Evaluating Creativity in Visual Art: A Survey-Based Framework

Abstract

Creativity in visual art is widely regarded as an abstract concept, posing challenges in contexts that require a consistent and standardized means of evaluation. Assembling a numerical weight-based set of criteria for gauging creativity would bridge this gap, giving way for more structured evaluation systems. The purpose of this paper is to delve into the assessment of creativity, proposing the following parameters for evaluation: originality, a balance of divergent and convergent thinking, and relevance to derive preliminary respondent-based parameter proportions. A questionnaire was completed by visual art experts (N = 50), including professional artists, art educators, and art students to gather nominal and ordinal data regarding parameter validity. The results revealed that these criteria are meaningful to creativity, however, hold varying levels of importance, in correlation with the number of respondents who selected each parameter. Divergent thinking received a weight of 35.34%, originality 31.90%, convergent thinking 17.24%, and contextual relevance 15.52%. Additional survey questions examined support for artistic Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancement, providing exploratory context for the attitudes toward AI acceptance. This paper navigates the aspects of creativity assessment, delves into the interplay between uniqueness and reason in the creative process, and provides a human-informed rubric that can be utilized in future studies of AI assisted evaluation.