On Art
Thoughts on What Makes a Work of Art Good (or Not)
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I have long been interested -- as far back as I can recall -- in questions about art such as:
How do we assess quality in art? I.e., what makes one piece of art great, and another not so great?
Are there objective means for deciding what makes art great, and if so, how should they be employed?
Why does one piece resonate with me but not another?
Why does one piece resonate with me, but not as much with other people?
How does subjectivity enter into answering these questions?
[In this essay, as in most that I write about art, I use that simple word, unless otherwise specified, to denote all forms of artistic expression. What I know best are music, literature, and painting (though expert at none), so I don’t normally comment on other visual arts, dance, and whatever else you might consider artistic expression. This essay is about ART in general.]
What follows bears some relation, as far as I understand it, to formalism, though the latter’s deliberate neglect of content in favor of form goes too far for my taste. How can we consider the quality of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony (Pastoral) without including the gorgeous melodies that speak to us so clearly and evocatively?; how can we consider the quality of van Gogh’s painting of Dr. Gachet setting aside the depth of sadness and compassion shown in his eyes? The inclusion of content almost certainly results in a messier theory of artistic quality than formalism, but I just don’t see how content can be omitted. I suspect that the formalists omitted it because they understood that content is where subjectivity is strongest, and is thus where art is most resistant to critical analysis. No one wants a messy theory. But as Einstein said, “[Theories] should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” The desire for a clean, simple theory of art quality is no reason to just pretend that content shouldn’t enter into it. There are myriad popular songs that follow very similar forms of harmony and rhythm, but differ in melody and/or lyrics. Some are better than others on the basis of these differences, though how we assess those differences can be challenging. Doing so is part of my goal here.
My own form of artistic expression -- songwriting -- happens to have a performative element, which places significant constraints on what I can do if I have any care for how it is received (which I do). In short, it has to be palatable, tasteful. But even if art isn’t performative, its accessibility to people -- a more generic term than the food metaphors mentioned in the previous sentence -- will, in large part, determine its popularity, and perhaps, too, its endurability. Thus, a measure of accessibility must be part of the responses to the questions listed above.
This notion of accessibility is very much tied to culture. In fact, I would tie it to culture definitionally: How well does the piece of art in question fit (or, if you’re into Venn diagrams, overlap) with the culture of the time and place? We will return shortly to other times, places, and cultures, but for my purposes here, I want to narrow the meaning of accessibility in this context to indicate an overlap with broad cultural norms. The flat sevenths and thirds introduced by field-working slaves in the American south were not accessible to the broader culture until the early twentieth century, at which time these modalities entered the culture with such strength that much of popular music was (and still is) centered largely around them, in what we now call the blues (and its descendents). I mean that they wouldn’t have been palatable if they’d been heard by the broader population. Accessibility in this sense is about what elements in art a population has been conditioned to by the broad culture. There are no sharp lines here, of course; the blues modalities which to the broad white and northern population would have sounded bizarre, sounded perfectly normal to the field-working slaves who heard, sang, and hummed them every day. So, I’m talking about the dullest of lines, but one that I think we can recognize and make use of in responding to the list of questions above.
But accessibility in this sense can’t be all that answers these questions, since it doesn’t account for how a piece of art might endure long after the cultural atmosphere into which it was born has shifted. In fact, art itself is a large part -- perhaps the principal one -- of how cultures shift, so there is a kind of feedback mechanism at work here. Originality is, in certain ways, the lifeblood of artistic expression, and because it has a role in shifting cultural norms, it impacts its own accessibility at later times. Art that is accessible under one cultural regime (in time or space) may not be under another. Art that is not accessible at one time (e.g., the blues in 1731) may become highly accessible later (say, in 1931). Elements of taste come and go and differ in space. Thus, originality plays a critical role in how enduring a piece of art will be. If it’s too original, however, it may easily get lost in a drawer somewhere, never seeing the light of day, even if the culture ultimately changes in its direction. Atonal music, for example, explored and championed by Arnold Schoenberg among others in the early twentieth century, was not accessible because it was so original (strange) that it ran into the predominant culture like a person running into a brick wall. Might there be a culture somewhere sometime that does accept it? Perhaps, but it will probably have to be rediscovered, because it’s now lost in the proverbial drawer. Such inaccessible art is better thought of, in my view, as an academic exercise. It may be intellectually interesting in certain ways, but that isn’t sufficient to make it good art.
When I speak of originality, I don’t simply mean the sort of grand innovation exemplified by atonal music, or more generally, what are sometimes called movements, such as cubism, rococo, romanticism, etc. Even within a very specific genre (a word I that think has far greater currency than it should), there is always a smaller type of originality, and its importance can’t be emphasized strongly enough. After all, unless an artist is engaged in the most exacting imitation (in which case I would not apply the term “artist”), there is always the filter of the individual’s personality and experience (which comprise the person’s taste) that shapes his or her artistic product into something original. The skills, techniques, and attitudes involved in this process comprise much of what we call artistry. This word mainly denotes workmanship and so is best included in the originality category. Artists develop their own style through a combination of technical refinement and what we might call the discovery of their voice. Shakespeare’s craftiness with wordplay simultaneously entertains and enlarges the meaning of his lines. Likewise, van Gogh’s brushwork contributes enormously to the boldness of the feelings he conveys, beyond the lines and colors. Liszt’s harmonic coloration in his piano and other works creates an atmosphere in which he drowns our senses and emotions. These examples are innovative, but all had been done before with different artistry -- technique, style, and intention -- which to explicate further is beyond the scope of this essay. I can play my guitar with certain techniques and styles that may be more or less imitative of others, but because I am me and not them (and even because I lack the skills to imitate them accurately), it sounds different when I have a go at covering someone else’s song. I have my own style that derives from my artistic sensibilities, experiences, influences, and skills (and lack thereof). So does every artist. That’s why I include this important attribute of artistic creation in the originality category. Some artists wield it more powerfully and effectively than others.
It may seem at this point that these first two of the three axes by which I wish to analyze and understand art -- accessibility and originality -- are merely opposites of one another, and are therefore redundant. That’s not how I intend them, though, which I can illustrate with contrasting examples from the painting world; both were of the highest originality, but one was instantly popular whereas the other was not. I’m speaking of the painters van Gogh and Picasso. Their originality is unquestionable, though the former was the prototypical “starving artist,” whereas the latter achieved enormous fame during his life in large measure because of his audacious originality -- remarkably so through multiple iterations! These differences show that cultural accessibility must be different from popularity, and so accessibility is not simply the negative of originality. It’s more complex than that, and this complexity is addressed by adding a third axis that I will call universality (timelessness would also be apt, but I’ll stick with the former here).
By universality, I mean the quality of art that penetrates the human heart and mind in ways that transcend culture. This is essentially the poetic quality I discussed in my earlier post “What is Poetry?”, and may or may not involve originality; Picasso was perhaps a bit more innovative, a bit more outside the culture than van Gogh, though both their works are broadly seen today as highly penetrating and affecting. (van Gogh was highly original as well, so I’m sure that there are better examples to make my point, but Picasso’s originality was of a demonstrative and forceful kind.) Good poetry relies more on this trait of universality (by which I mean of the human condition) than perhaps all the other modes of artistic expression. Shakespeare’s verse contains multitudes (as does Uncle Walt’s). The key thing is that universality is what chiefly drives all true artists to create. They seek to express something timeless and universal about the human condition, and whether it’s accessible or original are secondary considerations. Because these “somethings” are out there for artists uniquely to capture and express, this quality of universality is the most difficult of the three axes to describe. It’s elusive and prosaically ineffable pretty much by definition. That’s what art is there to do!
To review, we now have three axes along which we can consider and analyze (a rather too stiff and academic word for art) specific pieces of art: Accessibility, Originality, and Universality. It should be instructive now to look at how the three pairs of these characteristics relate to one another. I’ll mention in passing, for the mathematically inclined, that while these three axes may not be perfectly orthogonal (i.e., at right angles to one another as in the Cartesian x-y-z axis system we’re familiar with, and thus perfectly independent of one another), they do span the space, by which I mean that specifying the coordinates of a piece of art within this A-O-U axis system (not that any such precise specification could or should be made) goes some way toward answering the questions listed at the start of this essay.
So, how do these axes relate to one another? To a large extent, each lives in some tension with the others. Let’s return to the pair of accessibility and originality, where I’ve already used the example of atonal music to show that good art -- even if it might otherwise be an interesting academic pursuit -- should have a balance between the two. With atonal music, the balance is destroyed by “too much” originality at the expense of accessibility (which, recall, is by definition culturally conditioned). An example where art is out of balance in the direction of too much accessibility and not enough originality is the current state of popular music. In a previous post, Why AI Will Kill Artistic Creativity, I argued that the predominant formulaic approach to songwriting is creating an environment of popular music where everything sounds pretty much the same, and as a result is uninspiring, repetitive, and dull. Most popular music coming out now consists mostly in overworked tropes and cliches. My only exposure to hip-hop music is ambient, but I have yet to hear any (I’m sure there must be examples, so don’t flame me on this) that is not in 4/4 time, and with largely similar rhythmic qualities. Other popular music, too, sounds very “samey” to my ears. The reason why is not mysterious: The formulas exist to chase “earballs,” i.e., to make money, and the pop-music manufacturers have learned certain things that work; financial incentives inhibit deviation from these formulas. So, the bulk of popular music today (there are always exceptions) cannot rank highly in my A-O-U space because it sells out (literally) so strongly on O and U in favor of A. This example illustrates the utility of the A-O-U approach.
What about the tension between accessibility and universality? In the movie Amadeus, Antonin Salieri is set up as a foil for his contemporary Mozart’s genius. Salieri’s music rates highly along the accessibility axis -- he wrote for and well within his culture -- but he is portrayed (I’ll leave the reality to your judgment) as highly inferior on the universality axis. Insipid, uninspired, lacking genius, are a few words that come to mind about Salieri’s original composition for the king as we watch Mozart invent variations on it, transforming it into something much more interesting and pleasing to listen to. Mozart feels things that Salieri doesn’t about the human condition (which the movie character recognizes and is eternal tormented by), and has the genius not only to feel them, but to translate those feelings into music as well. Salieri had only the skills to make accessible, though uninspiring music.
Can art be inspiring, universal, timeless, etc., without being accessible? Surely. This is one of the conditions that makes the unrecognized “starving artist.” (The other being originality without accessibility, though Picasso, for example, seems to have cracked that nut; clearly he was accessible enough.) There have been countless artists throughout the ages -- perhaps most artists are of this type -- who felt or thought something universal but who were not able, for one reason or another, to express it in an accessible way -- at least for their prevailing culture. van Gogh’s works were like this until they weren’t. Most art in this category doesn’t experience such a turnaround. Providing examples here is challenging, because popular success is associated with A more than with O or U, so we have the problem of identifying unknown artists of this type, which are surely myriad. Sometimes, though, culture shifts toward an artist over time, making his work more accessible than it was in his or her own time. One example that comes to mind is William Blake, who was not popular in his time and died in poverty, though he is now regarded as a leading figure in visionary art and poetry with enormously universal things to say. He was not understood; he was not accessible. Happily, sometimes the world recovers the anonymous artist’s name with greater understanding at a later time.
Our last pairing to consider, then, is originality and universality. What is the tension here, and what would it look like for these to be out of balance? I think there are certain artists who, for various reasons, may prize originality above all else, even at the expense of having something universal to say. The vast majority of “conceptual” art strikes me this way; often, these artists seem to want to make a statement in some original way about a narrow point -- say, some political or social statement. Such works rarely rank highly on the universal axis (nor, typically, on the accessibility one). A lot of abstract art is, I think, also in this category, though it too is often lacking in accessibility. Just this morning, I was reading a formalistic review of Kandinsky, citing his art as fractal-like; that’s interesting intellectually, but how high on the universality scale does it reach? The reverse case, where there are grand statements (visually, musically, with words, whatever the case may be) of universal themes with little or no originality, we speak of art that is reductive, repetitive, cliche, unimaginative, unsubtle, in short, lacking art. I will provide no examples here so as not to be unkind, but will simply opine on the general ground that since only the rare person is a good artist, most of what is advanced by its creator as “art” is in this category. In fact, other than in a very few cases, most of the creations of most artists -- even very good or great artists -- are in this category. We’re mostly unaware of the lower-quality works of even great artists, often because they themselves destroyed them. Artists ought to aim high. Great ones usually do, though they recognize that they don’t always -- or even often -- hit the mark.
Of course, opinions vary, which the A-O-U theory can also at least partly account for. This is where, I think, subjectivity enters into the questions put forth at the beginning of this essay: Which of the three axes do you prize most highly, and which matters less to you? I can state without hesitation that for me, universality is the one I give most weight to. The Kris Kristoffersen song, “Help Me Make It Through The Night” rates very high on accessibility, but very low on originality (as pop songs generally do). Where it shines, though, is in its universality: For example, the line, “And it’s sad to be alone,” set within the atmosphere created by the lyrics before the line, is a sublime expression of desire for human contact, both physical and emotional. To me, this line rates similarly with MacDuff’s retort to Malcolm in Macbeth, after the latter suggests that the former kill Macbeth’s children in retaliation for Macbeth’s killing MacDuff’s: “He has no children!” We feel these things in our guts. We all do.
So how does this A-O-U construction address the questions I posed at the beginning of this essay? As I’ve discussed, rating highly on (generally) at least two of the three axes (better if all three) is what I’m really getting at with these ideas. If you want to think about it graphically and semi-quantitatively (which is pushing things rather far), the farther away from the origin in the A-O-U space, the greater it would be as a work of art, though we each have our own ideas not only where each rates along each of the axes, but also about the relative unit lengths along each one. What it boils down to is that these three axes are, I think, the ones to keep in mind when assessing the quality of a piece of art.
We can also see now how subjectivity enters in: We each have our own biases that give greater or lesser weight to each axis (again, quantitatively, this would translate into the unit intervals being different along each of the axes). As I said, for me, the unit length along the U-axis is longer than the others, so wherever I would rate it along that line, it would be further away from the origin than it might be for someone who didn’t weight universality as heavily as I do. Mileage may vary.
By now, I think I’ve addressed all the questions posed at the beginning of this essay, but there’s still that thorny issue of “content” that the formalists discarded rather than wrestled with. At the moment, I tend to think that content -- think of a deeply evocative phrase in a poem you like, or a very pretty song melody -- belongs in the universality bucket. There are reasons of human nature why these phrases and melodies affect you deeply. Some of this can be accounted for analytically: For example, popular music melodies are filled with cadences (phrase endings) that rely on the scale interval of a fourth or a fifth (it’s not important to the point if these terms are unfamiliar) because the frequency relationships of these intervals interact with our ears and brains in certain universal ways. Other content-related elements are more resistant to such analysis, yet I’m content to stick with my assertion that content best belongs to U. I welcome both supportive and contrary examples in your comments below.