Quantative Measures of Arts Output on their way

[Ian Macmillan]

Perhaps it was always just a matter of time before something like this came along:

 

http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/arts-council-impose-quantitative-measures-arts-quality

 

Anyone with experience of 'Quality Metrics' or other matters mentioned?  It looks like the makings of a new industry to me.

[AnneMarriott]

Goodness, is it April 1st already?

[Pas de Quatre]

How to kill off originality and creativity!

[Bruce Wall]

Having been in and about this game for more decades than I perhaps care to remember this truly is nothing new vis a vis the ACE regimes.  

Ultimately the ACE game has always been about - or certainly rooted in - a desire (nay, need) for quantification.  I honestly don't think anyone here should be surprised or shocked by this article. Surely there must be legions of filing cabinets already extant and stuffed with such (i.e., so called effective evaluations).  Those innards are simply filed under differing terminologies.  (Of course, I here assume that such evidence has been kept.)  There will I'm convinced be more.  Much more.  This is - yet again - but a re-naming of the proverbial tick boxes.  

 

What goes around, comes around and, at least in this instance and every one of those past, has at the heart of its dry spin a fervent desire to stick.  This - in and of itself - is nothing new. 

 

The proverbial 'we' keep somehow thinking that the art should be eternal.  Why?  We aren't.  Of course, it (the art) has a greater chance.  I agree.  It is a slim one ... but still it exists - and we cling to dangling hopes as if they were self-help drugs.  

 

To survive, however, art must speak to the eyes and ears of time.  That is quite a different agency.  It sits on a different shelf.  It comes with a different cyber address.  It lives in a different mansion.  

 

For this dictate to really be meaningful it should, I think, come with a health warning.  There should be a covering banner - in even larger print than 'Smoking Kills'.   'Lose yourself; lose your audience' it would read.  

 

The sleep of artisans might well then be more sound.  

Edited September 18, 2016 by Bruce Wall

[bridiem]

Having been in and about this game for more decades than I perhaps care to remember this truly is nothing new vis a vis the ACE regimes.  

Ultimately the ACE game has always been about - or certainly rooted in - a desire (nay, need) for quantification.  I honestly don't think anyone here should be surprised or shocked by this article. Surely there must be legions of filing cabinets already extant and stuffed with such (i.e., so called effective evaluations).  Those innards are simply filed under differing terminologies. (Of course, I here assume that such evidence has been kept.)  There will I'm convinced be more.  Much more.  This is - yet again - but a re-naming of the proverbial tick boxes.  

 

What goes around, comes around and, at least in this instance and every one of those past, has at the heart of its dry spin a fervent desire to stick.  This - in and of itself - is nothing new. 

 

The proverbial 'we' keep somehow thinking that the art should be eternal.  Why?  We aren't.  Of course, it (the art) has a greater chance.  I agree.  It is a slim one ... but still it exists - and we cling to dangling hopes as if they were self-help drugs.  

 

To survive, however, art must speak to the eyes and ears of time.  That is quite a different agency.  It sits on a different shelf.  It comes with a different cyber address.  It lives in a different mansion.  

 

For this dictate to really be meaningful it should, I think, come with a health warning.  There should be a covering banner - in even larger print than 'Smoking Kills'.   'Lose yourself; lose your audience' it would read.  

 

The sleep of artisans might well then be more sound.  

 

Yes, I think I had assumed that this sort of thing was already happening in some form (though not the peer review element, which is an interesting but potentially difficult concept). Wherever public funding is used, evaluation is inevitable (and perhaps appropriate). I'm sure the problem is the tick-box/reductive nature of this sort of evaluation, and the administrative burdens for already over-stretched companies/organisations. And, of course, the fear that a subjective process could end up being presented as an objective assessment, with negative outcomes for those being evaluated.

 

Oh and by the way, I DO believe that we are eternal! Not in our current bodies, but still eternal. Without that element, art would lose all its power for me. In the end, that's its point: it expresses, in some way, the eternal; not as something that is irrelevant to us (which would render art irrelevant) but as something of which we are an intrinsic part. Bit difficult to get that in a tick box, though...

[MaggiM]

What an absurd notion    If they are willing to spend resources on surveys, they could try to understand audiences, instead. Who they are, why they come, what do they expect, what they would like to happen, what they miss. It would give a richer feedback (beyond ticket sales) on  the  "eyes and ears of time", badly needed nowadays, imho, in the scenic arts. 

Edited September 22, 2016 by MaggiM

[taxi4ballet]

A lucrative deal for consultants, by the look of things. 

[Quintus]

I have done lots of this in banking regulation, measuring risk data and process quality.  There, we look for things that can actually be counted / measured, either as direct or justifiable proxy measures for the qualities being evaluated.  This framework is purely subjective, as it relies on collected personal ratings, and the dimensions that are used to add up to 'quality' are, I presume, simply reflections of criteria that the Arts Council uses to justify funding.  If you look at the dimensions listed in the Quality Pilot, they do actually push originality but also slightly odd things such as 'local impact'. Now local impact may have a political justification to it, but it has nothing to do with quality. The framework looks biased towards 'new and challenging', which is different from 'quality'.  If you took a traditional performance of say Swan Lake or Nutcracker, staged and executed perfectly and delighting the audience, it would probably rate low on most of these criteria but would intuitively still be high quality.

 

They do seem to have followed a process of collecting the criteria from the arts organisations themselves rather than imposing them, but the subsequent rejections suggest that said organisations were probably led by the nose by facilitators....

 

I would add that these are not actually quantitative assessments at all - these would be seen as qualitative in the world I work in.  Counting opinions about something does not mean you are actually measuring the thing...

Edited September 23, 2016 by Quintus