What Makes Art Good?

In a gallery hung with canvases that few visitors paused to notice, two critics argued about what, if anything, makes art good.

'A great work, I maintain, possesses qualities we can point to, balance, coherence and mastery of form.'

'Those words sound objective, yet each of them hides a judgement of taste dressed up as a fact.'

Duval, a formalist, believed that aesthetic value resides in the object itself, independent of the viewer.

'A poorly composed painting is worse than a masterpiece in the same way that a broken clock is worse than a working one.'

'That comparison is far too tidy, for a clock has a purpose, whereas art arguably has none but the ones we give it.'

Marlowe, who emphasised context, held that value is something communities confer rather than discover.

'A urinal in a hardware shop is plumbing; the same object in a museum becomes considerably more provocative.'

'I grant that context shapes attention, but it cannot manufacture quality out of nothing.'

'Otherwise every object would be equally good, and the word good would mean nothing at all.'

'It strikes me, rather, that our standards themselves have a history and will keep changing.'

The disagreement was not about which works to admire, but about where the admiration comes from.

'A century ago, the paintings we now revere were dismissed as clumsy; were the critics simply wrong, or were the standards different?'

'Perhaps they were wrong, just as people can be mistaken about anything that takes effort to perceive.'

'Skill in seeing, like skill in listening, can be trained, and a trained eye is not merely a different eye but a better one.'

'Better by whose measure, though? That is the question you keep assuming rather than answering.'

Here Duval conceded that no critic escapes his own era, even as he denied that all judgements are equal.

'To say that taste is cultivated is not to say that anything goes; some responses are considerably more informed than others.'

'On that, surprisingly, we may agree, though I would locate the authority in the community, not in the canvas.'

What both resisted was the lazy verdict that beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

'Subjective does not mean arbitrary; my responses are mine, yet they are shaped by everything I have learned to notice.'

'And objective need not mean eternal; a standard can be real without being fixed for all time.'

Slowly, the two positions moved from opposition toward something more like a division of labour.

'Call it this: the work offers reasons, and the tradition teaches us to weigh them.'

'I can live with that formulation, all the more so because it leaves room for the work to surprise the tradition.'

Neither had proved that beauty is a fact, nor that it is a mere feeling, but each had made the other's position richer.

'Good art, it seems, is neither wholly in the object nor wholly in us, but in the meeting of the two.'

If even our judgements of beauty evolve as our traditions do, one might ask whether history itself moves in a single direction, whether, in a word, we may still speak of progress.