Arts Council to impose quantitative measures of arts quality | Hacker News Reader

Arts Council to impose quantitative measures of arts quality

artsprofessional.co.uk

22 pointspanic28 comments

Oh dear. Even if we assume that some of the metrics can be useful ("Enthusiasm: I would come to something like this again"), they are deeply subjective, so any measurment would lead to good metrics for mainstream, lowest-common-denominator work. Pretty much the opposite of what art should be, given that many great artists were mocked or ridiculed in their time.

I suspect this is an attempt to recreate the success at the olympics, apply ruthless efficiency in selecting the very best and promoting them.

This sounds more like standard bureaucratic graft to me, where some private-sector middleman is going to get paid a bunch to "evaluate art quality" according to some proprietary set of "art quality metrics". The article says that the metrics platform will be owned by Counting What Counts Ltd, and organizations receiving grants will have to license it from them for £2,000/yr. Basically the business model of "shitty overpriced software you're required to have" that Blackboard Inc. pioneered in higher education.

Also generally part of a current trend (also seen in the sciences) where more and more grant money gets plowed back into managing the grant process itself rather than going to the things the grants are nominally supposed to fund.

There is a very workable to blackboard.

Did you accidentally the noun?

This is a very poorly written article that provides very little information about the method or its motivation. And the consultants they're quoting sound like idiots.

The reality, I believe, is this: Arts Council funding is limited and decisions need to be made about which projects will be funded over others.

So they need some transparent system based on info from: the artists, their peers and the public.

Without any information whatsoever its not clear on what basis they could be making any decisions. The whims of some Art Director who happens to prefer one thing over another?

> The whims of some Art Director who happens to prefer one thing over another?

I'd prefer this. It's the way it's been done for years, and it's usually referred to as curation: people who know what they are talking about making decisions about what's best.

But who then should curate the curators :)

There is nothing to the concept of "knowing what you are talking about" when selecting who to fund and who not IMO.

You might be lucky you have someone with great intuition and bi-partisan approach to what they select but you might as well be unlucky that they don't. "knowing what you are talking about" does not help you select what piece of art should be promoted over another because there really isn't any piece of art that should be promoted over another. I.e. there are no objective criteria.

So applying quantitive measures is as perfectly useful as relying on individuals and it applies transparency to the process especially when combined which I believe is is the aim of it.

There is another discussion all together about whether the public should be funding art but thats a whole other issue IMO.

> But who then should curate the curators :)

If I wanted to push my argument further, I'd say the ultimate answer is the same: people who know what they are talking about.

You're right that there is no real objective measure of the quality of art. Which leaves a choice: throw up your hands and say everything and nothing is of value, or do what sounds terrible to most people: trust that a cultural elite is capable of making sound choices about what is valuable and what isn't by virtue of their understanding of the tradition and community standards.

If there is no external and universal value, there can still be an internal value that grows from a culture, education, strong institutions, a living and evolving tradition[0], careful thought, and understanding — the people who have that are a cultural elite.

It's an elitist, subjective, and probably conservative approach riddled with biases and problems, but it's better than the two alternatives: the market decides, or (which appears to be the case in the article) some market researchers decide.

[0]: By tradition I mean: "an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of both internal and external debates."

It's Alasdair MacIntyre's definition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_MacIntyre

> There is nothing to the concept of "knowing what you are talking about" when selecting who to fund and who not IMO.

I disagree. For example, clearly the head of the Museum of Modern Art in NY would make better decisions than I would about who to fund, because they know what they are talking about.

That knowledge and its application aren't perfect, but they do add necessary value.

How do you know they would make better decisions? By all means, if you can figure this out there is a nobel laurate waiting for you.

>it's usually referred to as curation

It's also referred to as cronyism and discrimination. Allowing a decision-maker to employ purely subjective criteria is wide open to abuse. Without objective standards, that behaviour is impossible to challenge.

The problem is that most metrics are quite arbitrary when applied to art. If the objective standard gives equally nonsense numbers for all parties does it provide any added value over cronyism? The latter is obviously unfair, but the former is not necessarily fair but rather arbitrary. Financially art is anyway driven by fads and fashions - it's not science nor is it objectively measurable from any other point except market value.

Taken to the nth degree, the meaningless objective evaluation would just be a random number generator - entirely arbitrary, but entirely fair. There's a wholly legitimate argument that arts funding by lottery is better for society than nepotism and cronyism.

Does that remind anyone else of the "understanding poetry" scene from Dead Poets Society? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjHORRHXtyI

lol, if they succeeded it would be revolutionary. We can put that formula in a fitness function for AI and don't need artists anymore.

Seriously: Who comes up with that? We finance culture because it needs to avoid the markets not to become a dull product. At best they will aim at some mainstream, not at all supporting any advances in art.

We totally can! We'll just ask the output be at least 8 out of 10. The output being...uh, the average of grades from our ten resident artists. ;)

Right, but what do artists want? Grants, funding, cold hard cash in other words.

It's unreasonable to ask people to put their hands in their pockets and give you their hard-earned money if you can't explain exactly what you're going to do with it. That way lies Tracy Emin putting her unmade bed on display, or whatshisname and his pickled sheep - laughing all the way to the bank.

As most, they take what they can get.

Most funding however is not profit oriented. Often it is paying the material, offering a residency (not payed rent anywhere you want) or small financial aid because it's still very hard to make a living as an artist (unless you play/serve the art-market well).

Most any of these grants have a jury, the better ones actually have a small jury and more often than not the influence of a single jury is even enhanced by having some kind of weak positive veto. If a single member of the jury thinks someone is really worth it, than it is made highly likely that he gets funded. This is because democracy makes no sense here, you want to select a few good people for the jury, who then judge the best they can.

This system is still crooked, because most juries have bad taste, are forced to select something likeable or scared to take risks, but in every application artists write exactly what they will do with that money.

edit: I'm tempted to say a good basic income would be a solution, but in e.g. a movie production most of the jobs are not the nice creative ones, so art-house stuff would still need external funding to exist.

Emin's unmade bed and the pickled sheep were both impactful, memorable works of art. They were successful. I mean, just that you referenced them off the top of your head and I know what you're on about is proof of that.

They were memorable only for the media coverage of the controversy that other people's money was spent on them.

This is lottery money, not taxpayer's, but that finite pot of money has plenty of other, legitimate, causes it could be funding.

I've been to the first world. I noticed while there that they spend the majority of their time and effort in pursuit of activities that hardly be classified as basic needs. I've noticed that beyond basic needs, what can be classified as a 'legitimate cause' gets pretty subjective pretty fast.

There is even the curious phenomenon of the 'starving artist', a class of individuals who willingly compromise basic necessities in pursuit of things at the highest order of Maslow's heirarchy of needs. Though few of them are actually starving, really it just means they can't afford luxury goods commonly found amongst even the lower classes.

Let's suppose that there actually were a proposed quantitative measurement system for art. I'd try to make a piece of art that scores the lowest possible.

Sounds toxic. Imagine this was created by someone that sees art as a collection of objects.

Art is about artist, not art - and no one wants to directly be told they are not producing "quality art" by some system.

I did some work for a startup who is applying algorithm to picking up and coming artists.

http://tondoart.net/

I think the headline is mis-representative of what it's about.

It's does not sound like a measure of arts quality, but about creating a consistent set of metrics to judge with as a baseline.

Nothing wrong with that and everyone who don't believe in it don't have to use the sytem.

I think its now well accepted that there is an 'art' to math/science/code - why should the inverse not be true? Not to say that art should become some sort of an applied math, but is it a crime that a publicly-funded body should have some methods, strategy, and follow up on where its grants end up?

Some criteria are very easy to quantify. Authors race, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability status. It reflects on quality of art and its culture.

Arts Council is already using this criteria for grants and for hiring. It is only logical to use it on art itself.

Is there a hobo bonus?

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