Vidience

During the season of my second visit, the receipts of Brigham’s theater averaged eight hundred dollars per night; and one evening they reached thirteen hundred dollars. Mrs. Julia Dean Cooper was filling a long star engagement at two hundred dollars per night. At first she found the audiences, or as Gail Hamilton would call them, the vidiences, curiously fresh and inexperienced.

There was not even a referee, no seconds, no bottle-holder—barring one of the combatants—no reporters, no audience, not even a vidience.

It is very easy to see what a help to a vidience the caste can be, especially in some very heavy drama or costume play, which requires close attention to understand.

Mr. A. J. Eickhoff has coined us a new word, Vidience, designating a body of persons who “hear” by means of sight.

Years ago I saw Mr. Cohan in an American-flag-song-and-dance-show called “The Yankee Prince.” I found it a colossal bore. However, the house was jammed to the last inch, and apparently the audience or vidience loved it. […] With reference to the word vidience, which, at the suggestion of Mr. John M. Shedd, I advocated in a recent number of this magazine, I am surprised to learn from the Chicago News of April 29 that “the word optience for a movie assemblage is already in general use, in the Middle West at least.” […] R. H. Pitt, editor of The Religious Herald, Richmond, Va., claims priority over Mr. John M. Shedd for the coinage of the word vidience.

Among the related subjects discussed were: the economic struggle of the artist for survival in a world crisis; the fight against censorship; the repression of the Negro; the freedom enjoyed by artists in the Soviet Union; the boycott of the Nazi Olympic art exhibitions; organization of artists; the social basis of art; race and art; the artist in search of a vidience; ways to reach wider publics; art museums and the living artist; present-day tendencies in American art; art in Italy and Germany under fascism; and permanent federal art projects.

“The County Fair,” reproduced herewith, is a recent canvas by Waldo Peirce in the Gillespie Galleries display. Peirce is known to Pittsburgh vidiences through his entries at the Carnegie Internationals.

Television is a post-war load potentiality for the electric utilities. Some of potentiality rests on the capacity of prospective “vidiences” to absorb the sets and some depends on the type of programs offered and how well they are organized and supervised.