a whole lotta nonsense

The primary quality I am looking for is resonance, i.e. how much does the work resonate with me. Art is always subjective so I do not claim to be making objective statements about the quality of a given work beyond how much I resonated with it. For me, resonance = quality, or put another way, if I like it! Its good! (good to me, which is the only ever sort of "good" I can assign a work with certainty). I use the word "resonate" here instead of the word enjoy to account for works that are meant to be difficult and upsetting. Art is just expression and we often express thoughts and feelings that are upsetting to engage with but are nevertheless potent, important and resonant.

You might be asking why not use a 5 point or a 10 point scale like most other people for my reviews. Fair question! The reason why I don't is because I don't find it motivating or satisfying to talk about works that aren't exceptional. Basically, I don't enjoy calling someone else's art bad or mediocre, and often times I'll enjoy a work but it won't inspire me to write about it or think about it much after I'm done engaging with it. I want to write about works that inspire me to write, not catalogue my opinions on everything I interact with boiled down to a numerical number.

Another thing I'd like to address here is the top of the scale. Along the same idea as art being subjective and thus the only way one can tell if its good is that if the art resonates with them. This is why the top of the scale is "one of the best works of its kind." Because that's the highest praise that I can guarantee! I don't think I could call something the single best work of its kind, as even within a given art form there is an endless amount of variation that can occur, so to deem one work to be greater than all the others, even when using something as nebulous as my own resonance as the deciding factor feels close minded.

This is also why I don't have any rating that corresponds to a "perfect" score. I don't really believe in the idea of perfection, at least, not in art anyway. Most examples of perfect can either be argued away by semantics OR can only be perfect by existing inside of a closed system. Perfection is a concept of cold mathematical thinking and it doesn't apply to art in my opinion. Arguing that perfection exists in subjective spaces is to force an idea of objectivity in a place where it doesn't belong. All works have flaws, as creations that are expressions of flawed humans that are perceived by other flawed humans, they can never be flawless. This is not a bad thing! I think framing art criticism by plotting how close or far a given work is from some idea of perfection trains us to view everything in relation to how flawed it is. And again, what I am interested in, is the shinning brilliance of human creation, flaws are a part of that.