Hello fine folk of the internet and good people all around! It sure has been a while. How have you been? Sorry, perhaps an unfair question. In this day and age it seems increasingly impossible to give an answer shorter than a full blown essay to that question. Let me rephrase and say that I hope that, on the whole, you all are doing OK or better.

I've been wondering what to write for this next blog entry for a long time. I've started a number of drafts but was never able to get through them. As time grew I found it increasingly difficult to come up with something to write because I felt it had to be bigger and better than ever before. I stumbled upon a sentence that remedied that; 'Strive for excellence, not perfection.' This has helped me with my art and now also my writing. The phrase reminded me that perfection is an impossible task but excellence, that resides within a mindset that's bigger than just the task at hand. This concept of multiple disciplines working together is particularly relevant when it comes to visual art. Recently I kept seeing a discussion coming back which dealt with taste. Which got me thinking.

There is no accounting for taste

Or is there? If this sentiment was completely true it would be nearly impossible for a diverse group of critics to come to a consensus about what constitutes good art and what constitutes bad art. Since this is not, at least entirely, the case there is an obvious baseline we need to take a closer look at. There is more to art than mere opinion. The art of looking at art. Now, it's extremely important to understand that this has very little to do with personal opinion, to which each and everyone one of us has a fundamental right. I'll try not to fall into another discussion where we have to explicitly explain that things do not have to mutually exclusive. Meaning, just because I don't like A doesn't mean I am all for and only into B. Now that we've gotten that out of the way we can start.

Looking at art is a (surprisingly?) complicated task. It takes a lot of knowledge in order to be able to contribute to the discussion in a productive way. It's all about the frame (get it) of reference. When looking at art we have an incredibly long list of stuff to look at and understand, like (but not limited to):

Fundamentals of technique

Composition

Storytelling

Or, to get a bit more specific:

Brush economy

Color choice

Color temperature and saturation versus the storytelling

Perspective

Anatomy

Texture

Emotion (nice and vague, just the way I like it)

Oh, good glob, so much more...

This is all well and good but the problem is that so, so much of art is subjective. This leads to a paradox. If so much is subjective, how can we keep opinions out? Part of this is trust. Trust that a professional opinion is formed through years of exposure to artwork and this helps shape an informed opinion, not an off the cuff one. In essence some pieces speak to someone and not to others. This personal touch makes separating personal opinion from 'fact' (as far as facts go in judging art) incredibly difficult when looking at it from an outside point of view. Think: 'Why does the critics opinion matter and mine does not?'. See above on trust.

When you get started yourself you can judge a piece based on it's technical execution but even that would be pointless since some artists break the rules on purpose to get a better effect. What an absolute minefield.