Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts

Hiesun Cecilia Suhr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317748724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Social media have dramatically popularized practices of evaluation, especially of cultural products and artistic expressions. The practices of "liking" and rating any shared contents such as music to blogs, film, videos, photographs to artwork and performances are ubiquitous in today's digital environments. As a result, creative producers are increasingly developing reputations and careers through a complex blend of online social reputation management and distribution platforms, and more longstanding forms of marketing channels and professional evaluation. In this context, Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts seeks to examine the newly emerging forms of evaluation, such as contests, competitions, ranking, commenting, liking, and rating, which are taking place in digital environments. In doing so, this book investigates the criteria and assessment practices tied to the evaluation of creativity and artistic works and further questions what is at stake when digital environments heighten the role of amateur and peer criticism to the level of expert critiques. While exploring potential informal learning opportunities and offering incisive critiques on the emerging norms and standards of evaluation, the essays in this book cover a wide range of artistic and creative practices.

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Introduction

Toward an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts

Heisun Cecilia Suhr

The journey of creative artists in their attempts to build reputations is often tortuous, since the evaluations and judgments related to creative productions are prone to heated controversy and contention. Most importantly, a career in the arts commonly grants no sustained promise in terms of success or income. Much of this unpredictable reality is especially true for amateur or aspiring artists, but it is in no way exclusive to them. Even trained creative artists (with degrees) do not always follow preconceived pathways to build reputations. The construction of reputations for creative artists is directly connected with making a living, since distributors, audiences, and consumers consider reputation as a critical factor in their decisions to support their endeavors (Becker, 1982). In this vein, creative labor¹ has been considered precarious (Deuze, 2007; Gill & Pratt, 2008; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2008). In the creative fields, uncertainty and unforeseen pitfalls can potentially transform invisible courses into concrete destinations.

Regardless of this reality, we have recently seen a surge of amateur cultural producers creating and sharing their works in today’s digital environments.² They are not only gaining recognition, but more doors now seem to be opened for them to compete with one another and build their own careers, either by directly selling their own cultural products or through other opportunities. The rampancy of amateur creative productions in digital environments has also fostered the activities tied to the evaluation process, such as rating, ranking, commenting, competing, and “liking.” In music communities, social and digital media networking sites have had a far-reaching impact, as exemplified by the recent controversy around Al Walser’s effort to market his music for a Grammy nomination on Grammy 365, a private social networking site for voting members of the Recording Academy (Del Barco, 2013). Music contests are ubiquitous; Paramountsong. com unsigned-only music competitions, international songwriting contests, Indaba Music contests—all of these boast that winning songs can provide opportunities to artists, producers, and record label managers in the form of a variety of prizes. Visual arts communities are no exception to this trend. Many contests are now tied to the acts of “liking,” rating, and commenting. For instance, Youbethejudgeartcontest.com is one of many examples of art communities organized into digital environments. This site allows “everyday” people to judge which artworks deserve to win grand prize packages worth over $10,000. Pixoto.com similarly hosts weekly photography contests for members with prizes worth up to $150 for images chosen by voting members within the community.

Crowdsourcing contests have also been on the rise in design communities, along with sites that share portfolios for ratings and comments. Game designers exchange design ideas and collaborate through feedback and contests on BoardGameGeek.com. The ability of users to share their ideas and videos has turned this site into one characterized by constant ratings and rankings. YouTube, most commonly known for distributing amateur as well as traditional media content, is also serving as a viable platform for makeup artists to showcase their tutorials; the popularity of these videos cannot be underestimated, and the number of “views” on YouTube is not inconsequential. On this platform, one popular makeup artist, Michelle Phan, has even scored a deal with Lancome, a major cosmetics company (Gold, 2010).

As evinced in quotidian examples, digital environments can potentially provide a springboard to help build reputations or create opportunities and platforms for professional artists. In this respect, this book explores various creative communities and their online evaluation cultures. The goal of this book is to critically understand developing themes and to further expound on the evaluation cultures’ potential, as well as limitations and challenges. The contributors to this collection each tackle a different creative field, including art, music, photography, design, fashion blogging, game designs, and makeup tutorials. Together, they capture the nuanced issues therein from a wide range of methodological and theoretical viewpoints.

Creative Productions in the Digital Era

With the rise of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2009), the scholarly discourses surrounding creative productions have increased in a variety of contexts; subsequently, these discourses have engendered various buzzwords and key terms, such as “D-I-Y,” “user-generated content”(Cha, Kwak, Rodriguez, Ahn, & Moon, 2007; Hesmondhalgh, 2010; Martens, 2011; van Dijck, 2009), “co-creative labor” (Banks & Humphreys, 2008; Banks & Potts, 2010), “crowdsourcing” (Howe, 2008), “fan labor” (Jenkins, 1992), and “peer productions” (Benkler & Nissenbaum, 2006).

For some scholars, digital environments are positive developments, since they seem to open doors for amateurs and everyday consumers to partake in cultural productions, thereby fostering creativity. In particular, Benkler and Nissenbaum (2006) note that not only do the benefits of peer production exist in terms of offering opportunities through collaboration, but peer production further “serves as a context for positive character formation” (p. 395). A similar lauding of amateur creativity can be seen in the context of fan productions (Jenkins, 2006), through which fans take part in the process of creation. Such activities have been labeled and hailed as a form of “democratic” participation. In a similar vein, do-it-yourself productions have also been studied in terms of how these types of activities foster creativity and new types of learning in the informal context (Ito et al., 2009; Kafai & Peppler, 2011).

Against this backdrop, the positive views of some scholars have been challenged by other scholars (Andrejevic, 2009; Martens, 2011; Turner, 2009). The detractors’ arguments are usually tied to the concept of free labor, as conceived by Terranova (2004). This concept seeks to capture the ambivalent meaning of work. One works voluntarily, but these efforts can be simultaneously exploited and unwaged (p. 74). Andrejevic’s (2008, 2009) case studies on fan labor in the cocreation of television scripts is a case in point, whereby the democratic potential for interactivity and participation masks potential exploitation. Most notably, Kreiss, Finn, and Turner (2011) observe that peer production pertaining to digital collaboration not only may end up serving the commercial sector but may actually encroach on people’s private autonomy as the boundary between private and public lives blurs.

A similar tone of concern and caution was raised through the creative collaborations that have taken place in many crowdsourcing contests. The notion of crowdsourcing, as coined by Jeff Howe (2008), a contributing editor of Wired magazine, relates to the outsourcing of jobs for an open call in order to solve a particular creative problem. This trend has been of growing interest to scholars from varying fields, as they strive to unpack problem-solving efforts through crowds and their relation to the market (Brabham, 2008, 2012; Kittur, 2010). People who participate in these contests have noted intrinsic and extrinsic gains, such as simple pleasure, leisure activities, or earning an income (Brabham, 2012). Still, these crowdsourcing contests have been problematized through a critical lens that focuses on creative individuals’ working conditions. For instance, Massanari (2012) problematizes various aspects that challenge the graphic design professions in terms of ambiguous intellectual property, the failure to educate designers, and the meager compensation that undermines the profession in general.

In surveying various discourses surrounding creative production, the utopian views are repeatedly problematized, especially those that valorize the notion of “democracy,” under which rubric work relations and commercial interests thrive and prevail in the guise of user empowerment. Massanari (2012) argues that the issues can be understood from a professional or aspiring creative artist’s perspective, for whom stakes are different than for the everyday user of the web who may be simply passing the time. If choosing to not participate is presumably one of the solutions to escape the exploitations of everyday consumers, how can creative artists build their portfolios, share their works, and compete in opportunities to further their career goals, as well as build their reputations?

Problematizing these phenomena in terms of the creative individual who is seeking an opportunity or work of any kind requires an outlook that goes beyond judgments limited to labels of right or wrong. The complexity of working conditions for creative artists has already been explored in Hesmondhalgh and Baker’s (2010) study of the television industry, the recording industry, and the magazine industry. In this study, they note that self-exploitations are common, and the experiences of creative workers are most aptly described as “highly ambivalent” (p. 17).

Ito (2010) also examines the unique cultural expectations and norms that take place in anime music video scenes, the remix videos made by Japanese animation fans. She asserts that unlike the kinds of fans that want to appropriate mainstream standards or expect financial incentives, these fans establish their own standards and creative values by resisting commercialism. Although I would argue that the stakes are different for fan producers and aspiring or professional creative artists, as evinced in Ito’s study, sometimes recognition within a certain subculture community and intrinsic pleasure are the driving force. Through my casual encounters with artists and musicians, I am also reminded of the rich and profound motivations of artists. One memorable discussion I had was with a New York City–based painter at an art exhibition in Brooklyn. Upon discussing the potential exploitations of emerging and aspiring artists, his responses resonated deeply with me and baffled me momentarily. He stated that artists are not oblivious of this, but sometimes this is the choice one makes. In considering the discourses surrounding creative individuals and the digital economy, we seem to ignore that complex motivations exist. Beyond intrinsic pleasure or recognition, artists can knowingly and consciously consent to certain conditions or rules through a decision to either maintain or resist change. Some artists choose not to continuously weigh potential gains and losses, not because they lack critical thinking abilities, nor due to their naiveté. Instead, they are driven by a profound inner urge to keep their creative inspiration intact. When intrinsic pleasures or romantic views of artists turn into myths or platitudes, we may potentially overlook the very experiences and feelings that drive the creative fields.

Along this vein, the question becomes, if a researcher or scholar is unable to replicate the same intrinsic experience as an artist, how can he or she critique these practices from a creative producer’s perspective? How could the efforts to foster amateur, ordinary creativity, as well as professional artistry, not be discarded in problematizing these practices? A similar point was raised by Banks and Humphreys (2008) when they argued for moving beyond the two diverging discourses based on utopian and dystopian views: “The extraction of economic value from social relationships is a dynamic and emergent process which also transforms the practices of business and capital” (p. 402). The concept of “user cocreative labor” emerges from the authors’ ethnographic research into Auran Games; this notion recognizes the intricate work relationships that transcend the empowerment versus exploitation dynamics. As evinced here, creative artists’ issues are often located on uncertain ground, especially if the argument focuses on the gains and losses in the field of digital cultural production (Suhr, 2012).

To this end, the challenges of navigating these controversial boundaries still remain, and by no means does this book collection claim to resolve them completely. Finding solutions to these challenges will require intentional effort to incorporate the voices of artists as part of research data. Although this book does not serve as a radical departure from previous discourses surrounding creative productions, it seeks to bridge them by focusing on the emergence of evaluations and the reputation economy of creative artists in the digital era.

To move along this vein of thoughts, van Dijck’s (2009) commentary sheds further light on the trajectory of the scholarly inquiry at hand. In his discussion of YouTube, where evaluation occurs frequently through popularity and algorithms, he notes that “rankings and ratings are vulnerable to manipulation, both by users and by the site’s owners” (p. 45). This is a key point to keep in mind, as these manipulations of evaluative measures cannot be seen as always one-sided or explained only through power dynamics. After all, the users themselves are not entirely outside of the culture. The crux of the issue requires unpacking the evaluation process from an immanent stance. This involves “not the deployment of conventional understandings and standards in ordinary or even more reflective discourse, but the assessments of the rationality or worth of conventional understandings and standards by somehow drawing on resources internal to the society or culture which they are a part” (Sabia, 2010, p. 687).

Mapping Interdisciplinary Approaches to Creative Evaluations

Understanding the new terrain of evaluation in digital environments is no simple task, as the topic of creativity and evaluation is interdisciplinary at its essence. The discourses regarding the evaluation of creativity not only have had a long-standing history but are linked into multiple disciplines, such as arts criticism, music criticism, film criticism, media criticism, and aesthetics, to name a few. Taking a brief moment to explore the traditional and formal critique process regarding these topics is useful, since the concern and controversy over arts criticism has not disappeared in the digital age. For instance, the discussion of whether “only specialists can assess the quality of art, or whether the taste of the general public also has some merit” extends to the current discussions regardless of its different context (Haan, Dijkstra, & Dijkstra, 2005, p. 59). This is because artists and creative producers have always had an interesting relationship with critics and criticism, since criticism has long been a staple of most artists’ careers. As long as art critics have been influential, the concerns over art criticism have also existed, as reflected in The Crisis of Criticism, in which Berger (1998) problematizes the roles and the validity of the criticism of art. For some scholars, such as Jarvie (1967), upholding objectivity in art criticism is important; Jarvie contends that “criticism is pointless unless it has some objectivity, unless there are arguments which count, and unless we can gain from it something like an increase of knowledge (or appreciation, or insight)” (p. 83). In a similar vein, the dichotomy of subjective versus objective criticism also extends to professional/expert and amateur/public criticism of taste. The tension th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Toward an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts
• 2 Revenge Rating and Tweak Critique at Photo.net
• 3 Link Love and Comment Karma: Norms and Politics of Evaluation in the Fashion Blogosphere
• 4 Who Judges the Judges? Evaluating Competition as a Technique of Evaluation in Online Game Design Forums
• 5 Constructing Learning through the Creative Evaluation of Visual Arts Production
• 6 Evaluation and Self-evaluation on YouTube: Designing the Self in Makeup Tutorials
• 7 No Learning, No Spec: Spec Work Competitions and the Spec Movement
• 8 Unpacking the Shifting Landscape of Music Evaluation in Indaba Music Contests
• 9 Online Social Influence and the Evaluation of Creative Practice: A Critique of Klout
• Contributors
• Index