The Good From The Bad

Franklin of ArtBlog has been blogging up a storm about how market tastes are promoting bad art due to insistence that art cannot need not have form or any other distinguishing criterion except resale value:

It has weak internal mechanisms for assigning value because of two widespread beliefs: 1. Art, like an anonymous function, has no inherent function except what is assigned to it; or 2. Art has an inherent function, but this function is one that can be performed by other creative forms and does not distinguish it from them. In the first case, art cannot fail. In the second, it can only succeed by benchmarks that are not inherent to visual art. Both beliefs eviscerate the assignment of value.

What distinguishes visual art from other media is the project of form-making. Art's inherent function is to serve as a repository of visual quality: good form. An art object can be made to serve other additional functions. But if it doesn't serve its inherent function, it is either bad art, broken art, an edge case between art and non-art, or something similar.