What Do We Mean by ‘Good Art’?
When we talk about 'art' in any given context, we generally mean 'good art'. But the question about what this means is not raised. Maybe for good reason. Because the question is about as tricky as the perennial 'what is art?' question. No doubt both the questions are related. It's best you know from the very beginning that these questions cannot be answered in any comprehensive and water-tight way. In many cases, the answer revolves around the conditions that we can agree on what makes art ‘art’ and what makes good art. The ‘bad’ art question usually is not in the mix, except when there is a conflict of opinion.
Introduction
What constitutes good art has always been a vexed issue but vexed on differing grounds. In pre-secular art, the means of measure were much easier as they were based on skill and how a more or less prescribed message was conveyed.
In modern art, with its message of freedom of expression and the viewer's enlightenment, notions of goodness become more subjective and oblique, but also historical: the extent to which a work of art sustains itself over time. With the cataclysms of World Wars and the Holocaust, the innocence of beauty is brought into question.[1]
Portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo. Between 1503 & 1506. By Leonardo da Vinci. Via Wikipedia (Public Domain). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci,_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg
Now in the age of post-colonialism and globalization, beauty and good art are relative, regulated according to differing and shifting contexts and rules. And in the age of mass-corporatization and the spectacle, art on the public horizon is mostly at the service of entertainment and pleasure. This has become such an uncontested point that the problems with it have all but fallen by the wayside.
The enlightenment standards of artistic edification reverberate only softly. But people continue to make art, and look at art, and to write about it. This means they continue to have some faith in it, which also means that there is some belief that good art exists and is possible. These are all very, very big issues which I can only begin to gloss here.
When writing philosophically about art, one inevitably means 'good art', not adding the word 'good' as a necessity. By contrast, when we write about bad art, we automatically add the adjective ('bad'). Then there are qualified statements such as ‘most of contemporary art is populist rubbish’.
But writing about the abstract qualities of art, as in aesthetic theory, assumed that an ideal object in which both reader and writer have some faith. When suggesting what art must do, that is for it to be good: and that goodness is qualified in the process, as in Theodor Adorno’s distinction between ‘autonomous’ and ‘committed’ art.
The Modern Work of Art: Adorno’s Critique
This is a reasonable place to start from, since it situates the modern artwork within and against other aspects of socio-political duty. According to Adorno, committed art is art driven by a political agenda at the expense of aesthetic qualities, thereby manipulating art into a state where the very qualities that make art ‘what it is’ are undermined.
Theodor W. Adorno. Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969 was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society. Via UBC Wiki. https://wiki.ubc.ca/images/9/9f/Theodor_Adorno.jpg
In his criticism of Sartre’s plays and novels that reflect his engagement, Adorno argues that ‘the theses they illustrate, or where possible state, misuse the emotions which Sartre’s own drama aims to express, by making them examples’.[2]
Adorno criticises Sartre for the way he reduces characters to typologies, making his plot a plan for an ideological agenda, which indicates that he uses art as a vehicle for what appears a more urgent goal—the political message. All of this forces the work of art into the very kind of misleading cavil and ideological reductivism typical to, say, Nazism, which are precisely the kinds of forces that Sartre sought to combat: ‘The flaw in Sartre’s conception of commitment strikes at the very cause to which he commits himself.’[3]
If such art is bound to fail, then its opposite extreme, art-for-art’s sake, l’art pour l’art, is also in trouble. Such art ‘denies by its absolute claim that ineradicable connection with reality which is the polemical a priori of the attempt to make art autonomous from the real’.[4] No art can be wholly autonomous, although it wrestles with the possibility of being so.[5]
For Adorno, art must seek a place of exception, but not at the price of denying the existence of reality, or indeed the extent to which reality exists to support the wishful notion of art-for-art’s sake in the first place.
While art’s content (or the content in its lack of content) has an orientation in history and the world, the internal mechanisms within art precipitate a slippage, perhaps even a radical misunderstanding, that is art’s ambiguity. In its inherent capacity to be misunderstood lies not only its intrigue, but also its truth. It’s art’s capacity to enshrine and harmonise contradictions, that themselves can still not be quelled or resolved in the content of the aesthetic form, that for Adorno constitutes artistic form, its 'utopian' aspect.[6]
But if a work of art had neither of these qualities—autonomy or commitment—then Adorno showed a blind spot. He famously derided jazz and rock’n’roll as symptomatic of the ‘barbarism and profiteering of the culture industry’.[7]
The same would apply to pop art, which at one level declares the bland obviousness of life in an obvious way, and arguably in a way that is just as bland. Some of the ready-made ramifications and subtleties are not entered into as they precisely elide the inner tension proper to the illogical logic of the aesthetic. At least Adorno was writing when it was easy to draw a line between high and low. In the same breath as his derogatory reference to jazz and rock, he mentions Beethoven, an artistic paragon that they have abruptly and rudely usurped.
Mass Culture and the Contemporary Artist
But today, since the widening of mass culture with the Internet, popular culture is everywhere such that it can no longer be as a separable quality, attribute, or object, but rather as having seeped into every corner of life. Some things may be more pop than others, but nothing is exempt from popular culture.
So pervasive is popular culture that it would be mistaken to use an archaist such as ‘tainted’, since it would naively imply the existence of some better place or power, a safe haven of cultural calm purged of vulgarity and bathos.
Commercial films and television series are made about great composers, artists and philosophers, and the work of great writers is made into movies with mass-market appeal. These are just the beginning of innumerable examples.
The confusion between high and low culture that now prevails presents the contemporary artist with several problems that suggest solutions that he or she might or might not want to consider, or might find unwelcome.
1. If the world is driven by commercialism and the culture industry is all around us, then the most accurate approach to art is to set up a mirror to commercialism and do work that is about the saturation of popular culture and the pursuit of wealth (Koons, Hirst).
Damien Hirst. In front of his artwork I Am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds... Oli Scarff—Getty Images News/Thinkstock. Via Britannica.com. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Damien-Hirst/images-videos
2. To combat the supposed vulgarities and debasements of popular culture, the best thing is to deny the infiltration of popular culture by making work as if it didn’t exist.
3. If visitation numbers drive large artistic festivals and public exhibitions, it is best to avoid such venues except when deemed necessary to advance one's artistic reputation. Preferable might be to favour more intimate, specialist places with more sympathetic modes of display that are frequented by more appreciative and critical audiences (such as artist-run initiatives).
To summarise, you either become part of popular culture in the pretense of some critical model, or else you presume that some benign alternative exists, a critical enclave freed of dross.
The answer may appear to lie between these two poles. For the first, let us call it a hyper-pop condition that overestimates popular culture's placement and role, making too much of it. The second pole doesn't make enough of it because it either discounts it or underestimates it. When Adorno was writing, popular culture was still tangible and locatable: one can quickly point to Mozart's 'Eine kleine Nachtmusik' being piped through shopping malls or to the rowdiness of rock’n’roll.
But more subtle is how commercialization has crept into the tempo of our lives, from the advertisements that we are forced to watch on YouTube, to the very entity of YouTube itself, a portal that doesn't discriminate between films of intellectuals to goofy home videos.
Pop is Everywhere: Some Lessons From Fashion
A better way of illustrating the shift from old school high-vs-low pop and the ‘pop is everywhere’ schema is through fashion’s evolution from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Vivienne Westwood, together with Malcolm McLaren, are generally credited with giving life to punk styling.
While they certainly did not do this alone and from nowhere, their various shops on the King’s Road (Let it Rock, Sex, Seditionaries) were a centre of gravity for punk, and allowed punk to flourish into a recognizable style with specific attributes and now a relatively coherent history and evolution.
Sex, the Kings Road boutique owned by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. Photograph by David Dagley/Rex. Pictured, from right: Vivienne Westwood, Jordan, Chrissie Hynde, writer Alan Jones, unknown, and Sex Pistol Steve Jones. via theguardian.com
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/10/jordan-vivienne-westwood-sex-shop-photo
Together with Rei Kawakubo, whose first catwalk collection debuted the same year (1981), Westwood created a new syntax for fashion. The language of degradation—tears, distressed fabrics—was built into the garment. This inaugurated a major shift in the history of clothing. Before this time, tears and stresses in the fabric were the signs of misadventure, wear, and, by extension, abject poverty. They were to be spurned.
Today, these qualities were part of the language of the garment. It is nothing for us to buy at great expense jeans that have tears in them—unthinkable forty years ago—which today means you can buy a garment with the signs of labour and wear without having to go through the ordeal oneself.
Before Westwood, there was a clear division between good and bad clothing. Badness was something that was out of fashion, worn, inadequate, and indicated class divisions. Now badness is a language unto itself to be used in an ensemble that could end up being deemed good, bad, or indifferent according to different criteria.
This shift in clothing is therefore analogous to the change in popular values into the once coherent and sanctified ambit of high culture. Good art deploys and reintegrates popular culture in a way that first presumes a fictive binary between high and low in configurations that manipulate popular culture so that it can be understood in a different light, as more beautiful or more intriguing or more stimulating than it 'actually' is.
When Westwood returns to punk styling—the term applies to fashion using punk tropes like the safety pin or the functionless zip or belt—it is a measure that historicises punk in a way that artists of the 1980s would self-consciously appropriate from art history and elsewhere.
(This has always been done in Western art history, but the practice at this time was more concentrated and widespread.)
Such repositioning and conceptual remodelling of a once revolutionary and insurrectionary form are open to criticism that it draws on the style’s raciness without partaking in the risks that it historically once faced. It is, as the argument can go, another example of capitalism absorbing its opposition to its own benefit.
Art From the 1980s Onward
The same is said of art from the 1980s onward. Relational aesthetics draws from the revolutionary well of performance and protest, without any threat whatsoever. Performativity is used as a kind of ingredient to give the work a frisson whose deeper ethical tensions are counterfeit.
Yet the difference between the disingenuous ploys of Relational Aesthetics and Westwood's self-quotation of punk is simple. The former case persists in advancing the perception that it is high art while the latter is free in its use of tropes within a domain that is popular in both its history and its nature.
Whereas Relational Aesthetics is a toothless form of Situationism, Westwood’s punk styling (which was also nourished on Situationism with the hand of McLaren) reveals itself, in retrospect, as having an historical agenda, namely that the heroic stage of punk was only punk in its infancy that then needed to go to maturity.
The convulsiveness of early punk could never sustain itself. It was bound to self-destruction. Punk is used as a reminder of subjective displacement, of environmental degradation, of social alienation.
There is much more to this, but the purpose here is to provocatively succinct. Good (contemporary) art, then, may need to take a few lessons from some contemporary fashion. Rather than use the critical credentials of a visual language or style in work that ultimately only ventriloquises criticality, it is better for it to insert itself into the strata of popular culture and to find the places where it is replaying the best songs of the past according to the tonal key of the present.
References:
[1] Summed up by Theodor W. Adorno’s gnomic line, ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ ‘Culture Criticism and Society, in Prisms (1967), trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge MA: MIT Press (1981) 1990, 34.
[2] Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’ in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism, trans. Ronald Taylor, London and New York: Verso, (1977) 1995, 182.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 178
[5] Reiterated in more depth in the Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedermann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970, 160-161: ‘Kein Kinstwerk hat ungeschmälarte Einheit…’
[6] Ibid., 161.
[7] Ibid., 473.
