What makes good art?

In essence art is a series of trade-offs and somewhere amongst these trade-off’s sits every work of art.

Accessibility: art swings between being (1) incredibly accessible to the untrained eye, after which it degenerates into craft or design, or (2) accessible only to fellow artists, the cognoscenti or those who pretend to be.

Conceptuality: what did the artists mean? Some artists honestly have no idea – they are just going with the vibe, the feeling, whatever pops out of their share of the free volume of this universe. Others start with a plan, man – although they are often best placed to keep it to themselves given an artist’s often vague grip on left brain matters. The rest, they are somewhere in between.

Meaningfulness: along with concepts such as conceptuality comes ‘meaning’. Not always related to the intent of an artist, art sometimes becomes a mascot for a cause shared by many. Many artists never have such luck, and by such luck the artists are spared the curse of the pigeon hole.

Confusion: some would claim that good art promotes confusion and paradox, at least until it has been adequately explained away by the academic geniuses that explain away this stuff. No paradox, no worries; one person’s paradox is another’s dilemma.

Beauty: some art is designed to be eye catching, pretty or decorative. Other art is not. Some art is designed to be ugly, disgusting and confronting. Some art gets deigned one way or the other completely by accident. Audiences get immune to beauty and confrontation and then can’t tell one from the other. Beauty and truth are lost in pain and suffering, and we all will have an opinion and rarely do they matter or match.

The Vibe: truly great art inspires certain art critics to write things like “Good art is beautiful, regardless of its appearance, just as there is beauty in a good mathematical proof.” That is, great art has the power to make people create metaphors they don’t even understand, and that is power indeed.

Emotion: related to beauty and the vibe of the thing is the emotion that a work of art can sometimes produce in a person. Of course this is totally subjective but there can sometimes be a consensus whereby a work of art is deemed very capable of eliciting emotions. This usually speaks most to the infective nature of the desire to belong, itself an emotion. In general people have to be told that certain artworks will make them feel all gooey, and then many do.

Novelty: very little art is truly novel. Much is derivative of earlier works and some efforts are downright copies. The novel stuff is often temporarily interesting just because it is novel and often remains highly valued even after it becomes old news simply because we humans love ‘firsts’. We even care who wins a foot race by a hundredth of a second.

Value: some art is ordained to be of high value and the rest barely keeps up with the expense of the raw materials used in construction. Ordination of value is ouija-boarded into the universe by the mystic forces of the cognoscenti, acting seemingly in concert, but in fact reacting to a multi-layered fluff cake with all eyes on certain mystics that bully their way to the cherry-picking peak.

Execution: well it hardly matters any more. If in doubt, apply technology, or create a sensitive white-room objets dissonance arrangement, i.e. a white-room containing just one big found object and one little painting hidden somewhere on the wall.

Sweat: it is extremely important for an artist to spare little effort to create the impression that no effort was spared in the manic drive to create, based on clear intention, unwavering dedication, honesty, patience, perseverance, and complete self awareness or complete self-unawareness. No one likes the idea of a nine to fiver, not even your middle-class gallery day tripper. We want ghetto-poor nutters that cut their ears off. The madder the artist, the more authentic the art is assumed to be. Lay it on.

Rareness: an artist shouldn’t flood the market with their work unless their ascendency is already assured and they happen to also develop a taste for consumer goods. Not only should art appear to he hard to find but so should the artist. Nothing develops contempt as does familiarity.

Outsider: an artist should attempt to create the impression of being a complete outsider because it is from these unschooled potholes that true novelty emerges (once in a millennia or so). On the other hand, there isn’t a successful artist that didn’t once spend every non-productive hour on the bottle in the company of other aspiring geniuses.

Publicity: fame trumps all other objections in the modern era. Maybe it always has. Since we are moving out of the broadcast media era, one can now prophesize that the truly great artist will be great mates with someone that is a genius at SEO and Online Social Media Marketing.