THE CONTEXT FOR THE REPORT 26
the research talked about further and higher education in the
arts and humanities, curatorial and educational practice, arts
administration, activism, music and community work. Asked
to choose from a list of descriptors, most artists chose “collaborative”
with 96% of respondents identifying their practice
in this way. When asked which other terms they used or felt
were appropriate to their practice, 87% identified with the
term “socially engaged”, with 82% selecting “participatory” and
78% “social practice”. A range of other terms were also used by
smaller percentages of respondents, including “community”,
“agonistic”, “activist”, “pedagogical” and “therapeutic” art.
VALIDATING SOCIAL PRACTICE
AND THE ART WORLD-AS-NETWORK
Social practice ‘stakeholders’ — those invested in this
field — include artists, participants, audiences, commissioners,
curators, producers, funders, educationalists and researchers.
The funding for social practice comes from a wide range of
art and non-art providers including arts and heritage, charitable
trusts, health and social care and the private sector. It is
in part the disconnect between the art world-as-network and
non-art world commissioning, that causes what we identify in
this report as ‘the validation gap’.
For sociologist Howard Becker, the art world is “the
network of people whose cooperative activity, organised via
their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things,
produce(s) the kind of art works that the art world is noted for”
(1982: x). Validation can thus be understood as the result of the
art world-as-network acknowledging and rewarding artists for
producing ‘notable’ work. More than a fixed stamp of approval,
validation is a process, one that actively shapes reputation,
opportunities, demand and ultimately, for those whose livelihoods
depend in part or in full on this work, economic survival
for these artists.
Social practice faces two linked problems with regards
to its relationship with the art world-as-network and the role
of that network in validating artists. First, social practice is in
many ways a poor fit with the dominant art world-as-network’s
“joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things.” This
emerges in its choice of medium, its social-processual rather
than market-production aesthetic, its democratising rather
than elite impulses. Second, because social practice extends a
long way ‘beyond the gallery’and its operations, the dense, wellversed
and powerful network that Becker, and more recently
Sarah Thornton observed in their studies of the art world, is
currently ill equipped to fully validate it. Artistic practice is
largely developed through habitus (Coessens, 2011), which in
turn affects the art world-as-network. The habitus of social
practice however, because of how it crosses beyond art borders,
is poorly understood by this network. Whilst there are examples
of social practice artists who flourish in existing networks,
and pockets of social practice skill and excellence that manage
largely outside this network, the serious knock-on effects of
this for many artists working with social practice include a lack
of critical acclaim and championing for social practice art and
artists, a lack of appropriate artist development provision, and
a similar lack of familiarity and visibility inside the established
art world-as-network and amongst wider publics.
Our report details how this validation gap manifests itself,
why it matters and what can be done about it. Our findings
are based on a programme of action research consisting of
detailed analysis of 40 interviews with artists, commissioners
and researchers; surveys administered to a stakeholder group
of artists, funders and commissioners and participants; and a
social art commissioning programme carried out between May
2017 and January 2020.
In the next section we summarise the research background
and methods. Following this we turn to the interviews, drawing
out five linked issues of concern, illustrated with interviewees’
quotes, as a way to keep centre stage our pilot study’s call for
an artist-led or artist-informed model of validation. Next we
describe the commissioning programme, the aim of which was
to provide a platform for social practice artists’ critical writing
and debate, combat isolation amongst artists, explore some of
the specific issues and gaps that artists were facing, and create
opportunities for informal conversations between the wider
stakeholder group. Discussion of the insights gained through
this process follow. We end the report with eight recommendations
and a proposal for what comes next.