If London 2012 offered an unprecedented opportunity to showcase the dynamism of the UK arts scene, it also offered the most prominent platform from which to make the argument for continued public investment in the arts. The post-2012 visual arts landscape relies upon our capacity to articulate the value of what we do, as last week’s speech from Maria Miller reminded us.
But what forms of evidence do we produce, and whose criteria are we to use? Does your work demonstrate economic benefit, social impact and/or cultural value? Does it support artform and artist development? Does it engender wellbeing or produce and distribute cultural capital? How are you using your data, documentation and feedback? Should we return to art school studio assessments or embrace toolkits that give equal weight to artist and stakeholder expectations?
As Eleonora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett outlined in their 2010 article, Beyond the “Toolkit Approach”, the arts have been lamenting excessive instrumentalisation for many years. But, as this week’s What Next? conference proved, we are still wrestling with whether or not we should attempt to qualify the value of what we do according to terms set by policy-makers.
Shaun Glanville’s recent a-n article argued: ‘Any social good resulting from a work of art is incidental/ accidental/ fortuitous and not necessarily proportionate. It is illogical and unfair therefore to judge how “good”, “valuable” or “investment worthy” a work of art is by measuring, or attempting to measure, its social benefits.’
Glanville offers a set of questions by which he suggests we should judge an artwork. They will be as familiar to artists as a studio crit. But Glanville, and those who dismiss the application of social science methods to assess artistic worth, miss an important point. They fear that in adopting other criteria of assessment we give in to those who argue for the judgment of art purely as commodity or social corrective. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Public art provides a useful example.
Asking other questions
There are additional questions I would want to ask of any work, which evolves or finds its place outside a gallery or museum, such as:
– Does it provoke new and surprising encounters?
– Does it shake up our perceptions of the world around us, or our backyard?
– Does it provoke us to see things as if they might be different?
– Does it stimulate us to tell or involve someone else?
– Does it enable social interaction, or provoke new connections?
– Does it contribute to a dynamic and progressive sense of place?
These are not simply the questions I need to ask to justify continued investment in public art, but crucially the questions I want to ask to help me assess the register of a work – its potential significance, its capacity to generate a moment of transformation.
In the collective imagination, public art is cast either as the controversial, uninvited guest or the mass entertainer. Characterised by monumental scale or mass appeal, the successful public artwork is judged against its ability to galvanise popular opinion and contribute positively to place-making. Invariably, if it fails on either count, it is judged against its price tag. Even well-informed art critics mistrust the genre. British journalist Jonathan Jones has decried public art as ‘a production line for boring art, and mavericks have no place in its dreary ethic.’
And yet this myopic view of art in the public realm masks its recent transformation. Public art is now understood as a variety of forms and approaches that engage with the sites and situations of the public realm. We are seeing media, materials and processes previously thought unsuitable, the incorporation of dynamic curatorial methods and the exchange of single-sited, permanent outcomes in favour of dispersed interventions or cumulative, curated programmes which evolve over space and time.
If you were to use the studio crit questions to assess such works, you would miss out on the remarkable stories of transformation, displacement, intervention and process. The stories of the re-enactors of the Battle of Orgreave, or the citizens of Nowhereisland, should form part of our assessment, because these works are unbounded and dispersed. But to integrate the voices of participants and producers, the texture of site and situation and the wider impact on remote digital audiences requires an entirely different set of assessment tools than those used by a sole curator or critic.
Aesthetic integrity
In 2011, Professor Lynn Froggett and her team at UCLAN published their research findings from a two-year-long study into the impact of socially engaged arts practice and the ways in which its value can be evaluated and articulated. The research is particularly useful in giving us an example of how we might reconcile those two value systems – the importance of maintaining critical, artistic rigour whilst also holding the potential to be socially progressive.
Froggett argues: ‘Artistic outcome and aesthetic (whether conceived as aesthetic of process or of product) is not subordinate to other social agendas. The artwork remains as an essential third object or point of dialogue between the arts organisation and members of the public who are not arts professionals… To ‘work’ as this third point of attention, which activates new interpretations, it must retain aesthetic integrity – this enables it to endure as a third ‘object’ that opens up ways of seeing things differently.’
It is this aesthetic integrity to which new forms of public art aspire and which can distinguish critically successful projects from other cultural activities which offer immediate gratification, but which do not generate new forms of critical dialogue or transformation. Here is our argument for the value of contemporary art in the public realm beyond mass spectacle and for investment in durational arts projects, which allow for critical dialogues and deep engagement to occur.
Last week also saw the first round of the new Cultural Value Project – a two-year AHRC programme to test out new methods for assessing the value of the arts, to ‘help shape a more persuasive and innovative approach to the value to individuals and society generated by the arts and culture.’ With the groundswell of the What Next? movement across the UK and the emergence of new evaluative methodologies, we might begin to see a breakthrough in finding a common language which describes why the critical terms by which we value the arts are precisely the reason why they should also be valued for their economic, social and cultural benefit.
The original version of this article was published on the Situations blog publicartnow.com
Headline findings of the ‘New Model Arts Institutions and Public Engagement’ research study by Professor Lynn Froggett et al can be downloaded here.
