could not have anticipated on the basis of our previous habits. Building marketplaces for every conceivable kind of human interaction undermines this basic need on the part of human beings. Recommendation engines and curation algorithms undermine this need. Even an object like ChatGPT, in a way, can't meet it. When I talk to a human I want to be, in some small way, and not always, genuinely surprised by what they say. It is difficult for a machine which is trained to predict the next token to do this (it is obviously not impossible because LLMs (and other algorithms) know much more than a person and can thus surprise us simply by conjuring up that with which we haven't yet made contact).