Some Good Art

I’ve often wondered how you can tell the difference between good art and bad, and recently, I’ve stumbled onto something helpful. Good art, excepting technical art, is not obvious.

There is a piece of street art in Berlin that I am quite fond of. My infatuation germinated out of the fact that it was commissioned by the city council and not just thrown up by some lame, cool, loser. This piece was completed by someone with significant technical skill, unlike the paste ups and stencils I’d seen most places. Perhaps this isn’t in keeping with street art’s grungy counter culture vibe, but frankly, I don’t care.

The piece depicted two hands wearing gold wrist watches, the straps of which connected them together, like handcuffs. Obviously this is some comment on how consumerism keeps us chained.

While this artwork is nice, and I like the atmosphere and colour scheme Berlin has as a result of the proliferation of such pieces, it’s nothing groundbreaking. What upsets me about this kind of art is that it is so lacking in rigor that it contributes to the problem. This piece doesn’t say anything deep about consumerism. It doesn’t provide an alternative, and it doesn’t appreciate the complexities.

A great many people have written about the commodification of dissent, and given the intimate connection between street art, dissent, and being ‘cool’, I can’t help but see this as another example.  Such pieces will inevitably go into creating a ‘counter-culture’ that buys different things rather than thinks different things (kind of like people who listen to triple J and think it makes them ‘alternative’).

I’d always felt that the Berlin piece wasn’t good art, merely good cool, but I could never express why. Then recently I was thinking about a piece by Valie Export which shows the artist’s upper leg where she has tattooed the top portion of a stocking and a garter clip. This image really gets me because it says many things without obviously saying anything. It’s about feminism and the objectification of women, but also about how things move from mundane to erotic, and bio politics, among others. It really does capture reality in an image.

The Export piece is deep but unclear, which is the opposite of the Berlin piece. Sasha Grishin, the founder of the ANU art school, described this as the difference between good art and ‘one liners’.