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<b>10 Cliches: Good Art And Faulty Reasoning </b>

There's nothing worse for a critic than being asked what makes good art. Over the centuries it's been a thousand different things, from the golden chalice of Abbot Suger to a six-hour video of Bruce Nauman's empty studio. But for all that obvious variety, a bunch of hoary prescriptions for artistic excellence are still with us. How about we take all the misconceptions, outdated bromides and empty critical cliches about what good art needs to be, and lay them to rest for good and all.

Herewith my short list of 10 common declarations about art that don't hold water:

• <b>Good Art Is Realistic</b> – I know, we all thought that old saw had been thrown out years ago. But you'd be amazed how many people insist that you can still spot good artists because “the things those artists make do not seem painted but alive,” as Giorgio Vasari put it almost 500 years ago. To this day, ideas like that get trotted out in praise of hacks, and to dismiss any decent picture made since the impressionists.

• <b>Good Art Is Abstract</b> – The other day, I heard a museum docent trying to defend abstract expressionism to a crowd of realism-lovers: “You have to realize,” she said, “that contemporary artists can't just make the kind of realistic painting that you may prefer. They have to move forward into untested territory.” She represents a middle generation of modern art lovers that bought into the abstract credo in their youth, and still see it as a sign of worthy naughtiness. The truth is that for many younger artists and collectors, abstract art is now as safe, and probably as tired, as any watercolor scene of boats. Abstraction as untested territory? The cutting edge just moved back 50 years.

• <b>Good Art Is Finely Crafted</b> – A cuckoo clock is finely crafted.

• <b>Good Art Is Out to Change the World</b> – Once a century, if that, an artist makes a work that gets people to change their ways. The rest of the time, politics can be a crucial subject for artworks – think Goya or Cindy Sherman – but it is not their goal or end result. Mostly, artists change the world – profoundly – by filling it with fascinating art.

• <b>Good Art Is Timeless</b> – So why do we put dates on museum labels, and get historians to set works in historical context?

• <b>Good Art Is the Mirror of Its Times</b> – Could we really care so much about 15th-century Italian civic habits that our museums would pay millions just to have pictures that reflect them?

• <b>Good Art Is Self-Expression</b> – An altarpiece commissioned by the Catholic Church – that's Leonardo's self-expression? A portrait paid for by the court – that's about Van Dyck's inner being? A public sculpture ordered by a corporation is somehow Richard Serra self-expressing? Can someone please tell me just what “self-expression” means, anyway – or why we should care to see the spewings of some stranger's self?

• <b>Good Art Is Beautiful</b> – How about a Goya rape, Picasso's “Guernica” and a Nauman video of screaming clowns – good art, but beautiful? Or take even easier masterpieces, like a byzantine icon, a Leonardo portrait and a Pollock scribble – if all of these can count as beautiful, beauty means everything, and nothing, or nothing more than that we say anything we rather like is “beautiful.”

• <b>Good Art Is Made by Raving Geniuses</b> – The few lunatics and lushes who happen to have made good art mostly did it in lucid or sober moments. Most successful professional artists are and always have been – surprise, surprise – successful, competent professionals.

• <b>Good Art Is Therapy</b> – Not much evidence of that, for art's makers or its viewers. An artist can spend days, weeks, months making a work of art, and remain as badly adjusted and miserable as anyone on the planet. And as for critics, who spend more time looking at art than just about anyone, you'd have a hard time finding a more crotchety, dissatisfied bunch of SOBs – witness this list.

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 23, 2003; Page G02