Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ds_opseeker 719 days ago
Reminds me of an observation from a podcast done by a successful creative (sorry, can't remember who, I think Rick Rubin was interviewing the person):

Our society thinks it is normal to have a creative work evaluated by accounting, but never the reverse.

It would be fun to reverse that. "Ok, Jones, you made a profit of 30M, but we don't really see that you released that much creativity. We're going to have to cancel your project."

3 comments

> Our society thinks it is normal to have a creative work evaluated by accounting, but never the reverse.

It is normal because it makes sense: people can spend the money as they wish, but the same cannot be stated for creativity.

Material conditions apply. True profit occurs when our actions improve material conditions in pareto efficient way. Art that makes us better off is more valuable than art that does not... definitionally.
The market isn’t great at measuring whether art improves the lives of those within it.
The art market is a very interesting one - in both that it's driven in large part by human factors ( psychological ), and it's quite open to manipulations of various sorts.

If you want to study pathologies markets can accrue then in my view the art market is a very good area to study.

This sort of exists, but unfortunately only as slow trainwrecks. It is how Bobby Kotick was finally ousted from Activision-Blizzard, and similarly with Amazon's Rings of Power, and Boeing's 737-Max, and also with the crap Disney puts out in the last 25 years (new star wars movies). With Kotick however, I fear he was just replaced with more competent bean-grubbers.