Dynamic Evaluation of High- and Low-Creativity Drawings by Artist and Nonartist Raters

摘要

How does the quality of artworks change throughout the process of creation? To address this question, artists and nonartists rated the quality of in-progress stages of 20 emerging drawings: 10 whose final state had been rated by artists as highly creative and 10 whose final state had been rated as less creative. Artists associated quality with originality, but nonartists valued realism. Slopes of the quality trajectories of the emerging drawings, based on evaluations of both artists and nonartists, were reliably shallower for ultimately high-creativity final products than low-creativity final products. This suggests that less creative works evolve in a linear, incremental fashion, yet more creative works develop less predictably. No differences in the slopes were found when nonartists' choices of high- versus low-creativity drawings were compared. Thus, unlike artist raters, nonartists' choices of high- and low-creativity drawings do not seem to tap into any meaningful underlying characteristics of the artistic process.