REBEL: Producing Publics Through Playful Evaluation

While there are many systematic, reliable tools for the quantitative evaluation of public art as there are organizations and funders that require them, there is an absence of tools that meaningfully engage with the public. Public art organizations do assess some aspects of audience appreciation and participant benefit. This often involves evaluative tools that establish in advance the data and criteria to be reported on and to whom it is reported. This is especially the case in a common evaluative framework, which we argue gives a restricted and reductive value system when 5 = extremely successful and 1 = total failure. Today, public art may forego audience consultation, but its evaluation is inescapable, and its value is reflected in widespread digital capture and circulation through social media. A more playful and hands-on approach to evaluation offers an alternative to the prevailing paradigm based on econometrics like the “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” by promoting another possibility for more effectively surfacing the rich, lived-experience and peer-to-peer sharing of its users.