Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ARTIS (Art and Research on Transformations of Individuals and Societies)
Reporting period: 2023-08-01 to 2025-01-31
ARTIS is a first-of-its-kind consortium of research institutions in social sciences, art history, education, and cultural policy with the aim of addressing, and—for the first time—systematically assessing, applying, and informing better policy regarding, some of the most persistent yet undefined aspects of art’s role in human society. We argue that the arts can be transformative. They may have the power to move us, to make us feel better (or worse), to make us reflect, to educate us, to question accepted narratives; to change our attitudes and behaviors. The arts can also foster an exchange with points of view different from our own, inspiring mutual understanding, and are indeed open to all cultures and people. However, in order to actually address the question of the potential efficacy, the limitations, and the potentialities of art to address societal challenges, it is necessary to build a systematic, multidisciplinary, evidence-based program that combines empirical and theoretical methods for capturing, assessing, and harnessing impacts of the arts. It is further necessary to combine with perspectives of artists, art educators, and other stakeholders. Only when we understand how art can change us or transformations can come about, or what the measurable effects of art interaction could be, can we create actionable and bottom-up policy, understand art’s role in culture, and truly debate art’s potential or its limitations. These challenges are the ARTIS aim, with four general objectives: CAPTURE the scope and the unique nature of our art experiences as well as their transformative potential at individual and societal levels in a systematic, multi-disciplinary series of empirical investigations. This involved our objectives to empirically assess and quantify the transformative power of art (art’s ability to create change at the levels of the mind, body, brain, and attitudes or behaviors) as well as to map the general scope of art engagements. This will create a first-of-its-kind foundation for understanding and operationalizing art experience, with actionable answers for policy, stakeholders, and artist-led interventions. CONNECT to the wider social and political context, identifying attitudes and conditions regarding art’s use and assess historical, political, and cultural contingencies hindering or promoting transformative art. We also aim to identify especially the political implications of art for democracy from an art historical perspective. APPLY the work via co-experiment with artists and curators, relating our findings to specific contextual factors and aesthetic and design decisions, as well as co-creating artworks and art interventions. PROMOTE and create specific actionable tools through bottom-up collaborative policy communicating the importance, the quantified impact, and the transformative potential of art.
In this final reporting period, we happily wrap our program having made major achievements. The ARTIS program overall has marked a world's first, unique opportunity to collaboratively assess how individuals are engaging arts across Europe and in a number of settings, including art institutions, cities, and in individuals' work or domestic settings. All told we have collected new evidence with over 30,000 unique meetings between individuals and art, exploring several dozen major exhibitions, tracking engagements with newly created behavioral survey measures, phenomenological interview, digital app-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA), geolocation, mobile brain and body/physiology scanning, etcetera. This has led to exciting findings such as first evidence that visits to exhibitions, installations, or individual artworks can lead to meaningful change in a number of attitudes regarding contemporary topics (the climate crisis, refugees, gender, politics). Viewing artworks, murals in the city, or engaging in more active co-creations can make us feel better, reflect on our selves, feel more connected to our neighborhoods, find new insight'. Achievements also include large-scale representative sampling of individuals’ art experiences in which we identified a finite variety of, shared, ways of responding to art covering the gamut of positive/negative profound and mundane responses. This is also important for policy and museums, allowing us to anticipate and apply the impact of art. Similarly, we have used experience sampling techniques to track over 900 people across Berlin, looking into how they report feeling, how they rate their surroundings. These actions have been matched, in RP3, now with a large number of newly created exhibitions, workshops, major conferences, artistic co-creation actions, as well as a created curriculum and toolbox of practices. ARTIS members have made a significant contribution to the visibility, producing, to date, 46 publications, participating in 75 conferences, producing 2 books. This has been matched by our own critical reflection on the potentials but also limits of scientific and artistic collaborations, the role of empirical data, and distilling into new policy reports to European cultural and arts officials, stakeholders, and the general public on the transformative potential of the arts for individuals and society.
With COVID-19, geopolitical tensions, worldwide disruptions, the increasing mental health crisis, but also with new interest in alternative approaches for adjustment, health, wellbeing, the importance of the arts and wider culture are only becoming more salient. We have been in a unique position to create some of the first structures for testing and applying art to many of these initiatives. ARTIS has shown great promise, for the first time revealing the scope and nature of art experience and its implications. This provides stakeholders with specific quantifiable effects that may be brought about by art. It will help them to connect these to specific types of experience and modulating factors. This has, and will continue to, give policy makers actionable tools and knowledge to promote the importance of art for societal challenges. It will also provide a framework for actors to discuss art initiatives from a quantifiable, efficacy-based perspective. Our successes, even though we now close this successful chapter of funding, are not final. The next years will be concerned with writing, secondary and primary analyses, and further advocacy. We plan, both across our individual teams and between our programs, to build from our activities, to apply our tools, to continue to refine artist-led initiatives, to shape and enact policy, and to contribute to the sustainability of the ARTIS program. Even more, returning to the original claim made in our grant application--this project has shown how to successfully build a systematic program, starting with theory-driven, data-forward approaches, based on empirical evidence for what art experience actually looks and feels like and how art is actually being engaged and responded to in real life by a wide sample of society. We further have demonstrated the benefits from such a collaborative basis, providing an exciting example for future successes on arts and societal challenges.