Philosophical question: What makes art "good"?
I've been sitting on this ask for a while. On the one hand, it'd be way easier to just say "thousands of pages have been written on this topic with no agreeable consensus yet, so what does it matter what I think?" On the other hand, this exact question came up in one of my discords recently, and I remembered this is still a real question for people who don't spend their time combing through those thousands of pages. I'll try to give some personal thoughts. This is going to be a long one, so apologies in advance.
First, I have to assume that anyone reading this believes there is a real distinction to be made between that which is art and that which is not. Art is the resultant of intention for the purpose of aesthetic engagement. A chair might be beautifully crafted and have significant aesthetic qualities, but its true function is as a piece of furniture. To that end, it might be artisanal, but it is not art, strictly speaking. Those who say "art is whatever you think is art" (or similar derivatives) do not actually believe it, because their entire goal is to appropriate the label "art" for whatever product or commodity they personally value, which would be a meaningless goal if they did not already recognize the label "art" as a non-subjective signifier. For the purpose of this post I'll be containing my thoughts to visual arts specifically (music, literature, drama, and poetry are surely arts, but they will make things slightly more difficult).
In philosophy, the discipline of phenomenology seeks to explore experience as such. One might argue that Kant acted as a precursor to phenomenology with his distinction between phenomenon and noumenon, the former being that which is accessible to us through our senses. Since art is an aesthetic endeavor, this makes modern philosophical questions about art inextricable from questions about phenomenology, because art is something we must experience with our senses. We see paintings, we hear music, etc, but what are sights and sounds really, and how do we explain emotional responses to empirical stimuli?
One concept in phenomenology I find particularly useful in the domain of art is the concept of intentionality. In short, all of our thoughts are about something. We do not have free-form, disconnected thoughts, but rather thoughts that are directed towards particular concepts, objects, or feelings. We have thoughts with intention. This might seem obvious at first, but it has grave implications for our connectedness to the real world. If all of our thoughts are about things, then it is things (be they concrete or abstract) that anchor our minds to the world. Indeed, this is the crux of the Kantian paradigm (though he predated the modern terminology).
What does this mean for art, and how does it affect what one might consider "good" vs "bad" art? Here we get to the messiness of the objects of our thought. Is it possible for one to have their thoughts directed at the wrong thing?
I'm going to take a step to the side here and illustrate my perspective from a parallel street: the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic. In the modern uses of the word, the two are practically synonyms, but this is the result of a modern world that values pornography over all else, perverting the natural domain of the erotic in the process. So what is the difference? All human beings experience sexual desire, but we understand that sexual desire and lust are not identical.
In true sexual desire, we feel the erotic impulse not merely for the body of our beloved, but for our beloved embodied. We see in our beloved the self-experience of their entire person, a self-experience we recognize within ourselves, and we seek to bridge the gap between self and non-self, us and them. Christendom recognized this truth in its pronouncements that in the sacrament of marriage, man and woman become as one flesh. In a more romantic idiom, we recognize this impulse when we get lost in the eyes of our beloved. It is not the literal pupils and irises we see, but the person behind those eyes. In the sexual act, we consummate our desire as erotic love, the intention of which is directed at our beloved as a subject. Sexual desire, at its heart, is a search for knowledge of the Other: it is an outward direction passion of epistemology.
Lust, by contrast, is entirely directed inwards. We are only too familiar with lust as an appetite. Lust makes no regard for the personhood of its object, because the object of lust can be replaced at a whim. Imagine if someone suggested that you replace your true love with a nicer, more beautiful man/woman: the idea is so absurd it's insulting. But the accessibility and variety of modern pornography perfectly illustrates the non-specificity of lust. It doesn't matter what an object of lust is, because it is in the satisfaction of the self that the appetite of lust is sated. Lust denies the personhood of its object, which is why lust in its most extreme and degenerate forms (rape and pedophilia) can satisfy itself with any number of victims, each just as good as another. (As an aside, this is why pornography is so perverse. It displaces and usurps healthy desires with false substitutes. Note that this description also applies to much non-sexual products of the modern world.)
I'm sure you can see where I'm going here. The erotic attempts to use art to explore the dimension of sexual desire, a natural and fundamental part of the human condition. The pornographic serves to satiate the appetite of lust.
See here the Titian "Venus," an exploration of erotic beauty in the divine. Here the body is at perfectly at rest. The Venus could be clothed from head to toe, and her natural posture need not change in the slightest. She is in complete awareness of her form, and she gazes at the viewer with the relaxed confidence of a transcendent beauty. The viewer is drawn automatically to her face, which veils her nude body from perversity. You cannot objectify this woman, her flesh is off-limits to base appetites. Instead of consuming her, we adore and appreciate her, admiring from a distance the perfection of her features and the sublimity of her Self. We see in her a woman embodied, flesh and spirit entwined.
The male gaze meets the erotic (like the Venus) and feels a desire for more than mere flesh. She is pure subjectivity, and a function of sexual desire is to know that subjectivity as one's own. This is not a uni-directional force, however, and in the erotic moment that desire for knowledge compels us to make ourselves vulnerable for our beloved, that they might do the same for us. The Venus's eyes are both sword and shield, her face both an invitation for vulnerability and a bulwark against obscenity.
It's not exclusively in the beauty of the divine that we encounter erotic passion in art, however, and certainly human beings are not gods. See here a more terrestrial exploration of the erotic in Manet's "Olympia."
Notice first the similarities to the Titian: a nude figure, a relaxed posture, a self-awareness in expression. But immediately differences are apparent. This is no goddess, but a woman of flesh and blood. Hers are not the spotless hands of the divine, but the earthly hands of caresses, of money-handling, perhaps even of violence. Her features are hardened, but they are true. And like the Venus, her face holds vigil above her form. We see in her expression an entire person, a woman with a history, will, and total self-knowledge. She too is off-limits, but for more imminent reasons than the Venus, for this is a more imminent beauty.
In the Venus and the Olympia we see the body unashamed. They are bodies in sublime reclination, perfectly at one with themselves in their nakedness. Theirs is not a nudity of advertising or intentional display, but instead of total leisure. The veil between the viewer and these women holds fast, and we see in them a representation of the female form in all its splendor. These are not "real" women (though their models doubtlessly were), and so for the viewer, they are the subjects of imagination.
By way of contrast, let us move now to a work of false eroticism, Boucher's "Blonde Odalisque."
Striking differences are at play here. Most apparent is the subject's posture, an unnatural and inexplicable pose that she would never hold if she was fully clothed. This is not the body at rest, it is the body on display. The face is another red flag, as it has no feature to play in the body's composition, and we have no reason to be drawn towards it. Whether she is intentionally avoiding our gaze or is simply unaware of it, her subjectivity is compromised, and we are free to engage in more lecherous mental activity. This is not the body unashamed, like the Venus or Olympia. Instead, it is the body shameless. Her nudity, while beautiful, is dangerous and borders on advertisement. There is no history in this woman that concerns us beyond her bare flesh, and therefore she is not a fully intact agent to us. The erotic here is impossible, and we have brushed against the boundary of the pornographic.
What conclusions can we draw? The Titian and the Manet are works of art that pull our thoughts into them, realms of fantasy where the imagination must work, wrestle, and play with perspectives of subjectivity and the erotic. The Boucher also pulls at our thoughts, but not with the same end, instead providing an immediate satisfaction for fantasy in the form of a readily present object. There's no room for imagination here beyond inward-focused lechery.
Here we encounter another difficulty in art, the conflation of technical execution to artistic expression. One cannot deny Boucher's remarkable skill as a painter. But that skill does not automatically endow expressive merit to a work of art. Compare especially the Titian to the Boucher - the compositions have similarities in form but not in content, because there is more to a work of art than the literal pigments on the canvas. Those who cannot penetrate beyond the surface-level sense impressions of a work will find it difficult to delineate between genuine artistic expression and the evocation of mere sentimentality. Art must take itself to be fundamentally serious, and in that vein it cannot properly provide gratification for fantasy, for such satisfaction would be illusory. Where gratification comes easy, artistic expression recedes.
And now we return to the question at hand with a new perspective on what makes art "good." "Good" art is art which exists for its own sake, while "bad" art (and I'm using the word "bad" here very loosely, for much "bad" art is still skillfully executed) is art which exists for the sake of the emotions and feelings it satisfies in those who engage with it. In the phenomenological phrasing, "good" art pulls the intentionality of thought outwards, while "bad" art confines it inwards (metaphorically speaking). Indeed, it is the very notion of "inward-focused intentionality" that seems to be the defining feature of what the art-world calls kitsch.
We all know kitsch when we see it. The art on greeting cards, or in hotel lobbies, or in Precious Moments figurines. These are things that exist for the sole purpose of arousing an emotional response, and it is in that response that we find satisfaction. The automatic "awww" that we coo out when we open a birthday card with a cheesy poem inside is categorically different from the "awww" we whisper when we hold a sleeping infant. In this sense, kitsch is emotional pornography, in that its function is to both induce and satisfy an emotional craving without pulling one's thoughts towards anything except their feelings.
Much of modern art is kitsch. Some "artists" like Koons go so far as to produce works that are so blatantly obviously kitsch that it preempts the criticism, as if to say "I know this is looks kitsch, so it transcends the label into new territory, and you can't call it kitsch anymore." Such works are stupendously popular among art critics, because in a world where beauty is considered dangerous and hierarchical, the current vogue is to be as offensive to taste as possible. Other modern works are elaborate exercises in mental masturbation, a kind of "Emperor's New Clothes" litmus test for the anointed of the modern art-world. In these overly intellectualized forms of kitsch, the "merit" is found in one's own capacity to recognize and appreciate said "merit," and those who can't probably aren't sophisticated enough to understand.
But this presents another danger in the opposite direction, the glorification of tradslop. In an effort to signal as hard as possible an opposition to the trends of modernity, tradposters and right-wingers alike have fallen into the habit of idolizing prettier forms of kitsch.
Thomas Kinkade paintings all have exactly one function, to satisfy one's emotional cravings for idyllic coziness or nostalgia. On the surface it appears more "traditional" than Koons (or at least less "modern"), and the accessible prettiness makes it attractive as a counter-signal to the abstract ugliness of hypermodernity. Like the Boucher, the Kinkade has genuine merit in form and composition, use of color, perspective, and lighting (a trademark specialty of Kinkade). But beneath the surface, there is no genuine content in a Kinkade landscape, no representation for our imaginations to occupy, because it is purely for the sake of the emotional response of the viewer that the landscape exists. It is a prop that is satisfying to look at because that is its function.
By way of comparison, let's look at Wyeth's "Christina's World," a mid-20th century painting that, ironically, was considered too kitsch on its debut because it wasn't abstract enough. The Wyeth, like the Kinkade, induces a kind of nostalgia on first impression. But unlike the Kinkade, the nostalgia here is for a world rooted in reality. Our gaze moves from Christina to the homestead and back, scanning everything from her clothes to the tracks in the field for clues of the human life depicted. We might feel grief for the loss of a world long-past, recognition in the home depicted and the familiarity of its contents, or empathy in Christina's course towards the property. In all of this, our imaginations dance within Wyeth's representation, a somber and sublime depiction of Americana, but separate from us, enframed as an end in itself.
My suspicion is that in the modern world of commercial product, we are so inundated with a constant stream of slop that we are primed to overexcitedly pedestalize even mediocre content to heights it doesn't deserve. Film and videogame soundtracks are "just as good" as the symphonies of Beethoven, because they both use orchestras, right? The pop music of Phil Spector was pure genius compared to his contemporaries (and successors), but does that make it more artistically sound than the Wagnerian element he utilizes? Game of Thrones might not be Shakespeare, but it's got to be better than Harry Potter, isn't that good enough? Why not enjoy Kinkade when everything else is either perverse or Corporate Memphis blob art?
The "product vs art" discussion is sticky, because in a world dominated by the democratic atmosphere, it's forbidden to suggest that one's taste in anything, from food to films, might be inferior to another's. "Just let people enjoy things!" It is sobering to remember that the most effective products for mass consumption are those manufactured to satisfy the lowest common denominator, and what is more satisfying than the instant gratification of fantasy? But if one cares about art as a feature of humanity's impulse to create, then one must recognize that, like human beings themselves, not all art (and certainly not all product) is created equal. If it were, criticism would be impossible.
