The Power of Bad Art

Think Tank #159

Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948

When I was an undergraduate in college, I had a sociology professor who was obsessed with Jackson Pollock. She dedicated about three lectures to him. We watched his documentary. If I’m not mistaken, I think we wrote a paper on the guy. It was interesting, for a little bit. However, all I could think of was that she was seeing something I wasn’t seeing. She saw something different in each of his paintings, and all I saw were scribbles.

I am not saying that Jackson Pollock is a “bad artist.” What I will say is that claiming that he is a better artist than, say, Da Vinci or Rembrandt requires subscribing to a type of relativist thinking whereby nothing has any intrinsic value, through which meaning slowly gets destroyed. If the definition of ‘good art’ doesn’t rest on any key features such as precision or skill, then all that’s left to determine whether a piece is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is how it makes its viewers feel.

I teach sixth graders. I love the age group because they are in their last year of childhood. They are growing up. They understand most things that adults can. Yet, in a lot of ways, they are still babies. They get excited about computer games and laugh at fart jokes. And if you give them a basket of markers and tell them to draw on a piece of paper for a half hour, most of them haven’t developed that adult inhibition that stops them from having fun.

I witnessed this yesterday. They had just taken a mind-numbing three hour long multiple choice test, so at the end of the day, we just let them draw.

It was easy to spot the artists. While the rest of the class was drawing stick figures and amorphous dogs, the artists in the room drew realistic still-life images and skillful, personality-filled cartoons.

These impressive drawings were met with ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs.’ Their drawings were passed around the room. Although there might have been some disagreement about whose drawings are the best, the kids were all in consensus as to who the ‘good artists’ were.

You can always determine the truth from observing children.

However, the difference between kids and adults is that, after seeing their peers’ great art, the rest of the kids did not stop drawing. They resumed drawing their sloppy houses and smiley faces that looked suspiciously, ahem, phallic. With the exception of one kid (interestingly, the one who would typically be described as the most ‘mature’ of the group), they all created art whether it was good or not (and most of it, they would admit, was not).

It’s childhood. If you repeat the same experiment in eighth grade, you’ll get the same proportion of talent, but from everyone else, you’ll get triple the amount of dick drawings (except they won’t even have the courtesy to disguise them), and twenty or so blank or crumbled papers and students with long faces grumbling that they ‘can’t draw.’

It’s something that changes around adolescence. Why do only children let themselves create bad art? Is it societal, or is it intrinsic? Do our brains develop to a level where we no longer have fun expressing ourselves in unimpressive stick-figure form?

I think one of the reasons that people are attracted to Pollock’s work is because it liberates them. He’s an artist that they can relate to, because he makes uninibited art for grown-ups.

An adult claiming that one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings exhibits the same artistic skill as a Michelangelo is claiming something false. Art is subjective, and some viewers may prefer Pollock to Michelangelo, but there is an objective skill difference—even eleven-year-olds know that.

However, why do we care? Adults get themselves into this bind where they delude themselves into changing the definitions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ simply because they don’t want to be caught making bad art, or even enjoying bad art. Why even prescribe the label?

It’s not peculiar to the visual arts. Books stop being called ‘art’ and start being called ‘slop’ or ‘commercial’ when they are too fun, and are not polished enough.

I’ve been puzzling over why I had more fun reading books when I was a kid, and I think it’s because I didn’t care whether the books I read were objectively ‘good’—I just enjoyed them.

We need to move past the postmodern mess. We don’t need to change definitions to allow ourselves to have fun. There’s ‘good art’ and ‘bad art,’ and between the extremes of a Michelangelo and a children’s stick figure, there is a spectrum in the middle full of stuff that you may or may not enjoy.

Stop judging. Draw a stick figure. Life’s too short to worry about nonsense.

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