Follow the “Standardized Handbook for Critics of Art”—Or not?

    A piece of painting might be criticized as “vulgar” or “amazing”, and a snapshot of photograph could be rated as the “photo of the year”. But how or by what rules do critics make their judgment? Are there any objective standards that the critics can use to evaluate the works of arts in their subject area?

    An objective standard is, by definition, an existing basis of measurement that is well acknowledged, and should not change rapidly over time. However, on the subject of arts, people’s views change rapidly from time to time. For example, children seldom consider what was a fashion at their parents’ time as an acceptable style. Other works of arts, such as paintings, music, architecture, etc., are similar in receiving various public preferences from time to time. For example, the priceless paintings by Van Gogh had never been valued, nor appraised by any critics when he was alive, but today, his works of art have became admirable, and highly valuable among all paintings. Imagine when one kind of stylish art is brought to a different time period in history, most likely the public would exclude its appearance.

    In many different subjects other than arts, like economical, political, and social issues, critics have concurrence on certain standards that make their evaluation less arguable and more persuasive. But in the subject of art, objective standards could hardly be established because art is virtually a personal preference and a subjective inspiration of oneself. Not only the view of arts varies over time, but also from person to person. Different people often express different attitudes on the same piece of art. These facts advise that the persistent and well-acknowledged objective standards do not exist in the fields of art, while public preferences are able to vote for, or against the critics’ opinion.

    Now it appears that critics of arts do not have a handbook of objective standards to follow. Nevertheless, they do have established in their mind, whether they admit or not, a subjective standard while evaluating any works of arts. In order to evaluate a piece of art, one must have a basic stereotype in their mind to use as a measurement. This basic stereotype would be one’s subjective standards, which more or less, would reflect prevailing public opinions. A critic’s subjective standards, like all everyone else’s, are always influenced by the society, as he lives in through mass media, personal communications, or even inherited cultures. However there’s a factor that usually leads critics away from the public opinion, which is their knowledge. Most critics have studied in a certain subject for years or even decades, and have gain enough experiences, knowledge, and possibly instincts, which allow them to have deeper insight of the art works, make better judgment, therefore more likely to persuade its audiences to accept their point of view.

    Although while evaluating specific works of arts, the critics attempt to influence the public opinion with what they believe is good, mediocre, or bad, most of them do not feel that they have a responsibility to establish standards for works of arts. Rather they feel they have an obligation to express their own opinions and lead the public to embrace their interpretation and judgment on what they think is good or bad. Hence the job of critics is to dissect, analyze, explain and criticize the prime of works of arts. But because of their experience and their omniscient knowledge, their evaluations often are de facto viewed as the authorized “standards” by most of people. People tend to trust and quote the analyses, and after a period of time, start to rely on it.

       To a critic, an objective standards on the subject of arts might not exist, but while they use their own subject standards to evaluate and influence the public, their evaluations mistakenly became what the public think as a standard. Even though, this standard could not be a true objective standard because it could only last a short time as people’s sense of style changes.