Blogwatch

www.artsjournal.com/lifesapitch/

How to you get people to walk into Carnegie Hall, ponders music publicist AMANDA AMEER

Last week, I walked by an Abercrombie & Fitch store, stopped, turned right, and started to walk inside. What the Joshua Bell is wrong with me, I thought: I don't like Abercrombie clothes, I'm already late for a meeting, and there's no obligatory hot preppy "greeter" guy at the door. It just felt so cool to walk in.

Literally cool. The doors were wide open and the store was pumping AC into the street. Fancy hotels pull similar stunts in the winter: you'll be hustling along, face-in-scarf, and then, all of a sudden, angels are singing and you're briefly under heat lamps. Yes, maybe I will stay at The Plaza tonight, it's warm, here is my credit card.

So after narrowly avoiding Abercrombie I thought, when have I ever passed a performance venue and had a desire to go inside? I walked by Carnegie Hall every day on the way to work at IMG, and never once did I see, hear or feel anything that made me want to go into that lobby. I walked by the Miller Theater yesterday, or, at least I think I did, since I didn't actually notice it in the mass of Columbia. There's no effort toward creating a sensory experience: nothing to turn my head, let alone my feet. Moving beyond heat lamps and AC, what can venues do to get people in the door?

Give us some idea of what's going on in there, most basically and importantly. It's "Carnegie Hall" (jazz hands), but do people know the range of artists Carnegie presents? The posters wrap around the building, so unless you're circling the block, you're going to miss a lot of information. What needs to be pumped into the street outside Carnegie and any music venue, is, errrr, music.