There are a lot of different ways for art to be bad. I don’t mind when I think a work of art is ugly— if I’m seeing it, that means somebody likes it, and I think every artist has a potential audience that they deserve to connect with. Ugly doesn’t matter, so I keep it to myself. Ugly doesn’t mean Bad.
Bad Art can be good. Bad Art can be beautiful, funny, and thought-provoking— by my own definition, Bad Art has an effect on its audience. If the art was ineffective, it might not be so bad. Bad Art is bad because it’s destructive in a way that the art itself doesn’t acknowledge, that the artist doesn’t understand— the artist who makes Bad Art has little or no connection to the impact of their work. A work of art has some consensus from its target audience, even if it’s unspoken, and it’s the job of the artist to find the consensus, the truth of their own work. When they fail to do so, the audience faces the consequences.
Every work of art, even a single image, has a Narrative— thoughts, feelings, meanings, context, messages— and the narrative’s Framing, its context, inflicts itself on the viewer without their permission, even (especially!) when the viewer doesn’t notice. It’s important for an artist to understand the stories they tell, and when their artistic narrative might diverge from their intention as an artist— dissonance between the two makes for Bad Art. A bad artist has little or no skills in Narrative Framing— manipulating the thoughts, feelings, concepts, opinions, the network of subconscious references that appear, shift, and evolve in the hearts and minds of the different viewers. It’s the viewer’s job to use the narrative to discern the artist’s intention, to connect themselves with the work and to the artist by extension, but it’s the artist’s job to create a discernible narrative. One who fails to do so may make the excuse that their work is “ambiguous” or “up to interpretation,” but to a media-literate person, the difference between intentional ambiguity and unintentional incoherence in a work of art is as obvious as the novice artist not-so-secretly fears. More so when the viewer and the artist know each other…
“Media Literacy” sounds like a meaningless buzzword to people who spend too much time online. I know this because, like most people these days, I go through extremely-online phases in my life, and I lose the meanings of words in the process. Concepts merge and fade away, I grow nihilistic and stupid in the process. It’s as easy to stop thinking critically as it is to pick up your phone, we all know that. An artist needs concepts— the search for good ones might be the only thing we all have in common, as well as the work of making them coherent to an audience. So what becomes of an incoherent concept?
I read a comic recently by an artist I know personally. We’re not super close, but we’ve talked, traded our art, gone to the same parties and events, etc. There was always a sort of incoherent ambiguity to their work that I and many others found intriguing, and I had hope that one day, when they grew older and wiser, they’d have something more to say, a concept so universal and yet uniquely theirs that it would change me and everyone who saw it for the better. The message I got from their latest work is, I fear, politically reactionary. I don’t mean Republican, or fascist, but rather just a little bit right wing— the comic seems to want to reject politics altogether, but there’s an imbalance. Most of the hostility by the main characters is, knowingly or not, directed at the Left, with some spite towards racists and xenophobes thrown in for good measure. This is debatable only to those without strong media literacy skills— who don’t notice bias, who have never studied the art critique born from progressive social movements. But I don’t want to upset anyone, so you’ll just have to take my word.
It’s important to note that there are different levels of risk for different types of art. Dark humor is, perhaps, the most difficult tool an artist can weild, and by extension, the most effective. I love dark comedy. A major problem for comedy as a genre is that people don’t know that Gallows Humor comes from the person IN the gallows, the one being executed. The person subjected to torment feels the pain personally, and knows the horror of the joke. They make the joke funny by giving it depth and meaning. The laughter may come from the Mob, who put this hypothetical person in the Gallows, but jokes told BY the Mob are cruel, common, and worst of all, forgettable. These kinds of jokes are never new, and they don’t change anyone’s way of thinking. The laughter of the Mob is just common cruelty making excuses for itself, which is not interesting. When Gallows jokes are told by those outside of the Gallows, the funniest ones are ironically the most considerate. Think It’s Always Sunny.
That’s the problem with this secret comic I’m writing about. It’s obvious to me that this artist is out of their depth, that they don’t know what they’re talking about— but the aesthetic, the surface, is engaging, so a passive reader will still feel the reactionary politics even if they don’t notice them (and the audience NOT noticing would be another failure on the artist’s part). But how would YOU know that? I’m in community with this artist! They might even read this— I can’t say who they are or what this comic is without risking being ostracized. I wanna be in the same place as they are without feeling weird about saying hi. I don’t want to make enemies or push myself into the margins. And yet, I still think the art causes notable damage to our community, and if someone doesn’t say something about it the window of acceptability will open just a little bit more for the right wing in our scene. It’s happening already.
Despite the supposed irreverent nature of the art in this indie comix scene I write about, most of us seem to assume that these artists are too sensitive to handle criticism. I’ve never seen any. Reviews glow with shallow praise of aesthetics, comparing the work to other supposedly respectable works of art, and interviews with artists call for no responses to shared negative feedback. This is because we all know each other, or might meet at some point, and so this fringe craft we take so seriously gets caught in a conformist feedback loop.
Bad Art is uneducated and unaware— it raises a problem it can’t quite name, but tries to anyway, getting close enough for comfort. This becomes a real problem when the artist gives their little problem the name of Feminism, Queerness, Anti-Racism, or Progressivism itself.
I know this artist through their comics, many of them autobiographical, and through short conversations. Despite liking them, their semi-reactionary politics are not surprising to me. I doubt that they’re even aware of their proximity to the Right, they just want to parody a certain type of person in our scene. Specifically, the nihilistic faux-activist type with nothing nice to say. Classic! We’ve all met these people, and I’m as annoyed by them as the rest of us. They force so much political jargon into casual conversation, and yet my problem with this type is actually their LACK of politics: a lack of vision for the future, a failure of imagination, and a depression that they seem to spread on purpose. The HYPOCRISY of this comic!
Being media-literate, in this case, means seeing how similar the Reactionary is to the Nihilist in art— the politics of bitching about other people’s convictions.
The artwork that refuses to engage with itself, to frame the Narrative intentionally, takes the easier route of insults— failed political commentary directs its own missing parts outside of itself. The difference between the wise-cracking moderate and the dejected leftist seems to me to be aesthetic— respectively, the acceptance or refusal of right-wing convention. If you know me, you know I hate capitalism, I believe in mutual aid, I love trans people, I adore women, I’m gay, and in my wildest fantasies I tear the whole damn system down with my bare hands and teeth (or maybe magic powers and a tank). I’m like a more enthusiastic version of the people this comic clowns on. I’d had the thought, at first, am I just offended? Am I just mad cause I’m taking it personally? The answer to that is Yes, because I have a strong sense of justice that is intimately tied to everything I make, do, and read. This shit has consequences! I have high expectations and deep respect for progressive social movements— how could anyone not?!
Ugh. I love people, and I hate their lazy, passive ignorance. The way we seem to cause our own problems and never learn.
This artist I’ve been referring to is a woman, and I’ve noticed that a lot of the female artists who get attention in the art world are self-deprecating in their work. It’s not a problem, necessarily, male artists do it too, but there are a lot more men in this scene than women— independent artists with names, interviews, podcasts and gallery shows— the women who get the most opportunities, it seems to me, are often putting themselves in a small, somewhat reactionary box. Cheeky but demure, the respectable woman knows her place— if you know what the Madonna-Whore complex is, you know what I’m talking about (and if you don’t you should look it up). The men who respect these women get to have answers to the question “who is your favorite female artist?” without having to change their unconscious sexist perspectives, and the female artists they support get to have careers, which, ironically, would have been impossible without the Feminist movement. The irony of a woman publicly rejecting her own empowerment. It’s not intentional, and that’s exactly the problem.
I fear that Bad Art of this type, unaware of its context, hurts more than just the viewer in its anti-intellectual and unconscious validation of reactionary politics. The Right is too powerful for the unprepared to risk siding with, and I resent art that runs that risk without deep consideration and education (self-education counts, no excuses). I fear that inconsiderate art is a stepping stone to something worse, coming from the artist or their audience. Work of this reactionary nature makes room for right-wing propaganda, and this network of artists I’m a part of may one day grow intolerable for the most vulnerable people in society.
But I can’t write any of that, they might be reading… and I’m sorry if you are, so don’t make it a big thing, ok?
– Olive Nicole
