This is a fun analogy, even if it’s just novel to me.
With any kind of creative work for hire, from architecture to advertising, from jingles to commisioned sculptures, the client’s taste and budget, more than almost anything else, determine the outcome.
Take Cannes Lions as an example of a competition and awards ceremony that essentially exists to define what ’good taste’ means within that industry. The client’s team is prominently credited alongside the creative agency. They get to climb onto the stage for the speech and they have a voice on whatever video clip is made about the project.
Partly this is to encourage more ambitious and spendy work for the industry at large. But everyone involved certainly knows, that the same creative team, with the same creative idea, could have ended up making something much worse working with a different client team.
I can’t stand AI slop, yet I think I’ve unintentionally argued in favour of people creating it, as long as it’s… good by some measure?
>the client’s taste and budget, more than almost anything else, determine the outcome.
that's interesting! why do advertising firms work with artists at all then?
>the client’s taste and budget, more than almost anything else, determine the outcome.
That's a curious take. So we should change history books to declare Sixtus IV as author of the Sistine chapel, since Michelangelo was but a vessel or his taste and budget.
Sarcasm aside, I can accept some agency and curation in the act of choosing what to ask for. But I think appropriating the act of creation without being required to even have a passing idea on how to actually execute it, that I can only conceive as an undescribable act of ego and entitlement.
I can't take seriously the people who want to claim the title of musician without learning to play, be writers without having faced a blank sheet or even read others that much, etc.