I come into contact with music, movie, and book snobs every now and then. Since I don’t follow music and movies that much and I read non-fiction opposed to fiction…I can’t really tell quality art from shitty art. As for visual arts, I favor pieces that “look good”. I doubt that is good criteria.
A piece of art is an opportunity for an experience. The art provides the framework, but the reader/viewer/listener is free to play within the constraints the artwork lays out. (Or even add his own constraints on top of the ones the art provides.)
Good art is any art that allows YOU to play the way YOU want.
Great art makes you ask questions; bad art tries to answer them. I think “pretty” counts for something.
While hard to define, I think good art is lasting. Something you can keep going back to.
Yes. Good art is something you can come back to again and again and still find new things you never noticed before.
I like the Aristotelian view, here: A thing is defined by what it does, and a good thing is a thing that does that very well. A knife, for instance, is a thing that cuts, and a good knife is a knife that cuts very well.
Well, personally, I define “art”, roughly, as something which conveys emotion. So good art is art which does a good job of conveying emotion. Which is not necessarily the same thing as art I like, mind you: A piece of art might be very good indeed, but very disliked, if the emotion it conveys is an unpleasant one.
Any public, expensive, monumental art in this half century is probably not good art.
While the critics say things like “The giant clothespin is designed to challenge the viewer” I think it’s the opposite. Public art committees are afraid of content, so they buy the vacuous.
In San Jose they managed two major pieces with content, one with Aztec symbols on a vast fountain, which upset some churches, and another that was killed because it represented an early settler and mayor that was harsh with the native tribes. So from then on they went looking for the bland abstracts that they called challenging.