What makes good art? (Read 162 times)

Coincidentally, we took an out-of-towner (one we knew) to the local art museum yesterday, and we saw this:

I was fascinated with how the sculptor created the illusion of a veil. Great art? Maybe, maybe not. But the skill cut right through any perception or belief I had about the piece. It stopped me in my tracks for 5 minutes. In essence, woke me up. Piqued (pronounced  pee-kayed) my interest.

Then in the modern art section we saw this:

The other two walls contained  4-sided colored shapes like these two. It's the only room in the museum that brought out my sarcasm as I dubbed it "The Skill Room".  Is this talent? It must be art, it's in a museum. So, I'll call it art.  But has an artist who has gained some traction in people's perceptions as "great artist" pulled  the wool over their eyes and just cut some shapes, painted them and stuck them on the wall and call it "Wedges and Squares On The Wall" , and because that person was a "great artist", people think it's genius?

Maybe it's great art designed to make me feel sarcastic.

Is skill required? Or can we just chew some gum, stick it on a canvass and call it art? Should there be a little more work involved than what we see in "The Skill Room", and like we see with the Veiled Lady?

Incidentally, some months back I was in the Nelson-Atkins museum here in Kansas City helping my son with a class project (Euro History, I think) where he had to hunt down and get his picture taken with several pieces of art by various masters, and in the museum I came across this little statue of Mercury.  I found it inspiring, so I took a few pictures of it, edited in Picasa one of my best shots to make the background look like the sky (rather than the back of a display case) and made it my avatar here on RA.  Who says engineers cannot appreciate art?

BTW, I forget the details of the piece exactly, but my recollection is that it was sculpted in the 14th or 15th century in Italy, but the exact artist is unknown.

I do believe that piece depicted how Mercury was in love with his right armpit and would constantly bare it to the other gods. "Look at my gorgeous pit and its abundant hair."  I googled "engineers can't appreciate art" and apparently not many people write that phrase on the web, at least. So, it's not a leap to think that most of us aren't thinking that at all. I would gather most people are thinking "what do engineers do anyway?" and "you must have to be smart to be an engineer."  

Incidentally, some months back I was in the Nelson-Atkins museum here in Kansas City helping my son with a class project (Euro History, I think) where he had to hunt down and get his picture taken with several pieces of art by various masters, and in the museum I came across this little statue of Mercury.  I found it inspiring, so I took a few pictures of it, edited in Picasa one of my best shots to make the background look like the sky (rather than the back of a display case) and made it my avatar here on RA.  Who says engineers cannot appreciate art?

 

BTW, I forget the details of the piece exactly, but my recollection is that it was sculpted in the 14th or 15th century in Italy, but the exact artist is unknown.

"Look at my gorgeous pit and its abundant hair."

Ha!  LOL.  No, that quote wouldn't be Mercury.  It would, with no exaggeration, be my 13-year-old son, much to his mother's horror.  He has kept us informed of just about each one as it has come in.

To me, good art provokes a response. The nature of that response is subjective, but the best stuff will provoke a wide range of responses, and on different levels. I think it is fine for that response to be negative as well. That a piece disgusts some people is quite possibly a sign that it's good. That some people react negatively to what is vaguely described as "modern" certainly doesn't mean it is bad. I once had an interaction that left a friend annoyed with me. We were in a modern art museum, and he described many of the pieces as "stupid." I pointed out that it is a bit counterintuitive to not understand something, then describe it as such.

All that said, many pieces lose their effect when looking at a reproduction - especially a reproduction on a computer screen. It's awfully difficult to know how an abstract piece will affect you in person by seeing it on a screen.

First of all, good art is not necessarily beautiful.

 

Is beautiful art necessarily 'good'?  Maybe that's more reasonable.

 

I mean, it's so hard to qualify beauty in the first place, and 'good' could mean anything.  It could mean 'sublime.'  It could mean 'of moral benefit.'

 

'Good art' is certainly subjective and perhaps like truth, has to be defined by its viewers.  Of course, in an era when artists try to manipulate viewers in ways extraneous to the art... it gets confusing.

 

Me, I'm old-school.  I get the biggest sense of the sublime and of beauty when I see art that has required an obvious depth of creativity, insight, and comprehension that you might call 'Godlike.'  That is, so creative and fascinating it's impossible to readily understand it as having come from a human being, yet it has.

 

I hate most modern art, which is lazy, arch, and manipulative, and disgusts me.

Your post resonates best with me.  I think the best art conveys something that would otherwise be beyond my appreciation or comprehension or ability to express. That is why the greatest art (music included) might seem godlike.  Bach immediately comes to mind.  Lesser art still conveys something to the observer beyond what s/he can experience by other means.

I don't necessarily agree about modern art.  Give it a few centuries and the dreck will be weeded out of 21st century art.

It seems that Dewey and Kant both underpin their definitions of beauty with experience.  I would say that, like Truth, there is Beauty.  A thing may be beautiful (or ugly) whether or not a particular person experiences it so or not.  The experience may say more about the essential nature of the experiencer than the object.