What is your definition of an artist?” sculptor Gerald Beaulieu asked me during a conversation about the status of artists in PEI. After I stumbled through an answer, he offered his own: an artist is someone who creates and wants an audience.

Connecting with audiences is a particular challenge for visual artists. Except at openings, they may never share space with their work and its viewers. And even if they do, how to read the room? How does an artist understand audience engagement?

Even in performing arts spaces, PEI audiences are notoriously hard to interpret. We may be appreciative, but reactions tend to be quiet, guarded, inscrutable. Is that standing ovation polite or heartfelt? Too often, our critical judgments—positive or negative—are withheld or cloaked in the damning non‑judgment, “Well, that was interesting.”

One bridge between art and audience is critical cultural reflection. After an art experience, we do talk among ourselves about what made being in the audience meaningful. Artist Alexis Bulman says, “I wonder what a review culture could look like if it grew out of the way we already gather, talk, and make art here, on a small island where the distance between artist, audience, and reviewer is so small?” 

Of formal art writing on this island, we have very little. So, where do our conversations go, and where do they take us? This August issue of The Buzz, with its performing arts reviews, represents some of the only critical writing on PEI’s artistic creation. Thirty years after the Confederation Bridge, you could say we still haven’t built a critical Fixed Link for the arts. 

Meet Us Halfway, a grassroots online journal with one excellent but solitary issue, describes the need for “somewhere to expand the life of creative work beyond the representations of social media.” Instigators Pan Wendt and Norah Pendergast ask, “aside from self‑promotion, how do Island artists get seen and talked about? Avenues are scarce.” Their journal hoped to fill a gap left unfilled for 25 years after Arts Atlantic Magazine, PEI-based and edited by Joe Sherman, moved to Halifax and soon ended production.

Nationally, cultural critic Sky Goodden of MoMus said this about the end of Canadian Art magazine: “There is this shadow that falls… Nothing to say ‘we were here’ beyond the press releases. That’s where the real bitterness lies.” When we don’t have critical forums, and we don’t communicate to artists what their work has meant to us, how it changed us, it risks falling into shadows. “There’s work to do,” Goodden says, “to fill the gaps.” 

These gaps disrupt meaningful connection between artists and audiences. I’ve written reviews for these August pages—a tough gig. Even when I loved a show, I had questions. What do I say to help future shows happen? What language encourages a stand-out emerging artist to grow? What quotation can a small theatre use to draw audiences? What critique is serious yet positive enough for applications for work-sustaining arts grants? In a small cultural ecosystem with an even smaller circle of criticism, these questions are consequential.

My own decision was to share the crucial information a potential audience member needed to decide whether this was a show for them—to help get the right audience into the seats, and hope they’d take the next step: to reflect, and share those reflections with the world and the artists.

Gerald asked, “What is an artist,” but in the spirit of his definition, I ask instead: how to audience. My best response is simple. Be audience. Show up, engage, reflect, critique, appreciate, discuss, share. Repeat.