This weekend a creative director friend told me with great disappointment that his agency was implementing a numerical grading system for creativity on its creative work.
This is so obviously a terrible idea I shouldn’t even have to bring it up. Nothing kills art (or the human spirit) like an arbitrary score.
The only creativity you’ll get from that management is creative manipulation of the metrics you chose - means maximisation that loses sight of the end : great work.
Some things can’t - or shouldn’t be counted. Sons things - like art, love - and people - are more than the sum of their countable parts.
It takes no genius to understand than conflating, for instance, the box office sales of the Barbie movie with a ranking of the disposable film’s artistic value are an unforgivable mistake.
What gets measured gets managed gets manipulated.
And what doesn’t get measured does not mean it doesn’t have meaning or value.
Non fungible things resit being shrunk, flattened and digitised to fit our pre prepared boxes for easy sorting and comparing. As they should.
Any future guided by metrics alone to bend and contort to fits in such a neat pre-prepared flattened box is sure to be stifling - and short on creativity.
Todays signal looks at the new critique of “quantifiable aesthetics” and how confusing metrics with meaning is a slippery slope indeed.
What are you measuring?
Can it even be measured fairly?
Why are you measuring it?
Can you score “creativity”?
Hmmm.
Just because it can be counted and compared doesn’t mean it should.
Just because it can’t be counted and compared easily doesn’t mean it’s not important.
Read more:
Measuring what? https://news.artnet.com/opinion/quantitative-aesthetics-2276351
Seeing like a state : https://news.artnet.com/opinion/quantitative-aesthetics-2276351
Counting against creativity