Good Art, Bad Art

& how to tell the difference

I like a big old rock. I don’t go out walking much anymore where I can find them, but I well remember how I used to be very picky about size (more or less, the compact volume of a Volkswagen) & its precise smoothness & findable declivity where, with a breeze & not too fierce a sun (call it a latitude near the Canadian border), I could sit & write & maybe, if I was very lucky, pass the densest sleep of my life.

I also like a good philosophico-aesthetic schema. It’s a kind of rock: a koan. It excites me to find (or make) a new one. I don’t take it for gospel, & maybe I even forget all about it after my one noontide nap. (Looking at you, Jungian Myers-Briggs.) But even this mild persuasion is nothing next to an I-was-there twittervid of trees & roofs skating off in a hurricane.

Art isn’t often like that (the first time I heard “Smells Like Team Spirit” was in my parents’ driveway as I started up a packed station-wagon en route to Seattle), & I’m okay with that. I like spicy food (Tex-Mex, Korean) as well as the subtler nuances of sushi. (Topic for a haiku: what’s the difference between the flavor of tuna & the flavor of yellowfish?) But what sticks with me most are those Damcar-walloped moments such as when I met, in propia persona, Rembrandt’s last two selfies. I grokked... The penult: broken-down, despairing, sick & disregarded—his actuality. And the last one: triumphant, iconic—his artistic afterlife. (“Rembrandt” in quotes.) I was riveted. (Who stands stock-still & stares, in a museum full of guided tours? --Only another painter.)

I really have a physical reaction to some artworks, just as surely as caffeine or alcohol. I don’t need to call them “great”, although I think this must be what is truly meant by artistic greatness. And I am grateful for anyone who can help me find more of them. Alas (& you know it’s true) the vast majority of criticism happens for entirely other, socio-political reasons. Sometimes simply to further a career. And so, while I really would rather not give any amount of energy to this latest virality-aimed bludgeon of a tweet-meme (by someone I’d never heard of, but you know what? I already know him--& why are there 3,000 species of mosquitoes anyway?), it is after all a schema. It fascinates me, at the same time it repels.

“Analyze poetry. Analyze ice cream.
Career in making poetry. Career in making ice cream.
Schools of kinds of poetry. Schools of kinds of ice cream making.
Come up with a new form of poetry. Come up with a new flavor of ice cream.
Only one kind of poetry is right. Only one flavor of ice cream is good.”  --Xvarenah 10-27-09 (from Mozarabkultur 8-17-07)

If only that could exhaust the subject! But it doesn’t. First, one topic that I do think is interesting, but badly framed: what might be termed the “10 Books That Screwed Up the World” Gambit (faith-foundational tomes are by definition exempt—don’t ask me why). Never mind for the moment that the vast majority of humans, now or ever, don’t read. (Or go to museums.) Is there such a thing as an artwork that Should Not Exist?

“I’ll take Birth of a Nation for $1,000.” Well, I’ve been repulsed (sometimes by having chosen unwisely, sometimes by being persuaded by something I would later abjure), & I’ve also found some of my favorite things that I had to learn to appreciate (John Coltrane’s Ascension album, which took me, IIRC, at least ten listenings).  I could play the cheap elitist by naming Tuesdays with Morrie (which I sincerely abominate)—but surely there were a few of its million readers who benefitted materially? Definitely Fox News as a fountainhead of enshittification (but you knew that). But that’s hardly art (even to the people who turn every spare TV in every waiting room in every auto repair shop to its channel)… No, I don’t think even Wagner has that blood on his hands, nor poor Nietzsche (who, like Gautama, tried to warn us from his followers). What we need, rather, is more & better Forewords.

And suppose you are trotting out of an art gallery (knowing where to find one) & you say, “Gee, why is contemporary art so boring?” And you even did your required reading, so you know what it’s supposed to be saying. Is that Bad Art, or just feeble? Are you going to say, in one column goes Korenveld met kraaien (Wheatfield with Crows), & in another, this poor sap’s attempt to hustle-up a use for their MFA?

What I really want to do is blame someone when my poetry manuscript doesn’t get chosen for the three-months’-rent-worth grand prize they charged me $25 for just to enter. “The fix is in,” I tell my fellow non-iconical scribblerians. “Only Bad Poetry gets to win.” I leave it to you to fill in the adjectives.

Finally, & I think this is the bomb: I’m worried about summers that keep getting hotter & hotter in Texas until we all just spontaneously burst into flame. But I voted all the times they let me & it didn’t help! So what am I going to do (besides all the things I keep on doing that I used to do)? --Why, tell everyone else how to decide Good Art from Bad Art in one single-page diagram.

That’ll show ‘em.