Exposure is not good or bad. Exposure is a knife.

"You take a knife, you use it to cut the bread, so you'll have strength to work; you use it to shave, so you'll look nice for your lover; on discovering her with another, you use it to cut out her lying heart." - Huddie Ledbetter

You can expose an effect and ruin the magical moment you've created. Or you can use exposure in an artful way to create a more powerful magic experience for people.

I'm not defending people who just crudely expose tricks on youtube or in other forums. Nothing is gained by that. Wholesale exposure is not a good thing. But I do think you can let people in on some secrets in a way that makes them appreciate magic more and in a way that can lead to stronger magic moments.

Using Exposure to Capture Their Attention

Secrets are not the most important thing in magic. Yes, they're required (generally) for a successful magic trick, but that's like saying the film projector is the most important part of movie-making because you can't show a movie without it.

For a layperson though, secrets are the most immediately intriguing aspect of the art. Secrets are to laypeople what boobies are to a 13-year old boy.

So being willing to talk about secrets is an easy way to get people engaged in something they might otherwise not be. And once you’ve lured them in with some mild “exposure,” you can transition on to more interesting and more rewarding magical experiences.

[It should go without saying that when I talk about exposure, I’m not talking about exposing double lifts or rough and smooth. I’m talking about letting them in on tricks that don’t have a method that has significant broader magical uses.]

Using Exposure to Lower Expectations

This is an idea that you’ll find explored in the magic literature, but I think it’s something that can be used more frequently. It’s the idea of exposing things but doing it poorly so people’s understanding of the concept or technique is diminished in some way.

The classic example you’ll see is where the magician discusses palming cards and then does a really shitty palm with a stiff hand and part of the card peeking out. The hope here is that by “exposing” a bad palm then if someone sees your hand naturally curled with no part of a card poking out, they’ll assume you’re not palming a card (even if you are).

You can do this with lots of things. Bad coin vanishes. Bad bottom deals. Bad deck switches. Bad misdirection. Bad anything.

Now, of course, you don't want to introduce any new concepts to them. You don't want to be like, "Here's something called the gravity half pass," and then do it poorly.

What we're actually doing here is using exposure to poison the knowledge that they already have. For example, most adults have heard of the concept of marked cards, but most have never seen a marked deck. If you “expose” a marked deck to someone, and it’s the kind of marked deck that you have to really study the back of the card and do a bunch of mental calculations to determine what the card is, then you’ve helped establish in their mind what a marked deck is. So if, at a later time, you use a different marked deck (one that allows you to know the card’s identity with just a glimpse, perhaps from a few feet away) and you somehow know what card they picked without studying the back of the card, they’ll assume it wasn’t a marked deck.

In this way exposure can actually be used to make your magic stronger.

Using Exposure to Misdirect their Speculation

This is similar to the idea above, but here we’re going to expose a worse trick that’s similar in some way in order to get them thinking in a different direction on how a trick works and to emphasize the more impossible elements of the trick you don't expose.

I’ll give you an example.

About 6 years ago, Mickael Chatelain’s trick Ink came out. I bought it and performed it a number of times and always received a nice reaction. The version I performed was the one where you would draw one playing card on the outside of the box and it would visibly change to another playing card (the one the spectator picked).

Then one day I preceded this trick by exposing another “moving ink” effect, one I thought wasn’t great. It's also by Chatelain and it's called Numberground. It’s a trick where the 3 of diamonds drawn on the back of a card changes to the 5 of diamonds.