The Retention Model for The Encounter Economy
How distributed audience encounter replaces concentrated sale as the primary mechanism of cost recovery — and why retention, not transaction, is the institution’s metric I.
May 4, 2026
The Practice is the MME’s applied methodology series. Where A Substrate of Exclusion documents the structural conditions that produced mosaic’s institutional marginalization, The Practice addresses what an institution does about it. Reports are published selectively — only when a methodology has been sufficiently tested to be recommended to others. The frameworks here are designed to travel: across media, across disciplines, across institutions whose work has been similarly positioned outside the systems that recognize and compensate serious art. This is the activist playbook, written in the only register that holds up under scrutiny.
How distributed audience encounter replaces concentrated sale as the primary mechanism of cost recovery — and why retention, not transaction, is the institution’s metric I.
A Methodology for Converting Cultural Capital into Durable Power This document draws on the analytical framework developed by Saida Grundy in “Trump Is Terrified of