ON 'ART'.

To anyone who is not interested in art, I wouldn't recommend reading the following.

This rant wasn't really intended for you, or for anyone. Just myself, to see if I could make some sense of SOMETHING. And now it is here, just in case someone else has something to say about it too.

I wrote it all in one hit on word. Total spew. It is in no way refined or my final take on art. I can already think of counter-arguments to what I have written.

Take it or leave it.

...Along with everything else is the realisation that I have no idea what makes good art. I cannot draw any clear distinctions between why one work of art is considered good and another bad. There is no consistency in these judgements, and, in most cases, there is no consistency in judgements on the one piece of art. I don’t understand why some artists are considered better/more accomplished/more popular than others and I see no formula or checklist of criteria to make a good work of art. Of course, there are things like a conceptual grounding, or a body of support work, or technical ability or whatever, but a good work of art by no means needs all if any of these things to be considered good.

The more research I do into famous artists from different periods of time (mostly contemporary) the less I pretend to understand. Because it doesn’t make sense. There IS no such thing as GOOD art, or BAD art. With all the varying criticisms and opinions it seems more and more likely that art just IS. It exists independent of any opinions or thoughts that are projected onto it, and similarly, these thoughts and opinions do not change the work in any way, or make it any better or worse.

I think it might be interesting if works were only ever viewed separately by each individual. By separate I mean to say that the viewing arena would consist only of the viewer and the work, and no exterior influences would play on either. Then it would be a matter of the individual’s perception of the work, and only these thoughts and opinions would be projected onto it. None of this critic bullshit. No crowd hype. No recommendations. No explanations. No discussion. Just the work and the viewer. The art and the reaction. The cause and the effect. Would that drastically change what is perceived as good art? I think it might.

Different people are always going to have different thoughts and opinions on different artists and works, but our opinions (I would go so far to say) are ALWAYS altered by what we’ve heard or discussed in a public forum in one way or another, and to varying degress of course. Until we KNOW that a work is by a highly acclaimed artist, we might not think much of it or even pay it any attention. But upon learning who it is by we view the work with a whole other level of importance.

Preconceived ideas and impressions tend to alter the way work is received, because art is SUBJECTIVE. It is first and foremost a matter of taste and opinion. Some people like visually beautiful works, whereas others prefer work that makes them think. Either way there is no rule to what will make one work more successful than another, because there is little consistency between people on an individual level. This is because of differences in personality, taste, previous experience, education in any given subject, preferences and interests. Therefore, how well received any given work will be is to a larger extent dependant on its context in history (what is popular/accepted at the time), the forum in which it is placed (where in the world/what kind of environment/what TYPE of people it is exposed to) and predetermined background on the work (who it is by/write-ups/attention/hype/other works/where it is from).

Art is (very generally speaking) simply the creation and presentation of images, objects or ideas under the intended subheading of ‘art’. It is a method of raising the importance of something, whether by physically creating it from scratch, reorganising things, selecting things or presenting them. ‘Artists’ (and I use that term loosely) are (in a general way) simply chosing something to point out. They say “look at this” for whatever the reason may be, and wether this is an internal comment or directed at others is irrelevant. (There is a drip line where too much varnish has been painted on the inside of this mug.) So in the end, it really doesn’t matter WHAT the content of the work is, or the reason behind WHY the artist chose it, it is more the simple fact that someone saw value in something about it and therefore chose it.

In other words there is no such thing as “good art” or “bad art” because these terms are somewhat redundant when the judgement that is passed can only be put down to the subjective decision of any given individual. So then I suppose it comes down to why some works are more popular, or more widely considered to be “good art” compared to others, external of all types of impositions that arise from the art being a collective experience. Apart from personal preferences in aesthetic qualities, topics and ideas, works will become popular according to any number of the following:
- the amount of consideration entered into the creation of the work (taking the
implications of the work into consideration so as to make the message as effective as
possible)
- ability to impress
- ability to evoke an emotional response in the viewer
- ability to conjure intended reaction/thought in the viewer
- ability to communicate intended message in the viewer
- originality/a new or interesting way of going about something
- ability to capture viewers attention and hold it
- ability to CONNECT with the viewer
- the extent to which the work is informed on its given content and how
accurately/interestingly it relates to this
- the amount of intelligence within the work/levels of thought/cleverness (eg. Duchamp’s
portrait of Raymond Roussel)


And of course there are many other factors involved too. All I’m trying to say is that while no work of art can be definitively described as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it is certainly possible for certain works to be ‘better’ than others when opinions are viewed on a collective scale according to (but not in a rigid sense) the above points. People in general might appreciate or place greater value in work that achieves any number of the above points, than work that has none of these. This is where critics and viewers begin to order, make sense of and judge works in terms of value and importance. Good and bad. But the line will always be blurred because there is no definite scale or rule to ordering the quality of works of art. It will always remain a constant debate with no clear answer and there will always be groups in opposition to each other. There is no right or wrong, but there may be ways of making a work MORE right than a hypothetical baseline. Outside of that it is all opinion, and that's just the way it is.

All I can deduce from the recommendations of our teachers is that the work will be better if you do more and bigger. The logic must be that the more space it takes up on this planet, the more important it must be, and the more important it seems, the better it is. But of course, no one would ever admit to this.

What a joke.
I think I missed the punch line.