To Speak Meaningfully About Art
To be able to speak meaningfully about any art you must be able to order that art into at least four categories, these are
- Art that is good and to your taste
- Art that is bad and to your taste
- Art that is good and not to your taste
- Art that is bad and not to your taste.
If you cannot do this you will never have anything worthwhile to say about a work of art, at the most you will be able to tell people what you like, and that can be helpful to them because they will know what music to buy you, or if they have similar tastes to yours they will be able to buy books for themselves based on your recommendation. But in conversation you will be unable to speak with others who do not share your tastes, you will be unable to defend these tastes beyond asserting that you like what you like, and you will be unable to understand the weakness in what you like because what you like is good, and what you do not like is not good, and that is the totality of your understanding of art.
For the rest of this essay I will note how these rules, and the others we list pertain to literature, the reasons for this focus shall hopefully be made clear over the course of my writings.
If you wish to know if you can make this separation then ask yourself this — have you ever read a book or poem and thought- this is very good and I hate it. Most people have not ever had this experience, many have had the experience of thinking something was bad and to their taste, hence the whole “so bad it’s good” school of aesthetics, but hardly anyone likes to think that something they do not like could be good. Probably there is a psychological theory that will sound plausible to people to explain this oddity, I don’t care to explain it only to note it.
At any rate if you can say this is good and it is not to my taste it is almost certain you can make the other statements as well.
It is an old anonymous saying that about matters of taste there can be no discussion, which is true, but about them there can be referencing — it is useful to be able to refer to your taste when declaring you do not personally like a work you describe as good, or to explain why you love something you think is awful. Because people know their tastes well they can often use this to connect similar works, perhaps similar works of disparate quality that should be ranked.
Talking meaningfully about an art is for those who enjoy the art, or want to review it, or really anyone who enjoys clever conversation about important matters, and you might think that this is what is needed to be a critic of that art, but no, in order to have critical understanding of an art other requirements must be added to our initial four.
A critic must also be able to differentiate between works that are
- important in relation to their creator
- Unimportant in relation to their creator
- Important in relation to other works
- Unimportant in relation to other works
Thus a critic can end up dealing with works that are good, to their taste, important in relation to their creator and important in relation to other works, and all sorts of other combinations of these qualities.
As for what important and unimportant means in relation to things — a poem that helps you understand a book is important in relation to that book, a poem that helps you understand the oeuvre of the creator of the poem is important in relation to its creator. It is rare that something can be unimportant in relation to their creator, as an example we might take the Aunt Jane’s Nieces series from L. Frank Baum, because they do not inform our view of what is considered the primary trunk of his works.
If someone does not have this perspective on the art and they write about it, trying to rank the good and the bad in that art, they are reviewers.
A reviewer often has constraints on their writing that critics do not, reviewers tend to write many short articles reviewing whatever is current in their chosen art and this requirement for quantity and brevity is enough that one cannot expect reviewers to provide a great historical view.
Because of the many reviews they must write the reviewer often indulges in a practice that the wise critic should avoid, this is the practice of the negative review.To write with great vigor and hatred of what is not to their taste and is also bad. Many reviewers are at their best when writing on something that is bad and not to their taste; the enjoyment their writing in this manner enjoins is often the only reason to read them but I would recommend against it.
A critic on the other hand is most useful when they can tell us why something is good, as it is vastly more important to know why something is good so that we can emulate it; most things that are bad are so essentially bad that the cause of their badness is self-evident.
Finally there are the needs of an artist (that is to say someone in the process of making art) — an artist should be able to consider the primary four facets but also the following
- Things that I can use in making what I want
- Things that I must go against in making what I want
These two facets are in fact the most important for an artist. There are artists who cannot talk meaningfully about art because they cannot differentiate between what they like and what is good, but they have a good instinct for what they can use in making what they want and things that they must go against.
It would perhaps be nice if an artist also was able to consider all the facets that a critic needs to but this is also not necessary. It might be argued that an artist with too much grasp of the critic’s requirements would be apt to produce less vital art, as the considerations of the critic are to be applied after the process of creation not before.
It is of course true that an artist does not need to have these two facets available to talk meaningfully about art that is not their own, but as a general rule one wishes to hear artists talk about their own art, and others art in relation to their own, and in the case of speaking meaningfully about their own art the artist should keep these factors in mind.
If an artist discusses their own work too directly there is a danger that they will lessen the impact of that work for others or cause a prejudice in those who would otherwise come to the work unprejudiced, thus the artist must also maintain some circumspection if discussing their work.
One obvious way to maintain circumspection when discussing one’s work is to discuss work that others have done, that has been an influence, or to write essays that suggest how one should produce art in the artist’s chosen medium and genre. A fantasy writer writing about how to write fantasy is of course going to tell you, however obliquely, how they do it, how they think it should be done, and what they consider the purpose of it all to be.
There is another subject, closely related to this, that is as a general rule for the artist and the critic to speak of and that is the business of art.
The requirements for speaking meaningfully about the business of art do not overlap with the rules for speaking meaningfully about art itself, although the business of art may be useful for determining why any particular artistic expression is available for human consumption.
To Speak Meaningfully about the Business of Art
This discusses the requirements for artists and critics when speaking and thinking about the business of art, as a general rule the lay public is unconcerned with this subject as discussion about the business of art leaves out the most important consideration that everyone not in the business is interested in knowing — whether or not the art produced is any good or not.
An artist may in fact never have occasion to speak meaningfully about their business, although as a matter of politeness when meeting other artists it might be useful to be able to do so, but even if they do not need to speak they should probably be able to think about it.
The things that an artist needs to think about their art in a business sense is
- How will they produce their art?
- How will they distribute their art?
- How will they monetize their art?
In this case the word monetize is used for the more general problem of deriving a benefit from the creation of art aside from the creation itself, generally a benefit that allows one to live wholly or partially off the creative process.
As you can see these three parts are related to each other and they can be considered as sequential in that as a general condition you must first produce the art to be able to distribute it and after distributing it you will be able to monetize or derive a benefit from its distribution.
When asking how will they produce their art, the question is not about what methods they will use because it can be assumed that generally the methods artists in a particular medium use to produce their art will be roughly the same, although of course given the desire for uniqueness and the continual narrowing of artistic niches it may be that the artist’s methods are replicated no where else because the medium itself is not. All that said, the question of how they produce their art is a question as to what means will allow them to produce art.
Often in the history of this world the means to produce art has been provided by the possession of doting parents and their money, freeing the artist to focus only on their art. It can also be supposed that the means to produce will often be similar among artists in a particular medium. For example, many poets in order to produce poetry decide on a scholastic career in English literature, this allows them time to read the works they will need to consume in order to become better writers and pay them for the time to do this, at the same time they will be rewarded for writing in the career itself — thus providing the solution to point number 3.
There is in any establishment career in the arts often a close connection between all three points — the means you will have to produce your art will also generally be the way you will be rewarded for its production, and there will tend to be an establishment method for distribution of that art. But if you do not fit the establishment mode for producing the art, it can be that you will find yourself shut out (or partially shut out) of the establishment mode of distributing the art, and you will probably not be so situated that you can derive value for your artistic production in the ways of a member of the establishment.
Let us suppose a poet who was not part of the establishment and did not wish to be for whatever reasons one might have for not being part of an establishment, this poet does not take up a career in literature so as to be paid for pursuing their poetry, they have as an initial problem — how to be able to produce their art? If they do not have wealthy and indulgent parents, which is a major neglection on their part, they must decide how they will produce their art. Luckily poetry is the cheapest of arts, and they can perhaps just practice it after a day of work. It can be that they end up producing their work cheaply at night, putting out personal chapbooks and going to poetry readings for distribution, and deriving not much benefit from it other than the social benefits of being around like minded people. This cheap method of artistic production will of course not be available to someone who wishes to create something impressive in the field of sculpture.
All of the foregoing of course expects the artist to be thinking on these three problems during the present day; Dickens in his day had different ways to proceed in an establishment career than a novelist of today.
Of course there will be situations in which one of the three parts will become more pertinent than any other, for example in a time of censorship it might be much more important to question how one will distribute the art than either of the other two questions.
In times of poverty it may be more important to think about monetizing the art, and in that thinking about creating something that the artist feels will be most monetizable.
A critic will generally focus on how an artist solved these problems, and how the decisions taken reflected back on their work. In the foregoing mention of Dickens an obvious reflection of distribution and monetization was that the serial format Dickens was forced to write in led to many cliffhangers to keep interest between chapters and verbosity to increase word count and thus profitability.
Scott Fitzgerald monetized his short story writing to finance his longer fiction; in the times of noble patronage artists of course glorified their benefactors in order to produce things beside what was ordered. All these may be of interest to the critic in considering a work, and it may be of exemplary value to an artist considering how they should proceed to answer the three questions in the present.
To Speak Meaningfully about this Essay
Any communication must limit itself in some way, these limits are generally established by goals and presumptions that are not completely explained but only taken as a given, because to discuss those goals and presumptions would be to open up the possibility of discussing the goals and presumptions underlying them, and so forth ad infinitum like the discussions of the origin of God or Russian dolls of meaning.
Communication limits itself because clarity is only a property of things that have a limit, although sadly, so is incompleteness.
It should be obvious that this essay considers the word critic in a relatively old fashioned way and does not take any considerations of poststructuralism or related projects. Obviously this indicates we have some arguments with poststructuralism, which we do, but the arguments would require so much focus that they would inevitably dilute what we have written here; small observations made during major undertakings are often ignored in favor of the campaign as a whole.
As this essay ignores poststructuralism it is reasonable that poststructuralists will not have much to say about it that would be meaningful, other than to say “you ignored us”.
As far as meaningful conversation as a whole the following points are generally pertinent in any undertaking such as this one
- What suppositions are this essay built upon.
- What has the essay ignored related to its subject matter (we have already noted our ignoring poststructuralism, rendering the observation of its snub of less pertinence.
- What viewpoints on the subject matter is the essay most related to.
- What parts of the viewpoints espoused in the essay are the most well developed.
- What parts of the viewpoints espoused in the essay are the least well developed.
Given these points we conclude by reiterating briefly the points espoused in the essay — ¨
- There are 4 considerations that a layperson wishing to speak meaningfully about any form of art should make.
- There are 4 extra considerations that a critic wishing to speak meaningfully about art should be able to make — if they cannot consider all of these things then they are most probably not a real critic.
- There are two extra considerations an artist should be able to make aside from the original 4, although it would also be nice if an artist could make all the considerations a critic needs to make it is not necessary.
- There are 3 considerations that an artist should be able to make about the business of art.
- There are 5 considerations to be made about this kind of essay if one wishes to speak meaningfully about it.
This Essay was written mainly by Illuminati Ganga Agent 13, with some contributions from Agent 6.
There is a follow up essay to this one called Speaking without Meaning about Art https://medium.com/luminasticity/speaking-without-meaning-about-art-a40f585efabc
This and other essays of criticism can be found on Luminasticity’s criticism Page https://medium.com/luminasticity/criticism/home
