How Do You Know It's Good? by Marya Mannes

Here's a great essay about "art". What is it? How do you know if you are looking at art? How do you know if it is good? As students, you will be making judgments like this; here's hoping this essay makes it a little easier!
ow Do You Know It’s Good?
By Marya Mannes


(1) Suppose there were no critics to tell us how to react to a picture, a play, or a new composition of music. Suppose we wandered innocent as the dawn into an art exhibition of unsigned paintings. By what standards, by what values would we decide whether they were good or bad, talented or untalented, successes or failures? How can we ever know that what we think is right?
(2) For the last fifteen or twenty years the fashion in criticism or appreciation of the arts has been to deny the existence of any valid criteria and to make the words “god” and “bad” irrelevant, immaterial, and inapplicable. There is no such thing, we are told, as a set of standards, first acquired through experience and knowledge and later imposed on the subject under discussion. This has been a popular approach, for it relieves the critic of the responsibility of judgment and the public of the necessity of knowledge. It pleases those resentful of disciplines, it flatters the empty-minded by calling them open-minded, it comforts the confused. Under the banner of democracy and the kind of equality which our forefathers did not mean, it says, in effect, “Who are you to tell us what is good or bad?” This is the same cry used so long and so effectively by the producers of mass media who insist that it is the public, not they, who decides what it wants to hear and see, and that for a critic to say that this program is good is purely a reflection of personal taste. Nobody recently has expressed this philosophy more succinctly than Dr. Frank Stanton, the highly intelligent president of CBS television. At a hearing before the Federal Communications Commission, this phrase escaped him under questioning: “One man’s mediocrity isanother man’s good program.”
(3) There is no better way of saying “No values are absolute.” There is another important aspect to this philosophy of laissez faire: It is the fear, in all observers of all forms of art, of guessingwrong. This fear is well come by, for who has not heard of the contemporary outcries against artists who later were called great? Every age has it arbiters who do not grow with their times, who cannot tell evolution from revolution or the difference between frivolous faddism, amateurish experimentation, and profound and necessary change. Who wants to be caught flagrante delicto [literally, “while the crime is blazing”] with an error of judgment as serious as this? It is far safer, and certainly easier, to look at a picture or a play or a poem and to say “This is hard to understand, but it may be good,” or simply to welcome it as a new form. The word “new”—in our country especially—has magical connotations. What is new must be good; what is old is probably bad. And if a critic can describe the new in language that nobody can understand, he’s safer still. If he has mastered the art of saying nothing with exquisite complexity, nobody can quote him later as saying anything.
(4) But all these, I maintain, are forms of abdication from the responsibility of judgment. In creating, the artist commits himself; in appreciating, you have a commitment of your own. For after all, it is the audience which makes the arts. A climate of appreciation is essential to its flowering, and the higher the expectations of the public, the better the performance of the artist. Conversely, only a public ill-served by its critics could have accepted as art and as literature so much in these last years that has been neither. If anything goes, everything goes; and at the bottom of the junk pile lie the discarded standards too.
(5) But what are these standards? How do you get them? How do you know they’re the right ones? How can you make a clear pattern out of so many intangibles, including that greatest one, the very private I?
(6) Well, for one thing, it’s fairly obvious that the more you read and see and hear, the more equipped you’ll be to practice that art of association which is at the basis of all understanding and judgment. The more you live and the more you look, the more aware you are of a consistent pattern—as universal as the stars, as the tides, as breathing, as night and day—underlying everything. I would call this pattern an this rhythm an order. Not order—an order. Within it exists an incredible diversity of forms. Without it lies chaos. I would further call this order—this incredible diversity held within one pattern—health. And I would call chaos—the wild cells of destruction—sickness. It is in the end up to you to distinguish between the diversity that is health and the chaos that is sickness, and you can’t do this without a process of association that can link a bar of Mozart with the corner of a Vermeer painting, or a Stravinsky score with a Picasso abstraction; or that can relate an aggressive act with a Franz Kline painting and a fit of coughing with a John Cage composition.
(7) There is no accident in the fact that certain expressions of art live for all time and that others die with the moment, and although you may not always define the reasons, you can ask the questions. What does an artist say that is timeless; how does he say it? How much is fashion, how much is merely reflection? Why is Sir Walter Scott so hard to read now, and Jane Austen not? Why is baroque right for one age and too effulgent for another?
(8) Can a standard of craftsmanship apply to art of all ages, or does each have its own, and different definitions? You may have been aware, inadvertently, that craftsmanship has become a dirty word these years because, again, it implies standard—something done well or done badly. The result of this convenient avoidance is a plenitude of actors who can’t project their voices, singers who can’t phrase their songs, poets who can’t communicate emotion, and writers who have no vocabulary—not to speak of painters who can’t draw. The dogma now is that craftsmanship gets in the way of expression. You can do better if you don’t know how you do it, let along what you’re doing.
(10) I think it is time you helped reverse this trend by trying to rediscover craft: the command of the chosen instrument, whether it is a brush, a word, or a voice. When you begin to detect the difference between freedom and sloppiness, between serious experimentation and ego therapy, between skill and slickness, between strength and violence, you are on your way to separating the sheep from the goats, a form of segregation denied us for quite a while. All you need to restore it is a small bundle of standards and a Geiger counter that detects fraud.
. . .
(11) Purpose and craftsmanship—end and means—these are the keys to your judgment in all the arts. What is this painter trying to say when he slashes a broad band of black across a white canvas and lets the edges dribble down? Is it a statement or violence? Is it a self-portrait? If it is one of these, has he made you believe it? Or is this a gesture of the ego or a form of therapy? If it shocks you, what does it sock you into.
(12) And what of this tight little painting of bright flowers in a vase? Is the painter saying anything new about flowers? Is it different from a million other canvases of flowers? Has it any life, any meaning, beyond its statement? Is there any pleasure in its form or texture? The question is not whether a thing is abstract or representational, whether is it “modern” or conventional. The question, inexorably, is whether it is good. And this is a decision which only you, on the basis of instinct, experience, and association, can make for yourself. It takes independence and courage. It involves, moreover, the risk of wrong decision and the humility, after the passage of time, or recognizing it as such. As we grow and change and learn, our attitudes can change too, and what we once thought obscure or “difficult” can later emerge as coherent and illuminating. Entrenched prejudices, obdurate opinions are as sterile as no opinions at all.
(13) Yet standards there are, timeless as the universe itself. And when you have committed yourself to them, you have acquired a passport to that elusive but immutable realm of truth. Keep it with you in the forests of bewilderment. And never be afraid to speak up.