Bad art
Does bad art have an essence?
In the age of content, with tropes and formulas endlessly and mindlessly recycled or haphazardly pieced together like some Frankenstein-monster, the common aim nowadays seems to be less to produce good work than to trap distracted eyes into binge-watching and binge-consuming. Clicks make money; they draw attention to attention as the foundation of any social order. We are who we are by virtue of what we worship and how we worship. We don’t get to choose to worship, really, only what and how we get to worship. Chesterton, in The Everlasting Man (1925), points this out:
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him forever. Henceforth being merely secular would be a servitude and an inhibition. If man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in irons.
So what does worship look like in an age of content—that pandemic figure to the ground of endemic discontent? One consequence is that we have no shortage of bad art. I should quickly clarify that I’m using the word art here, and artwork too, in a fairly general sense. You’ll find some philosophers who do the same, like Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. They say art or artwork but they mean pretty much any product of human creativity. Books, movies, poetry, visual art, music, youtube videos, AI art, and more can be included in the category.
But what is bad art exactly? Is there some way to describe, in fairly universal terms, what makes art bad?
Even with such a wide range of possible artworks, I think there’s something fairly universal that informs what makes an artwork bad beyond questions of quality and craftsmanship. Arguably an artwork can be technically flawed without ceasing to be a decent artwork. Something may even be well very well crafted, slick and well polished, and still be bad as an artwork. Why, for instance, are the paintings of Thomas Kinkade so abysmally awful, even though they are, technically speaking, quite well done? Why are Michael Bay’s movies so mind-numbingly terrible, even though, at a technical level, they are unbelievably well produced? Why are Rupi Kaur’s poems bad, even though they are rather sweet and inoffensive to most of us?
As my examples here imply, much bad art is commercially successful. It is tempting to say, therefore, that bad art must be popular art. Before you hear some sloganeering war cry against every kind of populism, let me be clear that what makes art bad is definitely not its popularity. I have seen bad artworks produced by high school students, for instance, that are (mercifully) very unpopular. In contrast, a great many things that have become astonishingly popular are also incredibly good. For example, Radiohead, in general, makes music that is both popular and good. Thinking further back, Shakespeare wrote for a popular audience and is still regarded as both popular and artistically ingenious. Of course, even Shakespeare wrote bad plays. Even Radiohead has its catalogue of unaesthetic songs.
Somewhat as an aside, arguably Shakespeare’s art has improved over time. This may sound strange at first but it should make more sense by the time I’m done—although I refuse to explain this explicitly. Chesterton has gotten better—and more relevant!—in our time than he was in his own time. Jane Austen has also gotten better, and so have Dickens and Dostoevsky.
Mere death is no obstruction to improved creative prowess!
To get to answering what makes bad art bad, though, I’d like to reference a specific case. I apologise, however, for what is about to turn into an overly opinionated take on a much-beloved film director. He is popular too but, again, it is not his popularity that makes his work generally bad. Admittedly, I enjoyed his films when I was much younger but, unlike those literary examples just mentioned, his art has gotten progressively worse as I have gotten older. By the time he is dead, his work will have degenerated so much that he will rival one of his heroes for being one of the worst movie directors to have ever lived. I may be exaggerating but I’m not convinced I am exaggerating by much.
The victim of my critique is Tim Burton.
To be clear, Burton has made some pretty decent movies: The Nightmare Before Christmas, Big Fish, Big Eyes, and Ed Wood come to mind—although his brainchild The Nightmare Before Christmas is probably better than the film he would have made had he directed it instead of Henry Selick. However, many of his movies are awful, even though by some creative standards they shouldn’t be. Remember that under his directorial command, movies have been made like the very poorly considered Dumbo remake, and the tragic mess of an adaptation of Ransom Riggs’s fascinating and beautifully written novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Burton includes so much that is imaginative and odd and intriguing. Sometimes he manages to get the mix right in some moments in movies that are otherwise not very good. But terribly often, he gets it wrong. Still, it’s difficult to know exactly why. There’s much that I really should think excellent, and yet, it has even seemed to me that when Burton gets it right—when his art is good rather than bad—he does this accidentally rather than intentionally. I can’t say this for sure but with his artistic misses so obviously outnumbering his hits, the trend indicates this.
The answer to what makes his bad films so bad is found in the fact that they tell the audience what they should think and feel about what they are seeing instead of allowing them the freedom to make up their own minds. In many of his films, I get the sense that he is so enamoured with what he is putting together that he has not really thought about the audience as a vital component of the artwork. In creative writing and screenwriting, one of the rules is to show rather than tell, and I think this gets at where Burton, for one, goes wrong. He clearly tells more than he shows. Even Christopher Nolan, who has recently developed an absurd reliance upon telling through excessive exposition still manages to produce good work because his movies still require so much of the audience.
In Burton’s films, we enter weird worlds of many supposed wonders. But everything is so overstated and pushy that it’s difficult, for me at least, to feel like I have any space to make up my own mind on the meaning of the film. I can only make a judgment on the overall standard of the work itself, and that’s no fun at all. Burton’s movies—I would take Edward Scissorhands as a pertinent example of this—are often incredibly preachy. Don’t scapegoat the weirdos, he tells us, again and again. In the end, the audience is basically commanded to side with the freakish over the normal. In the end, we’re supposed to admire him for his wackiness and creativity, because he draws so much attention to it. But in drawing so much attention to it, it ceases to be at all surprising or compelling—it ceases to be wacky and creative and instead becomes exactly what you would expect from Tim Burton. He is now the master of his own clichés. As a film auteur, he has become ensnared in his own presuppositions. As another example of this phenomenon of telling instead of showing, think of those movies or series where the sad music starts playing before the sad event has even happened. Instead of allowing the audience to naturally feel something in response to what’s happening on the screen, it tells the audience: Feel sad! In this mode, art becomes impossible to separate from manipulation.
That word I used above—that word preachy—most closely gets at what I mean. There is a fine line here between description and command, and it’s not always easy to know when it’s being crossed. Certainly, subjectivity is going to come into play in deciding if it has been crossed. But the question is: Do you, as a member of the audience, have space to make up your own mind about the meanings in and of the artwork? Can you think for yourself and feel for yourself as you engage with the artwork, instead of being told what to think and feel? I suppose that even bad art can be rescued from its own slide into irrelevance when an audience fails to notice that they’re been preached to—or yelled at. However, on closer inspection or on a second viewing, people are likely to catch on.
I should say, to qualify the above, that I realise that art ought to provide some context and some information. It needs to give the audience enough to hook their attention on to so that they can draw their own conclusions. An example of someone who risks making bad art (but actually doesn’t) because of a tendency to overwhelm the audience with contextless surprises is David Lynch. Interviewers have famously asked Lynch to explain his work and he refuses to say anything. He refuses to tell. Lynch’s work is often so bizarre and alienating that an audience may feel cut off from any meaning in the work. The same sense of alienation may be evident to most people who stand looking at a painting by an abstract expressionist or a conceptual artist from the 1970s. How can an audience participate in meaning-creation when engaging with the work is so often so difficult? That said, Lynch’s films get better when you watch them more—and that is quite telling. Good art invites us to look again, to dive deeper.
But, in Burton’s worst movies as examples of bad art in general, the trend is to through unusual things at you on the assumption that you will think it is all very cool. Still, let me use Ed Wood and Big Eyes as examples of where he doesn’t do this, at least not in such a pushy, preachy way. Both films are biopics and both deal with protagonists that have bad taste—the terrible film director Edward D. Wood and the kitsch artist Margaret Keane, respectively—both tremendously good examples of people with disgusting work. I get the feeling that Burton regards their bad taste as somewhat good or at least appealing, in a way, although I can’t be sure. But these movies get towards the good, or perhaps the better, by not preaching.
Mercifully, the focus of these better Burton movies is showing the audience a story, without including what the audience should conclude within the movies themselves. Such movies show more than they tell—although there is some telling. Big Eyes, in particular, gets very close to telling. The contrast between Keane and her exploitative husband is so stark that it even gets close to yelling. But there is enough in the film that we have room to participate in the meaning-making process. It’s still, mind you, not an exceptional film. I don’t care to revisit it. But at least it’s not, say, Burton’s nearly unwatchable Planet of the Apes.
Let me put this more strongly. Bad art has a naive view of the audience—it doesn’t trust the audience to know what it’s looking at or what it’s looking for. And so, as far as it is concerned, the audience must be included in the artwork—and excluded in reality. This is partly why I find overly preachy movies or novels or other creative works of any ideological bent intolerable. I feel as if someone is, or many someones are, trying to manipulate me. I don’t want a wokesplaining movie. While I don’t want anyone to feel oppressed (or depressed), I also don’t want to be told what to make of what I’m encountering.
I need to be (and dare I say, we all need to be) allowed the tiny shred of subjectivity that I (and we) happen to possess. It’s difficult to really enjoy AI art because it cares nothing about your subjectivity. It is for this reason that I think the creation of AI art is more significant as art than any so-called product of machine learning. The process is involving while the product, at least for now, tends to resist involvement. One related reason why Duchamp’s famous Fountain was good art was because of how it fully involved the context—the entire art world. It drew attention to the vital importance of framing and not just the art object. That said, because Duchamp’s mode of art creation is now so common and so normal, his readymades are entirely underwhelming when viewed today.
Bad art resolves all tensions and ties up all loose ends for the audience—at the expense of the audience. Bad art has no paradoxes, no ambiguities, and no questions. All difficulties are resolved so neatly that there are no loose ends. In the end, we know what the bad artwork thinks about itself. It thinks it’s great. And in the end, because it leaves no room for debate and shuts down questioning, those who agree with its conclusions will tend to like it, and those who feel robbed of their agency will feel cheated. It is difficult to enjoy a movie, for instance, when you feel like it doesn’t need you to be there to enjoy it. This, I suppose, is where the idea of self-indulgence comes in. This is perhaps also why I would rather set fire to a Thomas Kinkade painting than look at one—at least then I’d feel as if my point of view mattered in some way. Symbolically speaking, I am setting fire to it simply by criticising it. In a sense, I am setting fire to Tim Burton. (Sorry, Tim.)
This should all at least somewhat explain, I hope, why some art can be popular and bad, while other art can be popular and good. A core difference is in the way the audience responds to being told versus being shown. The difference is in whether the audience picks up on the preachiness of the movie or book or poem or not. Some people are enamoured by mere style, are convinced by style over content—and they just won’t notice what is being imposed upon them.
Another way to explain the above, which further explains why bad art is on the rise in this age of content, is with reference to Aristotle’s famous four causes. Aristotle argues that everything has four causes: material, efficient, formal, and final. Roughly speaking, the material cause refers to the stuff out of which it is made; the efficient cause refers to what causes a thing to change from one thing into another; the final cause refers to the point of a thing, and the formal cause refers to the pattern according to which it is made. The final cause, especially in its intelligibility, is particularly reliant on the formal cause, namely the pattern according to which it is made. Another way of putting this is to say: the pattern or formal cause is the intelligible structure that gives the final cause its meaning. On the issue we’re looking at here, the formal cause includes the audience. It includes the entire environment or context within which the artwork lives—or dies.
Bad art tries to announce a micro-final cause without paying attention to the formal cause. It glories in efficient causality, too, as does much of modernity. In a way, it presents us with conclusions (a final cause) that have been completely divorced from any environmental ground; that is, from any formal cause. Bad art announces the conclusion without setting the conclusion up. In summary: The essence of bad art includes the work of the audience within itself and (con)fuses the final cause with the formal cause. This is why ideology ensures bad art. Just look at propaganda or contemporary advertising. So many protests make for some of the worst art produced by the terminally brainwashed. Participation is replaced by mere replication. The conclusions are taken as foregone and unquestionable but any kind of form or pattern that would render such a thing intelligible is not even allowed into the question of its intelligibility.
According to such ideologies, we must agree unequivocally, for instance, that some particular highly contested moral question is always either morally right/correct or morally wrong/incorrect without allowing us to pay any mind to the grey areas and turbulences and complexities of life—of which any sane person will know they are many. I’m not saying that there are no clear principles or rules. But without the form, the content is not properly unintelligible. Without the set-up, the payoff makes no sense.1
After setting this article loose on the world, some comments from friends made me realise that there are two particular ambiguities in what I have said that I would do well to address. First, it would be a mistake to assume that my attempt to define bad art here necessarily implies a judgment on enjoyment. It should be possible to not like something and still perceive it as good art. In fact, I can think of many examples of bad art that are enjoyable, and much good art that is unpleasant. This is no contradiction of what I have said, even if much bad art is unpleasant and much good art is enjoyable. My assessment of bad art, as having excluded the audience, points to the importance of interpretive involvement. However, second, relating to this interpretive involvement—broadly meaning the inclusion of an audience in meaning-making—I must stress that it is important not to confuse interpretive involvement with interpretive ambiguity. Much good art has a clear message but it still trusts the audience to be able to make sense of that message without it being entirely spelt out. I am not advocating, then, for ambiguity but for participation as fundamental to good art. It may be helpful for the reader to know that much of my thinking here has been developed in a classroom over nearly fifteen years, as I have workshopped creative ideas with students. Part of my job involves teaching creative thinking. I wanted to figure out a way to evaluate concepts without resorting to identifying ideas according to taste. This, then, is one dimension, the most important dimension I believe, of a larger scheme.