How Art Can Be Good

December 2006

I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference.
Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any
better than anyone else's. There is no such thing as good taste.

Like a lot of things I grew up believing, this turns out to be
false, and I'm going to try to explain why.

One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is that
it also means there's no such thing as good art. If there were
good art, then people who liked it would have better taste than
people who didn't. So if you discard taste, you also have to discard
the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it.

It was pulling on that thread that unravelled my childhood faith
in relativism. When you're trying to make things, taste becomes a
practical matter. You have to decide what to do next. Would it
make the painting better if I changed that part? If there's no
such thing as better, it doesn't matter what you do. In fact, it
doesn't matter if you paint at all. You could just go out and buy
a ready-made blank canvas. If there's no such thing as good, that
would be just as great an achievement as the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel. Less laborious, certainly, but if you can achieve the same
level of performance with less effort, surely that's more impressive,
not less.

Yet that doesn't seem quite right, does it?

Audience

I think the key to this puzzle is to remember that art has an
audience. Art has a purpose, which is to interest its audience.
Good art (like good anything) is art that achieves its purpose
particularly well. The meaning of "interest" can vary. Some works
of art are meant to shock, and others to please; some are meant to
jump out at you, and others to sit quietly in the background. But
all art has to work on an audience, and—here's the critical
point—members of the audience share things in common.

For example, nearly all humans find human faces engaging. It seems
to be wired into us. Babies can recognize faces practically from
birth. In fact, faces seem to have co-evolved with our interest
in them; the face is the body's billboard. So all other things
being equal, a painting with faces in it will interest people more
than one without.
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