The Blog

So the previous post claimed that an effective arts policy starts when we look at the vision statement (e.g. “creativity at the heart of every community”or a place “where the arts are valued as central to civic life, as a hallmark of local and national identity, and as sign and signature of our creativity as a people) and take the vision statement seriously enough to ask why isn’t it already like that?.

I also said that once you ask that question you’re forced into a diagnosis. Unfortunately you can’t do a diagnosis without some kind of theoretical framework or you end up in the “artists need to be more entrepreneurial”, “its not really commercial” and my favourite “how much money do you people want!?” school of analysis which assumes that the policy problem exists because people just aren’t trying hard enough. (Its worth bearing in mind that although we’re considering arts policy here, we can apply the same analysis to pretty much any public policy area).

A theory is simply a model of how something works informed by observation, research and reflection. It’s never 100% right but it helps us to be less and less wrong. And that’s important in policy.

It’s worth sitting with the fact that you will not find anywhere in the legislation, policy or strategy documents pertaining to the arts (or culture) in Ireland a coherent set of theories on what art is, what an audience is or how it’s formed, or an economic theory of why the state should be involved at all in the whole art thing. The “values” and “visions” are stated everywhere but there are no coherent theories underpinning them – at least not publicly.

The absence of coherent and explicit theories means that assessments and funding decisions can feel arbitrary, funding schemes tend to proliferate without any real pattern or consistent purpose, and the advocacy and the case-making tends to struggle for credibility, and ministerial and government support is dependent on personal preference informed solely by experience and not theory.

I reckon we can build a workable arts policy on three fundamental theories from which everything else – priorities, instruments, assessment, budget – can be derived. A theory of art, a theory of audience, and a theory of value.

First theory: art is a relationship, not an object

Most funding systems assume that that art is a thing: a production, a publication, an exhibition, an output of some kind. Money goes into the system (to artists and organisations) and objects come out. We count the objects, count the audience, do a drive-by photo and the job is done.

Without getting into the whole “art is a highly contested word” territory, lets see what happens if our theoretical starting point is that art is a relationship and not an object, or at the very least the value of art is not resident in the object but happens when people turn up and experience it – when the book is read, when the music is heard, when the show is experienced, etc. The English critic Christopher Caudwell put it succinctly back at the start of the 20th Century : “Poetry is what happens when it is read.”

The objects and events themselves, regardless of their technical proficiency, are simply evidence of a society thinking and reflecting on itself, but the art occurs in the relationship – in the spaces between the object and the audience. Art – with a capital A – occurs when enough people (or enough people with power) build a relationship with the object and declare it to be Art.

Art happens in the relationships, perhaps at its heart it is the relationship.

AI has done us a great favour here, because it can produce objects – painting, stories, scripts, films, music – of great complexity and skill in milliseconds and at almost zero cost (once we ignore the externalities of energy and water consumption, and price of deskilling), indistinguishable to many people to work created by individuals. If the value of art sits in the object then AI is the best argument against arts funding and the idea of the creative individual.

However, AI cannot replicate or automate the production of relationships: the magic moment when a particular person, in a particular room, in a particular town, develops a relationship with a singer, an actor, a mural, a dancer; when for that briefest of moment we feel seen, understood, connected, excited, transported by an encounter with other people working at the edge of what they can do. For a split second we see ourselves and we understand our world. The Art is in that moment, and then it is gone.

From a policy point of view a theory of art as relationship makes us realise that a funding system focused on the making and presentation of objects is simply a capitalist production line that will be more “efficiently” managed by AI. So lets try and avoid that.

Second Theory: audiences exist before the art arrives

I made the point in the last post that ” participation in the arts is one of the most reliably stratified activities in any society. Engagement tracks education first, then income and then geography. We learn about it from infancy (inherited social capital), our parents can afford the classes and the shows, we have access to facilities. A child who receives sustained arts education participates for life; a child who doesn’t, largely doesn’t. A family choosing between heating and a theatre ticket or a music class has not made a cultural choice. A town with no realistic public transport to the nearest arts facility has not lost interest in art, it just can’t get to it”. We don’t need to look at any of the great theorists of cultural participation to feel the truth of this – if you’re reading this its probably because there were books in your house growing up, or because there was music in the house, or because you were taken to a play by your mad relative, or because there was a teacher who just did mad stuff in class; there was a record store you could hang out in, a cinema you could get into, or the conversation around you turned toward the cultural. You can’t turn up with an object of what you think is art and expect to convert non-believers like a flute-playing Jeremy Irons. By the time we get there with our show, or story or exhibition, they’ve already decided what they like. They mostly made their choice in childhood, and taste (or preference or relevance) is formed early. The audience already exists – if you want to build a relationship with them you need to listen, respect, and respond. You can share your vision of the world, but if it doesn’t connect with theirs then there is no relationship, no Art emerges.

A lot of Arts policy is really uncomfortable with this reality and gets confused over engagement and development. If we assume that the audience already exists then the principle policy issue is do they have access to what they want – to the work that is relevant to them, that reflects their taste. If you want to capture the people who have no interest in turning up then you’re in the development business and you need to accept that meaningful development happens in families and in schools and youth clubs. From a policy perspective audience development is very very far upstream of access to the event.

It’s probably more accurate to say that taste, preference, exists before the art arrives. If the art is consistently relevant to particular people in a particular place then the chance of lasting relationships developing is high, and all those individual people who already know what they liked will, through repeated encounters with an arts centre, or a company or an artist, develop into an audience.

When thinking about audiences remember that they are formed before the art arrives, and then remember Amartya Sen’s theory of “capability”: the presence of an arts centre, or a theatre, or a gallery along with a programme of “Art” constitutes a formal freedom to do something, but their presence is meaningless unless the relevant “conversion factors” are in place: prior knowledge and relevant social capital, the sense that the building is “for you”, relevant education, time, income, confidence, etc. Resources, the presence of something, are not capabilities. An open door is not an invitation, and it is certainly not a bus ticket, a childcare place, or twelve years of music or dance education.

Audiences exist; listen, respect, respond.

Third Theory: the market that fails on purpose

At some point policy is going to have to spend some money, so it really needs a robust economic model that reflects the realities of the specific sector its intervening in.

There’s a lot of reasons why the majority of artists are poor (and getting poorer along with the rest of the 99%). The reason that interests us here is a specific aspect of the market failure in the wider arts sector. Arts activity generates economic value – something in the regions of €1.5 – €2bn in Ireland (depending on which report you read). Unfortunately very little of that value can be captured by a box office or an entry fee. The value is created but captured elsewhere in the economy. Direct state funding (or in Ireland’s case state funding and lotto money) redistributes some of that value via the tax system in the form of direct subsidy. This is a standard policy response to this kind of market failure.

However, there’s a second problem baked into the system. The Arts sector depends almost entirely on people for the creation of value. Arguably people (talent) are the key resource and the principal process (practice). Its very, very difficult to increase productivity significantly in the arts through the use of technology (which is what most other sectors do). If we can’t increase productivity and inflation is constant then costs continue to increase year on year and there is no way of stopping that. This phenomenon was identified in 1966 by the American economist Baumol in a huge study of the performing arts in New York, and the phenomenon of rising costs resistant to productivity improvement is called Baumol’s Cost Disease.

The main reason that state funding exists is not to support artists, its to keep art affordable to the public. If state funding didn’t exist then admission prices for everything (and everything would have an admission price) would far exceed the public’s ability to pay in a situation of declining real wages.

This means that policy needs to work out where the money can have the most effect: is it on the supply side (which is where most of it is now, in the making of work), or is it in the demand side, making sure that everybody who wants to engage has the capability (Sen) to do so. Now it would be naive to suddenly switch from a supply side intervention to a demand side one, but an effective policy needs to understand how to mix those two for maximum impact – and right now we’re not doing that.

Why does all this matter

Well first and foremost it matters to me because I enjoy it, but there’s a really practical outcome here. If we build policy on these theories then the priorities stop being a negotiated list of everyone’s favourite things and we can rigourously derive and test the priorities from the theories. For example does this scheme fund an encounter or merely an output? Does it form an audience or transact with one? Does it correct the market failure or subsidise something the market would do anyway? Funding applications can start asking questions like what relationships did you form, deepen, or make possible, and what is the evidence? The argument for funding at government level starts presenting a set of steps to correct a market failure aggravated by cost disease – these are terms embedded in the economic language that departments actually use and understand.

There’s also a really important democratic and advocacy bit here as well: a funding system that has no stated theories (no “first principles”) cannot be held to account, cannot be defended against cuts, and cannot be redesigned. Every decision made is arguable because nothing is based on anything real. What policy theory tells us will happen in this situation is what we see happen: the strongest incumbents win, the assessments always feel like personal preference, and there’s no compelling answer to “why fund this at all?” when the next recession comes around.

So, the better approach to arts policy is not ‘better values” or more aspirational prose. Set out robust theoretical frameworks on art, audience, and economics and then deduce the policy from them – even if you don’t like what comes out. First principles – you can’t beat them.

Vision. The idea of “having a vision”. The “Vision Statement, Mission Statement, and Values” structure we find in strategies and policies has dominated the strategy and policy field for a quite some time.  As a consultant I’ve spent a lot of time in workshops and focus groups with clients and local governments, with post-its and design sprints and lego and role play and what not creating some beautiful vision statements.  I can purple-prose it with the best of them!

But from an arts policy/strategy perspective the focus on Vision is a dangerous distraction. Look carefully at the language:

“We want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish.” (Arts Council England’s Let’s Create, 2020)

“a place for every story, a story for every place” (Australia’s national cultural policy, Revive 2023),

“Amplify our arts and culture to make New Zealand a creative powerhouse with global reach” (Amplify: A Creative and Cultural Strategy for New Zealand 2025 -2030)

Our own National Culture Policy (now out of date) stated in its original draft that its vision was to “put creativity at the heart of every community”. This was changed in later versions and the current publicly available version doesn’t seem to have a single vision, rather it has three “fundamental principles”:

1. Recognising the value of culture and creativity to the individual and society
2. Supporting creative practice and cultural participation
3. Cherishing our cultural heritage

Check through any amount of arts plans, policies, strategies, be they published by national or local government or national agencies and you will find versions of these visions of the future.

Don’t get me wrong, I think all of these are admirable, I’ve written many versions of them over the years but they are not policy (and certainly not strategy). If anything they capture the ongoing failure of policy. Let me explain.

All of the above are “value positions”. A value position simply tells us what the policy maker believes or wants to be seen to believe. Policy is something else entirely. Real, effective policy starts when you take the value position seriously enough to ask the question: Why is it not like that already?

Why isn’t New Zealand’s arts and culture a creative powerhouse with global reach?

Why isn’t everybody’s creativity in England given the chance to flourish?

Why isn’t there a place for every story in Australia?

Why have you not recognised the value of culture and creativity to the individual and society?

Why isn’t creative practice and participation supported?

Why isn’t the distinctive societal value of the arts recognised by local and national politicians, decision-makers and officials in a wide range of departments and agencies and provided for accordingly?

As policy makers, the moment we challenge the vision and ask the follow-up “why isn’t it like that already” we are forcing a diagnosis that reaches beyond the sector under consideration and back into the wider system. We are forcing a seriousness of intent.  

Are these problems that are hidden in the vision statement resulting from an education issue, an inequality issue, an ideological issue? Is creativity absent from lots of communities because the private economics of making art outside a major urban centre are subject to extreme market failure? Is it because funding structures which should correct market failure don’t understand the nature of that failure? Is it because increasing inequality and regressive redistribution policies have reduced the capacity of local governments – and local government arts offices in particular. Is it because of a wider cultural problem that really doesn’t believe in the value of arts? Is it because arts, critical thinking, and reflective practice have been downplayed in education for decades as we attempt to turn out employment-ready students?

Every response we make to the question “why isn’t it like that already” (particularly in a situation where policy action and investment has been consistent over time) points us toward a different policy instrument, a different budget line, a different accountability structure. If we don’t do the diagnosis then we’re not doing the policy and we end up with something akin to a mood board with a ministerial foreword.

I also need to add that this is probably not deliberate. It happens when we think an aspiration is an output. When “positive thinking” protects us from social realities.  We’ve said we want to build 300,000 houses by 2030 and that’s the job done; we’ve said we recognise the value of culture and creativity to the individual and society, so that’s the job done. Unfortunately, in so many cases, the difficult middle bit of the policy process, the diagnosis, the problem definition and identification, the selection of the appropriate instrument, the costing, the accountability is simply ignored and replaced with random ideas on how to realise the “vision” without asking why we need to have such vision in the first place. If we cannot address the primary cause of a problem, that problem ain’t going away and we end up with what governments find easiest to fund: programmes, initiatives, visibility etc., and then ten years later we measure the success of the aspiration by the existence of the aspiration.

It’s true, that when we ask the question  “why isn’t it like that already?” we create a difficulty for policy makers in arts/culture in that the answers can’t be found inside the cultural brief.  For example participation in the arts is one of the most reliably stratified activities in any society. Engagement tracks education first, then income and then geography. We learn about it from infancy (inherited social capital), our parents can afford the classes and the shows, we have access to facilities. A child who receives sustained arts education participates for life; a child who doesn’t, largely doesn’t. A family choosing between heating and a theatre ticket or a music class has not made a cultural choice. A town with no realistic public transport to the nearest arts facility has not lost interest in art, it has lost access to it.

The great Indian economist Amartya Sen’s capability approach distinguishes between the formal freedom to do something and the real capability to do it –  what he describes as the substantive freedom to live a life one has reason to value. A free museum in a city a two-hour bus ride away is a formal freedom. Whether it becomes a real capability depends on what Sen calls conversion factors: income, education, time, transport, confidence, health, the sense that the building is actually for you. Much cultural policy has spent decades supplying formal freedoms – open doors, free admission, “access” schemes – and then being surprised that the same social groups keep turning up. Sen would not be puzzled. Resources are not capabilities. An open door is not an invitation, and it is certainly not a bus ticket, a childcare place, or twelve years of music or dance education.

Those cultural policies – and we produce a lot of them here – that are built on visions that include the word “everybody” are really just a cultural aspiration and a hopeful claim about the distribution of capabilities, and therefore a claim about equity in education policy, income policy, and spatial policy. And this is precisely why scholars like Justin O’Connor and the great economist Marianna Mazzucato argue that art/culture are not stand-alone sectors but part of the underlying foundation of a society and an economy. Which is why, in an arts policy context, it’s really much easier to publish the aspiration than the diagnosis. The diagnosis implicates departments that haven’t signed the foreword, as it were.

Let’s at least be Honest in Policy

So let’s be honest in our next wave of policy making. Building policy honestly is not mysterious. When we’re building the next arts policy or strategy let’s sidestep the purple prose as quickly as we can. Here’s a workable approach:

1. State the value position and then convert it into a gap/problem/challenge.  So if the vision is “Creativity at the heart of every community” then ask why isn’t it already there? Don’t just map deficits, define terms and look for causes.

2. Diagnose the cause. Why does the deficit/challenge exist? Market failure, cost disease, funding mismatch, underinvestment, capture by incumbents etc, and then look for the structural determinants: education, income, inequality, place. This is where the real analytical work happens and it is the step most policy documents omit, usually because the answers implicate previous policy and partly because they implicate other departments entirely. Remember when we ask “why  isn’t it already like that?” a beautiful vision statement can become an admission of previous failures. And nobody likes that…

3. Choose the instrument that fits your analysis. De we need supply-side subsidy, or demand-side stimulus in the form of regulation, direct provision, tax expenditure/breaks. For example if we discovered that artists can’t afford to live in the community and that’s a problem, then a festival grant is the wrong instrument, however photogenic. And if your diagnosis tells you that we’re dealing with capability deprivation (in Sen’s sense), then the instrument may not be a cultural one at all: it might be an urgent need for arts education on the curriculum rather than at its margins, or income supports, or better transport, or just keeping a local venue open, or treating the town as the venue. We need to evaluate every policy instrument by the capabilities it actually expands, not the opportunities it formally supplies. The great systems analyst Donella Meadows argued that the deepest leverage points are in system structure and goals, not in parameters. Regrettably government arts policy loves tinkering at the parameters (another scheme, another fund) because they are the shallowest and safest place to act – dipping toes in the ocean. 

4. Don’t lie to yourself about the money. As a colleague once remarked to me, a policy without a price is a press release. Don’t just see what change is left in the government coffers, don’t set the budget based on last year’s allocation, and don’t suppose that all of the actions can be funded from a single department. Be honest about what you want to see happen, ask yourself who can deliver these outputs and outcomes for you, and then ask them what it will cost to do so. Pay the price and stop exploiting the sector. If the state won’t or can’t pay what the diagnosis says the problem costs, and can’t find alternative investment sources then say so, admit it and scale the ambition to the money –  do the reverse of the current practice, which continually scales the language up and lets the money stand still. And remember that funding that is not index linked at a minimum and increasing year on year is a managed decline. And remember that the actual number is meaningless – it’s what can be done with the number that’s important.  

5. Keep a clear eye on things. From a policy perspective it’s really important to monitor results (accept feedback and change the policy if appropriate), so who measures the situation in five years, against what baseline, and what happens if nothing has changed or if things have worsened? The problem with most arts/culture policy documents is that they are aspirational, and aspirational documents are pretty much unfalsifiable. It is the nature of good policy that it must be falsifiable, which is exactly why it is harder to publish.

At the end of the day,  it’s a really useful policy stress-test to search the document for the sentence that begins “creativity should be…” or “we want a country where…” and includes “…everybody”. Then look for the paragraph that explains why it currently isn’t. If that paragraph is missing, what you are holding is not a policy. It is a value position –  and the communities and people it invokes will still be waiting at the heart of nothing when the next policy is launched to replace it.

Values are where policy starts. Its not where the work happens.

Culture, Funding, and What Arts Pollicy Keeps Getting Wrong

I put up a post on social media last week that got a lot of attention. The bit that resonated was this

“But culture (arts, community, youth etc) does not behave like a product line. It behaves like soil. You don’t fund a forest by paying for leaves. You fund it by protecting the conditions in which growth is possible: time, trust, continuity, and shared meaning…many of our funding instruments are not neutral. They actively reshape the cultural field – and often in ways that contradict stated policy goals. Funding tools can create the problems they are designed to solve.”

I was surprised how much attention this post got, particularly by one comment: “That feels like a genuine discovery. And rarely in dialogue in this topic have I heard genuine discovery. It sounds like a treatise that needs to be disseminated where it can affect comprehension and change.”

So that felt like a bit of a challenge!! So this is my thinking behind the forest leaves metaphor and why there’s never enough money in the arts,

First, there is a fundamental mistake running through arts and cultural policy. It’s been there so long it’s almost impossible to see.

Public policy works on the assumption that funding responds to problems.

In reality, funding tools can create/aggravate the very problems they are designed to solve.

Now, this is not because policymakers are careless, nor because institutions are corrupt, and it’s not because artists are ungrateful. The reason is simple and it’s a really common mistake. The state, politicians, bureaucrats and other agencies keep misidentifying the object of cultural policy – and then they build instruments that reshape reality to fit the mistake.

The result of this mistake is a system that appears busy, inclusive, and productive, but is actually and quietly destroying the conditions that make culture/art possible in the first place.

The Forest and the Leaves

Let’s take a second to consider this metaphor. You don’t fund a forest by paying for leaves but cultural policy has become very good at funding leaves, as we all know.

Projects. Events. Outputs. Participants. Audiences. Artefacts. These fit neatly into applications, assessment criteria, and annual budgets. They can be measured, reported, and justified.

But culture – unfortunately – doesn’t live in outputs. It lives in conditions.

Time. Trust. Continuity. Shared memory. Informal learning. Intergenerational transmission. Risk-bearing capacity. These are not incidental to culture, they are its soil.

So here’s another great sound bite: when we fund only what we can see, we weaken what allows anything to grow.

The “three body problem”

At the root of the problem is a “conceptual collapse” that policy language rarely acknowledges.

Creativity, culture, and art are routinely treated as if they were the same thing and they are not.

So let’s take a moment to break it down – to name the parts as it were. Creativity is a given – a universal human capacity.

Culture emerges from the convergence of individual and group creativity over time.

Culture produces artefacts: and these are traces, indications, of a society thinking about itself.

Some of these artefacts endure, and we call these Art.

Art then feeds back into culture, reshaping imagination, language, and possibility.

This is a cycle, not a hierarchy.

Unfortunately, when policy collapses this cycle into a single category – ‘“the arts” – it creates impossible expectations:

creativity is treated as something to be allocated or produced, culture is treated as something to be delivered, art is treated as something to be predicted, and funding is expected to function simultaneously as welfare, evaluation, and validation.

Essentially the funding/policy system becomes incoherent because the model is incoherent.

Funding Is Not Neutral

Funding is often spoken about as if it were passive support – the beneficence of an enlightened state.

It’s not that!

Funding is a design tool.

Every funding instrument encodes a theory of how culture (and the arts) works:

project funding assumes culture is episodic, competitive calls assume scarcity and competition produce quality, pre-declared outcomes assume culture is predictable, individualised grants assume resilience is personal.

These assumptions just aren’t articulated, but they are enforced daily through forms, deadlines, assessment criteria, and reporting requirements.

And the arts eco- system behaves accordingly.

Time fragments. Risk is pushed downward onto individuals. Learning becomes performative. Collaboration becomes irrational. Continuity is quietly penalised.

These are not failures of character or competence. They are logical outcomes of the policy tools currently in use.

How Funding Creates Its Own Justification

The irony, or perhaps the joke, is that despite the fact we observe the outcomes produced by this system – precarity, fragmentation, exhaustion – we respond by intensifying the same logic.

We see instability, so we introduce more short-term grants.

We see fragmentation, so we add more competitive schemes.

We see lack of depth, so we demand clearer outcomes in advance.

We see exclusion, so we spread smaller amounts thinner.

Each response treats a system effect as if it were a localised failure.

This is how funding architectures become self-justifying: the damage they cause becomes the evidence for their expansion.

The forest weakens and the leaves multiply. It’s self harm at a systemic level.

The Quiet Substitution of Welfare for Cultural Policy

This is a really fascinating aspect of the great funding mistake and nowhere is it clearer than in the way cultural funding has been asked to absorb failures elsewhere in the state.

Because there is no coherent income architecture for artists, arts funding has quietly become:

income support, labour-market correction, wellbeing intervention, social policy proxy.

All without the scale, authority, or design to do these jobs properly.

This is not compassionate it is simply avoiding the issue,

When welfare is smuggled through cultural funding, both systems are distorted:

cultural policy becomes moralised, funding decisions become confused, and culture is instrumentalised to solve problems it did not create.

Arts funding should not be concerned with artists welfare because that’s a welfare /human rights issue not an arts issue.

Separating income support from cultural funding is not technocratic tidying – it is conceptual honesty.

Culture Is a Condition, Not an Activity

Let’s try and pull all this together. The central error is this:

Cultural policy treats culture (and therefore arts) as an activity when it is a condition.

Activities can be funded episodically, but the conditions that produce those activities must be sustained.

Culture, however, behaves like a field:

relational rather than transactional, cumulative rather than episodic, place-based rather than mobile, time-dependent rather than immediate.

Project funding is excellent at producing events, but it’s very poor at sustaining fields.

When the project approach becomes the dominant logic, depth declines even as activity increases. We just get more stuff.

What an Effective Alternative Requires

A different outcome does not need better intentions, or a more refined language, but it desperately needs better models and better tools.

It is my belief that an effective cultural funding architecture would:

Fund conditions as infrastructure. Time, continuity, coordination, reflection, and learning are not overheads. They are the system. We need to accept that cultural value is retrospective: what endures cannot be predicted. Autonomy and unevenness, failure, are not flaws: they are conditions of seriousness. We need to mix funding instruments deliberately because direct grants stabilise time and risk; income supports belong in welfare, and tax systems drive investment and engagement. No single policy/funding instrument can do all the work. We need to evaluate coherence, not volume. Retention, collaboration, memory, and capacity tell us more about cultural health than output counts ever will.

What This Implies About the State

If we take all this seriously, it leads us to an uncomfortable conclusion.

The state currently relates to culture as something it funds, uses, and depends on – but does not recognise as a form of public intelligence.

So, in the absence of a robust theory of culture and art, administration and funding step in.

Application forms and guidelines replace understanding, metrics replace meaning, and competitive funding replaces stewardship.

Essentially, culture and the arts are tolerated so long as they remain legible and useful.

But their deepest value lies precisely in what resists legibility: ambiguity, contradiction, deep time, critique, and shared sense-making.

A state that cannot accommodate this is not hostile to culture.

It is simply incoherent.

The Point of the Forest

The forest metaphor works because it exposes the mistake cleanly.

Leaves matter; but they are not the forest.

Projects matter; but they are not culture.

If you fund only what you can see, you will destroy what allows anything to grow

The question really is not whether to fund culture more “generously”. It is whether the state is willing to redesign the invisible infrastructure that shapes cultural life:

funding logics, time horizons, risk distribution, and the boundaries between culture, welfare, and civic participation.

Until that happens, we will continue to get the same outcomes – with better language, kinder intentions, and more exhausted systems.

That is not failure of will, it is failure of design.

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.