Thoughts on bad art

Today’s plan was to post an old rant of mine, maybe doing some light editing to brush it up. I went through my notes to read it over, and it turns out I actually have more things to say than what is in the rant. I felt like I had written more about it in my notes, and sure enough, there is enough to turn it into a proper essay. Some day I will finish it up and publish on the Slog. There are some things in here that I don’t agree with anymore, but I still think it’s worth sharing, so for now, here is the rant:

Ok so bad art stuff. I think part of this has come up from Mr Big Feelings Leftist Essay Guy, particularly when discussing why his videos are so good. One reason is because he shows me how art can be experienced, and that the experience depends heavily on who the reader is. That, and discussions with a friend with very different taste in art(sidenote: They think Neon Genesis Evangelion is a 2/10 which at first was a 1/10, but then they watched Serial Experiments Lain and felt it was even worse so eva had to get a bump. ¹ ) has made me feel that art is really only completed in collaboration with the reader. Who is to say that a piece of art is bad when somebody else might enjoy it? And art I love might be garbage to others.

There’s also the question of whether there is a point in trying to judge art objectively. One measure I’ve seen is asking these three questions: “What was the artist trying to do?”, “Did they succeed?”, and “Was that worth doing?” (sidenote: A similar position can be found on this (fairly arbitrary) blog post: 2023-08-15 - On Art. Even if I think I disagree with it, there’s something about this quote that rings true to me: “And you can feel [the artist’s emotions] in work that doesn’t speak to you, too. You can feel that the feeling is there, but that you don’t have the button in you that the artist is trying to push.”. I’ll have to think more about this in the future.² ). I can’t help but feel like those are meaningless questions to ask when you are trying to enjoy a piece of art. This assumes the role of a judge, and I don’t like how that implies that I should try to find faults or in other ways try to judge it. It’s weirdly antagonistic. Instead I think it’s more useful and enjoyable to try and get as much out of the art as possible. One part of this is that that you have to manage your expectations; having too rigid expectations, or having expectations that clash with the work, can render you unable to enjoy it. With the example of Neon Genesis Evangelion, having the too rigid expectation that it will always be about big mechas, or that you are going to get answers to every lore question, or having the expectation that the animation will always be smooth and dynamic might make the end disappointing. Reading the Malazan Book of the Fallen and thinking that a bunch of plot will happen and that everything will be explained clearly will probably lead to confusion.

One (silly) way to define good art that focuses on this positive aspect of art, is that good art is art that makes me or others feel emotions. (sidenote: I don’t think I agree with this definition anymore. It’s too totalizing. Art is complex and weird and nuanced; it can’t, or at least shouldn’t be put down into neat little boxes like this. ³ ) According to that definition it’s pretty easy to decide if something is good art, I just have to find a person that likes it. You might disagree and think it is bad, but that doesn’t deny that it has been something important to this person. Something about it is positive for them, and doesn’t harm you.(sidenote: Being boring or ugly doesn’t bring any harm, but there are ways in which art can be harmful if we consider its effects on the real world. Politics is never truly escapable, and art is often full of it. Racism, queer-phobia, fascism and other harmful ideas and ideologies can be and are spread through art. I feel like such art is the only type of art that qualifies as bad.⁴ ) Bad art on the other hand would be art that nobody finds good. This is obviously a much stronger statement, a statement about the absence of good, and would be potentially impossible to prove if we include hypothetical individuals in that statement (such as past or future humans). Given that, I wonder if bad art exists at all in this framework.