Blog: Object Culture Part VIII Good and Bad Art Making a Choice

Featured image: Checkered Pot Red Flowers

There are many kinds of art and many ways to make art. Plus, there is good art and there is bad art. The bottom line question is, which kind do you prefer? And regarding the kind of art that you prefer and value, can you give reasons for why you value it?

Values require that you make a choice. There are always choices in values and there are personal beliefs that are attached to values. Values are either good or bad, they do not exist in the middle. Especially if the “middle” is understood as a big melting pot where everything is neutral and nothing has an identity.

My values come from honoring life, my life, and the life of others and of other things like nature, plants, the earth and water. Values place a goodness or badness on something. But, is there really good and bad art? Only if you give it value. And, what are the values you give it?

Values allow folks to judge and to evaluate. We choose and make our own values. Rarely, if we are honest with ourselves, do our values totally align with a group’s values mainly because of our uniqueness. The key here is that we get to choose, replete. We choose the values that are important to us and go with them. This does not place how art is valued in a nowhere zone of nothingness because
generally there are others who are thinking along the same lines but not exactly the same lines, this places art in the technical color group in the middle. For me, my values for what is good and bad art align with my philosophy of the “self” and the individual as unique and one of a kind.

Judgement of art will never say, anyone can be an artist, nor will it say that anything and everything is art. It all is a matter of taste. Judgement in art easily can make this statement; “No, this is not art” or “Yes, this is,” and then tells why. Judgements about an object need to happen in order to say this is good or bad art or that this person is an artist or not an artist. You may wonder, “Why can’t we just say these are different and leave judgement out of the whole definition?” Because, “If everything is just different, then nothing is different. If there is no difference at all and we are left with nothing. You need to value difference in itself and choose why difference has value to you.”

The same question can be placed on art. If all art is everything and anything and there are no values placed on works of art, then really art is nothing but a word.