At 5:02 PM -0500 3/10/08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Quality = marketability?
To a businessman, sure. Profits come from units sold. The more units sold at a given price point, the more profits.
I'm not saying that's a measure of quality (although it is certainly ONE measure of ONE kind of quality), just that nobody who's serious about the bottom line can think otherwise. Artists of any kind are not notorious for being good at business or at marketing.
I don't know how many reject letters I got with rhetoric to the effect that "this is a business decision only and does not reflect the quality of your work." Does it clarify the quality vs. marketablity in the hands of business executives if we substitute Hollywood film industry types for record company executives?
Same paradigm entirely, but dealing in multimillions of dollars investments rather than "only" tens of thousands to produce a new product.
But I can't help thinking that the whole 20th century attitude of "I define quality because I'm the artist and you're not," that completely ignores the marketplace and does not respond to society's attempts at feedback, encouraged the feeling that the inmates were running the asylum in the arts. Beyond "I know it when I see (or hear) it," there are no completely objective measures of "quality" that everyone can agree on. That made it very safe for the wording in your reject letters to be used, since they couldn't define "quality" any more than anyone else could! (See Dr. Alan Gowans, "The Unchanging Arts," for an insider's strongly held opinions on the matter.)
John -- John R. Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
