Nobody Ever Said Art Had To Be Good

Ever since I got my hands on the internet, time and time again I would find a video criticizing "Modern Art" as lazy and unauthentic. From pieces like Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan where it's just a banana taped to a wall with shiny duct tape, or paint being mopped onto a canvas just to be hung up in a prestigious gallery, it all seems rather silly. While it may be called “Modern Art”, the genre began to rise around the late 1800’s and early 1900’s as a way to challenge the artistic norms of the time. Art genres like Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and Avant Garde were leaders in defying societies perceptions of art. Slowly Modern Art began evolving to become more and more abstract, such as Barnett Newman’s series of paintings called “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue.” These paintings were simply vertical lines of red, yellow, and blue paints that varied in thickness across the canvas. While the idea of the painting sounds simple, many people did show that they were in fact afraid of red, yellow, and blue through numerous knife attacks on the paintings. There’s a huge misconception that in order to make art at all, someone needs years and years of training in some form of top rated art school where they study every single immaculate rule and detail that comes to art. In reality, you don’t need advanced theories, expensive equipment, or even skill, the only thing you ever need to make art is to have something you feel the need to convey. Art by definition is a human made piece of work to express a thought or feeling. Something as simple as a small child's scribbly depiction of their favourite Sesame Street character or an improvised song that someone sings to their dog can be considered art.

Image Credit: Mutual Art

An art piece’s whole purpose is to make you feel something, whether this be through its impactful message, the raw emotion displayed, or the overall appearance of the work. Since we are all human beings with full ranges of emotion, those feelings that erupt within us may be unfavourable ones such as hate or utter disgust towards a piece. These negative emotions are completely valid to feel towards any form of art, and if anything should be felt in order for one to develop their own taste and preferences as a person. In essence, claiming that something like modern art is not art because it makes you feel upset that it is displayed in an art gallery where other pieces of art which make you feel happy “should be,” means that modern art did its job as art. Art cannot appease everybody because it’s not supposed to. When you consider something as talentless or confusing it may mean that you need to look a little deeper into what the work is trying to communicate. Analyzing why certain colours may have been used or what certain symbols mean can be great clues for deciphering what something means to you. Taking a step back to take a piece in is also a good tool for discovering your personal taste because you are thinking about what you like and dislike about art.

People don’t just create art because they really like spending a fortune on alcohol markers, they create art because it’s a way to tell a story. Historically, art is how a plethora of societies have been able to preserve stories from their cultures. Oftentimes when dictatorships rise to power, one of the first things dictators will do is censor art from communities that will tell the stories of their oppression. This is because it stops people from spreading awareness of the cruelty they face and it denies them their humanity. As human beings we inherently want to express ourselves to other humans, so naturally we turn to art as a way to communicate what we experience and feel to the masses. Art is intrinsically a human thing and should stay that way. Whether you’re watching an illegal recording of a broadway musical on YouTube or judging the most recent Met Gala outfits, you are interacting (albeit parasocially) with someone’s personal feeling that they put into their art. To deem a piece of art that a person or group of people put thought into creating as “not art” is in a way deeming the creator(s) as “not human,” because this judgement dismisses the human experience and care that went into the piece.

In the scope of deeming something as “not art”, it should also be acknowledged that if we allow ourselves to consider one piece of art as “not real art” then nothing can be seen as art. In order to have certain pieces be disqualified from the art label, there needs to be some sort of list of requirements to figure out which pieces can be considered art. But due to the subjectiveness of how each individual person will perceive art, there can never be a list of requirements without some form of bias behind it. Art can never be simplified to an axiom because of its ever evolving possibilities and perspectives it offers. Art is such a broad label that covers an infinite amount of mediums, and some mediums vary across cultures too. Someone from one cultural background could deem a piece of art with huge cultural significance to a completely different culture as “not real art,” because it’s not something familiar to them. If we let that art denier’s claim stand, then with that logic every piece of art could be seen as “not real art” because art is not something that can be universally agreed upon. The act of claiming a piece isn’t “real art” closes our mind to the possibilities of what art can be, thereby shutting down our opportunities to discover art that can change our world views for the better. Of course it should be acknowledged, there’s a difference between art being professionally judged to a certain standard and art being judged to the question of whether it’s art at all. Even in professionally judged competitions the judges can agree each contestant’s piece is art no matter if it is considered good or bad.

At the end of the day, why should it matter if some random Joe Schmoe doesn’t believe that something like Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings is art because they see it as lazy? It matters because when we view certain ways for people to communicate as not valid it shuts down our possibilities to listen and grow from each other as people. We should leave art as an open expression of what we endure as a part of the human race. Art doesn’t need to be constantly under scrutiny for “not being good.” Sometimes you can just paint a cartoony flower with acrylic paints from the dollar store and that’s okay because that might just be what you feel at the moment. Not everyone has to understand the complexities of a piece of art for it to exist as “art.” We are all artists, no matter if you can paint so realistically your paintings are confused for photographs, you only sing off-tune in the shower, or if you make short films on your ancient looking phone. No amount of made up criteria or comparison to artists within your genre can change the fact that people are inherently artists. So with that message: go out and make some art! Pick up knitting, abstract sculpting, video game coding, poetry, or your very own mixed media creation method that feels right for you! Go make the art that only you can make.

Works Cited

DeGuzman, Kyle. “What Is Modern Art — Definition, History and Examples.” StudioBinder, 20 Mar. 2025, www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-modern-art-definition/#:~:text=Modern%20art%20is%20an%20art,%2C%20Fauvism%2C%20Dadaism%20and%20Surrealism. 

Piper, Rhiannon. “The Vandalism of Barnett Newman’s Paintings.” Rhiannon Piper, 23 Aug. 2024, www.rhiannonpiper.com/articles/the-vandalism-of-barnett-newmans-paintings-an-analysis-of-destruction-and-restoration.