Is it possible to measure creativity? Is it possible to measure artistic talent? Is it possible to assign a grade to students in the arts based on a measure or on multiple measures?
Those are the questions posed in this article, which describes the efforts by states to develop metrics for the arts. https://m.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-forget-the-sat-this-new-standardized-test-measures-artistic-ability
I am assuming that the title of the article is a mistake. It is not about a “standardized test” for the arts but rather a replacement for standardized tests.
I instinctively recoil at the idea of measuring creativity or artistic talent. There is something inherently subjective about any such judgments. These days, who can say what is art and what is not.
Please, teachers of the arts, help me here. I can see grading students for participation, persistence, and engagement. But how can you grade them for talent and creativity?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This article doesn’t give much of a clue about the nature of the tests—whether there is anything objective in them. But actually the key issue is something different: *how* tests are used. If you can actually measure something validly, Ok. Then if you use these formatively, to help guide learning, they can be helpful. Actually even subjective judgments from an artistic mentor can be very helpful. Where testing becomes destructive is when it is used *punitively*. That is the key issue.
The tests given at this point test only minutiae, not real learning (think specific artists and paintings, or something equally rote). Once again, there is NO evidence to assume that the testing is objective. Simply by selecting what gets tested, or not, makes the testing subjective. Never mind that standardized testing has been proven to NOT be objective, particularly with regards to the poor and minorities.
Well, you can test pretty objectively whether somebody knows their times tables. And that can be helpful if you then help the child learn the products that the child doesn’t know well yet. My point was that the educational dysfunction starts when you punish the child for not knowing, rather than helping them to learn more. It is the bad use of tests that is the problem.
Exactly Right!!!
You grade them the same way you grade characteristics like “grit” – NOT WELL. As soon as you get away from “Type 1” assessments into the “squishy realm” of “Type 2,” then the assessor basically has control of the assessment’s outcome. Scary thought.
AND perhaps even less helpful, in too many cases the “assessor” has little to no reason to be stratightforward in the act of assessing. When high-stakes punishments are attached, any level of information might be produced.
This is insane. Does wealth buy power that ends up corrupting the buyer’s mental ability too?
It’s obvious that Lord Acton was right.
“When a person gains power over other persons–political power to force other persons to do his bidding when they do not believe it right to do so–it seems inevitable that a moral weakness develops in the person who exercises that power. It may take time for this weakness to become visible. In fact, its full extent is frequently left to the historians to record, but we eventually learn of it. It was Lord Acton, the British historian, who said: “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
“Please do not misunderstand me,” Ben Moreell continues. “These persons who are corrupted by the process of ruling over their fellow men are not innately evil. They begin as honest men. Their motives for wanting to direct the actions of others may be purely patriotic and altruistic. Indeed, they may wish only ‘to do good for the people.’ But, apparently, the only way they can think of to do this ‘good’ is to impose more restrictive laws.”
http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-2-number-6/power-corrupts
I went to back to school night for my 9th grade HS student. She is taking art this year and I am curious how it will be “graded”. What baffled me was that her PE teacher informed us that our children need to bring pen and paper to PE class every day and that they will have a test at the end of the semester. The teacher politely indicated that it is not in the best interest of the students to be bringing pen/paper and that she would rather that they engage in physical activity. Guess she wanted everyone to know that she wasn’t the “heavy” making the rules. SAD!
I think it’s certainly possible to measure specific artistic talents, albeit without great precision. A skilled painter could correctly determine that I am a terrible painter, even if it were impossible for her to specify exactly how terrible of a painter I am.
See my discussion below of the misuse of the term “measure”. Assess, evaluate, judge are just a few of the more appropriate words to use when discussing the work of anyone. Measure is not the correct term to use.
Your proposed verbs all work for me.
” But how can you grade them for talent and creativity?”
The same way you grade them in math, and you can draw the same valueless conclusions.
The grades you give out have no value?
The arts should be evaluated not with scores or grades but with written narratives.
Or savage reviews.
“The arts should be evaluated not with scores or grades but with written narratives.”
The same with math. Why not?
At some point down the line there may be a need to rank students. For example, when the glorious day arrives colleges no longer use standardized tests to rank applicants, admissions officers may find that it’s useful to have transcripts that list grades.
“When the glorious day arrives colleges no longer use standardized tests to rank applicants, admissions officers may find that it’s useful to have transcripts that list grades.”
Good one, and almost one thousand colleges are already using transcripts that list grades instead of those flawed tests. Here’s a link to that list.
http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional
In addition, Stanford uses standardized test results but those tests are only one element of a complex admissions process and the test results were not all that important compared to transcripts and other documentation that shows the HS student’s extra curricular activities. Our daughter had slightly below average SAT scores but was accepted to Stanford based on her being a scholar athlete with a 4.65 GPA on her transcripts in addition to a lot of extracurricular actives she was involved in. She also had to write an essay that was read/graded/evaluated by a real person at Stanford and not Pearson and/or a computer. I think she also had to go through an interview with a real person instead of a simulation.
“At some point down the line there may be a need to rank students.”
Universities need to decide whom to admit. Is it really useful to do this based on scores?
When a workplace interviews several candidates for a job, do they give a grade to each candidate?
None of the colleges I have been to ever ranked candidates based on scores. Why do it with students?
Is giving grades convenient compared to written narratives? Yes. Are grades better descriptors of students than narratives? No. Are grades more objective descriptors of students’ work than narratives? No.
There are American universities that have freshmen classes of 5,000 or 10,000 students, and perhaps four or five times as many applications. So the convenience factor is significant. And while grades may not be more objective than narratives, that doesn’t mean narratives are more objective than grades. It’s possible that each is equally subjective. Also, not everyone writes particularly well, or even well, whereas from the reader’s perspective, grades are remarkably coherent.
FLERP
There are now nearly 1,000 colleges and universities that do not require entry exams.
So that’s nearly 1,000 colleges and universities that might be currently using high school grades to sort applicants.
Grades, essays, recommendations, and evidence of students’ community service. I would rely on them over a standardized test any day. By the way, I spoke to a waitress in a restaurant who is preparing to be a physical therapist. She must pass a 5-hour certification test that consists of 250 multiple-choice questions. If she gets a good score, do you think she will be a good physical therapist? I have had a lot of experience with PT over the past two years. I think that is a truly stupid certification exam.
Diane .
Chsrters won’t care they love money .
Your always right 🙂
My Dawghter is on 8 grade and child honor student on a public school Hialeah Gardens .
She is very creative and narrative .
As soon I could post what I did . I’m soo happy the Hialeah Education Acaddmic . Inc .
Sub-bestimate me . I wish I could right proper English . I’m very creative . I would like to right them with some help , finish the way I’ll close it .
I love the way you repost , I enjoy a lot , sincerely from my heart , people are crazy , you have short but deep knowledge , they can’t handle my ether but consider please I’m an non- English Speaker .
Do you remember me ?
By the way nice pictures with Hilary , Congratulations .
No intrinsic value only whatever “value” each individual gives them which means, in essence, that grades have no value.
I would think that just means that grades have no “intrinsic” value, not that they have no value at all. As you imply, grades have the value that people give them. Anyone whose application to a college has been rejected because their grades were too low understands that.
Here is a very short narrative for math that indicates the problems with grades.
She can calculate well only if alone and if there is no time limit. She also has a hard time thinking alone. But during conversations, she turns out to be extremely inventive: she takes the other person’s thought and develops it, then gives back her creation for further improvement. She not only is willing to think about mathematics, but she actually gets very excited when she takes part in discovering a new formula. She may then bring up the formula even weeks after its discovery and assures me how much she likes it, how beautiful she thinks it is.
An engineering school may not want her, but a liberal arts college? Is she fit to be a math major? You bet. Is she going to get good grades in math? Very doubtful.
Diane,
I think the issue is the inverse. Rather than asking if work in the arts can be “measured” like math, reading and other disciplines, we should be asking why work in these other disciplines is not viewed like work in the arts. Grades and numerical assessments are constricting in all realms, because creativity, imagination, innovation, differing intelligences and myriad other factors render most assessment schemes irrelevant.
Exactly.
The data drivers are dominating every aspect of school. Not everything can or should be distilled into a number. Creativity is one of them. This is a subjective “appraisal,” and I don’t know how we can or should express it with a numerical value. The purpose of this futile charade is to assist the “bean counters” in creating some version of VAM and their relentless pursuit to collect data to feed the computer.
But how can you grade them for talent and creativity?
I don’t think you can grade those directly. But if a student is participating, engaged, persistent, then the talent and creativity will derive from it in some way.
“Teachers follow step by step instructions”. Very creative. How do people who allegedly want to inspire creativity in kids construct a test or strategy and then make teachers into drones? I don’t believe them. I don’t believe the CEOs. What they really want is to extol creativity to make themselves a buck or to look like they’re on the cutting edge. Kids who can demonstrate the concepts taught in an art class, are engaged and focused get an A.
There are kids who can take those concepts and flabbergast you with their insight. They get an A too. And then the art teacher gets the privilege of contemplating the profound mystery of human creativity.
I fought having to give “grades” to my elementary art kids (K-4) for the last half of my teaching career of 27 years. I stood up for the kids–suggesting that the principal drop in as often as possible to see just what awesome, all-round learning happens in art class. Of course, even with his children in class, that amounted to, maybe, one visit a year.
Fortunately, although I was tormented, i never was forced to give grades.
If the upper echelon would get out of their inner sanctum and see “art in action”–fine arts, music, theater–perhaps insidious grading would become irrelevant even to them!
I worked on the development of the Michigan Arts Education Instruction & Assessment (MAEIA) project in Michigan mentioned in the linked article. To clear up some of the things in the article:
The MAEIA project was not a test, and certainly not a standardized test; the part of the project I worked on was a collection of sample music-specific assessment tools, nearly all of which are authentic assessments (composition projects, performance exhibitions), and many that take several days or weeks to complete. Each assessment has some form of rubric, or other tool for teachers to use to provide feedback to students, and to use in reflecting on their own practice.
These assessment tools are voluntary, not mandatory, and are available to all teachers free of charge. They were developed by teams of music teachers and music teacher educators, and the project was funded and sponsored by the Michigan Department of Education.
I would also object to the headline of the linked article as not properly capturing the purpose or goals of the MAEIA project–the purpose was not to create a “standardized test to measure artistic ability.” It was, according to the project website, to develop “a comprehensive package of resources and tools arts educators will use to increase access to high quality arts education programs and practice in Michigan’s schools.” The feedback from music teachers I’ve heard was that they are appreciative of having access to a large body of high-quality, well-designed projects and assignments, and have both used some of these resources and used the ideas from the projects to develop new assignments of their own.
I agree with several of the comments in the thread above, that the real issue here is not whether or not there is a need for standardized tests designed to measure artistic creativity. The real question, as stated by stevenelson, is: “Rather than asking if work in the arts can be “measured” like math, reading and other disciplines, we should be asking why work in these other disciplines is not viewed like work in the arts. Grades and numerical assessments are constricting in all realms, because creativity, imagination, innovation, differing intelligences and myriad other factors render most assessment schemes irrelevant.”
I taught beginning band (grade 5) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for 8 years. I loved doing band work and found that we needed every bit of rehearsal time to put on a splendid performance. Taking time out for standardized tests would be a crazy waste of time.
Some students worked very hard and accomplished not very much. Some were very talented and achieved even though they didn’t work very hard. Some average students worked hard and achieved a lot. Some didn’t work and got next to nowhere.
How would any standardized test grade these students? It requires the understanding of a teacher who is directly involved. Is a test going to degrade a kid who loves his instrument, works hard and isn’t achieving a lot? Is a high achiever who does no practice supposed to be graded top of the class? Eventually, this student will have to begin working or there will come a time when the rest of the hardworking students will catch up and surpass this lazy one.
What would the standardized tests measure? In my estimation absolutely nothing of any value. Listen to the students performing to get an idea of what they are achieving.
One of many obvious things we already know that will be discovered is that kids who grow up in homes where creativity and the arts are appreciated and displayed/heard will do better at these pursuits in school. Likewise with the effects of socioeconomic status. Unexamined here is the fact that some kids have no significant or positive exposure to the arts at home and arrive at school with the specific skill sets such exposure provides in an atrophied state, as well as with the attitude that the arts are not important and are something they cannot do well in. This cuts across all socioeconomic sectors. Also unexamined is the difference between being able to produce “product”, whether physical or auditory, and the conceptual/intellectual growth that can accrue from participating in art criticism and analysis and of just being exposed to amazing works of art and learning the stories of how they came to be. For example, the art critic who can barely draw a stick man but is brilliant at understanding and describing the genesis of an individual artists work and the social context within which it resides and how it interacts with that context vs. “Outsider” artists who have no training in the arts yet produce astounding works. Long story short, we will discover what we already know, that those children with the advantages bestowed by socioeconomic status or that naturally cleave to creative pursuits due to who and what they are will do better in schools that can support their passion and worse in ones that lack the needed resources for that, and that “regular” kids will see the same effects in proportion to their interest in the arts as influenced by home life and by their teachers and curriculums. Last, a long time ago, there was a poll of the CEO’s of some major corporations and the result was, as was indicted in the article, that creativity as developed by the arts is of fundamental importance to both individual and industry success and the arts are not to be thought of as some kind of frill or extra that can be disposed of during times of tight budgets. The understanding of the critical importance of nurturing creativity is at the core of things like play based early childhood education, and it is at the core of the success of Finnlands education system where academics are not introduced until the age of 7 or 8 since play based education is the focus for those years. We do not need more data collection, the money wasted on that should be spent on keeping and enhancing the arts in all schools. Further, I am highly suspect of bean counters who would quantify this with an eye on managing and eventually standardizing an inherently variable and fluid enterprise. Enabling art teachers to meet and collaborate to expand their capabilities and spread interesting approaches would also be a better use of the funds spent on data collection and analysis, it would essentially be to allow them to reside on a different point on the fractal continuum of ideas that they use to inspire their students, to let them synergize among themselves in the same way that they create and facilitate very similar synergies among their students. Yes, FYI, I have a long background in the arts.
Actually creativity is not a priority item for these “reformers”. Test scores, indoctrination is the priority. Education is reduced to academics and academics that fit the needs of the CEOs. A true education has been reduced to that myopic mind set.
Too: of GREAT interest: NOT just in Indiana.
ITT has shut down Merrillville campus, all other locations
Students can transfer or wipe out federal loans
Joseph S. Pete joseph.pete@nwi.com, (219) 933-3316 Updated 1 hr ago
ITT is shutting down Merrillville campus, all other locations
Buy Now
John J. Watkins
ITT, which has a campus in Merrillville, is shutting down.
ITT Educational Services Inc., which has a Merrillville campus, shut down Tuesday, shortly after a federal crackdown that prohibited it from accepting any new students with federal financial aid.
The for-profit school’s closure will put 8,000 employees out of work and disrupt the educations of about 40,000 students nationwide.
“It is with profound regret that we must report that ITT Educational Services, Inc. will discontinue academic operations at all of its ITT Technical Institutes permanently after approximately 50 years of continuous service,” the company said in a press release. “With what we believe is a complete disregard by the U.S. Department of Education for due process to the company, hundreds of thousands of current students and alumni and more than 8,000 employees will be negatively affected.”
ITT, which was the subject of various state and federal investigations, at one time had more than 220 students at its Merrillville campus at 8488 Georgia Street. The Carmel, Ind.-based for-profit college, which made $580 million of its $850 million in total revenue from federal aid dollars last year, had about 130 other campuses in 29 states.
The U.S. Department of Education leveled sanctions more than a week ago after finding ITT Tech failed to meet a number of accreditation standards, including student retention, placement and licensure passage rate.
“For more than half a century, ITT Tech has helped hundreds of thousands of non-traditional and underserved students improve their lives through career-focused technical education,” the college said a statement. “This federal action will also disrupt the lives of thousands of hardworking ITT Tech employees and their families. More than 8,000 ITT Tech employees are now without a job — employees who exhibited the utmost dedication in serving our students.”
U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said in a blog post that current and recently enrolled ITT students can choose to wipe away their federal loan debt and restart their education at another college, or that they might be able to transfer their credits somewhere else. The second option could make more sense for students close to graduation, but other programs might not accept their ITT credits and transferring could jeopardize their ability to have federal loans discharged.
“Whatever you choose to do, do not give up on your education,” King wrote. “Higher education remains the clearest path to economic opportunity and security. Restarting or continuing your education at a high-quality, reputable institution may feel like a setback today, but odds are it will pay off in the long run.”
Federal and state agencies have been cracking down on for profit colleges in recent years, which has resulted in the closure of Indiana Dabney University in Hammond and Brown Mackie College campuses in Merrillville and Michigan City.
Simple, one can’t!
From Ch 6 “On Standards and Measurement” of my forthcoming book “Infidelity to Truth: Educational Malpractice in American Public Education”:
“. . . The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of measure includes the following:
1a (1): an adequate or due portion (2): a moderate degree; also: moderation, temperance (3): A fixed or suitable limit: bounds b: the dimensions, capacity or amount of something ascertained by measuring c: an estimate of whit is to be expected (as of a person or situation d: (1): a measured quantity (2): amount, degree
2a: an instrument or utensil for measuring b (1): a standard or unit of measurement—see weight table (2): A system of standard units of measure
3: the act or process of measuring
4a (1): melody, tune (2): dance; especially: a slow and stately dance b: rhythmic structure or movement: cadence: as (1): poetic rhythm measured by temporal quantity or accent; specifically: meter (2): musical time c (1): a grouping of a specified number of musical beats located between two consecutive vertical lines on a staff (2): a metrical unit: foot
5: an exact divisor of a number
6: a basis or standard of comparison <wealth is not a measure of happiness
7: a step planned or taken as a means to an end; specifically: a proposed legislative act
What the heck happened there??
I believe it is time to highlight what Noel Wilson has proven about absurdity of standards, standardized testing and the grading of students:
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
All Too Inhuman
I worked as a private vocal coach and performer before becoming a first grade teacher. I have a master’s degree in teaching the arts. The arts use concepts such as line, color, shades, shapes. These are common terms used in all of the arts. For an art text wether it be visual, musical, dance, or drama, all the pieces must be in place and in balance to be considered well executed. I know that as a vocalist, I work at differing concepts with each piece. Sometimes, I may need To figure out how much space is needed in the mouth, how much breath pressure is needed and how to manage the approach for a given pitch. Imagine It can be very complicated depending on the placement of the pitch in my own body. But when it is right, it can be stunning. This does not include the tempo, expression or dynamics of the phrase in which the pitch occurs. Nor does this account for phrasing or lines of the piece as a whole. It can be complicated but when the piece works, it can feel as simple as talking. All of the arts have certain ideas about what constitutes beauty or success even when crossing genres.
Most students grow through consistent practice and critique, both of their own work and the work of others. It can be tedious, heart rending and is always personal. We seem to forget that success is 90% work and 10% inspiration. The study of the arts is very personal. Most of us equate our efforts in the arts as an expression of ourselves. Art is the language we use to express our personal voice.
The grading of individual work needs to be approached with caution. A heavy handed approach can damage a student’s ability to tap into their own sense of creativity. A heavy handed approach can damage a student’s blooming confidence which allows the student to take the risks necessary for growth. A heavy handed approach can cause some students to believe they have no ability. They have no voice. They are silenced. I do not know how to put this into any rubric or test. Art speaks for itself.
Well said !
http://scissorsandglue.net/2016/09/07/what-does-art-do-really/