Evaluation Bridges the Divide
How Evaluation Tells the Story of Inner Experience
Welcome to Measuring the Immeasurable, a newsletter helping arts and culture leaders understand the language of public value. Often, evaluation is understood to be about numbers. I think the core of all evaluation is good stories. Here I suggest that stories are how we bridge the ineffable impacts of our art to the urgent need of our culture. If you find this work useful, please consider sharing and subscribing.
The most significant challenge in assessing the impact of art is that it is, at its ground, essentially a private experience. Art may have instrumental impacts — on our sense of place, well-being, neurocognitive development or aesthetic enjoyment — but the root and ground of that impact is always a personal experience, what the philosopher John Dewey described as “inaccessible1.”
Consider two patients going in for heart surgery. They may have wildly different lives, conditions, and health. One patient may be in the theatre for lifestyle reasons, the other for a congenital defect. The good surgeon will be responsive to these different defects and conduct the surgery differently. The prognosis may be different for each patient. However, the desired outcome will ultimately be the same for both patients: Continued life and good health. Whether we are a patient, a doctor, an onlooker in the theatre or a government bureaucrat collecting statistics, we can broadly agree on what the goal of surgery is. This makes evaluating surgery easy.
Now, consider two people at a gallery gazing at Tommy May’s Wirrkanja2. They have wildly different lives, perspectives, and experiences. One may be a curious but somewhat bewildered tourist from Indonesia, the other may be a member of the Walmajarri diaspora living and working in Noongar Country. What kind of experience do we expect each person to have? If one bursts into tears, and the other merely raises an eyebrow, is that good, or bad? Should they have the same reaction? The two viewers have different experiences of the work. Unlike surgery, they cannot agree on what art is for. If two individuals cannot agree on the purpose or intent of a work, how can we possibly evaluate its impact?
Historically, support for the arts has come from people who understand that the impact of the arts is inherently private, and therefore plural. That includes sympathetic philanthropists who have the privilege to live in homes full of art, private school educated Government ministers who fondly remember learning the cello, and a shrinking professional class who can afford to regularly access art experiences. These groups support art primarily because they ‘get it.’ They do not need an evaluation report because they have fond memories of what art has done for them.
Unfortunately, not everybody ‘gets' it. Even board members of arts organisations often need their arm twisted to go and see a show or visit an opening. The raised eyebrow of an audience member could be curious engagement, or judgmental disengagement. Overworked government officials increasingly understand art through the lens of cold data, several steps removed from the warmth of original experience. In each case, those who don’t understand art fail to see what the relationship is between art and the concerns of daily life.
However, there is one art form which is robust, which all but the coldest amongst us are still moved by: Stories. Stories are how we create a bridge from our inner experiences to other people’s inner experiences. We can’t directly communicate how a work made us feel, but we can tell a story about it. "This happened, and I felt this way, which opened up this feeling, which reminded me of this event..." The good story connects the work to the broader context of life. It also invites the listener to experience the work for themselves3.
Good evaluation begins in experience and turns experience into stories. These stories, combined with other meaningful data, allow us to demonstrate the relationship between private experiences and public good. Or, as John Dewey put it way back in 1934: “[Our] task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.”
See Art as Experience, which inspired much of this post - and my thoughts on art evaluation more broadly.
We sometimes derisively call these stories ‘word of mouth marketing,’ which has always been, and will always be, the most authentic, meaningful, and effective form of ‘marketing’ there is.