Feeling lost in a world of creativity. Photo by Richard Longman.

By Mike Levin

Looking for meaning in life, like all good, middle-class yearnings, comes in waves, through an unspoken relativism that makes us believe beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that real creative experience is never artificially manufactured and should never be judged as good or bad. Rap music for sons, classical for aunts and always the belief that all are equally valid, except that our own choices are a little more so.

So it’s off to the Bytowne Cinema because the current movie won at Cannes or to the Mayfair Theatre because of films by artists who had leave to use the Library and Archives’ collection of public-domain video. And what a treat this should be because the government has the good stuff.

Then an hour later, Public Domain seems more like Public Lame because with all those resources and all that creativity, the films have vacated the memory pan because video montage with no narrative or context takes so much effort.

Then the wave of recriminations about artistic judgement and a rush to understand broader views on what good and bad art really is, and finding either a rant against perfectionism or against modernism, and aren’t they the same thing?

The best. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

“The truth is that good merely means ‘I like’ and bad means ‘I dislike’. The art world requires the concepts of subjective good and bad, because that is what drives the desire for improvement and the hard work that goes with it. Without judgements, we would be surrounded by mediocrity,” writes artist Giff Constable.

So bad art makes us human. What does good art make us?

Then it’s off again through the grid of technology, the frustrated shriek of computers, the grunt of software, that produces perfection – never another astral aura on a Photoshop-ed picture or a sour plunk from a keyboard synthesizer. Always the questions about whether imperfection makes us feel more human or whether that’s just a nostalgic tick that went out with a 40-year lifespan.

Then more questions: can a million-dollar Barry Hobin house have a soul even though it looks like a block of Lego pieces, or does a Donair taste better in Athens or on Elgin Street. What’s the value of funk and will it help us find meaning in life?

The worst. Courtesy of the Museum of Bad Art.

And if the intention is bad art, is good-bad better than bad-bad? Isn’t this the knock against modern art?

“The backbone of the painters’ craft, namely drawing, was thrown into the trash along with modeling, perspective, illusion, recognizable objects or elements from the real world, and with it the ability to capture, exhibit, and poetically express subjects and themes about mankind and the human condition and about man’s trials on this speck of stardust called Earth … Earth, hurtling through infinity with all of us along on board, along with everything we know and everything we hold dear. Modernism is art about art. It endlessly asks the question, ad nauseum: What is art? What is art? Only those things that expand the boundaries of art are good; all else is bad. It is art about art. Whereas all the great art in history, my friends, is art about life.” (Fred Ross, Chairman of the Art Renewal Center).

A rising insecurity lurches out of half-constructed criticism. It’s perplexing, even for gallery owners, because judging is part of the job description, and there is always one more who knows what they like, but not how to express it.

“Good art is about intention, trying to make something honest, a notion of adaptation. Maybe it’s more about being a dialogue,” says Don Monet (Cube Gallery). “Well, I look for honesty and love.”

There’s serenity in the simple dichotomy that both Constable and Ross are right, especially if you’re in love with life. And if you can avoid the cynicism in Paul Bloom’s new book, How Pleasure Works, that says we are incapable of appreciating art just by the way it looks, but rather by what the tastemakers say about it. Does that mean that expensive art is the only good art, a wink and a nod among the knowledgeable (and wealthy) that says “Yah, we got soul.”

Abstract by Serge Duguay. Courtesy of Cube Gallery.

Then it’s back to the Cube for a litmus test at the gallery’s new show about the abstract. Surely art with no apparent message is the most difficult to judge on being good or bad? I don’t understand it, so how can I possibly see its honesty?

Monet is on firm ground. “In some ways it’s easier because the artist is asking you to deny representation and rely on feeling. In that way it’s similar to Impressionism.” Because feeling is the only basis of judgement we trust, and it’s why good collectors will head straight for the piece that is most disturbing, looking for the challenge of asking themselves “why is it so difficult for me?”

And the road opens. It’s OK to dislike art if it doesn’t make you feel anything. It’s even OK to think something is bad if it doesn’t stay firmly inside your memory pan, a wash of narrative, context and even nostalgia.

Icon by Tyler Bohm. Courtesy of Cube Gallery

This is why I didn’t like Public Domain, even though I dearly wanted to, and why I am suspicious of technology that eliminates human error. It doesn’t make it bad art; it just didn’t make me feel anything. And that offends my middle-class values.