Some blithering about art

What makes a good work of art a good work of art? There've been many different answers over the years. For most of the last 500, a good work of art has been (broadly speaking) pretty narrowly defined as a technically well executed history painting. After modernism though that all changed. There was a time when a good work of art was defined as a specific type of abstract painting, but that of course is thankfully no longer the case. Nowadays, a good work of art is usually defined as anything presented as art that makes you question (or something like that).

That's one way of looking at it anyway. What about a historically independent definition of good art, one that you can apply equally well to a 15th century religious altarpiece, an early modernist abstraction, or a contemporary anything? One old idea that I think has legs is that in a good work of art form and content reinforce each other. I prefer to think of it as the visual and the conceptual reinforcing each other. Something that looks good but that is vapid is obviously not as good as something that looks good that is not vapid, but something where looking good and meaning something are mutually interdependent is even better.

I don't think I'm explaining myself very well. Looking good is obviously subjective. I personally like cool, calm, balanced pictures. Other people like vibrant, bright, busy pictures. It's not maths - there's no proof either way - so the visual style of a picture can't be a determinant of whether it's good or not. Take Piero della Francesca's Baptism for example, it's not the visual style of the picture that makes it great but how he's encoded the meaning of it into the structure of it, at all sorts of levels from the geometric construction of the composition to the paint treatment of the River Jordan.

Of course, once again it's not like maths. The meaning in the Baptism is totally unlike the meaning of 2 + 2 = 4 - different people get different meanings out of the picture but I sincerely hope they don't out of the equation. The meaning of a work of art resides in the associations that work provokes in the mind of the viewer. However, this still gives us a somewhat objective measuring stick. Lots of people get lots out of the Baptism because there's so much in there to be got.

Art's a funny business. People worry about who's hot and who's not, who's in which gallery, who's selling for how much. It's important to remember none of that stuff matters. What matters is doing good shit and getting it out there any way you can.