"Gay Cure" App to be taken down

The Washington Post (3-24-11) reports that an app from a religious group that seeks to "cure" homosexuality will be removed from the Apple apps store. They are also being pressed to cease carrying an app that helps warn drivers about DUI road checkpoints. Does the controversy surrounding these two applications represent the entrance (imposition?) of social values into the choice of what software to sell? Will all software now be subjected to an ethics test before it is listed? Or are these particularly egregious cases unlike most software which is ethically neutral or harmless?

Creativity vs. Profitability

On Wednesday morning, author (and Larry Thompson's messiah) Dan Pink returned to Ringling to speak about his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. In the book Pink sifts through economic and social science studies to find what motivates people in the workplace. Of particular interest was a study he cited by Teresa Amabile regarding commissioned versus non-commissioned work of art.

"In the 1990s, a team of researchers led by Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile conducted an intriguing experiment with visual artists. Amabile asked 23 painters and sculptors to randomly select 10 of their commissioned works and 10 of their non-commissioned works. Then she presented the 460 pieces to a panel of art experts – museum curators, art historians, gallery owners, and so on, who didn’t know where the works came from – to evaluate the art.

“Our results were quite startling,” Amabile and her colleagues reported. “The commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, yet they were not rated as different in technical quality.”

Put another way, the commissioned art was good. But the works that were great were consistently the non-commissioned ones."

At Ringling we always speak of "Shattering the Myth of the Starving Artist". Amabile's study suggests the best art is done not for money, but for self expression. Conflict?