I just had a tutorial with Mike Punt “the reader” at i-dat. He asked me how do i value my work? I stumbled. “Just on aesthetics” i said. “Yes”, he said “but that doesn’t mean anything”. Well bloody hell I don’t know. Up untill now i have just judged my work on how pretty it is and how striking and unique it is. Flashy images: tick, Swirling colours: tick, morphing intracate patterns that move: tick, live musicians: tick, live dancer: tick, audience clap at the end: tick, operated the technology in performance as well as hoped (how do you denfine that?!): tick. Basically the way i have judged my work’s value so far has just been on how beautiful i thought it was and how much love the audience or user give me once they’ve seen it. But Mike says I need “an external set of criteria that assess the value of the work.” I respect what he is saying but how the hell do i do that? Like what? A list of tick boxes and if i tick mostly A’s then the work has succeded? Well… whats the tick box for it being very visually and auditorially pleasing? Would you rate you level of pleasure at 1, 2, or 3? Thats silly, what am i going to do; go round handing out questionaires that break the audiences phenomenological experince of beauty and pleasure down into quantifiyed set units????
I admit that I am being silly and truth be told i realise fully that what Mike is hinting at is the way forward for my work, but as a new masters student busy acclimatizing to MA level study in Art its a bit of a weird idea that there would be a defined system for analysing wether an art work was of high value, to me or anyone else. I mean my work doesn’t really make money at the moment, so i can’t pin its value down to hard currency, like the brownie selling freshly squeezed lemonade can.Even if I wasmaking money from my work i still don’t think i would want to judge its total value by the money it made. Microsoft make lots of money, but they are basterds and their fine art is poo (design work is pretty good though – if you like it with a thin facade of easy, fun clenliness for all, and underneath a dirty barbaric mega system for f*cking over the worlds poor and just every body.)
What am i trying to say?
Well just that i realise i need some kind of criteria to judge the value of my work but just that where i am right now i don’t know where to start.
Money doesn’t work for me on this one.
Audience heads might be something but thats not the actuall work itself and besides Van Goff died inobscurity, did his paintings get proportionately better depending on how many peole liked them. NO. A good piece of art should be a good piece of art even if it falls in a wood and no-one see’s it.
What about performance technique. Well that sounds closer to me, but the audience doesn’t really have to be aware of how well i execute my performance technique in order to judge wether the image on the screen is pretty enough to give them the level of pleasure that will bring them back to pay for another event.
But now i’m talking about the audience, money and prettyness again.
Oh God!
I need help.
I’m confused again…
I’m sure i will find the answers to these questions and thanks to Mike for pointing me in the right direction where i’m sure Geoff, M.Phillips and Chris will illuminate further.
