4 ms·

Is it any different from a programmer that creates a product to fill a niche?

• _delirium 16y ago
  It's probably different for different kinds of art, but one of the biggest things I like about art/music/literature/etc. is that I'm getting someone else's reaction to things, vision of how things are, opinions on things should be, etc. So it starts feeling fake and misleading if I realize it's not actually their reactions or vision at all, but was, in the extreme case, something carefully concocted out of market research and focus-group testing. Even if I was the focus group, so it was perfectly targeted, I don't actually want art/music that extracts my own vision/ideas/etc. and reflects them back at me! I want to see someone else's take on things. I feel it's fairly hard to get particularly innovative and deep stuff that way as well. The optimization-based approach to making art can only really optimize surface-level, but rarely gets you a totally new vision, which needs more of a strong creator's imagination behind it. For example, supermarket-romance book publishers using focus groups and metrics could never have invented cyberpunk.