On Art, Artists, & Evaluation

Evaluating artist-led projects is persistently uncomfortable work – and I’ve done a lot of it in recent years: artists in residence, artists in health settings, artists and climate, artists embedded in community systems, in bureaucracies, etc. All this work that artists do sits slightly sideways to the frameworks we are expected to use to account for public value. Once the word evaluation enters the brief evaluators reach instinctively for outcomes, indicators, deliverables.

The problem is that Artists reach for something else entirely.

This mismatch is not a technical problem by the way. It’s a conceptual one.

So, bear with me. The problem is that most evaluation frameworks assume a linear logic: inputs produce activities, activities produce outputs, outputs produce outcomes. (Who doesn’t love a good logic model). The assumption then is that the artist enters this logic as a producer of things – artworks, workshops, events, moments of participation – which can then be measured for impact. But this assumption, this logic misses what artists are actually doing in these contexts. It misreads the nature of their labour, and therefore misunderstands their value.

Artists in these roles are not primarily producers. They are researchers. Arguably art is the original form of all research.

Obviously not researchers in lab coats or with spreadsheets (though sometimes those appear), but researchers in the original sense of the word: people who re-search a situation. They look again. They look differently. They attend to what is usually overlooked.

Like all good researchers, artists begin with relationships. They embed. They listen. They notice patterns, tensions, contradictions. They collect fragments: stories, gestures, materials, overheard comments, institutional habits, silences. They connect these fragments across boundaries that usually remain separate – between departments, disciplines, people, timescales, ways of knowing.

Amanda Palmer once described her work as “collecting, connecting and sharing”. That phrase captures something essential. It is not extraction. It is not production. It is sense-making.

This is why artists are particularly adept at working in complex systems. Health systems. Local authorities. Climate responses. Communities shaped by layered histories and power relations. These are not environments where change moves in straight lines or where causality can be neatly traced. They are living systems, shaped by feedback loops, informal practices, emotional undercurrents and inherited assumptions.

Artists sense complexity. It’s part of the toolkit. Artists work with ambiguity rather than trying to eliminate it. Artists notice where language fails, where processes contradict stated values, where people behave differently than policies suggest they should. They feel the system as much as they analyse it.

From an evaluation perspective, this creates a problem only if we insist on the wrong question. If we ask, “What outcomes did the artist produce?” we will always be dissatisfied. The answer will feel partial, anecdotal, resistant to quantification.

If instead we ask, “What did the artist surface?” the work becomes visible.

What relationships shifted?

What conversations became possible?

What assumptions were disturbed?

What new ways of seeing entered the system?

What world was reflected back at us?

What did we learn about ourselves?

These are not soft or secondary effects. In complex environments, they are the conditions that make any durable change possible.

The mistake we repeatedly make is to treat the artwork as evidence of impact rather than as a mode of evaluation in itself. We try to translate the work of artists into reports, logic models or metrics that sit outside the practice itself, as if the art were merely illustrative.

But the art is the evaluation.

The artwork – whether it takes the form of an installation, a performance, a score, a temporary intervention, a set of instructions, a story, or a social process – is how the research is shared back into the system. It is a proposition. A reflection. A reframing. It carries data that cannot be reduced without being destroyed.

This does not mean abandoning our critical rigour. On the contrary, all art work is an intense methodological discipline: careful observation, ethical attention to participants, iterative testing of ideas, responsiveness to context. What art and artists resist is not rigour, but reduction.

The push by funders and policy makers to frame art in terms of outcomes reflects a deep institutional anxiety rather than a concern for genuine accountability. Outcomes promise control. They suggest that if we design the right intervention, we can predict and manage change. Artists, by contrast, reveal how little control any of us actually have – and how much depends on relationships, trust, timing and openness.

This is uncomfortable knowledge, particularly for organisations structured around a faith in certainty and compliance. But it is precisely why it’s important to understand that art is research and that is why it is so valuable.

So what have I learned from recent evaluations of artist led projects. Evaluating artist projects requires a shift in stance. Less auditing, more interpretation. Less counting, more attending. It requires evaluators to read artworks not as decorative extras, but as analytical texts – dense, layered, situated.

It also requires commissioners and funders to accept that not all value arrives on schedule, or in forms that can be anticipated in advance. Some of the most significant effects of artist-led work are delayed, diffuse or indirect. They show up later, in changed practices, altered language, new alliances.

If we are serious about learning from these projects – not just justifying them – we need evaluation approaches that mirror the artists’ own intelligence: relational, systemic, reflective.

Artists are not delivering outcomes to a system. They are helping the system understand itself.

And in an era defined by complexity, that’s probably the most necessary research of all.