Good Art

Good art does something to us. Good art stirs us. Good art awakens a part of the self that otherwise lies dormant.

You know good art when you see it. Not because someone told you it was good, not because it's hanging in a museum, not because the books say it’s stunning. You know it because you feel it. Good art bypasses knowing.

There are many things in life that are good and fulfilling and worth it because they give us something. They are teleological. They point toward something. Good art is not like that. Good art is sufficient in itself. Good art needs no purpose or aim or justification. When you feel it, to impose any seems cruel.

You can look at a lot of art and never experience good art. The two are totally unrelated. Art, as an institution, as a concept, points toward great accumulations in learned minds. Good art points nowhere but here. Good art demands you in the present. Its placement in a corpus, in a collection, is absurd. It can only exist as it is being experienced. It is something that happens.

Kafka wrote that the purpose of literature is to hack apart the frozen sea inside ourselves. An encounter with good art is the feeling of that ice breaking.

When you find good art, you'll know. If you see art that checks your boxes, that you want to file away for later—that is not good art. With good art, you'll feel the deep groaning of tectonic plates shifting within you. You'll feel the vertigo of suddenly uncertain footing.

Many seek art for something. Comfort, distraction, novel ideas. They point to art and say, "See how this enriches my life, how it elevates my understanding.” This is admirable and can even be true. But it is not good art. It is insulation.

So go find some good art. Not to collect it or to understand it. Let it break you open. Let it wake you up. Let it remind you of the vast, dark waters that flow beneath your surface. And remember that the ice always reforms, but never forever. Never irrevocably.