How do you know if art is good or bad?

One of the questions I get asked is, “How do you know if art is good or bad?” In this day and age of oversimplification, that gets hard to answer. We like quick, easy answers. Right now, people in the United States are telling each other in simple terms which presidential candidates are good or bad.

“Rebirth,” acrylic on canvas. 8 x 8 inches

The truth is, what makes art good or bad is not that simple. But I think there is one main thing art has to do for me to consider it to be “good.”

But before we get to that, what are the things we can measure?

• the level of craftsmanship and technical skill
• adherence to the so-called rules of design or composition
• the number of references and clues for people “in the know”
• Pull up any famous artwork and you can “grade” them, or create a scorecard around these criteria. That’s not an entirely bad way to go about it. But what makes deciding if art is good or bad so hard is that everyone has different standards and it’s hard to agree. (Just like everything else in life.)

And sometimes you come across artworks that check all those boxes but still lack life. It might be objectively good or bad. They are impressive, but they don’t do anything to you on a deep, visceral level.

That’s why I think the most important thing for art to do is make you feel something.

I’ll go so far as to say that some art can be good even if it is technically or compositionally inferior. It’s good because it has meaning and makes you feel something. It has soul. It’s the difference between a song played by a computer, mechanically hitting all the right notes at the right time, and the joy of a crowd singing along to their favorite song at a concert, even though they aren’t perfectly in sync or in tune with each other.

Do the “rules” help make art stronger? Sure. But sometimes you lose something in the process by overthinking it. I think that’s why some so-called “naive” or “outsider” art works so well. It’s free from all the overly intellectual stuff that gets in the way of saying something meaningful.

The bottom line: art needs to make an emotional connection.

In my own art, I try to make sure there’s some kind of feeling in it.

Do I want my paintings to be strong by checking off the boxes I mentioned earlier? Of course. But more than that, I want to make sure you feel something when you look at it.

One simple way for me to do this is to think about how I want people to feel when I’m creating a new painting. Yes, I’m thinking about you. I’m asking myself how you are going to react to it. How do I want you to feel when you see it? Excited? Awed? Terrified? Anything but bored.

Most often, the feeling I’m after is a sense of hope and optimism about the future even if things are going bad. Which is what I’m usually feeling myself, while painting. (I call myself an optimistic pessimist, if that’s even a thing. Personally, I can be kind of moody and gloomy, but I’m always looking for the upside of things.) So for me I’m always chasing after that spark of hope.

So tell me, what’s one piece of art that has moved you and left an impression on you?

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