HCI Cannot Be Used to Evaluate Art

Critiquing Art I agree with the workshop organizers that it is not constructive to evaluate interactive artwork under the same guidelines as traditional HCI work. There are often extremely divergent goals associated with artists and HCI researchers. Yes, there may be obvious parallels such as an artist that wants to insure that their work is correctly interpreted. However, art critique ≠ interactive art evaluation. Artists are not simply entertainers that must make working systems for users to easily interact with. Artists are creating systems, tools, artifacts, conceptual pieces, and the like based on their personal inner reflections, social observations, and other sources. They need to make works that fail in every way imaginable – intentionally. They need to design works that are obvious as well as vague. The work they create is almost always considered complete as declared by the artist and not up for re-design and modification at the whims of gallery users. If we demanded user evaluations of artworks, many conceptual works and numerous revolutionary art pieces such as The Fountain (Duchamp 1917) would almost certainly not be part of our art history. Or more recently, why would Chris Burden be permitted to create a work that intentionally destroyed a museum (Goliath)?