ART Vs ENTERTAINMENT

The Beatles are better than Busted, and of course neither should be mentioned in the same sentence as Beethoven.

Ulysses is the greatest novel of the 20th Century.

Damien Hirst is just taking the public for a ride.

Can we make objective qualitative judgements about art? Is there a difference between “great” art and “mere” entertainment? Or is it just a matter of taste, like choosing between wines? Worse still, are prejudice and snobbery involved?

Some of us were discussing this in a bar in Buda yesterday. I mentioned a remark by Neb, a commentator on this blog, that entertainment is “just” to make you feel good, and is escapist. My colleague maintained that all art is like this, that the feeling of satisfaction or catharsis or even sadness after reading a good book is really not any more valuable than the fleeting pleasure some people get from hearing the latest manufactured chart-topper. I suggested that the essence of art is not that it can conjure up some feeling, but that it contains some important message about life in the real world. He challenged me about this notion of “importance” and who is to be the final arbiter of this. Might the importance be illusory, and have more to do with the smugness of the educated?

His main point was that people lucky enough to have some hours of leisure have a need for something to occupy their minds. Art and entertainment just two labels for what is in fact the same thing: a distraction. And therefore it's all escapist! (As opposed to, for example, doing voluntary work in your local Oxfam shop.)

We might attempt to define great art by agreeing a checklist of criteria e.g. longevity (that it will be relevant to people a century later); the fact that it manifests a degree of talent or skill, which is some sense measurable; that it requires some thought to execute and to be properly understood. The problem is that none of these criteria alone would suffice. That of longevity, for example, can be challenged on the grounds that we can imagine a piece of “bad” art being valued over time. (Kylie songs on 22nd Century digital media?) It’s unlikely, but not impossible.

Can anyone improve on this checklist, or, better still, give a watertight definition of good art? Or should we just abandon talk of “good” and “bad” in this context as a category mistake, and replace this with the less loaded “I prefer…”? The implication in terms of public policy would be to show up the awarding of Arts Council grants as being entirely arbitrary.