Assessing Socially Engaged Art

Simoniti, Vid

doi:10.1111/jaac.12414

Cited by 25 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Following a pitching process with both academics and community participants, social practice artists Close and Remote joined Life Chances. At their first meeting with community participants and co-researchers, Close and Remote stated that the aim of art should be to make work that is of long-standing value, where value is understood as involving, but not be limited to, social benefit and is expressed through both process and outcome (see Simoniti, 2018).…”

Section: Art As Methods and Outcomementioning

confidence: 99%

Life Chances: thinking with art to generate new understandings of low-income situations

Watson¹,

Cohen²,

Evans³

et al. 2020

Imagining Regulation Differently

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This chapter explores how contemporary social practice art materialises interactions between regulatory regimes and low-income families with children and enables disruptions of regulatory regimes in ways not possible using traditional social science approaches. It focuses on a research team that included artists Close and Remote. Here, the chapter explains how the team co-produced, with community members and academics, a socially engaged artwork — Life Chances — that aimed to generate new knowledges about the regulatory regimes that low-income families with children experience. Aiming towards a form of improvisational empathy, Life Chances worked with Thomas More's (1516) Utopia and Ruth Levitas's (2013) Utopia as Method as ‘a form of speculative sociology of the future’. By staging and troubling contradictory notions of ‘life chances’ through art, the chapter specifically asks how the regulatory services that families encounter in two urban settings — the Easton area of Bristol and Butetown, Riverside and Grangetown in Cardiff — shape, constrain, and enable the life chances of individual families and communities.

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Section: Art As Methods and Outcomementioning

confidence: 99%

Life Chances: thinking with art to generate new understandings of low-income situations

Watson¹,

Cohen²,

Evans³

et al. 2020

Imagining Regulation Differently

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Here, arts advocates express concerns with regard to only funding the arts based on their instrumental benefits. The instrumentalization of the arts also leads to debate on how exactly to understand and judge 'quality' in the arts (see, e.g., Bishop, 2006;Simoniti, 2018). There is a tension between utility on the one hand and aesthetics on the other (Brice & Fernández Arconada, 2018).…”

Section: Evaluating Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over the past decades, an expansion from the arts beyond galleries into society took place, with artists actively engaging with particular social contexts (Brice & Fernández Arconada, 2018). Various terms are adopted in this context, such as community-based art, socially engaged art, sitespecific art, social practice, dialogic art, interventionist art, contextual art, and collaborative art (Bishop, 2012;Simoniti, 2018). The objectives and output of artists involved in this kind of art vary enormously, but, as Bishop (2006, p. 179) notes, they all share "a belief in the empowering creativity of collective action and shared ideas".…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insights and Inspiration from Explorative Research into the Impacts of a Community Arts Project

Vaart

2021

Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship

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In today’s society, the resilience of communities is in the spotlight. How can communities shape and respond to the challenges they face in order to achieve a better future? For researchers focusing on this question, researching artistic practices can provide valuable insights and inspiration. From a resilience perspective that seeks to incorporate people’s everyday lifeworld and local knowledge, community arts in particular hold much potential, being an art form that actively engages people in the creative process. Evidencing the impact of community arts projects has become more important over the years. However, as this chapter discusses, there are several tensions and concerns around evaluating the impact of the arts. The chapter takes as its empirical focus one such project in particular: the multi-year theatre-trilogy Grutte Pier, which took place in the Dutch village Kimswerd between 2014 and 2018. In this village, the site-specific theatre company PeerGrouP worked together with the inhabitants to create a trilogy around the village’s historical figure Grutte Pier. The chapter reflects on an explorative research project into the impact of this community arts project on the village. Hereby, it contributes to the understanding of how meaningful change can be achieved in communities, preparing them for a more sustainable future. The reflections on the explorative research support the need to adopt a critical perspective with regard to assessing the value of artistic practices. The experiences in Kimswerd show that community arts projects can be an evocative way of engaging a community and can result in a variety of effects. The chapter discusses both personal effects, relating to personal growth, people’s social life and feelings of pride, as well as effects at the village level, such as the creation and strengthening of bonds between the inhabitants. Effects are expected to go a long way and be a great boost for a community’s organizational capacity and future activities. In light of these findings, it appears to be a successful formula to have artists coming to a community as ‘outsiders’, actively engaging inhabitants in a large community arts project that is both locally grounded and offers the inhabitants various ways of participating themselves.

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“…That said, by choosing to create a piece of socially engaged art, the artist has chosen to create a work that can and should be judged not merely on artistic value, or value as art, but also on its ethical/pragmatic value. Vid Simoniti () addresses this pragmatic standard of assessment in “Assessing Socially Engaged Art.” “[Simoniti's] pragmatic proposal is precisely to insist that for this subset of artistic production we should evaluate art by means of its impact, that is, by comparing it with ‘nonart’ political initiatives” (Simoniti , 80) . When discussing ally aesthetics, this impact should be measured in part by the reception of the work.…”

Section: Assessing Work Of Ally Aestheticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ally Aesthetics

Fried

2019

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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In this article I discuss what I am calling “ally aesthetics.” I suggest a set of necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, considerations for the creation of successful instances of ally art. Focusing on three case studies, I propose some key characteristics of ally aesthetics, such as its contextual/temporal nature and how that relates to success and the importance of understanding the place of the ally aesthetic within the larger movements they are allying with.

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Assessing Socially Engaged Art

Cited by 25 publications

References 18 publications

Life Chances: thinking with art to generate new understandings of low-income situations

Life Chances: thinking with art to generate new understandings of low-income situations

Insights and Inspiration from Explorative Research into the Impacts of a Community Arts Project

Ally Aesthetics

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