posted
In the "Star Trek vs Star Wars" thread Teshi made the following observation
quote: I am going to say that I think it's okay to love something very deeply and still say "Well, it's not as good as _________." You don't have to arrange things in order of "good" in the exact same order of things that are "liked".
Based on your hedged answers I think many of you are aware, especially script-wise, that Star Wars is not that "good" a movie. Sure- it's got awesome battles and cool sets and graphics and harrowing moments and things, but George Lucas just doesn't have the same adult depth/interest that much of Star Trek has.
You can like Star Wars more, but still think that Star Trek is better, you know. It's allowed.
This post has caused me to mull over the question of what defines good art, whether its movies, books, music, poetry, paintings or any art form. This is a question which has been debated at least since the times of ancient greeks and quite frankly I think that the scholars have never managed to get it right. The ancient Greeks esteemed the unities of time, place and action as absolute essentials to good art, and yet with the possible exception of unity of actions, these unities have been widely rejected as critical aspects of good art. I could continue on through the ages of art criticism in various genre's demonstrating that theory after theory about what consistitutes good art has been reject. In the end, there is no reason to believe that the definitions of good art currently esteemed by scholars will be more lasting than those of any previous age.
We always seem to be addressing the question from the wrong direction.
In the end, good art is art that engages people either by stimulating their minds or their emotions. We might add that great art, is art which is able to engage a very large number of people from diverse cultures and time periods.
Of course those definitions are useless to anyone trying to produce good art because they tell us nothing about the qualities one needs to incorporate into the work in order to engage peoples minds and hearts.
What those definitions do is refocus our questions about good art? Rather than discussing whether or not "Star Wars" is a good movie based on some changing set of scholar standards regarding dialogue, character development, and blah, blah, blah . . ., we end up discuss what it is about "Star Wars" that has engaged peoples hearts and minds despite is failures in terms of widely accepted intellectual measures.
That is not a discussion that will be pleasing to those who like to think of themselves as the artistic elite, but it is a question that will help artists better understand what makes good and even great art.
So now here is my question. Pick a work or art, any work of art that has engaged your mind and heart and try to identify why it engages you in a way that would be meaningful to an aspiring artist.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
Ohh, words like "good" and "bad" tend to make me cringe. Things that I like a lot, such as my favorite movies and bands, are those that put the most effort into the aspects that I find most important to me.
Posts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:Words like "good" and "bad" tend to make me cringe.
When words like "good" and "bad" make me cringe, its usually because I feel that some one is trying to make those that disagree with them feel inferior or stupid.
quote:Things that I like a lot, such as my favorite movies and bands, are those that put the most effort into the aspects that I find most important to me.
Could you tell us about which aspects you find most important?
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
It depends on the art form. It is also something that is very personal to most people so defining what good ART is is hard to put into a nice little prepackaged box. In film there are standards in editing, script writing, art direction and the list goes on that a number of professionals have gotten together and said this is what constitutes good and then you get the oscars. So that just confuses the issue more than anything else and that's kind of how I feel about the question? But it is a good question none the less.
Posts: 871 | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
As to "good" and "bad", what you said is exactly one reason I don't like those words. Another reason is people sometimes use it to describe things that they "like" and "dislike", and by using "good" and "bad" it implies that their opinion is, in a word, law.
Which aspects I find important... hmm... well, with movies, the most important thing to me is Flavor. Whether the costumes, soundtrack, colors, cinemetography style, and lighting all come together to form a coherent Flavor that makes the movie uniquely itself... for example, if you caught only a minute of a movie on TV you might still recognize what it is because of all of these things. Other things that I find important are very carefully crafted photography... I am partial to geometric composition of the frame, especially if the composition is telling us about the characters or things within it. Use of color in this way is interesting as well. Special consideration to detail in costumes, makeup, and sets also interest me, though for me to be sucked into a movie not specifically necessary. Also, good dialogue is not important to me, I don't mind cheesy movies because what is important to me is the movie is totally devoted to itself, extra points if it doesn't take itself too seriously. Humor, drama, and especially romance are not important to me, what is important are themes, such as post-apocalyptic societies and how people come together in them, unconventional relationships between individuals or groups of individuals, how different people think or view the world. In the evolution of movie genres, I tend to like the movies that either start or pioneer a genre, or are on the line between perfecting the genre and parodying a genre, because novelty is not lost on me. And the most important thing in a movie to make me really like it is a cast of characters coming together to a common purpose, who are all very different and clash even though their goals are the same. When special effort is put to craft characters which do this, I tend to enjoy the movie more because that is important to me Posts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
In one class I had to take, the teacher said what differentiated art from "lesser" things is that it reveals something about the human condition. While this is merely one opinion, I have found it useful. The more deeply a film, book, painting makes me connect to the universal the better I think it is.
In any book I regard as art, I have ached when the characters hurt, I loved when they loved, and even when I disagreed with them I understood them and couldn't help but feel for them. I think an aspiring artist could glean from this that what makes something good art is the ability to display something that connects us all to the ways we are the same.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
I pick American Gothic, the painting by what's his face that's famous. Yeah I can't remembeer who it is. But I remember seeing it at the Chicago Art Museum. I remember thinking when I was a kid that the postage stamp was stuipd and who would like that picture no matter how important it is?
And then I saw it. I didn't know I was going to see it. They didn't have it displayed or labelled ostentatiously it was just along the gallery wall like any other picture.
I could have stood there for another hour, just looking at that painting. I still wouldn't say I "liked" the painting, but it profoundly moved me. The detail was incredible. You could see the smile lines that showed it wasn't just grumpy old folks with pitchforks.
posted
From another perspectice, some Art is communication, therefore "good" art would be that which communicates the intended message to the intended audience. (Note "intended".)
Some art is simply expression. In that context, "good" art would be that which effectively expresses what the artist desired to express. It might effectively express that thing only to the artist himself, but that wouldn't make it less "good" (IMO), just less "pertinent" or less "important", or other subjective labels.
In other words, Art is so dependant on such an incredibly personal connection between an artist and an experiencer of that art that such words as "good" and "bad" can have no objective meaning. The works we tend to call "Great" are those which most successfully create the most connections between the artist and the most people. And again, this is entirely dependant on who we include in the sets of "we" and "people". What Western Culture considers "Great" might not be given a second glance by a sufficiently different culture.
In other words, you can ask 10,000 people if a work of art is "good" and you won't know whether it really is or not until you answer the question yourself.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
Art is subjective as Lisa says. What makes are Successful (Isn't that a better word than "Good"?) is when it invokes an emotion.
If it makes you laugh or cry, if it has a pleasent flavor (as myr said), if it makes you swell with pride or joy, if it makes you feel loved, shamed, hated... excited. This is all successful art.
Even art that does nothing but make you angry is successful. But I think this would be a time I would use the term "Bad" for art since it's too easy to simply provoke people.
Unsuccessful art is art that makes you feel nothing...
To me, art is all about the feelings it evokes.
Even a rollercoaster can be art.
Pix
(I feel like I typed all this before.. didn't we have a thread like this once?)
posted
I remember discussing this for hours in my philosophy club meetings in college. It was definitely a heated debate as we tried to define merely what constituted art in and of itself. We eventually came to the conclusion that art is purely subjective and only becomes "good" or "great" when a consensus is reached among a broad spectrum of people.
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