Brookings Tries to Put a Rubric on Wonder

Somewhere in a Tuesday agenda packet this month sits a document that ought to make people uneasy: a rubric for evaluating artwork proposals. The Brookings Public Arts Commission is building a scoring sheet for beauty. Alongside it comes a standardized public submission form and a submission calendar, the machinery of a selection process that wants to be fair, transparent, and defensible in the way city business is supposed to be. It is, on its face, a small administrative item. It is also a quiet admission of something Brookings has been circling for years: that public art here is not treated as art in the gallery sense at all. It is treated as infrastructure.

That reframing matters, and the same meeting agenda makes the case for it inadvertently. The commission's rubric discussion sits next to updates on the skate park and on Dakota Nature Park, the two sites where the town's public art ambitions are currently most alive. Nobody is proposing to hang a painting in a climate-controlled room and invite the public to file past it reverently. The relevant surfaces are concrete a skater will grind against, sightlines along a trail, the texture of a park entrance. Art commissioned for those spaces has to survive weather, liability concerns, maintenance budgets, and the judgment of a City Council that answers to taxpayers who did not necessarily ask for any of it. Once art is funded publicly and sited in shared civic ground, the case for subjecting it to a legible, repeatable evaluation process becomes much harder to dismiss as philistinism. A private collector can buy on instinct. A city commission spending public money cannot easily say it chose a proposal because a majority of members liked it best. It needs a paper trail.

This is, in a sense, exactly the instinct one would expect from a land-grant university town built on agricultural science and engineering. Brookings measures things. It measures soil, crop yields, snowfall, water tables, structural loads. A community steeped in that habit of mind was always going to eventually ask whether aesthetic judgment could be handled the same way: broken into criteria, weighted, scored, made auditable. There is something almost touching about the attempt, a town trying to extend its native competence in quantification into a domain that has always resisted it.

But the resistance is real, and worth naming plainly rather than waving away. A rubric assumes that the qualities that matter in a piece of public art can be separated into independent, scorable categories: durability, site appropriateness, community relevance, technical feasibility, maybe originality as a line item worth some fixed number of points. The trouble is that the best public art often works precisely because it does something a rubric cannot anticipate, some accident of scale or placement or unexpected resonance with the people who pass it every day. Score too cleanly for safety and feasibility, and the process reliably rewards the proposal that offends no one and surprises no one either. Committees that grade by checklist tend to produce results that look like they were graded by checklist. That is not a hypothetical risk in a town this size; it is the most likely outcome of any well-intentioned rubric applied without care.

The honest answer is that the commission is not really choosing between bureaucracy and art. It is choosing between two different failure modes and trying to pick the less damaging one. Pure discretion, three or five people deciding by gut feeling what gets built in a public park with public money, invites its own problems: favoritism, inconsistency, a process that outside artists can reasonably suspect is closed before it opens. A rubric, done well, can protect against that by making the criteria visible in advance and giving every applicant, inside Brookings or well beyond it, the same shot at understanding what the commission is actually looking for. The submission calendar being built alongside it matters for the same reason: predictability is itself a form of fairness, especially for artists who do not already know someone on the commission.

What the rubric cannot do is replace judgment; at best it can discipline it. The real test will not be the document itself but what happens the first time a genuinely strange, ambitious proposal scores poorly on paper and well in the room. If the commission has built enough flexibility into its own process to let that proposal win anyway, the rubric will have done its job as a floor rather than a ceiling. If it hasn't, Brookings will end up with a skate park and a nature trail decorated by whatever survives a spreadsheet, which is a particular kind of public art: competent, defensible, and utterly unremarkable. The town that taught itself to measure almost everything is now finding out what happens when it points that instinct at the one thing it was never quite built to measure.