Art Impact Takes Time

Art Experiences and Art Impacts

Welcome to Measuring the Immeasurable, a newsletter helping arts and culture leaders understand the language of public value. Today’s post focuses on how time turns immediate aesthetic experiences into long-term impacts. I hope it is useful to you, and if you find this work useful, please consider sharing and subscribing.

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Landscape, by Albert Pinkham Ryder. Open Access from The Met.

Most arts evaluation focuses on the immediate aesthetic experience of the audience. There is a lot of pressure to get surveys underneath noses while the audience can still recollect and talk meaningfully about their experience. This approach has use and supports transparent reporting, but it always struck me as a limited approach to evaluation.

The greatest art experiences have an immediate impact, but also germinate in us over time. Good art provokes a dialogue within us. Our initial, vivid aesthetic experience enters into conversation with our past experience, and this leaves us transformed. These impacts do not register on surveys, but they aren’t totally ephemeral either: Indeed, true transformation tends to manifest in clear, visible ways which can be evaluated and shared. This is the real impact: The maturation of the initial aesthetic experience we might capture in a survey.

As an example, I once heard about a homelessness charity that operated a large residential facility¹. In the interests of being more accountable to the homeless population, they set up a committee of former tenants who could provide advice on their operations. They struggled to make it work. Their committee of former tenants had very little cohesion, frequent conflict and people eventually dropped-off and stopped coming to meetings.

In parallel, that same charity was running an arts therapy program. Eight formerly homeless women came together and made art as a way to process their experience. The charity assessed these immediate, experiential outcomes the way we might assess the aesthetic experience of an audience at a production. They surveyed them and interviewed them, looking for the immedediate catharsis and satisfaction which comes from art-making.

What the charity didn’t anticipate was the sense of community that would come through the art therapy program. The women not only healed through art, they also bonded. After the conclusion of the program, the eight women heard the charity needed a committee and they all agreed to participate. As they had spent several weeks making art together, they already had the trust, cohesion and commitment required to be a high-functioning, productive committee. Their immediate experiences of the art therapy program led to long-term impacts.

The vivid experience following a production or program is worth capturing, but any arts organisation which wants to understand and communicate its value needs to focus not only on immediate experiences, but longer-term impacts.

1. I can’t find the original citation for this, but I believe it was in Danny Burns’ Systemic Action Research.