Recently I was a guest on a Dutch podcast: “The Good the Bad and the Interesting.” I was there to defend my statement about the role of mediocrity in today’s society (something I will write another blog post about later). At the beginning of the podcast, we touched quickly on the question when I believed something — like design, art, business, etcetera, to be good (as in: well made). And the answer that I gave is something that many people have asked me to elaborate on later after listing to the podcast.
What I answered was this:
Something is good when it satisfies the ethical, cultural, and aesthetical norms of the beholder.
Let me explain this statement in reverse order.
The Beholder
I believe something not to be a priori good. That means that you need an observer to determine the quality. If, with the snap of a finger, all humans disappear from the earth the distance from the earth to the sun stays 149.6 million kilometers. It is a priori true. If we take a design or artwork that people, in general, find good, like the paintings in The Sistine Chapel and we snap our fingers again, the paintings are neither good nor bad. They just are.
There is a famous Buddhist story called Hui-Neng’s Flag; it is about the same principle.
Two monks were watching a flag flapping in the wind. One said to the other, “The flag is moving.”The other replied, “The wind is moving.” Huineng overheard this. He said, “Not the flag, not the wind; [the] mind is moving.”
— source
Aesthetical Norms
Aesthetics are about beauty.
Anything can be beautiful, not only art or design.
Three important things to note:
1. Something that is good does not have to be beautiful. When artists placed a fake whale on the shore of the Seine, it was not traditionally beautiful. It was good art, though.
2. Aesthetics is subjective. If the whole world thinks something is ugly except for you, that is fine.
3. An artist being good at his or her craft, like a singer, does not equate to the work being of aesthetic value. Many people find Bob Dylan’s work to be of high aesthetic value, but he sings out of tune. This is also the reason why an art school, like a conservatory, does not create artists. It creates people who are good at the craft of playing an instrument.
Back to beauty. Aesthetics are like muscles; they can be trained. The more you train your aesthetic muscles, the more you are able to enjoy them. A good rule of thumb to train your aesthetic muscle is this. If somebody talks about something, like music, games, literature, etc., in a positive way, and you feel like the man in the cartoon above, Ask yourself one question: “Why don’t I see the beauty in this?” It is as simple as that. By keeping an open mind and analyzing what you don’t understand, you will train your aesthetic muscle.
Cultural Norms
In the West, before enlightenment, if your art pleased God then your art was good. Fair enough, even if a bit exaggerated, but the point is that cultural norms change.
As written in the Oxford Dictionary, culture is “The ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people or society.” This means that time, location and, again, subjectivity play a role in the definition of something being good.
An excellent example of this is the Peking Opera. Singing towards a particular tone rather than being exactly on the tone is something that westerners would call off-key; in Chinese culture, however, the closer you can sing towards the note, the better the achievement.
Ethical Norms
Ethics are closely related to cultural norms. An excellent definition of the differences can be found in this article on Boundless.com:
Culture reflects the moral values and ethical norms governing how people should behave and interact with others.
— source
This means that something can be the same in a particular culture but be different ethically in various groups. An example of this is greeting in Europe. In Europe, it is a cultural phenomenon for a man and woman or two women to give each other two or three kisses in greeting. But ethically it is in southern countries in Europe acceptable to kiss somebody you just met whereas in Scandinavia it is only done when you know someone really well.
There is one caveat, though. In 1974, Marina Abramović did a performance where she laid out 72 tools on a table and asked the public to use the tools on her. Besides feathers and boas, there were bullets, a gun, and a knife. After her performance, blood was dripping from her head. This performance did not satisfy cultural norms in a positive way but it resonated in a negative way. It still resulted in a work of art, which in general is seen as something that is “good.”
Conclusion
So, to conclude, I believe that something is “good” if you, as the observer, decides it is good. You, as a human, must find something “good.” If you are gone, it does not have to be good anymore. That which triggers you to find it good or not is based on the culture you live in, how well your aesthetic muscle is trained, and if the work resonates with your norms in a positive or negative way.
This can all be captured in the following diagram:
