Art

I believe that there is actual truth in the world, and that some things are good and some things are bad regardless of what an individual might think about them. But when it comes to art I'm completely in the dark.

I have no idea what makes some art "good" and some "bad." A year or two ago I saw a couple of news stories about some 9-year old "prodigy" who completed these "brilliant" and "beautiful" paintings that sold for thousands of dollars. To me it looked like the kid had used paint to scribble on a canvas. If I had painted the exact same things, mine wouldn't have sold for 10 cents at a garage sale.

I remember almost none of the stuff I learned in elementary school art classes. What I remember the best was when we learned how to draw a person's face. We learned that a person's head is more of an oval in shape than a circle. I also remember learning that the eyes sit roughly in the middle of a person's head -- about even with the ears (as opposed to way up at the top of the face, which is where my stick-figures' eyes always had been). After I learned these things in elementary school, my drawings of peoples' faces got a lot better. But Pablo Picasso probably would have failed elementary school art, because he never really seemed to care where facial features were supposed to go. Yet he's a famous artist whose works still sell for crazy amounts of money all over the world. Why?

My ignorance of "good" art is not restricted to paintings or visual arts either. It extends to music. I like to consider myself somewhat knowledgeable about music, but at times I feel like a complete moron. I watched Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" music video the other day. Whereas most people apparently see a revolutionary and artistic video performed to a groundbreaking song and musical style, I see a complete whack-job wearing the most non-sensical costumes that seem to be designed around two objectives: 1) making Lady Gaga as naked as possible without being censored on television, and 2) ugliness (and I'm talking about the costumes, not the woman wearing them).

Let's not limit ourselves to music and paintings. What about audio-visual arts like movies? I can be just as stupid about those! When the movie Sin City first came out I went and saw it in the theater with a group of my friends from college. If I hadn't been dependent on my friends for a ride home, I probably would have walked out of it. It was awful. In my opinion it had less of a plot than if I had shot home video of a drunk guy stumbling down the sidewalk. As far as I could tell, it was mostly about sex and violence. I didn't understand it, and I regretted spending money on a ticket. But on the way home, my friends and I were discussing it. One of my more intelligent, more cultured friends tried to explain to me how artistic and creative the movie had been. I told him that I could throw mud on the wall and draw a monkey out of it and you could call it "artistic and creative," or you could just be upset that I had thrown mud all over an otherwise clean wall. I guess I don't understand who decides where the line is between a stupid waste of time and a priceless masterpiece.

Part of what's frustrating is that oftentimes I do see rather subtle things in a song's lyrics or a movie's cinematography that make me think I have at least a slight eye for artistic things. One example is the final, climactic, dramatic scene in one of my all-time favorite movies, A Few Good Men. Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson) enters the courtroom to take the witness stand, and the camera angle is from below, looking up at him, and through some kind of lens that makes him look almost larger than life; proud, extremely powerful, and intimidating. By the end of the scene, after Jessep has exploded on the witness stand and gotten himself into all kinds of trouble, the camera angle looks slightly down on him, making him appear weak, and almost inconsequential. In the last 20 minutes of the movie he goes from a big, bullying, tough-guy, almost super-hero to a weakened criminal who's under arrest. It's one of the things I LOVE about movies. A filmmaker can rouse emotions and responses from the audience that would not come from just the dialogue or the action. I consider it very "artistic." I can usually tell what makes one photograph better than another. I can go to an art museum and really enjoy myself, but I'll probably linger at only 5-6 different exhibits that seem to attract me. The vast majority will probably not make much sense to me, so I'll glance quickly and move on.

But surely an artistic work's "goodness" or "badness" is not simply a matter of subjective opinion, right? Is Lady Gaga a great artist only because a lot of people happen to enjoy her music and videos? I find that hard to believe. Somebody educate me.