Audience Participation in Cultural Projects Bringing the Organization Back In

Based on the observation that cultural institutions are showing increasing interest in developing participatory projects, the authors pose the following question: How and to what degree can participatory projects lead to a transformation of the organization, similar to the activation of the work of art via the gaze of the spectator? They use three case studies to demonstrate that, while audience participation in the cultural field has developed apace and has effectively transformed the relation of participants to the worlds of art, it has not succeeded in penetrating the boundaries of the organization beyond ad hoc services. They discuss this phenomenon in reference to the need to implement organizational change further upstream and to the difficulty inherent in making available specific approaches to evaluating participatory projects.