Good vs. Bad Art

GWC Community Off-Topic/Other
#1

I’m teaching a fine arts survey class this school year and it’s gotten me thinking about the concept of good and bad art. The discussion on this week’s GWC got my mind rolling around this again.

Do you personally think there is such a thing as bad art? Ninety percent of my high school students will do everything in their power to avoid calling any art “bad”. Most of them have this “If someone tried their best, then they did a good job” mentality, which to me just smacks of “everybody gets a prize”, “there are no losers or winners in fact we don’t keep score”, “no small parts only small actors” mentalities.

When I hear Sean and Chuck talking about not being haters, I’m like, “Yeah, man, not everybody appreciates the same things”.

But I strongly feel that there is such a thing as good art - art that not everyone “gets” but is nonetheless good in that has broken barriers and stood the test of time. And is good art exists, doesn’t that mean bad art also has to exist? Isn’t that logical?

So I am wondering what GWCers, the friendliest people on the web have to say on the subject.

#2

That’s a good question.
There is a right way and a wrong way in terms of technique, for example 3 point perspective. The Renaissance painters used ingenious devices and methods to achieve mathematical precision, and yet modern painters purposely distort the perspective. Can an art student say, “I don’t deserve a D, this is actually a brilliant work of art that transcends natural order”? I guess that’s up to the teacher.
Then there’s controversial art. Is religious art good, and the defacing of religious symbols bad? If the artists intention is to offend, It seems to me they do a pretty good job.
I’m not offended by controversial art, but then I’m not the critic you need to be concerned with. Just don’t stand next to me at the pearly gates.

#3

I look at art as something that can not be objectively judged. Either that, or something that is designed to make you feel something. It’s not so much if the artist tried hard, it is more about if the piece affects the viewer.

#4

interesting discussion point.

I would put forward that maybe art could be evaluated by a number of scales instead of just good/bad.

Persistence (test of time)
Mass Appeal (broad or narrow)
Cultural Bias (Jerry Lewis in Paris)
Tools of the time (stone, oil paint, synthesizer)
Availability to audience

In short, I think there would be various Venn diagrams to discern a piece of art’s place in culture and time ( maybe Venn bubbles due to the multi-dimensional aspect of the scales).

As an aside, I like to use temporal constraint removal thought experiments it imagine what persons from the pasts would think of art that they were never allowed to experience. Would Norman Rockwell spool up Run-DMC?

my 2 pennies.

#5

I personally think that art is a quality of an object, and not classifiable as good or bad in the sense that you mean. Is the smoothness of bedsheets good or bad? Is the fact that a rock is less smooth mean the rock is bad, or just different?

Items can be art or not, or possibly exist on a continuum of “artness.” They can be good or not (or again exist on a continuum). But they cannot be good art or bad art, any more than a rock can have a bad amount of smoothness.