A few weeks ago, I attended a show that wasn’t very good. It wasn’t bad, I guess, but it was an arty bit of esoterica that I only would have had the attention span for in my twenties. I couldn’t focus. While ostensibly watching the performance, I started thinking of ways to expedite my tax filings, pondered the purchase of an energy efficient refrigerator, and wondered how it was that NSYNC’s music videos haven’t aged very well relative to how timeless they once seemed. By the conclusion of the evening-length work, I was bored, depressed, and thankful that I wasn’t the poor schmuck arts marketer whose job it was to communicate a rationale for such meh art.

I haven’t always been so distracted. In the early 2000s I was a proud arts marketer who crafted media campaigns for emerging artists and arts institutions. I helped plan digital strategies for any number of shows on faith that, while I’d never seen the specific work being marketed, the art could find an audience. My job was to use online communications to create context for art in people’s lives. At no point did I consider there might be art that couldn’t have or didn’t deserve an audience. There was no bad art. Only art marketed badly.

The recessionary years after 2008 were particularly contractive, and I left arts marketing when it became clear that the expense of finding audiences had grown disproportionately to the revenue they brought in. In retrospect, I see this resulting from twin technological rationales: the failure of online social media and the digital long tail to materialize sizable new audiences for live art, and that the carpet bombing of online browsers by neurologically addictive social platforms substituted habits of attending live art with the compulsion to consume online content.

While the particular financial difficulties of that era are arguably diminishing, there are signs that the job of the arts marketer is about to get substantially more complicated. The proliferation of mobile devices, wearables, and the Internet of Things has increased the number of internet connected devices in the average household to 7.4 and rising, making customers more accessible to messaging, but necessitating vastly more strategic consideration than, for example, print ads. Marketing via context-aware wearables- which are just one emerging digital platform among dozens- necessitates copious data analysis and user anthropology, not to mention moral judgement. (Just because user data can be mined to understand, for example, when your customers have sex, doesn’t mean it should be.) Such considerations are rarely built into arts marketers’ job descriptions, but they’re no doubt an increasing component of their job expectations.

The looming bonkersness of near-future marketing is alarming enough, but I fear this belies a darker, potentially intractable structural problem for the arts. While I am no longer an arts marketer, I am a working choreographer and producer. I am an indelible supporter of the arts, and am thoroughly invested in the future of a healthy artist communities. But good luck getting me to your show, because I see less live art now than ever before in my adult life. Part of this is that I’m older, and have a four year old son who wants to play Darth Vader, and he’s not welcome at most of the events I’m invited to. I have a mortgage, and I work long hours. Age has turned me into a homebody. But it has also been a sadly long time since I saw a show that excited me, seemed worth my time, and persistently held my attention. That has to do with artists’ work, perhaps, but equally so the changing composition of my brain. According to a recent Microsoft study, human attention spans have decreased from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to 8 seconds in the year 2013. That’s a 33% decline over a decade, leaving humans with less of an attention span than most vertebrates, including goldfish. The reason for this is the pervasive use of electronic devices and online social media, which make it difficult to focus, but also legitimately change our neural chemistry. Don’t mistake this attention deficit as being just a problem for Millennials. I mean, don’t get me wrong, making fun of Millennials is hilarious. But ridiculing the people we’ve failed to turn into our audiences completely misses the point: the technology that permits arts marketers’ access to audiences has the perverse effect of making art less attentionally accessible.

This may or may not be intractable, but I think we can all agree that a certain level of badassery is required of contemporary arts marketers. The work necessitates a ceaselessly up-to-date understanding of Internet culture, data science, a stable ethical center amidst moral ambiguity, and the ability to tell stories in any conceivable medium. Arts marketers are the first to face- and be blamed for- the crazytonk bananapants arts ecology we find ourselves in today. The job of today’s arts marketer is nothing less than to reimagine how art exists in the world.

So here’s to the crazy ones- the arts marketers- who must find a home for creative work that seems frequently out of time. If they succeed, the future of art will materialize seamlessly and apparently inevitably. If they fail, no one outside the sector will ever know or remotely care.

Sydney Skybetter is speaking during the session Ready to Wear? Emerging Technologies and the Cultural Sector during the National Arts Marketing Project Conference 2015. REGISTER before this Friday, 10/23!