What makes art good or bad?

Art is everywhere, it is the music we listen to, the drawings we draw, the dances we dance and even the movies we watch. But what makes art good or bad? It is a hard question to answer and in my opinion I think that one can judge art on if it accomplishes what the intended purpose was but mainly people judge art based on their personal perception.

Any art form has some sort of guideline or rules. For writing you have to make sure your grammar is correct, if the piece has a theme you need to stick with it and try not to deviate. For example if your told to write something happy or bright and your story ends up dark and depressing, it does not accomplish what the intended theme was. So when looking at it as a happy piece it fails to be good. In music you have notes, in order to play good music you need to learn to use those notes effectively to play a certain song or create your own. Even with dance, different types of dance have different moves, and if you effectively execute the choreography your dance will be good. Of course all art forms need emotion and passion to make it truly good. If you can feel the emotion a writer puts into his or her book, or the passion of a dancer your more likely to find it good. But to truly appreciate the work of art one must posses some knowledge of its technicalities. It’s not that someone who has for example no experience painting cannot appreciate a good painting, it’s just that they won’t be able to comprehend the effort that when to paint it when compared to someone who paints at that level themselves.

Your personal perception and what you’ve experienced though life also plays a role in judging whether art is good or bad. Everyone has his or her own personality, for example, some one that’s very cheerful may not enjoy a darker piece of work and so my label it as bad. It also depends on what you like, if a work of art is based on a topic you enjoy you are more likely to say it’s good. An example would be someone who likes horses would find a story about horses good, compared to someone who hates horses, though the story maybe well written.

To me judging art is very personal, there can never be a universal standard by which one can judge art, as it’s a work of expression. There maybe be guidelines but a lot of the subject matter is left to the artist’s discretion. One person may like something the other won’t because they both have different perceptions of the piece.