THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF ART

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS GOOD ART?

 

This is a book about good art. Or more precisely it is a book about how to recognise good art and tell it apart from bad art. As such it may seem to be a rather self-indulgent book full of art that I like and that you, the reader, may not like. Such a book would therefore seem to have even more limited appeal than it might otherwise have, other than possibly to spark interminably long dinner party discussions along the lines of ‘what on earth does he see in that, or why doesn’t he like such-and-such a work’. However I hope to be able to show that it is possible to reach a consensus as to what is good and bad art.

Looking at art is how we discriminate between good and bad works so let us start by looking at two works, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, (1538; http://www.amazon.com/Titians-Urbino-Masterpieces-Western-Painting/dp/0521449006), and Emin’s My Bed, (1998). These may seem rather extreme examples but valid, I think, because as they are both displayed at prestigious art galleries they are therefore presumably fair examples of what is currently considered good art.

I am willing to bet that the majority of you would say the more traditional Titian is the ‘better’ work of art although maybe for different reasons. The Emin work may be more modern, to have something more to ‘say’ about modern society and the conditions in which we live, but which one, assuming we had the space, would we like to have in our house. This is a comparative choice as you, or indeed I, might actually not choose either given perhaps another choice, but it serves to illustrate that consensus is possible over what is good and bad. As these are comparative choices between only two works that is not to say that Emin’s work is absolutely bad; I am sure we can find worse examples but this work cerainly sparked some debate over the subject of 'what is art'.

Of course, in choosing those two examples, I could be accused of making it easy; how, for example, might we choose between a Raphael and da Vinci, or between Monet and Cezanne. Well, I hope to also answer those questions, but the aim of this book is not to produce a ranking order of artists, but to produce, for want of better word, rules that allow us to ascribe a quality to modern art, to help us decide if any of the current day artists are likely to revered in the same way as Monet or Raphael are today and also perhaps answer why it is we still revere Titian after more than four centuries. Whilst the choice we made above is a comparative choice, for that is the simplest choice to make, I hope in this book to show that absolute opinions can be formed without reference to other works of art.

I would like to hint at some factors that might have formed our opinion on the above works. The Titian work is pleasing to the eye, particularly so to a man I would suggest, the painter is clearly skilled in his art, and there are many features of the painting to draw the eye and interest us, for example to the little girl in the background. By contrast the Emin work is not so pleasing, it is very literal, with stained sheets and fag butts; we can almost smell it even from the printed page. We could reach a hasty conclusion here; good art is aesthetically pleasing, pleasing to the eye and to the senses. This apparent requirement for aesthetically pleasing art to be beautiful excludes a considerable amount of, mostly contemporary, art from any canon of good art. It is a problem that has fractured the academia of aesthetics and art history such that two no longer meet. The art historian Arthur Danto has written of aesthetics being stuck in the past because of its association with only things of beauty which leaves itself ill-equipped to cope with contemporary art practice. Of course an all-embracing aesthetic judgement leads right back to where we are now, where everything produced in the name of art is art. Art history has become a domain of CSI like study into the mechanics of the art works production and the circumstances of its production, whilst the art theorists and aestheticians have had to find new friends in the philosophy departments of academic establishments.

A second conclusion we could make in comparing the Titian and Emin is in the required skill of the artist. I think few of us could even contemplate wielding a paintbrush with the same skill as Titian clearly shows whereas I think any of us could make a passable imitation of the Emin work. But even if we were to exactly copy Emin’s work the idea behind the work would not be present because Emin’s experiences which motivated the work are not our experiences. Skill in the production of a work of art can be deceptive in any case as the common detrimental saying, ‘my five year old child could have painted that’ shows.

This fracturing has, in my opinion, made it impossible to currently discriminate good from bad art because I believe it requires disciplines from both fields to make these decisions. Unfortunately is has also led to modern galleries and museums wasting valuable space on works that are, to put it politely, mediocre. The rules are not in place to decide what is good or bad anymore. This is a modern condition because the rules were there before, albeit that the rules may have been contentious. What was important is that it was thought necessary to have such rules. Otherwise we reach the condition where everything deemed to be suitable for public display is art. This was the challenge laid down by Duchamp when he first entered his factory made urinal into the exhibition of the Society of Independent artists in 1917. The work challenges both the idea of the artist as a ‘special’ creator, (Duchamp only chose the orientation to display the work and he also signed it, although not in his own name), and the conventional idea of a work of art as being beautiful, which I think we can agree it is not. So because the work is not beautiful does that mean it is not a good work of art? It will take a little more reading before we can answer that.

In a 2004 survey of art experts, (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4059997.stm; an interesting term, experts), the urinal came top in the 500 most influential modern art works, (there is a considerable disparity between the choices of artists and those of art historians in this survey). Emin has herself cited the work as being influential and the link between Emin’s My Bed and Duchamp’s Fountain is that they both are works that represent ideas. As such the viewer is expected to engage with the work and to empathise with the artist’s idea. If this doesn’t happen, and it is unlikely to unless the artist and viewer have similar histories, the viewer is likely to move on. This by itself does not compartmentalize the work into the bin of bad art but it is factor. This relationship between the viewer and the art work is what I will call the third of my four dimensions. This will be explored at length later but for now I just want to introduce the notion that the relationship between art work and viewer is a major contributory factor in whether an art work can be deemed good or bad.

Returning to the Titian work cited above, there is one aspect of this work that can contribute to its quantification and that is its longevity as a ‘great’ work of art. In 1568 Vasari wrote in his seminal book, ‘The Lives of Artists’,

'Thus Titian having adorned Venice, or rather Italy, and indeed other parts of the world, with the finest pictures, deserves to be loved and studied by artists, and in many things imitated, for he has done works worthy of infinite praise, which will last as long as illustrious men are remembered.' (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/vasari/vasari25.htm).

Four hundred and fifty years later the work is still regarded as ‘the apotheosis of High Renaissance painting’. This constancy in a work’s valuation across centuries leads to my fourth dimension, a thread of time that runs through all good art. As the art critic Clement Greenberg writes,

'All values are human values, relative values, in art as well as elsewhere. Yet there seems to have been more or less of a general agreement among the cultivated of mankind over the ages as to what is good art and what bad. […] Kitsch, by virtue of a rationalised technique that draws on science and industry, has erased this distinction in practice.'

Greenberg famously discriminates between good and bad art through a number of prescribed ‘rules’ which drew on Kant’s ideas of beauty, although his theories were largely debunked in the late 1960s. However once those ‘rules’ no longer applied we were left with the free-for-all of art practice that was Post-Modernism. It might appear at this stage that good art is therefore highly accomplished natural art, by which I mean art that reflects or improves upon nature, a criteria that was used in the past to discriminate good from bad art. However Greenberg was a champion of the avant-garde and often wrote that it was in avant-garde art where we will find the greatest modern art, or more accurately that art which pushing forward the frontiers. At the time that he was writing this, artists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock were those that Greenberg in particular pointed to as producing good art. There is little apparent naturalism to these artists. We should also remember that Titian was also avant-garde in his use of colour; Vasari noted that Titian’s paintings, ‘For his first works were finished with great diligence, and might be looked at near or far, but the last are worked with great patches of colour, so that they cannot be seen near, but at a distance they look perfect. This is the reason that many think they are done without any trouble, but this is not true. And this way of working is most judicious, for it makes the pictures seem living.’

Any rules that we do make to quantify art need to applicable to contemporary art; we do not want to wait four hundred years before we can decide if Emin’s bed is still being displayed at the Deep Space Nine art gallery. Hindsight in this case should be able to test our new rules, but nothing more. One of Greenberg’s ‘rules’ related to the verticality of the art work. Verticality and horizontality are terms coined by the art historians Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss although they were used primarily as condescending terms; these terms constitute my first and second dimensions respectively. Krauss in particular, who was once a disciple of Greenberg, later chose to attempt to bring down Greenberg’s Modernism, as his theories had then been termed, (hence the term Post-Modernism for the art that followed). Indeed poor old Greenberg and his compatriot Michael Fried were attacked on many quarters.

Firstly Modernism was seen as elite, favouring particular artists at the expense of others. Secondly it was seen as misogynistic in that most of the artists cited as exemplars of Modernism were male; that certainly rancoured the up and coming feminist art historians. On that point it is clear that the Titian work I have mentioned has also come in for some bad press. Thirdly Modernism was medium specific in that it favoured painting as some sculpture but excluded all works that we now call installation or performance art. All of these arguments have some validity. However it is inevitable that any system that preferences one work of art over another will be seen as elitist, especially by those whose work it deferences.  The principal argument the feminists had against Modernism was the same, elitism, in this case the chosen works, mostly by men, were chosen by men against the background of a patriarchal society. Whilst it is true that Greenberg and Fried were men, and the artists they principally lauded were men, (with some exceptions such as Helen Frankenthaler), and the gallery and museum owners choosing the works for display are mostly men, it is a little unfair to put the entire blame for our unbalanced society at Greenberg’s feet. In some ways Modernism amplified the concept of ‘the artist as genius’, and as that artist was usually a man that also galled the feminists. However laudable or otherwise the feminist’s aims are, even if our society it was matriarchal we would still require skills that allow us to determine what is good or bad art. We can assume we are not just glibly saying that all art by female artists is good by definition. The last major criticism of the medium specificity, is that, for Greenberg at least, painting in particular emphasised the work of art by highlighting its two-dimensionality, something more difficult with sculpture or architecture. In other words, painting’s ability to remove depth, (and for Fried this also included some sculpture), highlighted a uniqueness of the work art and removed it from mere copying. It is this aspect of the work that I term the first dimension.

So in this brief introduction you will see that the four dimensions of art I wish to explore are the vertical, the horizontal, depth or the relationship between the work and viewer, and time, the thread which links all good art. I will devote a chapter to each of these dimensions and I hope will show that aspects of these dimensions imbue good art whilst other aspects do not. Whilst exploring the social and political conditions that the work was created in, or by examining the political beliefs of the artist, or by researching the materials that were used in the work’s creation, may add something to the history of the work, they do nothing in telling us if a work is good or bad. Currently we are in the situation that anything displayed in a gallery, by association with the history and proximity of the good art that surrounds it therefore assumed to also be good art.

I hope by the end of this book we will have the tools to make a decision as whether that work is good or bad, absolutely and consensually.