Art is a strange beast. What is art? What is good art?

Jared and I (et. al.) were at the Moss St. Paint-In today. The works are a mix of amateur and pro and I was there scouting for View Art, my Mom’s joint. During the walk I tried to put into words my gut reactions to the work.

I came up with a little critical framework. As with any system it abstracts out the reality: Good art is good regardless of the system used to evaluate it — I saw fine paintings that broke all of these guidelines — but there seems to be reason to the “this painting is really good” rhyme.

First: Who the fuck am I to criticize? Well, good point. My Mom’s been in the art biz since the 1960s and I grew up in her house. I’ve seen a shitload of paintings, good and bad, and we have basically identical taste, by her design.

If you’re a painter: Shine on, flower. I haven’t painted in years — you got that on me. What’s good doesn’t necessarily sell, and what sells isn’t necessarily good. Good is good, regardless.

That said, here’s a disgusting tip: If you want to sell, paint with a consistent color scheme. Art is priced and sold like wallpaper because it’s a decoration, and rainbows really don’t go with anything.

Second, you have to understand conventions. The difference between Jackson Pollack and your kid nephew’s finger painting is, yes, art school. If your work smashes all conventions then it is incomprehensible, indistinguishable from chaos, from noise.

Which is fine, if your art is a totally private language. But if you want to communicate you need something for the audience to latch on to, some convention, some way in. If you don’t give them a dangling thread then they can’t unravel the sweater, and if you’re fully-clothed you’re not naked. Intensely private languages, somewhat oddly, shield you from communicating anything intensely private.

I look at Pollack and I think about Mondrian, who, if you care to, can link things back to representative forms.

Third, you have to break conventions creatively. Strictly conventional painting is basically fascist, and wasn’t even interesting in the 1920s. Emily Carr and Adolph Hitler were both painting at the same time. She broke the rules and he slavishly obeyed them. It’s easy to see which is which, and why he utterly failed:

Whose eye is Yolked and whose eye is Volked?

Fourth, art is a mirror. We love seeing ourselves reflected back. Impressionist landscapes — G7, Carr, all other Canadian artists for the last 80 years — drive me nuts. The Canada I know isn’t an expanse of wilderness, it’s post-industrial, post-suburban, post-Christian, and increasingly post-modern and post-European.

What reflects my reality is not what reflected my grandparents’ reality.

Fifth, last, hardest, is the idea of Becoming. Aristotle talked about potentiality and actuality, Nietzsche said, “become what you are.” Trent Reznor wrote The Becoming.

Hunter S. Thompson talked about work “sounding a high, clear note”. That’s what I want to see in art: A clear vision with a lack of hesitation, the feeling that an artist has broken their eye and is being forced to show me something new. Good work seems to use the artist to create itself, to have a quality of thoughtlessness.

The content of the work should be necessary and sufficient. Even if a style is completely derivative you should be able to see that special “this is not a hobby, this is me” quality.

Good art is compulsive, reflective, public nudity.