Good Art?

Picture source.

What makes good art? According to one of my former coworkers who’d minored in art criticism in college, good art is “Anything that makes the viewer feel something.” I don’t agree with that definition, but let’s leave it for now.

What prompted this digression into art theory? I’m ostensibly Adventure Girl’s Grammar teacher. Since she’s in Grade 8, she’s doing more writing. This year, her first writing assignment was to write a short story consisting of dialogue between two characters, based on a painting.

While we have a few art items around the house, the majority of them tend to be airplanes or fantasy landscapes, since those are my particular tastes. Character pieces, not so much. But hey, we have the internet! There are enough art museums online that you could just be paralyzed into indecision. Cue a virtual visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

This is where we get back to the art criteria that my friend used. Because the painting above doesn’t make me feel anything, possibly aside from a vague feeling of “This is art? Really?” Same goes for whatever this is below.

Lest I be accused of just picking on “modern” art, I find this piece just as ugly and incomprehensible, despite being over a century old.

Okay, so what do I like then? Paintings that are actually of something. Landscapes, character portraits, things that make you look and wonder what the story is, or things that memorialize some true story. Baseball at Night, the piece in the header for this blog, is a good example. Not photo-realistic by any stretch of imagination, but never the less, it shows a classic baseball scene with characters where it’s easy to imagine a whole story going on around this game.

Where am I going with this, aside from revealing my pedestrian tastes in art? Not sure. I definitely believe that good art endures, and it’s difficult to imagine that something like Hot Beat is going to endure for centuries. But hey, I’ll be dead by then. What do I know? It does tie into something that’s been bugging me a lot about Brian Niemeier’s assertion about Cultural Ground Zero, but that’s a blog for a (hopefully soon-ish) different day.

Oh, and what did Adventure Girl pick for her story? The painting below. Spoiler alert, she spun a pretty good little piece of flash character fiction out of this. I’m pretty sure she couldn’t have done the same from Blue on White.