Topics Art

Question Do you agree with this statement: There is no such thing as bad art?

Accepted:
November 8, 2005

Comments

No. And to prove it, here's my ascii picture of a car:

__
_/ o\_
=O----O}

That aside, I don't know exactly what you have in mind. Is it that maybe the term "art" already excludes what someone might have wanted to call "bad art"---so that "good art" is redundant? If that's the question, I suppose I think sometimes the term "art" is used like that. If we say "a guitar made by Fred is a work of art", we're probably not using "art" in a way in which it makes sense to add, "and a very bad work of art at that." But in plenty of other cases, we don't use "art" so that "bad art" makes no sense.

A rather different issue concerns the objectivity of evaluations of artworks. If I say "that drawing is really bad", does the word "bad" denote, once and for all, an objective category of artworks, so that my statement is true or false depending on whether the drawing falls in that category? Or does my statement do only a more subjective job, perhaps of expressing my distaste for the drawing? Or is it somewhere in between those extremes---maybe asserting that the drawing would be regarded as distasteful by people of a certain type (perhaps, people to whose tastes in art I accord a certain kind of respect)?

That philosophers have studied these (and many other) options as to what "bad" means in this kind of statement is a consequence of what can seem a rather odd tension: on the one hand, we talk simply in terms of "good/bad" rather than "good to me/bad to me" or the like; and this makes it sound like we take it to be an objective matter of fact what's good or bad. On the other hand it seems clear that our judgments about what artworks are good or bad are guided by our own tastes and reactions; this makes it seem like we must really be expressing something about our own idiosyncratic evaluations rather than about an objective measure. In this respect, "that's a good drawing" seems intermediate between "that's a good flavor of ice-cream" (which seems quite subjective), and "that's a good knife-sharpener" (which seems considerably more objective). Part of the difference here may be that whereas it's silly to argue about whether vanilla ice-cream is good, or to ask for reasons for thinking so, that's not true in the case of the knife-sharpener.

Is it silly to argue and reason about whether an artwork is good or bad? Certainly it's an extremely common practice---could it really be as silly as arguing about chocolate versus vanilla? Suppose it does in fact make sense; does that show that "good/bad", as applied to artworks, marks once and for all an objective distinction? Or does argument and reasoning merely reflect optimism that we're not so different in our evaluative dispositions, so that disagreements in what's good or bad art might well only reflect differences in factual knowledge and in sorting matters out---differences that can be remedied though discussion?

The distinctions and issues here are of great interest especially insofar as they illuminate two other sorts of evaluative talk that are Big Game philosophically: moral and rational evaluation.

(For much more on the particular case of art, see Nick Zangwill's piece in the Stanford Encyclopedia.)

Question Do you agree with this statement: There is no such thing as bad art? Accepted:November 8, 2005

Question Do you agree with this statement: There is no such thing as bad art?

Accepted:
November 8, 2005