Yes it’s possible, because greatness is subjective - it means different things to different people. Society tends to measure greatness based on popularity, wealth, or awards, but that is a shallow marker of true genius. Think of all the blockbuster movies and books that are mediocre at best, yet they’ve received one (or all of those) “qualifications.” Exposure to a large audience does not indicate whether a work of art is great. History has proven that to me.
Can what people think make something a great work of art? Sort of, but even a lot of acclaim by itself doesn’t make something a great work of art. Some thing has to an be an authentic kind of whatever kind of thing it is, before it can be considered as an outstanding thing of that kind. So, I think that, in a way, works of art are like different kinds of animals or plants: Organisms are all authentic living things. I’ve studied lots of small and out of the way critters, like water fleas, copepods and coccolithophores and they are all just as authentic as elephants or your favorite feline. It’s having its own biological life which makes a critter authentic, and I think, too, that authentic art has its own kind of life, which lives in the imagination. If you have some kind of artistic drive, it’s because you’ve felt the life in some kinds if art, but if it happens that one’s own imagination is not good habitat for the life of a particular work of art, then, if you’re self honest, you can’t say that it’s great or not.
I see lotsa good posts on this question. Ah, if we could only all meet at Red’s Tavern and have it out!
Somebody has to connect with the art for it to be art. At least one person.
Only exception is a castaway stuck decades in a desert island that sings for the trees. Guaranteed it´s good art.
Definition of Great Art: Art that persists in time. People keep exposing to it and talking (good or bad) about it.
Great artists are at least niche artist. Those who reach mainstream is for for a combination of vision & work and for being useful. With "useful" I mean that they happen to be in synch with a kind of spiritual zeitgeist that needs to be expressed in public.
All great artists find an audience, if they keep going (even if they don´t, like Rulfo). Maybe they find it post mortem (Kafka, Pessoa). But they do. I like to think that.
We seem to have uncovered a self-selecting taxonomy of writers' opinions about greatness 😄 but I don't know that we've really answered the question or even really defined what greatness is.
I have a couple of related questions:
The first is: What prompted this question?
And the second: What were some of the takeaways from the Twitter discush?
I agree, reading through everything I can see that there is a lot of debate as to the definition of the word "great"—which I intentionally didn't define because I wanted the salon to engage in open debate! 🥳
That being said, the one qualifier I added was to ask participants to first think of all the "great artists," then respond. My hope was that that would get people thinking externally, about who they think are the great artists, and then to ponder the role an audience played in those artists' greatness.
Ultimately though, we have a lot of writers here, and so rather than thinking about great artists, many turned the question inward to wonder whether they could consider their own art great—which I think is a very different question. Making the argument that all of our art is great is akin to saying "everyone's special." By claiming that all of us are great, it only proves the inverse, that none of us are.
I interpreted the question the way Geoff did: "Who are the Great Artists of Our Time?" When I think of the great art/artists I think of: Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Phantom of the Opera, Meryl Streep, even Kanye. It doesn't matter whether I think these people are great—there is some consensus that these artists are the greats in their fields! And I think that greatness is determined by a variety of things: some kind of mass acclaim, some kind of awards/recognition, longevity/staying power, etc... which I'm surprised we haven't really dug into here!
As to why I asked this question: I've noticed a common theme in the comments of my newsletter where many writers are upset by the idea of greatness/fame/having readers. There seems to a common aversion to being successful as a writer and I've been curious why. Especially as other fields don't seem to have this as much (would we fault a singer for wanting to step on stage?)
Anyway, I'm writing a piece about fame, and I wanted to ignite a discussion about it. And... mission accomplished!!! This conversation turned all kinds of existential!!!!!! It truly feels like a real literary salon now.......
My first reaction to this is to draw a possibly contentious analogy, like "can a mathematical formula be true even if nobody believes it?" The color of light from a star never seen by anyone should be as secure as any fact.
Art's different, or so it seems. There's always an element of taste and individual judgment involved in appraising a work. But then there's the further curve ball that taste and judgment can be refined. Not all tastes are equal, unless we want to go down the vulgar path of identifying the beautiful with the pleasing.
The most responsible take blends a little of both. There has to be some appreciation of a work for it to count as great, without translating "appreciation" into a crude appeal to sentiment or conventionality.
To answer the question, "yes". I find it hard to imagine a remote future world where nobody cares for Shakespeare or Cezanne and therefore their works come to lack greatness.
There's two ways to think about that. If you buy that aesthetic judgment has truth values and there is such a thing as correctness, then either
1 you are mistaken or
2 everyone else is
Both of which are reasonable options, if not exactly easy to answer. Visual illusions make things look as they aren't, which can fool many people even though there is a fact to decide between true and false claims.
If the value of art is all down to subjective taste, that makes the question a lot easier, if less satisfying.
It comes down to how we define greatness and whether or not that determination actually has merit. Is greatness temporal? There are a lot of “great” things only discovered with time or that speak at the right moment. Is it great because it makes money? Gets on a celebrity booklist? There’s a lot of art labeled “great” because we’ve collectively accepted that branding whether or not, on critical analysis, it’s actually true. I don’t think a work needs any acclaim or has to have “worth” in the way we believe it to be in a capitalist society. It’s existence and capability to be inspiring is all it takes.
We decide what is “great” in whatever context that is. While there’s something to be said of having an audience, there are great pieces of art that we just haven’t observed yet. I’d argue for the intrinsic value of art as we do nebulae or distant star clusters we haven’t seen yet.
Completely agree -- context is everything. "Greatness" seems to also include what's in vogue right now.
I'm nost sure that's the way it *should* work -- I prefer the idea of the intrinsic value of art as well -- but popularity can sway our perception of value. (Which is, I think, a big part of the reason why some paintings go for $54 million and others for a couple of thousand...)
There’s always a market! But I think about how number one hits are not frequently names in the “greatest” lists. They might be one-hit wonders who’ve been forgotten by now. Others have devoted followings and are relatively unknown.
Kind of a tangent: I recently learned that Vanilla Ice makes about four hundred thousand American a year on the royalties to "Ice Ice Baby." That's after Queen and Bowie's estate gets their cut.
Ooooh this is a big ‘ol can of existential beans. Thoughts:
- How narrow is the definition of “no one”? There are over 6 billion people on Earth currently; odds are that if you were to put your work in front of *all* of them, at least 1000 people would think your art is great.
- Which brings me to the next problem: does it matter how *many* people think your work is great, or *which* people think your work is great? Is greatness decided by critics? Curators? Historians? The general audience? Who gets the final say? Oceans of ink have been spilled on the divide between art vs craft, high vs low culture and the various icky implications of the whole thing. Greatness isn’t readily bestowed upon artists or art forms associated with the poor, the uneducated, women or people of color. Rather, the idea of “greatness” is frequently tied up in ideas about power.
- There’s also the often unspoken idea that greatness means mass recognition. Can an artist be great and hyperlocal? If you’re working in a traditional craft that only a small community will ever know about - but you’re the best craftsperson that tradition will ever see - are you any less great than a bestselling novelist? Does greatness scale differently depending on the art form?
- The quickest shortcut to greatness is dying young which I know sounds awful BUT hear me out. If you produce some fairly good work and then pass on, you don’t have time to embarrass yourself. There’s something to be said about artistic potential being crystallized while it’s a shiny new thing, before decline or stagnation sets in.
TL:DR; I don’t actually have an answer to your question but it’s fun to think about.
I'd say the answer is no. Greatness requires audience consensus. If "no one" thinks the art is great, then the label isn't applicable. You can write a great novel, but you haven't written "The Great American Novel" without a bunch of critics and readers hailing it.
However! IMHO: Just because no one thinks the art is great, that doesn't mean the art has no merit. Or that it's not well-crafted or meaningful. Or that the author shouldn't be proud of it. Or that public consensus around the work will never change, perhaps giving the art that "greatness" stamp at a later time. Greatness is a measurement of public opinion, not an inherent quality.
Greatness is declared within groups. For example, someone may tell you a certain Minecraft video is the greatest YouTube video ever. There may be a wide consensus among millions of Minecraft players this is the case. If you don’t play Minecraft, you might say it’s not one of the greatest videos - maybe it’s weird to you, or unfunny, or sloppily edited - but the outsider perspective probably won’t change the group’s consensus.
I think it scales depending on the popularity of the art’s medium or genre. For example, a great movie may take thousands of movie critics, academics and viewers to declare it great before there’s consensus in the film world. Whereas a great zine may only need a few hundred fellow zine makers and readers.
If one person beyond the creator of the art/music/story considers it great, then it's great. If thousands of people consider the work great and discuss it often, then it's famous but not necessarily any greater. Of the millions of people who have gone to The Louvre, I wonder how many of them really consider the Mona Lisa their personal favorite?
You bring up an interesting point re: the Mona Lisa. I would consider Leonardo Da Vinci one of the great artists, and the Mona Lisa one of the great artworks. But it's not my personal favorite...
Still, maybe there needs to be some kind of consensus to arrive at the fact that something is "great!"
Hahahaha. Is it really though??? I mean, yes, I think there needs to be some level of marketing to get art out into the world, but once people have access to it, it either resonates or it doesn't.
I mean, I was being a little cheeky 😄 But it's tough to discount completely when you get agents and publishers who say something like, "It's a beautiful book, but not for us. We're really in need of a new Fifty Shades." So is Fifty Shades of Grey great? 😄 I dunno.
An artist could make a great painting and never show it to anyone. Does that make it any less great? As long as one person thinks art is great, then it is. To that person. Art is subjective. Popularity is not a good basis for greatness.
I guess I think that whether or not an artist thinks their art is great is a totally different question from what art is considered great. That would be like asking a parent which kids are the greatest in the world. Hopefully they will say their own 😆. But if you want to know what kids are the great kids of their generation, you'd need some kind of external consensus beyond the parents. I agree that art is subjective, but I'm starting to wonder if greatness is not. 🧐
Defining great is also subjective. 🤣 Even a general consensus of what is great will have detractors who disagree. I had a couple people say they loved my novel. I don’t think it’s “great," but perhaps they do. So maybe it is great to those people. But not great as far as current literary standards are concerned. Does it really matter? Except to those who seek greatness?
I don’t think there is an absolute or definitive answer to your question. It is mainly opinion. But that is what makes it fun to debate. 😀
And I believe most artists want to do great work. And if a vast majority of people think it is great, it probably is.
The fact that some people disagree with a proposition is not proof it is subjective. Some people think the world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. This does not make the shape of the world or the composition of the moon subjective, it makes those people ignorant and in need of education. Similarly, the fact that people disagree about aesthetic properties is not proof that they are subjective. Those people who don't see beauty or greatness in a great piece of art may simply be in need of education.
You are comparing physical properties with aesthetic properties. They are different. Yes, the fact that the Earth is round can be proven definitely by going into space. But whether a particular region of Earth is beautiful is definitely subjective. Just as art is. You can prove a painting is real by looking at it in a museum. That is its physical property. And you can argue that it is great because it is in a museum. But that is the museum curators opinion. Someone else can view it and consider it uninteresting. There can be majority consensus about art being great, but it is still just a largely-held opinion. Or subjective. At least that’s my subjective opinion. 😉
Are they different? They are properties we ascribe to physical objects. When we say that a painting or a tree or a person is beautiful, we are describing a physical object. If beauty is the property of a physical object, how is it not a physical property?
The distinction may rather be that beauty is a non-instrumentable property. You can't use mechanical devices to measure the beauty of an object the way you can measure its size or its weight. That means that it is not subject to classical scientific investigation, which can only investigate intrumentable phenomena.
But the distinction between instrumentable and non-instrumentable properties is not the same distinction as that between subjective and objective. For one thing, we are constantly inventing new instruments. An AI, for instance, might be trained to distinguish beauty from ugliness. Then beauty would become an instrumentable physical property.
I believe that is my whole point. But you are using language I don’t understand. So I am not sure. 🙂 Beauty and greatness are subjective and personal to the individual viewer. There can be a general consensus, but it is still opinion. You can teach people or software to recognize “beauty” (or greatness), but you are really teaching a largely-held opinion of what beauty (or greatness) is. Is a largely-held opinion enough to make something (like greatness) a fact? To some. In my opinion, it’s subjective.😉😂
This may sound silly, but you've certainly heard the saying, "if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
The answer to that is, what do you consider a sound? Is a sound the vibration that's made when the tree hits the forest floor? Or is it when that vibration is picked up by a human ear?
I think about that because, in writing fiction especially, the reader has a role to play in what a story means. Their interpretation matters. (That's not to say their interpretation *defines* what it is, but it influences what other people might think too.)
And, how we interpret things over time can -- and often does -- change. (Shakespeare and the Bible come to mind, but there are many, many other examples.)
That's why, if I have to pick one side or the other, I think there has to be an audience reaction for us to be able to evaluate a work of art -- ultimately, all art is a conversation about who we are.
I really like the idea of great art as great conversation. Maybe the answer is simply 'No, art cannot be great if no one thinks it is, because the greatness lies in the depth of the discussion it spawns in its audience'
I agree. And I think the tree falling in the forest example is a perfect one @Terrell! If a work is put out into the world, but no one resonates with it, can it really be considered great art? My inclination is to say no. (Even if it is still art, and it is still worth creating.)
Umberto Eco has some thoughts on beauty that I think are super relevant to this question, and have gotten me thinking along the same lines. He equates Augustine's thoughts on 'time' to his own thoughts on beauty, drawing from Augustine's quote on time, “If no one asks me, I know what it is; if I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I don’t know.” Eco isn't satisfied or happy with this problem of definition, but he notes that he likes Dino Formaggio's definition of art: “Art is everything people call art.” Eco goes on to say the same about beauty, but I really like Formaggio's definition because it's simple and emphasizes the intersubjective-ness of art rather than anything objective, and it made me think.
Maybe we can extend that definition here and say something along the lines of "Great art is everything people call great art"?
If we say "Great art is all art people consider great" (better wording than above), I want to say people in the individual sense. But maybe we would need to clarify 'consider great' then. I don't think it's enough for it to be a purely intellectual consideration, I think there needs to be an emotional aspect, so maybe even better wording would be "Great art is al art people *feel* is great".
But thinking about it more, I really the idea of consensus in feeling. Like, if two people are moved in the same way by a piece of art, if it inspires whatever 'feeling' we say is the threshold for greatness in the above definition, in at least two people, and those two people can share the experience or connect with it in the same way, then maybe that's the minimum for greatness.
Yeah, that is a problem with this argument. It reminds me of the Ira Glass quote on good taste, maybe we need to have some prerequisite threshold of experience or expertise to weight someone's consideration of greatness? Unfortunately our definition is getting out of hand... 😅 But I guess it's not an easy question to answer.
As a follow up to that, I think the temporal axis would be important here too. Like, if I say "Great art is all art people consider great", then there could be situations where art fluxes in and out of greatness depending on the intersubjective whims of the time. I don't love that idea, but maybe there's a stronger case there than elsewhere.
It is an interesting question that can be stated and answered from different perspectives to get different answers. I am reminded of public domain stories. There are more than tens of thousands of public domain stories. Likely hundred of thousands. A handful are kept in print and remembered. The last decade many creators have gone back to the dusty past of the public domain to find overlooked gems and written treasures to republish, revised, rewrite, be inspired by, and to continue to writer stories for. For the most part, these stories were forgotten, left to the past until someone found something in them that, at least to them, was worth consideration and merit. And then, through those efforts, people discover or rediscover something that was previously not thought of as anything, something forgotten, is now seen in new light and has value, potentially considered great.
There is also a grey area to this question: can art be art even if you don't like it?
I think here the answer is most definitely yes. There is art that I can appreciate, but I don't like. Pink Floyd springs to mind -- it's one of those bands I wished I liked, but I don't. But I appreciate their musicianship, and they clearly resonate with millions of people.
Bordeaux wine is another (if you accept wine as art, as I do). I can tell a great Bordeaux from a not-so-great one. (Or at least I used to be able to -- I recognize my palate is ageing...) But I was never a fan of it.
Muscial theatre I can't stand. But it's undeniably art.
In the book world, I've read some award winners that I didn't like reading. Again, I can usually appreciate the artistic merits of these books, but they're just not for me.
I agree with G.M. Baker and others who said that just because people don't recognize the greatness in the art doesn't mean it's not there. So in that sense, art *can* be great if no one else thinks so. Art may be hard to define, but it can be undeniably present -- whether you can identify it or not.
You bring up a good point with Pink Floyd and the other examples. I think sometimes art is representative of the time and space you’re in. A song hits at the right time and feels representative of you. It’s yours. And if you’re not in the space where it speaks to you or you just don’t like it, then it fades in the background.
What we enjoy may be serendipity, not the thing itself. It’s “good” to you. I think of music or books I just can’t get into. I’m not in that space but I know if I were 15 or 23, I’d be all over it.
I'm reminded of that scene in 12 Monkeys when Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe are watching Vertigo, and he says something like the film hasn't changed because it can't change, so he must have changed. Which brings up a whole other dimension of this question, since we change but the art doesn't.
I would think not, it's like a Turing Test but for Content. My thesis here: https://russellsapalmer.medium.com/the-content-turing-test-d39e9765de19
Yes. Any and all art forms are great when it evokes a response, whether that response is positive, negative or neutral from the one connecting to it.
Yes it’s possible, because greatness is subjective - it means different things to different people. Society tends to measure greatness based on popularity, wealth, or awards, but that is a shallow marker of true genius. Think of all the blockbuster movies and books that are mediocre at best, yet they’ve received one (or all of those) “qualifications.” Exposure to a large audience does not indicate whether a work of art is great. History has proven that to me.
Can what people think make something a great work of art? Sort of, but even a lot of acclaim by itself doesn’t make something a great work of art. Some thing has to an be an authentic kind of whatever kind of thing it is, before it can be considered as an outstanding thing of that kind. So, I think that, in a way, works of art are like different kinds of animals or plants: Organisms are all authentic living things. I’ve studied lots of small and out of the way critters, like water fleas, copepods and coccolithophores and they are all just as authentic as elephants or your favorite feline. It’s having its own biological life which makes a critter authentic, and I think, too, that authentic art has its own kind of life, which lives in the imagination. If you have some kind of artistic drive, it’s because you’ve felt the life in some kinds if art, but if it happens that one’s own imagination is not good habitat for the life of a particular work of art, then, if you’re self honest, you can’t say that it’s great or not.
I see lotsa good posts on this question. Ah, if we could only all meet at Red’s Tavern and have it out!
I´m gonna think aloud:
Somebody has to connect with the art for it to be art. At least one person.
Only exception is a castaway stuck decades in a desert island that sings for the trees. Guaranteed it´s good art.
Definition of Great Art: Art that persists in time. People keep exposing to it and talking (good or bad) about it.
Great artists are at least niche artist. Those who reach mainstream is for for a combination of vision & work and for being useful. With "useful" I mean that they happen to be in synch with a kind of spiritual zeitgeist that needs to be expressed in public.
All great artists find an audience, if they keep going (even if they don´t, like Rulfo). Maybe they find it post mortem (Kafka, Pessoa). But they do. I like to think that.
We seem to have uncovered a self-selecting taxonomy of writers' opinions about greatness 😄 but I don't know that we've really answered the question or even really defined what greatness is.
I have a couple of related questions:
The first is: What prompted this question?
And the second: What were some of the takeaways from the Twitter discush?
I agree, reading through everything I can see that there is a lot of debate as to the definition of the word "great"—which I intentionally didn't define because I wanted the salon to engage in open debate! 🥳
That being said, the one qualifier I added was to ask participants to first think of all the "great artists," then respond. My hope was that that would get people thinking externally, about who they think are the great artists, and then to ponder the role an audience played in those artists' greatness.
Ultimately though, we have a lot of writers here, and so rather than thinking about great artists, many turned the question inward to wonder whether they could consider their own art great—which I think is a very different question. Making the argument that all of our art is great is akin to saying "everyone's special." By claiming that all of us are great, it only proves the inverse, that none of us are.
I interpreted the question the way Geoff did: "Who are the Great Artists of Our Time?" When I think of the great art/artists I think of: Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Phantom of the Opera, Meryl Streep, even Kanye. It doesn't matter whether I think these people are great—there is some consensus that these artists are the greats in their fields! And I think that greatness is determined by a variety of things: some kind of mass acclaim, some kind of awards/recognition, longevity/staying power, etc... which I'm surprised we haven't really dug into here!
As to why I asked this question: I've noticed a common theme in the comments of my newsletter where many writers are upset by the idea of greatness/fame/having readers. There seems to a common aversion to being successful as a writer and I've been curious why. Especially as other fields don't seem to have this as much (would we fault a singer for wanting to step on stage?)
Anyway, I'm writing a piece about fame, and I wanted to ignite a discussion about it. And... mission accomplished!!! This conversation turned all kinds of existential!!!!!! It truly feels like a real literary salon now.......
My first reaction to this is to draw a possibly contentious analogy, like "can a mathematical formula be true even if nobody believes it?" The color of light from a star never seen by anyone should be as secure as any fact.
Art's different, or so it seems. There's always an element of taste and individual judgment involved in appraising a work. But then there's the further curve ball that taste and judgment can be refined. Not all tastes are equal, unless we want to go down the vulgar path of identifying the beautiful with the pleasing.
The most responsible take blends a little of both. There has to be some appreciation of a work for it to count as great, without translating "appreciation" into a crude appeal to sentiment or conventionality.
To answer the question, "yes". I find it hard to imagine a remote future world where nobody cares for Shakespeare or Cezanne and therefore their works come to lack greatness.
How do we account for works that clearly aren't great but everyone keeps saying they are? 😄
There's two ways to think about that. If you buy that aesthetic judgment has truth values and there is such a thing as correctness, then either
1 you are mistaken or
2 everyone else is
Both of which are reasonable options, if not exactly easy to answer. Visual illusions make things look as they aren't, which can fool many people even though there is a fact to decide between true and false claims.
If the value of art is all down to subjective taste, that makes the question a lot easier, if less satisfying.
It comes down to how we define greatness and whether or not that determination actually has merit. Is greatness temporal? There are a lot of “great” things only discovered with time or that speak at the right moment. Is it great because it makes money? Gets on a celebrity booklist? There’s a lot of art labeled “great” because we’ve collectively accepted that branding whether or not, on critical analysis, it’s actually true. I don’t think a work needs any acclaim or has to have “worth” in the way we believe it to be in a capitalist society. It’s existence and capability to be inspiring is all it takes.
We decide what is “great” in whatever context that is. While there’s something to be said of having an audience, there are great pieces of art that we just haven’t observed yet. I’d argue for the intrinsic value of art as we do nebulae or distant star clusters we haven’t seen yet.
Hard agree 😊👍
Completely agree -- context is everything. "Greatness" seems to also include what's in vogue right now.
I'm nost sure that's the way it *should* work -- I prefer the idea of the intrinsic value of art as well -- but popularity can sway our perception of value. (Which is, I think, a big part of the reason why some paintings go for $54 million and others for a couple of thousand...)
~Graham
There’s always a market! But I think about how number one hits are not frequently names in the “greatest” lists. They might be one-hit wonders who’ve been forgotten by now. Others have devoted followings and are relatively unknown.
Kind of a tangent: I recently learned that Vanilla Ice makes about four hundred thousand American a year on the royalties to "Ice Ice Baby." That's after Queen and Bowie's estate gets their cut.
😭😭
This is a lesson to pursue your dreams.
😅
*Raises a Glass* To art’s undiscovered gems.
And undiscovered countries. 🥤
Ooooh this is a big ‘ol can of existential beans. Thoughts:
- How narrow is the definition of “no one”? There are over 6 billion people on Earth currently; odds are that if you were to put your work in front of *all* of them, at least 1000 people would think your art is great.
- Which brings me to the next problem: does it matter how *many* people think your work is great, or *which* people think your work is great? Is greatness decided by critics? Curators? Historians? The general audience? Who gets the final say? Oceans of ink have been spilled on the divide between art vs craft, high vs low culture and the various icky implications of the whole thing. Greatness isn’t readily bestowed upon artists or art forms associated with the poor, the uneducated, women or people of color. Rather, the idea of “greatness” is frequently tied up in ideas about power.
- There’s also the often unspoken idea that greatness means mass recognition. Can an artist be great and hyperlocal? If you’re working in a traditional craft that only a small community will ever know about - but you’re the best craftsperson that tradition will ever see - are you any less great than a bestselling novelist? Does greatness scale differently depending on the art form?
- The quickest shortcut to greatness is dying young which I know sounds awful BUT hear me out. If you produce some fairly good work and then pass on, you don’t have time to embarrass yourself. There’s something to be said about artistic potential being crystallized while it’s a shiny new thing, before decline or stagnation sets in.
TL:DR; I don’t actually have an answer to your question but it’s fun to think about.
A lot of good points.
I'd say the answer is no. Greatness requires audience consensus. If "no one" thinks the art is great, then the label isn't applicable. You can write a great novel, but you haven't written "The Great American Novel" without a bunch of critics and readers hailing it.
However! IMHO: Just because no one thinks the art is great, that doesn't mean the art has no merit. Or that it's not well-crafted or meaningful. Or that the author shouldn't be proud of it. Or that public consensus around the work will never change, perhaps giving the art that "greatness" stamp at a later time. Greatness is a measurement of public opinion, not an inherent quality.
So if greatness is only a measure of public opinion, how do we account for things that are clearly not great yet are hailed as great?
Greatness is declared within groups. For example, someone may tell you a certain Minecraft video is the greatest YouTube video ever. There may be a wide consensus among millions of Minecraft players this is the case. If you don’t play Minecraft, you might say it’s not one of the greatest videos - maybe it’s weird to you, or unfunny, or sloppily edited - but the outsider perspective probably won’t change the group’s consensus.
What size group is large enough to make something great?
I think it scales depending on the popularity of the art’s medium or genre. For example, a great movie may take thousands of movie critics, academics and viewers to declare it great before there’s consensus in the film world. Whereas a great zine may only need a few hundred fellow zine makers and readers.
So a minimum of a few hundred?
I agree with this 100%.
“Great” minds... 😄
Zing!
I see what you did there 🤣
If one person beyond the creator of the art/music/story considers it great, then it's great. If thousands of people consider the work great and discuss it often, then it's famous but not necessarily any greater. Of the millions of people who have gone to The Louvre, I wonder how many of them really consider the Mona Lisa their personal favorite?
I think the Mona Lisa is over-examined and fawned over but relatively banal and uninteresting.
You bring up an interesting point re: the Mona Lisa. I would consider Leonardo Da Vinci one of the great artists, and the Mona Lisa one of the great artworks. But it's not my personal favorite...
Still, maybe there needs to be some kind of consensus to arrive at the fact that something is "great!"
You'll never get "consensus" on art. I know people who hate The Clash and Catcher in the Rye.
Yeah, like Graham doesn't like Pink Floyd 😏😄
Sufficient marketing and propaganda? 😄
Yes! There are sooo many powerful works of art that don’t get nearly the same amount of airtime. Can we x-ray and scrutinize another painting please??
I second this request!!!! 🥳
Hahahaha. Is it really though??? I mean, yes, I think there needs to be some level of marketing to get art out into the world, but once people have access to it, it either resonates or it doesn't.
I mean, I was being a little cheeky 😄 But it's tough to discount completely when you get agents and publishers who say something like, "It's a beautiful book, but not for us. We're really in need of a new Fifty Shades." So is Fifty Shades of Grey great? 😄 I dunno.
Good point!!! Does greatness need to "stand the test of time" maybe??
An artist could make a great painting and never show it to anyone. Does that make it any less great? As long as one person thinks art is great, then it is. To that person. Art is subjective. Popularity is not a good basis for greatness.
I guess I think that whether or not an artist thinks their art is great is a totally different question from what art is considered great. That would be like asking a parent which kids are the greatest in the world. Hopefully they will say their own 😆. But if you want to know what kids are the great kids of their generation, you'd need some kind of external consensus beyond the parents. I agree that art is subjective, but I'm starting to wonder if greatness is not. 🧐
Defining great is also subjective. 🤣 Even a general consensus of what is great will have detractors who disagree. I had a couple people say they loved my novel. I don’t think it’s “great," but perhaps they do. So maybe it is great to those people. But not great as far as current literary standards are concerned. Does it really matter? Except to those who seek greatness?
I don’t think there is an absolute or definitive answer to your question. It is mainly opinion. But that is what makes it fun to debate. 😀
And I believe most artists want to do great work. And if a vast majority of people think it is great, it probably is.
The fact that some people disagree with a proposition is not proof it is subjective. Some people think the world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. This does not make the shape of the world or the composition of the moon subjective, it makes those people ignorant and in need of education. Similarly, the fact that people disagree about aesthetic properties is not proof that they are subjective. Those people who don't see beauty or greatness in a great piece of art may simply be in need of education.
You are comparing physical properties with aesthetic properties. They are different. Yes, the fact that the Earth is round can be proven definitely by going into space. But whether a particular region of Earth is beautiful is definitely subjective. Just as art is. You can prove a painting is real by looking at it in a museum. That is its physical property. And you can argue that it is great because it is in a museum. But that is the museum curators opinion. Someone else can view it and consider it uninteresting. There can be majority consensus about art being great, but it is still just a largely-held opinion. Or subjective. At least that’s my subjective opinion. 😉
Are they different? They are properties we ascribe to physical objects. When we say that a painting or a tree or a person is beautiful, we are describing a physical object. If beauty is the property of a physical object, how is it not a physical property?
The distinction may rather be that beauty is a non-instrumentable property. You can't use mechanical devices to measure the beauty of an object the way you can measure its size or its weight. That means that it is not subject to classical scientific investigation, which can only investigate intrumentable phenomena.
But the distinction between instrumentable and non-instrumentable properties is not the same distinction as that between subjective and objective. For one thing, we are constantly inventing new instruments. An AI, for instance, might be trained to distinguish beauty from ugliness. Then beauty would become an instrumentable physical property.
I believe that is my whole point. But you are using language I don’t understand. So I am not sure. 🙂 Beauty and greatness are subjective and personal to the individual viewer. There can be a general consensus, but it is still opinion. You can teach people or software to recognize “beauty” (or greatness), but you are really teaching a largely-held opinion of what beauty (or greatness) is. Is a largely-held opinion enough to make something (like greatness) a fact? To some. In my opinion, it’s subjective.😉😂
"Those who seek greatness" is an important observation.
This may sound silly, but you've certainly heard the saying, "if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
The answer to that is, what do you consider a sound? Is a sound the vibration that's made when the tree hits the forest floor? Or is it when that vibration is picked up by a human ear?
I think about that because, in writing fiction especially, the reader has a role to play in what a story means. Their interpretation matters. (That's not to say their interpretation *defines* what it is, but it influences what other people might think too.)
And, how we interpret things over time can -- and often does -- change. (Shakespeare and the Bible come to mind, but there are many, many other examples.)
That's why, if I have to pick one side or the other, I think there has to be an audience reaction for us to be able to evaluate a work of art -- ultimately, all art is a conversation about who we are.
(Okay, I'm getting off my soap box now... :)
I really like the idea of great art as great conversation. Maybe the answer is simply 'No, art cannot be great if no one thinks it is, because the greatness lies in the depth of the discussion it spawns in its audience'
I agree. And I think the tree falling in the forest example is a perfect one @Terrell! If a work is put out into the world, but no one resonates with it, can it really be considered great art? My inclination is to say no. (Even if it is still art, and it is still worth creating.)
Umberto Eco has some thoughts on beauty that I think are super relevant to this question, and have gotten me thinking along the same lines. He equates Augustine's thoughts on 'time' to his own thoughts on beauty, drawing from Augustine's quote on time, “If no one asks me, I know what it is; if I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I don’t know.” Eco isn't satisfied or happy with this problem of definition, but he notes that he likes Dino Formaggio's definition of art: “Art is everything people call art.” Eco goes on to say the same about beauty, but I really like Formaggio's definition because it's simple and emphasizes the intersubjective-ness of art rather than anything objective, and it made me think.
Maybe we can extend that definition here and say something along the lines of "Great art is everything people call great art"?
By 'people,' do you mean any person or a consensus? Or something else? 😄
If we say "Great art is all art people consider great" (better wording than above), I want to say people in the individual sense. But maybe we would need to clarify 'consider great' then. I don't think it's enough for it to be a purely intellectual consideration, I think there needs to be an emotional aspect, so maybe even better wording would be "Great art is al art people *feel* is great".
But thinking about it more, I really the idea of consensus in feeling. Like, if two people are moved in the same way by a piece of art, if it inspires whatever 'feeling' we say is the threshold for greatness in the above definition, in at least two people, and those two people can share the experience or connect with it in the same way, then maybe that's the minimum for greatness.
Makes sense. The only issue it presents is sometimes many people agree something is great when it clearly isn't 😄
Yeah, that is a problem with this argument. It reminds me of the Ira Glass quote on good taste, maybe we need to have some prerequisite threshold of experience or expertise to weight someone's consideration of greatness? Unfortunately our definition is getting out of hand... 😅 But I guess it's not an easy question to answer.
Not at all easy. It's a good question, though! Thought provoking.
As a follow up to that, I think the temporal axis would be important here too. Like, if I say "Great art is all art people consider great", then there could be situations where art fluxes in and out of greatness depending on the intersubjective whims of the time. I don't love that idea, but maybe there's a stronger case there than elsewhere.
I can see that.
It is an interesting question that can be stated and answered from different perspectives to get different answers. I am reminded of public domain stories. There are more than tens of thousands of public domain stories. Likely hundred of thousands. A handful are kept in print and remembered. The last decade many creators have gone back to the dusty past of the public domain to find overlooked gems and written treasures to republish, revised, rewrite, be inspired by, and to continue to writer stories for. For the most part, these stories were forgotten, left to the past until someone found something in them that, at least to them, was worth consideration and merit. And then, through those efforts, people discover or rediscover something that was previously not thought of as anything, something forgotten, is now seen in new light and has value, potentially considered great.
Great question!
There is also a grey area to this question: can art be art even if you don't like it?
I think here the answer is most definitely yes. There is art that I can appreciate, but I don't like. Pink Floyd springs to mind -- it's one of those bands I wished I liked, but I don't. But I appreciate their musicianship, and they clearly resonate with millions of people.
Bordeaux wine is another (if you accept wine as art, as I do). I can tell a great Bordeaux from a not-so-great one. (Or at least I used to be able to -- I recognize my palate is ageing...) But I was never a fan of it.
Muscial theatre I can't stand. But it's undeniably art.
In the book world, I've read some award winners that I didn't like reading. Again, I can usually appreciate the artistic merits of these books, but they're just not for me.
I agree with G.M. Baker and others who said that just because people don't recognize the greatness in the art doesn't mean it's not there. So in that sense, art *can* be great if no one else thinks so. Art may be hard to define, but it can be undeniably present -- whether you can identify it or not.
~Graham
You bring up a good point with Pink Floyd and the other examples. I think sometimes art is representative of the time and space you’re in. A song hits at the right time and feels representative of you. It’s yours. And if you’re not in the space where it speaks to you or you just don’t like it, then it fades in the background.
What we enjoy may be serendipity, not the thing itself. It’s “good” to you. I think of music or books I just can’t get into. I’m not in that space but I know if I were 15 or 23, I’d be all over it.
Oh for sure -- generation and age are a huge factors too. Like going back to see that movie you loved, only to find it doesn't hold up...
Music can be like that too, I find...!
~Graham
I'm reminded of that scene in 12 Monkeys when Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe are watching Vertigo, and he says something like the film hasn't changed because it can't change, so he must have changed. Which brings up a whole other dimension of this question, since we change but the art doesn't.
Blade with Wesley Snipes and Indiana Jones, though… 🤌🏾
It’s “great” in the moment and that’s what it’s good for.
I preferred Passenger 57 😏
That is a classic. Wesley is really an underappreciated treasure.
Definitely agree. Loads of things I think are great in some way but are just not for me.