Art Can And Should Be Measured – Outlook Zen

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RP

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July 27, 2026July 27, 2026

“When we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we’ve never crossed before.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

According to the Frankfurt school: when art becomes a commercial endeavor, art suffers. That is because true art, the best art, is by definition something that stretches people’s perspectives, challenges their views, and elevates them as humans. It is also almost a tautology that there’s no such thing as a free lunch – such elevation and growth comes at a cost. Of mental turmoil and cognitive dissonance. People’s instincts are primed to avoid both things. And to embrace things that bring easy pleasure.

And this is exactly why people binge watch Game of Thrones, not documentaries. Hence the point made by the Frankfurt school – commercial art will be dominated by art that entertains, not elevates.

It strikes me though that the above dilemma isn’t unique to art. That the exact same dynamic has been at play for decades in the world of nutrition. Food can broadly be rated along two axes: taste and health. Some inspired chefs manage to find a sweet spot between the two. But in most cases, one comes at the expense of the other. Low-sugar low-fat low-cholesterol high-protein high-fiber food inevitably tastes nowhere near as good as their unhealthy competitors. And our instincts immediately prime us towards eating the food that is bad for us.

Unsurprisingly, that is exactly what we did for decades. Until nutritional science evolved. We got better at quantifying the health impact of eating chocolate everyday. We got better at quantifying the nutritional value of each food item. And we got better at giving people objective data-driven recommendations on what to eat and what to avoid

And that is precisely what we are today missing in the art world.

Imagine if every single TV show, movie, book, came with a fact sheet quantifying its “artistic value” along numerous different dimensions. Imagine if we had a cottage industry of advisors and apps guiding us towards educational art and away from the Kardashians. We as a society could benefit and evolve just as much as we did from decades of nutritional science.

All of this is predicated on one thing however. Science, facts, empirical data. Art has long been described as the antithesis of all this.

When someone like Martin Scorsese refuses to acknowledge Marvel movies as cinema, he is simply written off as sour grapes. But is he really? If we can quantify and approximate the educational value of different school curriculum and styles of teaching, why can’t we do the same with art?

Imagine randomized control trials where we measure how watching a specific movie impacts its viewer’s empathy, altruism, or motivation. Indeed, some of this has already been done. To quote a research paper on music’s impact on the body:

Listening to music has been repeatedly shown to have ergogenic benefits during various modes of exercise, including endurance, sprint, and resistance-based activities… Listening to music has been shown to modulate many of these (physiological) responses (i.e., heart rate, catecholamines, muscle activation) often leading to improved performance. Furthermore, listening to music during exercise may positively impact psychological (i.e., mood, motivation) and psychophysiological (i.e., rate of perceived exertion, arousal) changes, which may allow for favorable responses during an exercise challenge

But surely me singing Happy Birthday doesn’t elicit the same psychophysiological changes as Eminem singing Lose Yourself. To quote the top comment from the linked Youtube video:

You gave me hope to live,  when my dad got arrested, when my mom had no money,  when I got picked on every day for being white. You helped me get through it all, and you still are, this is actually currently happening still, and you Eminem, you gave me hope. You saved my life. Thank you. Without you, I wouldve ended it all. No one gets me,  no one understands me,  but when I hear your songs, I know there is someone who feels the same pain I do

For some reason, no one has ever said anything similar when I sing Happy Birthday. And this isn’t unique to Eminem either. We can easily replicate the above research experiment with different songs, measure empirically the magnitude of the physiological response produced by each song and singer, and use the results to objectively compare different songs and artists.

We could extend this same principle to any artistic medium. We could quantify the impact that each painting, sculpture, book, or movie, has on its viewer. We can even classify each artwork by “genre”, based on which metric it excels most at – art that motivates us, induces empathy, promotes honesty, heals trauma, or...