13

It has always been difficult to define or illustrate good or bad art.  The word means to  make; an artist is a maker, that’s what the word means, and there are a lot of  different notions out there about that making, about what is good art; what is bad art. No answer here, (but see Dorothy Sayers about the artist as maker).

What I want to do is bring up a modern notion about that making. The  modern notion is novelty. Look around. Art is making anything, and “whatever is new is good; whatever is different is better”. There is no end to it. Just come up with some new idea, something no one else has done before. Anything.  throw some paint on some plywood and call it “Urban Sunrise”, gather some rocks in a pile and call them “Nature’s  Gospel”, bang on a drum and call it Mozart’s dream, leave a blank space on a gallery wall and call it “Time.”

Anything works. Just be different. That’s much of modern art. But while it is certainly true that art definitions are challenging, we can say a little. There is some refuge from novelty. We can say that repetition with variation yields something. We can say there is a difference between order and disorder. We can say “that reminds me of something”. We can say “that’s nonsense.” Novelty in this random world does not stand unchallenged.