Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 1410779" data-attributes="member: 151">OK, quick question: how do you segment good art from bad in a way that is universally agreed upon, or even agreed upon by the majority of viewers? I haven't found a way, yet. There are a couple of ways we could define the art as being 'good': 1. It succeeds in a desired goal (i.e. to induce a reaction, to illustrate a point or instruction or visualize something). 2. It adheres to accepted guidelines of a particular ruleset for that artistic style When I was twelve, I thought much of Erol Otus' artwork was terrible. I mean really, really bad. Now, I love it. The artwork didn't change...I DID. I began to appreciate Otus' line work, and his style more than his perceived realism. IMHO, I finally GOT IT. For me, the piece evoked what D&D was all about, and used a bold visual style to create that metaphor. Others might just feel it was too 'cartoony'. Determining who is correct is a losing battle, IMHO. It works for some, and not for others.  Now, another problem is that art is both ephemeral and ever-changing. By the standards of the dutch masters, Guernica is a piece of junk. By some folks standards...it still is. But how do you determine new art, if it's working on a standard that hasn't been defined, yet? When Yoshi-toshi* or Monet or Picasso or Pollack or Lichenstein decides to make their own rules, knowing that they're breaking established artistic standards, how do you determine if they're good? A writing teacher once told me that you had to understand the rules before you could break them, and an art instructor told a friend virtually the same message. But the implication was clear: the rules are meant to be broken. The only issue was that you should understand why the rules came to be in the first place. Perspective was an innovation, once upon a time, just like Hemingway's dialogue.  The point being that art isn't getting a free ride, it's just getting leeway because it's much, much harder to judge success for it. In this very thread, I've heard the most popular artists of all three editions bandied about, with very different interpetations of their skill. Is Elmore good? WAR? Trampier? Parkinson? Wood? Wham? The Brothers Hildebrandt? There is no straight-forward answer. Some folks see David as a transcedent piece of artwork, a reflection on the perfection of the human form. Others just see some naked guy. YMMV. [shrug] And for the record, every single artist named in this thread has done something I consider worthwhile. I may not like that every female starts to look alike in Elmore's work to me, for example...but that doesn't mean I don't like Elmore, just some of his work. Some of my favorite fantasy artists, like Michael Whelan, haven't really done any purely D&D work, but I think of them that way, anyhow. There's a reason that the phrase "I don't know Art, but I know what I like..." came to be popular. Often, just as in music, movies, books and culinary pursuits, what is popular isn't always what would be considered to be the best by those in the field...but that doesn't necesarilly invalidate it. If some guy finds a velvet Elvis painting to be emotionally moving, who am I to tell him he's wrong? * - FYI: I know that his name has no hyphen (heck, it's spelled in Kanji!)...but Eric's Grandma rewrote his name with smilies...so we needed to change it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification