What is Good Art?

I’m always looking for readable theories on what is good art as opposed to non-art, mediocre art or art that is not worth talking about. So I’ve been reading the third in a series from the Routledge & University College, Cork, called Doubt, by Richard Shiff. This book is also discussed in another blog .Though it’s a critique of critics, it has interesting ideas for me as an artist. Referring primarily to painting, Shiff suggests that interpretation has replaced an understanding of the painting itself – what he call the “materiality” of the artwork.

But the focus of his discussion is the perceived conflict between absolutism and relativism, though he does not frame it in these terms. He begins with the concept of identity – something that many contemporary artists find of interest. But in the face of all the other crises and disasters in the world today, identity may not merit the attention it is given. Shiff explains that this concept is more than what is commonly referred to as “identity politics” and encompasses a wider philosophical  issue.

This wider definition of identity has to do with an understanding of the self. Is the self a constant, or is it situational, differing according to outside stimuli?  This difference is described as one between the “temporalized” self and “all-at-onceness”. He believes the assumption of the “temporalized” self is the crux of the post-modern approach to criticism. Because their critiques are based on this assumption, Shiff describes the lengths critics go to avoid the extremes of absolutism and relativism. This is achieved by, for instance, providing criticism as a subjective exercise of simply giving the critic’s personal views.

He also attempts to address how this dichotomy has influenced the post-modern approach to art-making. For instance, he uses the example of the artist Robert Irwin, who refused to have photographic representations of his work made as they would set up a duality by “explaining one thing in terms of another”.

Robert Irwin: Scrim Veil, 2013—Black Rectangle—Natural Light

This duality or “self-difference” (where the self differs from itself) is what Shiff assumes artists must struggle to avoid. He suggests that the goal is to “resist the gap between reason & emotion, mind & body, identity by name & identity by feeling”.

Some would argue that self-differing is an aspect of the human condition, and that it is impossible to attain any “all-at-onceness” that suspends the temporal dimension. And many in the secular West would say that religion is not the remedy. To post-modernists for whom there are no absolutes and everything is relative, religion is a remedy that worked in the middle ages, but is irrelevant to materialistic contemporary society.

So it is left to artists and critics to explain how to overcome “self-differing” or the condition where there is no integration between mind & body, body & self, self & consciousness. The results are sometimes elegant but tortured thinking about why artists make art, what the higher meaning of art should be, what artists should be creating, what is important and so on.

This is not to disparage the role of art criticism, and, as discussed in another blog, Harold Rosenberg’s early 1970’s book on art criticsm Art on the Edge makes a good case for it’s importance. Rosenberg argues that artists, critics, writers and thinkers need to be working toward over-arching theories to explain what is good art and what differentiates good from bad. Otherwise, he says, it will be left to the market to decide.

But in the field of art criticism there seems to be uncertainty about the legitimacy of developing theories. In other fields, it is accepted that the critic avoids accusations of subjectivity, absolutism or relativism by stating values, assumptions and objectives at the outset, carrying out a review and presenting the findings. Some would say that this type of objectivity is unattainable in art criticism because art is about feelings rather than reason. But theoreticians in every field likely have strong feelings about their subject that do not deter them from stating their views.

As Rosenberg says, someone needs to develop an over-arching theory as to what is good art and what is not. Otherwise the market happily decides and Western culture declines. It’s a challenge that few contemporary art critics seem willing to accept. Where is someone with the self-confidence of a Clement Greenberg, but a more rigorous and rational approach?