Art – Maybe I’m Missing Something…

Here’s a snippet from the latest instalment in the Orson Scott Card Reviews Everything column.

“Because my wife was preparing to teach an art history class this month, for Mother’s Day I got her (among other, much nicer gifts!) a copy of The Museum of Bad Art Masterworks, a hilariously appalling book by Michael Frank and Louise Reilly Sacco.

The museum really exists, in the basement of a movie-theater outside Boston. There are four hundred pieces of bad art in the permanent collection. Some pieces were actually donated by the artists — a refreshing sign of genuine self-knowledge — while others were scavenged from dumpsters, curbs, garbage cans, and garbage dumps.

The thing about this art isn’t that it’s talent-free — I can produce art like that whenever I want. It’s that it was meant to be good.

It’s easy to look at art you don’t understand or art of a kind you don’t care for and dismiss it as “trash.” But when you have samples of genuine trash, it changes your perspective completely. Now you can see, easily, that even art of a kind you don’t care for can be good — of its kind.

…If you care about art, you have to own this book. If anybody questions your taste in art, just hand them the book and say, “This is bad. What I have on my walls is good. Or at least it’s better than these!”"

This greatly disturbs me because upon checking out some of these “bad” pieces of art, I discovered I actually like, not just some, but most of them.  In fact, there are quite a few in which I am hard-pressed to identify a single flaw.  Exactly what rules are being so blatantly broken as to warrant such open scorn and snickering from the intellectual elite?

I know it’s silly to get so worked up over something as harmless as a museum whose soul purpose is to brighten people’s days, but the combination of the words “art” and “bad” stirs my innermost predilections to extreme discomfort.  It gives me flashbacks to one precarious afternoon when I showed some friends one of my all-time favorite films only to elicit a “this is supposed to be art?”  That comment wouldn’t have lingered quite so long in my boyish cockles if not for the fact that its deliverer was an Art Major who studied in Europe.

For all I know this film, which penetrated me more thoroughly than almost any other, could be the laughing stock of the “art world.”  What does that say about me?  Am I in some way an unworthy vessel for “high” artistic expression?!

The answer seems to me so obvious that the whole root of my confusion on the matter comes from the fact that everyone else hasn’t figured it out yet.  This is that ART is SUBJECTIVE.  So much so that the two words are often used as synonyms!  Correct me if I’m wrong, but it occurs to me that the value of something that matches so completely the description “subjective” can ONLY be measured by one all-encompassing, sacred criteria: the individual’s response to it.

Adopting this philosophy is no trivial adjustment. To embrace it is to give up many treasured words and expressions in common use which are in direct contradiction to its presupposes. No besmirched piece of art can be redeemed by saying it’s simply “over (someone’s) head.” Neither can a universally praised piece be dismissed as pretentious drivel. In fact, let’s just throw out the word “drivel” all-together. And along with it goes the inherently objective words “good” “bad” and “ugly.”