During the recent Grantmakers in the Arts conference in Boston, the issue of measurement continued to rise and fall in various sessions. After all, if arts grantmakers are in the business of positive change (or sustaining positive things), they inevitably wonder how they’re doing in delivering on that promise. Such evaluation requires both a target and a measure of progress toward that target.
The challenge is in applying existing metrics (dollars, headcounts, activity, test scores) to such complex and hazy goals (truth, beauty, pleasure, wisdom). To this task I humbly submit the following metrics, already spinning around the world for other purposes.
- hedon
a single unit of pleasure, already used in ethical mathematics (don’t ask, I don’t know) - milliHelen
the amount of physical beauty required to launch one ship - warhol
a unit of fame or hype lasting exactly fifteen minutes. Some useful multiples from the Wikipedia include:- kilowarhol — famous for 15,000 minutes, or 10.42 days. A sort of metric “nine day wonder.”
- megawarhol — famous for 15 million minutes, or 28.5 years. The type of person your parents talk about all the time, but of whom you’ve never heard from anyone else.
If we really hunker down, we could suggest a USRDA for each of the above (U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance). And each cultural production could publicly post the detailed value of its contents: ”Tonight’s performance of Romeo and Juliet contains 250 hedons, 950 milliHelens, and 14.9 megawarhols.”
Hilarious, Andrew. We could even advertise quotes from critics, “Last night’s performance delivered its promised 950 milliHelens and more..” or before the concert, “Please turn off your cell phones to insure your full helping of megawarhols…”
What a concept! Now I can express more objectively such pleasurable experiences as reducing my stack of reading material by one inch (that would be one hedon), noting that the garlic I planted in September is now showing its first shoots (2 hedons), getting a call from my neice inviting me to visit in March (50 hedons). But we need a measure for the reverse. How about the cringe-o? Viewing a distasteful commercial, 2 cringe-os; listening to a Bush speech, 50 cringe-os.