Art Myth #2: My art isn't as good as other art

When I taught art, I heard lots of people say things like, 'My stuff is terrible. All I can draw is stick people.'

To them I replied, 'That worked out pretty well for L S Lowry.'

And that's the subject of today's essay: 

Is there such a thing as good or bad art?

I'd argue that notions of good or bad are in the eye of the beholder. And they are more likely to relate to  personal taste and preference than to any measure of quality. 

Let's for a moment, compare art with another great sensory pleasure - eating. How are the products of professional chefs judged?  

If you go into a McDonalds’ pretty much anywhere in the UK you'll find that the Big Macs look and taste pretty much the same. The company has set a standard and aims to ensure that every meal meets it. Their success is judged on homogeneity and numbers of units sold. They are producing food to match the tastes and desires of the customer and they sell millions of Big Macs. 

So they must be good, right?

But now let's visit Heston Blumenthal's multi-award winning Fat Duck restaurant. His iconic Snail Porridge dish doesn't sell in the millions. It's also very expensive. So we can't judge it by sales figures or value for money. Instead, we reward it for its originality and creativity. Heston has a whole bunch of Michelin Stars. 

So his food must be good, right?

Here we have two very different products being valued as 'good' or 'bad' food by different methods. But those value judgments break down if you don't like the taste of either.

To a McDonald's lover the Big Mac is good food. It's safe, predictable, tasty and exactly what they like to eat. To the gourmand who seeks out new flavours and food experiences, the edgy delights of Snail Porridge will appeal more. But neither food lover is right or wrong. They just have different palates (and budgets). As I said above, it's all in the eye (or the tastebuds) of the beholder. 

Art is the same. Some people will prefer traditional landscapes, portraits or still lifes. Others will like experimental abstract art. But we can't say that one type of art is good and the other bad. As Carl Rogers once said, ‘The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.’ 

Now, it must be said that if you are making art to a tight brief - such as a graphic novel where it's expected that the characters are all recognisable - then any deviation from that could be seen as 'bad art'. Similarly, if the perspective is warped or the anatomy is all wrong, you might be tempted to say that it's 'bad'. But then again, many of the comic artists we now regard as groundbreaking did exactly that. They broke the rules. They were asked for a Big Mac and they produced Snail Porridge.

The great joy of visual art is that every rule is there to be broken and your choice of medium is limited only by your imagination. All you need is the passion and drive to create and the belief that what you produce has value. It can be wrapping a river bridge in gold cloth. It can be spraying on a wall with an aerosol paint can and cut-out templates. It can be a photograph of a crucifix in a tank of urine. Art doesn’t stand up to comparison between artists and styles. 

Could you assign grades to different works of art? How would you score them? And against what benchmark would you compare them? Would Lowry's stick men score equally as well as Barbara Hepworth’s pierced stones or Jackson Pollock’s drizzled canvasses? They’re all so different. What criteria do you use?

How do you compare an apple to an orange? Or a banana to a pear? How do you compare unlike with unlike? 

You can’t, of course. We can't say that any one fruit is good or bad. We can't say which is best. All we can say is which we’d prefer. And we might all choose differently … which means that, depending on who you ask, all of them could potentially be the ‘best’. Or, indeed, the worst. 

When I taught art with youth groups I ran an exercise where I sent them off into the National Gallery and told them to come back with a list each of the best three works of art. They all came back with different lists. 

But what about professional art critics, I hear you ask? Can't they guide us?

Not really. Because they can't agree on good or bad either.

Image: Karen Bryan (Creative Commons)

In 1998, conceptual artist Tracey Emin famously suffered a three day emotional and physical breakdown in which she spent most of her time in her bedroom. She then transported her bed - unwashed and unmade – and its immediate environs to Tate Britain and put it on display. My Bed was also entered for the prestigious Turner Prize and Emin sold the piece for a reported £150,000 to the Saatchi Gallery. 

This is how the gallery catalogues the piece: ‘A consummate storyteller, Tracey Emin engages the viewer with her candid exploration of universal emotions. Well-known for her confessional art, Emin reveals intimate details from her life to engage the viewer with her expressions of universal emotions. Her ability to integrate her work and personal life enables her to establish an intimacy with the viewer. Tracey shows us her own bed, in all its embarrassing glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown. By presenting her bed as art, Tracey Emin shares her most personal space, revealing she’s as insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world.’ 

Are you convinced? Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. But that’s the issue under discussion here -  opinion. Whether you love the piece or not – and few living artists divide popular opinion more than Tracey Emin - there’s no doubt that it is considered fine art by some experts. 

But not all of them. 

The late Brian Sewell - one of the UK's best known art critics - called the piece ‘self-sentimental memorabilia’ and said of Emin herself: ‘The sane man must ask whether he should give any of this pretentious stuff the time of day in aesthetic terms when it seems that this self-regarding exhibitionist is ignorant, inarticulate, talentless, loutish and now very rich.’  Michael Glover called her work ‘unadulterated, self-indulgent crap’ and, most savage of all, Philip Hensher wrote: ‘Is it possible to be a good conceptual artist and also very stupid? There's no hope for Tracey Emin. She's just no good.’ 

But balance that against popular critic and documentary maker Waldemar Januszczak who wrote of Emin’s work: ‘It's a voice that has never been heard in art before because the Professor Higginses who run the art world have never allowed it into art before.’ Or Marcus Field who said that, ‘Some have questioned whether such apparent unmediated outpourings can constitute art. And yet there is so clearly artistry involved. Apart from the obvious handiwork, there's the crucial defining feature of an artwork: that it should not only represent life, but reveal something about it, too. Her work may not do this for many of the men or metropolitan elite who despise it so much, but I suspect that it articulates feelings for others in a way unique in fine art.’ 

See what I mean? Even the experts can’t agree with each other over what is or isn’t good or bad art. Their opinions are no more valid than yours or mine.

Do you want further proof? History will back me up here.

Van Gogh produced over 2000 works but only sold two in his lifetime. The ‘experts’ of his day regarded his emotional, vibrant paintings as the ‘daubings of an idiot’. 

Franz Kafka’s work was so unique that a description – ‘kafka-esque’ – was coined to describe a particular genre of writing. Yet he died of starvation and tuberculosis aged just 40. 

John Keats died of TB at the even younger age of 25 but his poetry wasn’t recognised as anything special until some 70 years after his death. 

And let’s not forget the cautionary tale of Pierre Brassau ... 

In February 1964, art critics were invited to the first public exhibition of Brassau’s works in Goteburg, Sweden. And they loved it. One wrote: ‘Pierre Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.’ Several paintings sold on opening night. It was only later that the Göteborgs-Tidningen newspaper revealed that Brassau was, in fact, Peter - a 4½ year old West African chimpanzee who lived in Boras Zoo. His keeper reported that Peter loved paint. Literally. The chimp had eaten a whole tube of cobalt blue and had so enjoyed its tart taste that he had started to play with any paints he could find. 

And relatively recently, in 2005, Katja Schneider, the director of the State Art Museum of Moritzburg in Saxony-Anhalt, mistook a painting by Banghi, a 31-year-old female chimp for a work by Guggenheim Prize-winning artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay. ‘It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay’, she said with authority, ‘He was famous for using such blotches of colour.’ However, upon discovering the truth, Dr Schneider said, ‘I did think it looked a bit rushed’. 

What do the critics really know? They know what they like. 

One last thing to note - good or bad has no relationship to monetary value. No matter how much a bowl of Snail Porridge costs you, its value is zero if you can't stomach the idea of eating snails. And where does the value lie? In your liking it or in the price tag?

I own a print by the renowned Turner Prize-winning British artist Grayson Perry. I bought it because I liked it. It cost me £30. 

Three years later I was lucky enough to find myself working with him. We got on well. So well, in fact, that I rather cheekily asked him if he’d sign my print, which he kindly did. ‘That’s the only copy of that print I’ve ever signed,’ he told me. ‘It’ll be worth a lot more now.’ Then he frowned and said, ‘And that’s what’s wrong with the whole art industry. All of the perceived value is in the signature, not the art. Its worth is only judged by how much it's worth.’ 

Grayson had much to say on this subject when he was invited to write and deliver the BBC’s 2013 Reith lectures (well worth a listen - click here).

All of which demonstrates a point that I absolutely 100% believe: 

There is no good art.  There is no bad art.  There is only art you like and art you don't. 

Whether it’s a naïve wooden mask carved by an untrained tribesman, a massive steel installation created by a renowned sculptor, or a pencil drawing you’ve done of your dog, it’s all art. 

And it’s all equally valid.  

And that means that your work - even if it is only stick figures - is valid too.