INSIGHTS 48
Several commissioners admitted that they often took their
cues from other organisations when searching for new artists
to commission:
…we’re looking at…who else has hired
them, organisations that share the same
ethos. And if they’ve worked for them
successfully, they’re likely to be able
to work for us successfully as well
(Commissioner, 9B)
For the majority of ‘non-art world’ commissioners, the
benefits to participants were the driving force behind supporting
social practice, linked to drivers delivering government
initiatives around social impact and wellbeing, but there was
less sense of imperative for participants to have more agency
in the projects.
Regardless of this, a large majority of artists and commissioners
emphasised the overlooked importance of ‘participants’
and collaborators as primary validators of social practice:
Many also acknowledged that there is currently a lack of
satisfactory ways to capture participants’ views — and pointed
towards a hierarchy between participants and funders in relation
to the respective weight of their various validating judgements.
In addition, artists considered legacy as essential, but
found it an unsupported aspect of practice. They considered
current evaluation methods to be insufficient, opaque or only
measured in monetary terms. On the other hand, funders from
local governments and commissioners connected to larger
institutions (galleries) had confidence in their potential to
develop evaluation frameworks of social practice, and emphasised
how keen they were to develop new partnerships with
other commissioners. They were also confident in their own
ability as validators. Meanwhile none of the social practice
artists we interviewed identified funders as part of the validation
process, beyond providing more support in terms of money.
I think everybody involved in the
project [has a role in its validation]…
It’s participants, it’s our collaborators
and partners (Commissioner, 3B)