The question is only answerable once you have a working definition of ‘art’. There are many to choose from, but let me offer one which seems to make sense and to enjoy a lot of support amongst the sort of people who sit around yakking about such things:
“Art is the attempt to distill, express and convey human experience within a creative and aesthetic discipline”.
Okay, it’s a bit cheesy, and a bit circular since the word ‘aesthetic’ can only be defined with reference to ‘art’, but let’s say it’s a good enough short-form definition to be going on with.
Given this operating definition, we would tend to say art is ‘good’ if it succeeds in conveying something about human experience, and ‘bad’ otherwise. The only conventional litmus test for this is sustained and enduring popularity. If each new generation that comes along finds something worthwhile, something to appreciate, in a given work of art, then we tend to reckon it must be pretty good. If not, then we tend to think it either wasn’t very good, or only had appeal for a given clump of people at a given point of time, and didn’t have whatever qualities it needed to appeal to a broader group.
However, whenever this notion of ‘sustained and enduring appeal’ crops up, it is important to remember that not all works of art enjoy the same opportunity to be conveyed and disseminated. Making the point rather eloquently, someone (Chomsky?) once said that literary critics should be trying to discover the Zulu Dostoevsky.
I’ve seen this attributed to Saul Bellow, about a Zulu Tolstoi. See Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism, p. 42 (he explicitly states that he’s not sure whether the attribution is true, though).
Considering that for the last ten years, there has been a museum in the Boston area devoted to it, I should certainly think there is such a thing as Bad Art.
Here is the painting, which the curators have dubbed “Lucy in the Field with Flowers”, that inspired the gathering of their collection.
So far the consensus seems to be that “good” or “bad” in art is utterly subjective, either on an individual level or in terms of mass popularity. Is it possible to inject an objective measure such as Fibonnaci numbers, or is this approach considered a crock?
Sorry, a canvass covered in yellow paint with a big red stripe across is bad art. A canvass covered by splatter painting is bad art. 5 year-olds can do this kind of crap. End of discussion. I’ll take this to the pit if I have to.
Art is art. Bad art is not art. Art is about making craftsmanship look easy, right, the only possible option. You put in the work but then you need the inspiration, genius, vision to transcend it. It’s a two-way thing - you also need an audience that is able to appreciate it - that takes application and vision too. It’s practice made perfect on both sides and then you bring in the numbers - it has to work that way for lots of people - it has to have a universality in human terms and in cultural and temporal terms. That seems to narrow the field down a bit.
If you want to come up with some criteria but haven’t studied art (I’m assuming that most of you aren’t current/former art students), then why not start with a similar subject that we all HAVE studied - English!
Instead of “is there bad art”, ask “are there bad postings on SDMB”. Then we could perhaps agree on a set of knowable and communicable criteria. We’d note a few “stars” who really know how to hit their target and delight us beyond mere descriptive writing, and probably agree that certain posts were gibberish. And I think we’d find that a minimum skill with language is essential to communicating any message. Plus we might agree to appreciate things that are slightly off the wall (similar to Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings) or minimalistic. I’m thinking there’s a time and place when a red stripe on a yellow canvas might parallel a good one-liner from Eve.
