In with the bad

A post I did a couple of weeks ago, about my view that creativity is a relationship (and thus inherently subjective, in the sense that each person will contribute something different), prompted an interesting discussion with a friend that centered around the question of whether there is actually such a thing as bad writing, art, or music.

My initial response was that the answer had to be no.  The most we can say with confidence is that there is "writing, art, and music I don't happen to like."  What comprises that list will differ for everyone, so there's no such thing as "objectively bad" creativity.  I had an experience a few days ago of exactly this; I had picked up a copy of French composer Olivier Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise, considered by many to be his finest work, and I found it to be so discordant it was virtually unlistenable.  I would never jump from there to saying "it's bad"; it's merely not something I enjoyed.

But my friend's question went further than that.  Setting aside simple matters of taste and preference, are there works that just about everyone can agree are bad?  What about considerations of execution -- skill and craftsmanship -- such that we can look at a work and say, "Okay, that's poorly done?"  The problem is, even that may not be so easy.  Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may recall that a few months ago, I did a piece on a fellow named Paul Jordan who decided to poke some fun at the art establishment by producing paintings that were made to be deliberately bad, and found that they were taken seriously -- and received glowing reviews from major art critics, and multiple offers for being featured in solo art exhibits.

It's wryly amusing that there's actually a Museum of Bad Art, in Dedham, Massachusetts, devoted to artistic works that are (in their words) "too bad to be ignored."  I have to wonder what the artists whose works are featured there think of their inclusion.  Maybe it's like a scientist winning the IgNobel Prize; perhaps, as writer Brendan Behan famously said, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and it's better to be known for doing something dramatically awful than it is simply to be ignored.

What's curious, though, is that the people running the Museum of Bad Art themselves seem to have a hard time explaining the criteria they use to determine whether a piece qualifies.  Marie Jackson, the Museum's Director of Aesthetic Interpretation, said, "Nine out of ten pieces don't get in because they're not bad enough.  What an artist considers to be bad doesn't always meet our low standards."  Kitsch doesn't qualify, nor does anything that is judged to have been a deliberate attempt to produce bad art.  (One has to wonder what they'd have done with Paul Jordan's paintings.)  MOBA curator Michael Frank explained, "We collect things made in earnest, where people attempted to make art and something went wrong, either in the execution or in the original premise."

But what does it mean that "something went wrong"?  Simple lack of skill isn't enough; according to honorary curator Ollie Hallowell, it has to have an "Oh my God" aspect to it.  But even that suggests something curious.  The fact that MOBA only accepts art that's "so bad it's good" implies there's a category below that, of art that is "simply bad."

Imagine being an artist, and having your work rejected from the Museum of Bad Art on the basis of not being good enough.  It recalls Dorothy Parker's quip about a book she was reviewing: "This book was not just plain terrible.  This was fancy terrible.  This was terrible with raisins on it."

Bone-Juggling Dog in Hula Skirt by Mari Newman, one of the pieces that did make it into the Museum's permanent collection

So we're back to there being an inherently subjective aspect to all this.  There's clearly a difference between someone who lacks skill -- someone attempting to play the piano who makes mistake after mistake, for example -- and someone who has technical competency on the instrument but who doesn't play expressively.  Likewise, having basic technical writing skill (using grammar and punctuation correctly, for example) doesn't guarantee good storytelling.  But beyond simple considerations of mechanics, how do you even begin to determine objectively the quality of a particular work?  Could bad storytelling, for example, be couched in perfect grammar?  If so, what makes it bad?  I thought the Twilight books were positively dreadful, but if you thought reading them was a life-altering experience, I'm not nearly arrogant enough to tell you that you're wrong.

What's bad, apparently, is as subjective as what's good.  Exactly as we should expect.  So this is a further illustration that you should simply enjoy what you enjoy, and continue to create fearlessly.  Marie Jackson of MOBA says that her Museum shouldn't be looked at as simple ridicule, but an impetus for us creative types to continue to put ourselves out there.  "I think it's a great encouragement to people... who want to create [and] are held back by fear," Jackson said.  "When they see these pieces, they realize there's nothing to be afraid of—just go for it."

Maybe.  I don't know.  If I were an artist, I'd have to work to wrap my brain around being included in the Museum of Bad Art.  As a writer, I certainly don't enjoy feedback like I got from a "friend" a long time ago about the first three chapters of a novel I was working on: "This is somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck."  (The chapters eventually got worked into my novel The Hand of the Hunter -- if you read it, I can only hope you won't agree with her.)  But I have to be realistic about the fact that my writing won't resonate with everyone.  

After all, that's the nature of creativity.  You win, you lose.  Some things work and others don't, or (more commonly) work for some consumers and not for others.

Even if there's no real objective standard for creative quality, to that point I agree with Marie Jackson: the critical thing is not to get caught up in whether or not you're "good enough," but to keep creating.

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