JUDGE ME: Value, Judgment, and Legitimacy as Public Procedure

This essay examines JUDGE ME as a structured inquiry into how value is judged, internalised, and legitimised in contemporary society. It situates the work's courtroom structure, witness system, expert testimony, dynamic jury, and scripted recomposition as artistic research methods for making judgment visible as public procedure.

JUDGE ME is best understood not simply as a performance about artists, but as a structured inquiry into how value is judged, internalised, and legitimised in contemporary society. The work takes the form of a trial in which a performing artist and a marketing professional-entrepreneur are positioned as claimant and defendant, while the audience functions as jury. Witnesses and expert witnesses are called to testify. The formal question concerns whether artists and their work are adequately valued in society today; the larger question concerns how societies determine what counts, by what criteria such determinations are made, and how those judgments are absorbed into subjectivity.

The juridical frame is central to the work's significance. A courtroom is one of the clearest institutional spaces in which judgment becomes visible as procedure rather than remaining naturalised as common sense. Claims are articulated, positions are opposed, evidence is presented, and legitimacy appears as something produced through form. By placing value inside a courtroom, JUDGE ME makes explicit a process that usually remains diffuse: the worth of persons, professions, and forms of labour is constantly adjudicated through overlapping systems of market recognition, institutional validation, media visibility, social intelligibility, and internalised self-assessment.

The work was generated through a multi-stage artistic research process. The first phase involved exploratory field mapping through a questionnaire and more than twenty street interviews conducted in Norway. The purpose of this stage was not quantitative representation, but the identification of recurring assumptions, tensions, and fault lines around value, recognition, work, and legitimacy. These early materials established the broader field of attitudes from which the work's central conflict could later be drawn.

A second phase consisted of witness workshops, organised across several long sessions. Participants first engaged in free conversation and were then prompted with questions that had emerged from the survey and street-interview phase. The function of these workshops was not to produce consensus, but to allow positions to emerge relationally: where participants converged, where they diverged, and where the most revealing oppositions became visible. In this sense, the workshops served less as data collection than as a method for exposing the structure of disagreement.

The script itself was built through repeated listening, extraction, selection, and juridical recomposition. Workshop recordings were reviewed not for representative opinion, but for recurring topics, shared concerns, contradictions, and points of direct opposition between witnesses. Usable fragments were extracted line by line and reorganised according to the logic of a trial. The resulting text is therefore neither raw transcription nor fiction. It is an authored recontextualisation of real speech. Because the witnesses had participated in the workshops and later appeared in the performance, the recomposed lines were ultimately spoken by the same people who had originally voiced them.

The work also includes a layer of conceptual intervention that did not arise solely from workshop testimony. Certain key questions, particularly those concerning externality, welfare economics, institutional mediation, and the hierarchy by which emotional or subjective forms of value are downgraded, required a broader discursive frame. For this reason, two expert witnesses were introduced: a cultural economist and a museum curator. Their presence widens the work beyond personal testimony and situates the conflict within economic and institutional contexts. It also allows the work to articulate questions that exceed the immediate witness material without abandoning its dialogical structure.

This methodological structure is mirrored in the performance architecture itself. The claimant and defendant are both performed by the same body, which means the work stages not only social conflict but embodied contradiction. Cross-examination, rebuttal, and logical continuity must be sustained across opposed standpoints in real time. At a crucial moment, however, the procedural frame is interrupted by a monologue in which the artist steps outside both positions. This rupture is essential. It prevents the adjudicative structure from becoming a closed machine and reintroduces vulnerability, situatedness, and the irreducible presence of the authorial subject into the work.

Although the audience experiences JUDGE ME as a continuous trial, its dramaturgy is modular. The work is organised into three sections, each carrying a distinct argumentative pressure and a cluster of subtopics. This hidden modularity allows a range of embedded issues, including market legitimacy, institutional authority, emotional value, usefulness, visibility, and externality, to unfold without dispersing the work's central inquiry. The audience, moreover, does not remain a passive public. Through revisable voting software, spectators become a dynamic jury whose judgments can shift throughout the performance before settling only at the end. The work therefore emphasises judgment in motion rather than verdict as static endpoint.

The significance of JUDGE ME extends beyond the question of artists' value. The artist serves here as a diagnostic figure through which a wider crisis of recognition becomes legible. The work shows that judgment is never neutral, that legitimacy is always structured, and that systems of valuation do not remain external but become internalised as self-assessment, shame, aspiration, and division within the subject. In this respect, JUDGE ME belongs not only to performance but to a larger inquiry into how societies authorize value under conditions in which market metrics, institutional prestige, and public visibility increasingly function as dominant proofs of worth.

In the context of NVI's research on value, judgment, and legitimacy, the work is relevant because it demonstrates how artistic form can operate as a method for investigating legitimacy rather than merely illustrating opinion. It provides a concrete model for asking how judgment becomes public, how contested values might be structured without collapsing into false objectivity, and how irreducible human subjectivity persists within procedural systems. In this sense, JUDGE ME is not only a finished artwork. It is a prototype for thinking about value adjudication in relation to broader questions of governance, institutional design, and increasingly automated forms of social evaluation.