What Makes Good Art?

And a story about phallic symbols

My wife and I did a theater study abroad program in London in 1999. We were part of a large group of students from BYU who wanted to have a 7-week, intense series of classes and experiences to learn more about theater.

The program included nine or so plays that we would see as a group. We students could also do what we felt drawn to as far as seeing other plays.

Annemarie and I saw fifty plays.

But the first play we saw as a group is where we will kick this piece off.

Within hours of landing in London, one of the directors of the program let everyone know that he’d heard about a play outside of London, I think near Hammersmith, that could serve well as a starting point. It was Lysistrata. From its Wikipedia entry:

Lysistrata is an ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes, originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BCE. It is a comic account of a woman's extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War between Greek city states by denying all the men of the land any sex, which was the only thing they truly and deeply desired. Lysistrata persuades the women of the warring cities to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace—a strategy, however, that inflames the battle between the sexes.

A fun concept for a play - and a really old play too!

Well, it turns out that the people putting the play on had decided that it was not only old, but kind of dull. Why did they still do the play? Maybe because they wanted to shock.

Shock, they did.

I don’t remember why, but there was a long portion of the play during which every female character wore a 3-foot long phallus on her front.

It was distracting, to say the least.

I sat through the first half of this play in confusion. I knew I wasn’t particularly well-educated by this time. I’d had one year of real high school and had completed my first year of undergraduate studies. I’d grown up quite sheltered in a cult as well, so I worried that I was missing something about this play and that its symbolism was going over my head.

I’d seen plays. I’d acted in plays and in other productions as well - on stage and film. I felt like I was pretty conversant with the medium.

When intermission came, I turned to the director of the program, Bob Nelson, and asked, “Bob, uh… is this… um… good?”

He burst out laughing and shook his head. In his unique, warm voice - still laughing, he replied, “No, Jared. It’s definitely not. It’s terrible.”

Comforted, I watched the rest of the production and on our way home, via the Tube, we students and teachers had a lively discussion of the awful production we’d seen.

Everyone agreed it was bad. Even not-particularly-educated me.

Why did we know it was bad art? How could we tell? How can we do the same with other art?

Before I try to answer this question, I’ll point out that we saw a production of “The Winters Tale” by Shakespeare, put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company, not long after. This production was so beautiful, so powerfully interpreted and acted, that I wept through the last act. I’ll never forget it.

So, back to the question of what makes good art.

This is a big question that I would say no two artists could ever fully agree on. But I think there are some things that will contribute to an effort being ‘good art’ - without which you’re not going to have good art.

First off, it needs to be intentional. Jackson Pollock paintings often look like random splatters of paint - and in some cases, that’s exactly what they are. But the randomness was intentional. Pollock set up parameters and was willing to let the paint stay where it fell within the parameters and mechanisms he used.

I don’t like Jackson Pollock’s work because it’s not at all appealing to me. But I recognize why it wound up being so highly valued - even if I don’t value it much.

Secondly, good art needs to provide some kind of access to the viewer. What I mean by this is that the art can’t simply be something fully random, or fully accidental, or completely opaque in its appearance or intention or medium or experience that it provides. It can confuse, but for that confusion to be an artful confusion, it needs to have given some kind of access to the viewer, something they can understand or resonate with.

Thirdly, and very connected to the second one, good art needs to have some level of truth to it. In whatever medium the art is presented in, it should present something resonant, something that is centered in the reality of the human experience, something that can be felt and recognized.

Fourth, I believe that good art needs to leave a mark. That mark could be some lingering questions that won’t dissolve even with distance from the piece. The mark left could also be a feeling or a sensation or some kind of sensory input that becomes in some way indelible. For example, I still remember how I felt when I first saw JMW Turner’s painting, “The Fighting Temeraire.” Here:

I saw this painting first in a history or history of art textbook. The light, the angles, the composition all combined to make a deep impression on me. So when Annemarie and I were in London and we walked through the National Gallery - I saw the painting again and instantly was transported to the first time I’d seen in. I stood staring at the huge original in the National Gallery for long minutes.

Fifth, I think good art should have something to say - and it should say whatever it’s saying in a way that feels both new and familiar. Or at least familiar enough for me to comprehend it or at least start getting a feel for what it means. Turner had something to say about the play of light in the heavens and on the ocean - along with other things. We should step away from good art thinking about it and wondering about artist intent, how it makes us feel, whether it lifts or does something else to us.

I probably missed something, but I think these elements go into making a piece of art good and worthy of our time. If a piece is missing any of these, like that Lysistrata play was missing access and something to say. It just felt like some people had carelessly pooled their thoughts on the play and decided to stage it without much in the way of rhyme or reason. With the phalluses… phalli?.. whatever, we should have been taken aback at first (we were) but then we should have at least been able to understand why the actors were wearing them. We did not.

If you read this far, you probably have something in you that’s burning to get out - to be created. Be it through writing, painting, singing, playing.. whatever. You need to go do that thing. By doing that thing, you’re living true to yourself and true to what’s in your core. Stop fiddling around and create.

And don’t worry about making it good on the first try. Go back and make it good after your first attempt is complete. Make it good art.