If or when you decide to send one of your works to an art competition you would have to assume that there is a universal canon for deciding whether a work of art is good, bad or indifferent? Well, there must be. It stands to reason. Judges regularly award prizes and works are purchased in all sorts of formats from exhibitions to studios on the basis that such judgements, often based on opaque criteria, do have a common set of rules. Perhaps it is hard wired into evolution and all that is required is to present a work of art for judgement and the universal canon come leaping to the fore. It doesn’t help when the lame position of ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is trotted out in that in itself that statement is predicated on several billion people have individual canons on which to draw.
Why would museums and collectors even consider bad or indifferent art when it comes to opening their cash registers and bank vaults. After all, a Gerhard Richter became the most expensive by a Western artist to sell at an Asian auction when his 1987 abstract painting Abstraktes Bild (649-2) sold for HK$214.6 million (US$27.6 million) at Sotheby’s. At that price it must be brilliant. In fact, everything that Richter produces garners high prices so he must be ticking all the boxes for good art. [By this time, everyone must have one by the way since he churns them out by the truckload and they all sell.] Now I have nothing against Richter but abstracts are abstracts and the world is full of them whether they are made by dragging a squeegee across a surface loaded with paint or not. Notions of investment aside, just what is so special, other than that Richter created them? There must be an answer, a universal truth.
As an artist I assume that what I produce is art, art being generally understood to be any activity executed by people that expresses an idea, an emotion or a world view. Whether it is ‘good’ art, ‘bad’ art ‘saleable’ art or ‘collectable’ art is beside the point. Because art is an expression of self, an outward symbol of interpretation of either an inner world or a perception of the outer world, then I am an artist and what I produce is art. But does that make everyone and anyone an artist if they pick up a brush or pencil or even make the journey to a gallery? How many times have I heard ‘I know nothing about art but I know what I like.’ If all that art has to do is to stir emotions and have the semblance of an idea it may not be the art per se that is doing the stirring given the emotional, political, social and sexual baggage people carry around with them. Do all people inevitably choose good art simply because ‘good’ art talks to them or has aesthetic qualities to do with particular arrangements of colour and form that trigger a response? It all sounds very random.
If an object made by someone calling himself or herself an artist has qualities which designate it as aesthetically pleasing, then surely, it is art. Aesthetically pleasing? Art critics, historians and the general public have a difficult time dealing with beauty. The analysis of a work of art relies on proof, those things that can be identified as evidence. The problem with beauty is that it’s almost impossible to describe let alone define. To say that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ simply throws in random choice. Works of art don’t have to be beautiful, but aesthetic judgement plays a large part in the reception of art. If there is no common ground or base to the idea of aesthetic pleasure then art competition are just random choice on the part of biased individuals.
For some people Art is a component of culture which reflects economic and social conditions or conditioning. Qualifying Art according to purpose really doesn’t help. And of course, just who are the arbiters? If, like Duchamp, I declare any found object to be art just because I say so, does that make me a trustworthy arbiter of the good, the bad, the ugly, the indifferent or indeed, the beautiful. Beauty might not be an objective quality in the work of art, nor is it a rational way to argue for the cultural importance of an object. To describe the beauty of an object is like trying to explain why something’s funny. – the understanding gets lost in the translation.
Works of art need not be beautiful to be considered important. To call something beautiful is not a critical assertion, so it’s deemed of little value to the argument that attempts to understand human cultures past and present through the beauty of its art. You could say, in philosophical terms, that beauty is not a necessary condition of an art object. To call something beautiful is not the same as calling it an important work of art. But calling a piece of art important brings in factors other than those inherent in the work itself.
Do judges approach their task with a ready basket of tools to judge, beauty, significance, importance or is it just individual choice? Given the frequent cries of bafflement and astonishment, to say nothing of downright disbelief, at the announcement of winners of the Archibald prize each year, there would seem to be two canons of acceptance. The packing room crew often gains the plaudits while the judging panel, the brickbats. Good, bad, ugly, indifferent – there is little agreement, but the process of judgement continues apace. Perhaps in the end there are only two criteria. Does the work go with the wallpaper or will I be able to sell it for a profit much like stocks and shares which are not burdened with the baggage of qualifications of beauty? Whether it is good or bad art doesn’t seem to apply, whatever those terms might mean. Strange world we live in when we accept the concept of a universal canon but have little idea what the canon actually is let alone how it is to be applied universally.