What makes art?

A thought experiment about hotel art moved into art museums

From time to time I find myself in a hotel room or AirBnB that is decorated with examples of “hotel art.” It’s worth taking a little time to consider why these don’t get the respect of “museum art,” and whether that would change if we hung these in a museum. Can I imagine moving these watercolors to the MFA? Yes, but it would seem surprising – perhaps intended with irony. But it’s hard to explain in objective terms what would seem odd.

One issue is that there is nothing about them that seems particularly masterful. They are certainly better paintings than what I could have made – they have a certain presence, a certain amount of representation. We could say that they have avoided certain kinds of beginner’s errors. But they haven’t avoided what we might call journeyman’s errors. The composition is odd, and not with any particular intent – instead, it just seems that the painter doesn’t understand how to arrange the elements in the frame. At one of the key focal points of one of these pictures is an outboard motor. Is this important to the picture? Not really. In fact, the picture would be improved overall by omitting it. The colors are too lurid to be realistic, but also too realistic to be making a point – the color scheme seems to be a little like a tourist postcard, where everything is intensified but only to attract the buyer and (perhaps) bamboozle the viewer. So in a broad sense it doesn’t seem to be true, and it doesn’t seem to be competent.

All of that said, this analysis is only a matter of taste. I can come up with reasons why I do or don’t like the picture, but I may have trouble convincing someone else that my reasoning is correct.

In contrast, we have a better likelihood of reaching a shared judgment about whether someone is doing something new. When I argue that someone is doing a new kind of painting, the argument is less about its merits than about whether it is defensibly new. The counterargument consists of identifying some other/previous artist(s) who did “the same thing.” There can then be a fruitful discussion of how/whether that art is the same kind of work or not. Although in a narrow way this is still a judgment call – we may not easily agree on whether two works of art reflect the same ideas or techniques – nevertheless, it seems more objective than talking about whether something is good or not.

So we may have an intellectually coherent basis for talking about the relative novelty of art works, even if we don’t have an intellectually coherent basis for talking about the relative merits of art works.

Another theory is that art must be interesting. That would seem to make art a relative of the “attention economy” in which our attention is bought and sold by advertisers, as well as making art a form of entertainment. There is surely some grain of truth to this characterization, even if it’s not the whole story. If we consider all the forms of art that are attracting attention or forms of entertainment, we can identify multiple dimensions to classify works of art. There is a dimension of medium, that includes both performing arts and “gallery arts;” a dimension of quality from low to high; and a dimension from commercial to non-commercial. But is art simply about attracting an audience, and is it all about what kind of audience one attracts?

One cynical possibility – worth exploring – is to say, yes, that’s exactly what it’s about. Concerns about quality might be just ways of motivating and attracting an elite audience. The elite audience selects itself on the basis of this shared (but essentially arbitrary) notion of quality. Within this framing, we can understand reversals in critical assessment of artists as mere fluctuations of popularity and fashion. We may not be any better equipped to predict or manage such fluctuations, but we can stop looking for some underlying theory or truth. Instead, we would assume that there is a currently-popular framing of arbitrary nature, with some players reinforcing that framing while others attack it. As I’ve written previously, a possible theory would then be that “normal art” is similar to Kuhn’s “normal science”: there is a shared paradigm, within which people solve puzzles, but from time to time there is a crisis in that paradigm.

We may not be able to identify unambiguous features that disqualify the hotel art from hanging in the art museum, but that may not matter. It may be that the actual distinction between “greater” and “lesser” art has less to do with any given objective quality and more to do with social processes associated with the art. There is an intriguing potential link here to a famous 1979 paper by DeMillo, Lipton and Perlis about “Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs.” The observation there is that the mechanics of a mathematical proof matter less than the way in which a proof serves to build a rough consensus among mathematicians, and that mechanically proving a program might be useful but is a different kind of activity. Likewise, it may be that the specific features of a given work matter less than the social processes that serve to pass judgment on it.