Occasioning cultural patronage: A mesosociological approach

Across non-commercial, state-funded cultural organisations in the UK it is a common practice to host exclusive events with a view to producing feelings of attachment within patrons or potential patrons. These are often part of ‘friends of’ schemes. This happens against a discursive backdrop which promotes broadening access to arts and culture to an ever wider public. In this paper, I interrogate how cultural organisations perform multiple identities in order to solicit patrons while retaining credibility as a publically-minded organisation. My analytical approach is broadly mesosociological, with an attention to small groups as a unit of analysis and to events as containers of grouped activities. I stress that these events are highly crafted and carefully managed in order to generate the desired social outcome, a process I call ‘occasioning.’ Data are drawn from an ethnographic study of an opening night of a visual art exhibition which had two aspects: an invite-only ‘friends of’ event, and a ‘public’-facing event. This occasion therefore condensed in time and place the gallery’s performance of multiple and conflictual identities in the pursuit of different organisational benefits. I structure the analysis under the headings arenas, relations, and histories. In conclusion, I suggest further research programmes engaging with ‘friends of’ schemes, such as a cross-art form comparison and an exploration of what happened to such schemes and their attached events in the pandemic context