From Network to Meshwork Executive Summary | Page 13

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Validation is defined in the report as the accumulation of critical acknowledgement
and associated opportunities that act to endorse contemporary artists’
work. Whilst self-validation — an artist’s personal belief in their work — is
essential to the development of an enduring, robust practice, external validation
is also necessary to establish and maintain a professional career in the arts.
In the art world this is often understood to take the form of critical reception
by critics, peers, participants and audiences, access to sales and paid opportunities
via commissioners and funders, and access to professional mentoring
schemes and other forms of training and artist development (Thornton, 2009).
However, the art world means different things to different players. The
sociologist Howard Becker characterised it in 1982 as a network in which
people’s cooperative activity and joint knowledge of shared conventions leads
to the kind of art the art world is known for — in many ways a self-perpetuating
and tautologous system. For the majority of contemporary artists, endorsement
of their place in this system comes from gallerists, dealers, collectors,
curators, peers and gallery-going audiences. But for social practice art where
much commissioning, funding and audience participation goes beyond this
network and where art work is unlike that produced in other art worlds, this
endorsement can be elusive and difficult to access.
Social practice art is often commissioned and funded by an array of
‘non-art world’ organisations and individuals, for example primary, secondary
and tertiary educational establishments, local authorities, healthcare
providers, heritage bodies, rivers and waterway trusts, non-art charitable
foundations, as well as being artist-led or self-initiated with the artist(s)
raising funds themselves (e.g. Portland Project, Stoke on Trent; Poole
and Genever); and by artists who are social activists living in and part of
their particular communities (e.g. William Titley, Nina Edge). Combined
with the conceptual, ethical, artistic and practical specificities of social
practice art, it is the diverse and fragmented character of this provision
that partly explains why artists working in these ways are not being
professionally validated.
The research adopted an ‘action research’ methodology to investigate
the existing landscape for social practice artists, commissioners and funders,
while simultaneously developing and testing a new model of validation. We
privilege participants’ voices in the report, resisting theorising as a form of
validation at the expense of the living knowledge that those quoted here so
clearly possess and demonstrate.