People show appreciation for the things they like. Annual awards for movies and music are handed out to works that have gathered the majority of the votes for that year. Acclaimed art pieces are bid for and sold for obscene amounts of money. Tourists come from thousands of kilometers away to briefly behold famous artworks only to be quickly shuffled along after a semi-satisfying gawk. By these quantifiable standards are art pieces deemed ‘great’ by most people. The visibility, the spectacle, the draw of the crowd validating a work of art is like the accumulation of ‘likes’ on a Facebook post. While certain art deserves to be beheld and adored by huge audiences, true artistic greatness lies not in the finished product but in the process and intent behind the act of creation itself.
The world values material evidence to rate great art. Up to a point, that’s fair. ‘Artist’ is a job title regardless of the medium. To survive, since they are not engaged in any other occupation, artists create art and sell the art they create. The most successful artists – by material standards – are those who can pull in the most money for themselves, or for the organisation that represents them. They are known as ‘bankable’ talent who attract large audiences willing to pay for the experiences their favourite artists can immerse them in. Whether it is the thrill of listening to the same piece of music on repeat, or the euphoria of a special-effects laden yet strongly emotional piece of storytelling, or of owning a piece of an artist’s creation that no one else possesses – along with the incentive of a hefty tax write-off, people consider such art pieces as ‘great’ enough to enshrine in their respective gallery, museum, a book of world records, or a private collection to be viewed by only a select few of envious aficionados.
However, a work of art is not great because it won a popularity contest. It is great because it is a process of taking a non-material thought and making it exist in the material world – for apparently no practical function. It is great because out of all the other inhabitants on this planet, only we human beings (as far as we know) are the only ones to practice this unique ability. It is great because it infuses our ability to make choices and exercise judgement onto an act of creation. It is the reorganisation of random bits of material into a thing that communicates an individual’s inner thoughts and emotions to be experienced vicariously by another.
A piece of art on public display is the result of a process of turning intent into purpose. The final product that people get to see, hear or read is merely the tip of an iceberg. If it is well acclaimed, it is the result of many trials and errors, many failed and discarded drafts, many bouts of despair and self-doubt, but persevered through because the artist believed that the next attempt would be better. If an art work required teamwork and collaboration, like a piece of theatre or film, the coordination to get all the right talent working together at the right time is in itself a work of art that is completely invisible to the “ah-ing” and “aw-ing” audience delivering their box office triumph.
And even if not, the simplest of art pieces like the imprints of hands on cave walls (now a common pre-school activity but on paper) made by prehistoric artists still conveyed the same process of turning intent into purpose. They are statements that made a simple declaration: I lived. Personal identity not just recognised by the self, but also an effort to connect with others like themselves in the form of not just one but many similar handprints by different sized hands, layered over by others suggesting generations of kin saying ‘we were here’. Not popularity but a population, not just laughing and clapping, but adding their own unique identities in pigment for no other audience but themselves. That modern day people found their collective art and publicized it is beside the point.
We could talk about other art works considered great because they were made by master craftspeople whose techniques intrigue and inspire us today. The intricacies of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, the lifelikeness of Da Vinci’s portraits of people and their literal internal landscapes, the deliberately exaggerated horrors of a firing squad execution by Goya, the playful twisting of perspective by Escher, the seemingly random splashes of colour by Pollock, the depiction of existential dread that words alone cannot describe in Munch’s ‘The Scream’. All famous pieces, so iconic we can picture the works in our minds by their names. Like the cave paintings of centuries ago, their works share with us an emotional resonance of what it means to be human in art so powerful that they still reach out to us through time.
The works of great artists do eventually find their way into museums and galleries that people gravitate to. It is because they represent the human experience so well that they become as famous as they are today. But today, art works are made to become famous as quickly as possible through marketing campaigns and other ways that influence audience support for an artist and their work. Very often the commercial drive tends to overshadow the creative effort and is aimed at what creates the most popular response instead of the most genuine one. And sometimes, like Taylor Swift’s songs, the popular response is also driven by the genuine connection her fans have with her. But it is still too early to know if they’ll be bopping along to ‘Love Story’ a century from now.
What is great about art is that our ability to create art is inherent in all of us. The trouble with measuring artistic greatness in empirical units (viewership, box office receipts) is that most of us fear we do not measure up to such artificial standards that we tragically won’t even make an attempt at art. We simply exist to consume art others make and use our judgement and choices to validate others instead – even if it is a child’s splotchy portrait of their family in poster paint stuck on a refrigerator door.
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Inspired by Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘A’ Level H1 General Paper (Paper 1) 2025 Question #2