Bad Art Is Like Porn: You Know It When You See It
What is bad art anyway? Is it possible to define that magic dust that makes it stunningly wrong? If good art seduces you across the room, completes a feeling inside you, and grows with time, then bad art is like a bad marriage that lasts forever.
Last night my friend Marianne invited to me one of those painting parties with cocktails for girlfriends. I haven’t painted since high school, when my art teacher told me not to pursue art, no lie. I had a sort of stage fright going to this thing — what am I going to paint? Turns out it’s a sort of paint-by-numbers thing, with a woman with a microphone showing us each step, so we all end up with the same painting of a moonlit landscape. The teacher with the mike fills us in on what’s going to happen and says do not talk while she’s talking. She reminds me of those church-lady teachers I had in school. And everybody’s taking it really seriously. This is already pushing my authority buttons.
But just like school, the naughty girls find each other and sit in the back. My friend Sarah and I order margaritas, and she immediately does her moon a rebel green. And we both do too many trees, because we were talking and not listening, which becomes a problem later. We notice Marianne at the well-behaved table next to ours has started painting on the back of her canvas by mistake, so we tease her for a long time about that. Everyone else is just silently painting. We get more margaritas, and the teacher comes by to check on us and sees we’ve been doing it all wrong. We weren’t supposed to do trees under the moon, because the moon is supposed to be bursting through two thickets. Now it looks like there’s a hole in the middle of the treetops for no reason. My friend Sarah decides to cover her green moon altogether, and it looks like blood is pouring over her moonless land, and I tell her just keep going — let that blood drip to the bottom because that will solve the tree problem. Every time Sarah looks at my painting, she bursts out laughing. I say it’s not that bad! It’s much better than anyone ever thought it could be!
When I get home my 15-year-old says why is there a hole in the middle of the trees? Look, I never claimed to be an artist. What makes art “good “ revolves around the application of that difficult word “taste.”
“Some people believe that good and bad are personal distinctions and entirely in the eye of the viewer,” says Scott M. Levitt, Director, Fine Arts, Bonhams & Butterfields, Los Angeles. “Others believe that there is good art and crap art and no one can tell them otherwise.” I think the real answer is somewhere in between.
You can’t just say bad art is not beautiful. Look at William de Koonig’s Woman III. No woman wishes to look that way; no man wishes to tap that. Yet Woman III sold for $137,500,000. No, if the art would wanted prettiness, it would embrace evangelical America’s favorite painter Thomas Kinkade’s cozy cottages, with windows that glow so much they seem, as Joan Didion once wrote, “as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.”
Says Darryl Smith, director of The Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, “Well I suppose the making of art is neither good or bad really. That distinction has more to do with politics and of course economics.”
“Reality is by agreement,” says Robert Berman, Robert Berman Gallery, Los Angeles. “The arbiters are the museums, the curators, the people who spend their lives aactually being critical of what they see. If you add in four or five art critics, if you get four or five major collectors who are passionate to patronize it, and several major auction houses to auction it, then a vetting process begins to unfold.”
But surely those politics and economics are rooted in the pursuit of an absolute? Personally, I think you can know good art only by what it is not. My painting is not original, not of the moment, not uniquely identifiable, not bold, not passionate, not challenging, not unselfconscious, not ambitious, not technically impressive at all, not something you could stay in love with forever, and definitely not logical. As Alan Bamberger, a San Francisco artist, puts it, “It doesn’t necessarily have to have all of these qualities, but at the very least it has to keep you coming back for more…and never, ever bore.”
My painting is something only a mother could love — and not even my mother.
“I think the best “take away” here is that if you want to know what is good and what is not, you have to get out and look for yourself and make that decision,” says Scott M. Levitt, Director, Fine Arts, Bonhams & Butterfields, Los Angeles. “Take a year, and make it a rule to visit museums and galleries every weekend and read art-related books and magazines as much as possible. If you don’t use this approach, you will officially have no eye.”
If you do, will you have your answer as to what happens between the painting and your eye? Who knows. Why do you like a song? Don’t you kind of like not knowing?
