"Quality"
November 15, 2022
I listened to Casey Neistat talking with Rich Roll recently. Neistat is an ultra-successful YouTuber who once made 800 videos in 800 days. I remember seeing his NYC Bike Lane video when it came out (11 years ago) and thinking it was pretty special.
After realizing he was fried and needed to hit pause on his career, Neistat moved from NYC to LA to slow down and figure out what was next. Which ultimately meant moving back to NYC to make more videos. He speaks about coming full circle to doing exactly what he wants to do, and renewing and strengthening his focus on creating the highest quality work possible over creating the highest number of clicks.
As Rich Roll eloquently writes in the intro to their conversation, “When influence is valued above creativity, craft is supplanted by self-marketing. Creativity is replaced by serving algorithms. And art is dead.”
Which made me wonder about “quality.” What is it and how do you recognize it? Can it be defined and measured?
My first stop was the Oxford Dictionary, which defines “quality” as “the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something.”
But this just created more questions: Does quality require some sort of comparison? Does quality only exist as a relationship between two or more things? And on the idea of excellence — who creates the standard by which excellence is measured?
In the English Premier League, commentators will refer to certain star players as being of “high quality.” And in a sport like soccer there is a system of many players to compare to each other as well as carefully measured statistics (goals, assists, saves, etc…) that can definitively separate a star player from the rest. It’s pretty easy to state that Mo Salah is a player of high quality. But how do we measure quality in art?
A trip back to the Google unearthed a 1967 book by Jakob Rosenberg titled On Quality In Art, in which he states: “Artistic value” or “quality” in a work of art is not merely a matter of personal opinion but to a high degree also a matter of common agreement among artistically sensitive and trained observers and to a high degree objectively traceable.”
Hmmm. Who are these “artistically sensitive and trained observers?” Academics? Other artists? Curators? Bloggers? Art critics that don’t make art? In response to this, ArtForum writer Bruce Boice writes, “All critical evaluations are necessarily subjective, and there are no conditions under which these subjective responses can mysteriously sneak into the realm of the objective or the absolute. Thus the concept of quality in art is incoherent; it is the product of confusion and hope.”
That’s more like it.
But…YouTube is said to now host over 800 million videos. Is it safe to assume that at least a handful of these videos are of “quality” while the rest are not? Is this ratio of quality going up, down, or staying the same? Or, is the advancement of art and the tools used to make it helping increase this ratio of quality to non-quality?
I decided to ask the experts. Using an AI art generator called Dream I entered the keywords “quality art” and selected the “Realism” filter (which seemed more appropriate than the “Fantasy” or “Steampunk” options). A few seconds later, here’s what I got:
Ok.
Then I tried another AI generator called Starry AI, and got a few more examples of “quality”:
My hunch is that with an increase in the speed and ease of production comes a rapid increase in quantity, and an overall lowering of quality, at least by human standards. Take for instance this “interview” between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs, which was generated by AI using existing audio clips of the two. It’s interesting and novel, but it’s also awful. As technology accelerates, there will be more and more stuff like this — terabytes of mindless filler churned out by algorithms and bots.
I like to think that quality is somehow intertwined with time — not in how working on something for a long time makes it better — but more in how quality work will eventually stand the test of time and rise to the top over years, decades, centuries. On that note, I liked this closing thought from Mr. Neistat:
“It’s extremely unsexy. It’s extremely uninteresting, and no one wants to hear that it takes time, but it takes time. Patience is really the most undervalued aspect of succeeding in the world of media today.”