Does it move me?
Depending on art form. Graphic art should be evaluated on the balance between lines and color.
If it moves you emotionally,it has been evaluated in the highest degree.
By the viewer, if it has no meaning for me, it has none for me. I cannot adopt the value of others, I may understand, or sympathize.
A piece of work can be very valuable to me, but its for me. I experience art on a very personal level. Everyone should find their own value, their own meaning, this, I think widens and depends the artwork itself.
There are no rules to this either.
One way is to see if the work is succsessful with that artist's intent.
But mainly, if you like it-good, if not-move on.
Throw it in the river. If it floats it's a witch, and if it drowns it was innocent.
If we knew finally and forever the answer to this question, art would be over.
A good piece of art should have a wow factor, something that makes you stop and look at it. It should have a good composition, that leads your eye through the artwork. It should have contrasting value, and a change in texture that makes you want to touch it.
If it contributes to a person's wellbeing, if it takes us to another dimension, if it challenges the way we think and see...if it teaches us something.
I constantly tell my students that just because you don't like a piece of art, it doesn't mean it's bad art. There are plenty of pieces out there that aren't my cup of tea but I can still appreciate the technique and idea in the artwork. I think sometimes viewers need to look at art in a different light than just "would I put this above my couch?".
By feel, for the recipient.
By achievement, for the artist.
Ideas and Technical proficiency
Does it move you? How strongly does it move you? Does its execution speak to you? Do you get it? If you owned it, where would you place it? Would it serve a function in your life? I think you also evaluate the artist when you evaluate their work. What has their life experience been?
Often times I'd see people judging something as a work of art and not a work of art. Often times I judge some people in my life as 'friend' and 'just an acquaintance'. Again- doesn't mean that they're not somebody else's friend, though.
But it's no use getting a headache over things like this, really. What you see is beautiful, for you, is a work of art. Your own Dorian Gray...
I'm unable to answer this as an art critic would and should.
For me :
Do I like it?
Why do I like it?
Do I feel I can't live without it?
Is it well painted?
Does it matter whether it's techinically well painted?
Will it keep me interested for the rest of my life?
Will I feel proud to have it hanging on my wall?
Would it have re-sale value for either myself or my descendants?
Does re-sale value matter to me?
SUMMUM BONUM
There are very few of humankind, wrote the philosopher Matthew Arnold, for whom the summum bonum of life is an eternal series of intellectual acts, for whom this life is seen essentially as subject-matter for thought, for whom thought is a series of elements in a vast movement of speculation. The few who do live this sort of life stand apart, and have an existence separate, a distinctiveness, from that of the mass of mankind. The region which such individuals inhabit is a laboratory wherein are fashioned new intellectual ideas, syntheses of old ideas and serendipitous connections between ideas which would not otherwise have occurred had not such an intense amount of intellection taken place. There are few individuals who live the "purely intellectual life, whose life, whose ideal, whose demand, is thought, and thought only."1 As I approach the age of sixty I found this emphasis on thought, which Arnold apotheosized and which the Central Figures of the Baha'i Faith place in an important position,2 very much to my liking. It fitted in with the significant diminution that had taken place in my late fifties of the social dimension of my life's journey and my strong disinclination to spend great quantities of time, as so many in my society and at my age did, in gardening, watching TV, playing some sport or game or being engaged in one or several of a host of manual or artistic activities. -Ron Price with thanks to 1David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold and Pater, University of Texas Press, 1969; and 2'Abdu'l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, p.1, among a host of other locations in the Baha'i Writings.
I could not, of course,
pursue this path
to the utter exclusion
of everything else.
About eight hours a day
of writing, reading
and focused thinking
was all I could manage
given the limitations
of my concentration,
the realities of my life
which dictated social intercourse,
some relaxation and exercise
and the general necessities of existence.
Ron Price
11 March 2002
____________________
THE LAST SHAPING
Emily Dickinson's formulations in her many death poems tend to be generally grim, even nihilistic due to the fact that she has no concrete evidence of the precise effect of death upon perception. Her death poems enjoy an immense variety, inventiveness and dramatic force but they are all, in the end, as she admitted, just 'speculations.' Inspite of their grim quality, her death poems generate a confidence and hope of further insight. They represent her attempts to cope with the reality of death in her daily life and place death within the larger perspective of her efforts to live a meaningful life.
Since death has been especially interesting to me for some forty years now, having had to live with a bi-polar disorder and its accompanying death wish, since the Baha'i writings have a great deal to say about death that is instructive, positive and very encouraging, I take many of Dickinson's death poems as starting points and turn the grim side to something much brighter and far less nihilistic. -Ron Price with thanks to Greg Johnson, Emily Dickinson: Perception and the Poet's Quest, University of Alabama Press, 1985, pp.166-167.
Who would want to see and see
in endless circuit links?
Ceaseless drifting here and there
would give the eyes sharp kinks.
From one perception to the next
down an endless track
would be exhausting to the mind
and would clearly break one's back.
Knowing that an end's in store
heightens all we've got,
sharpens, enhances, tinctures,
mountain, river, dot.
Belief goes on to regulate
all that's in our sails,
regulates this aweful leisure
as death weighs us in its scales.
There'll be a finished feeling
just as sharp as knife
when death's bold exhibition
shapes at last my life.
Ron Price
19 February 2002
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