Volume 10, Number 2 · February 1, 1968
How Do You Know It's Any Good?
By Ernst Gombrich
On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence Past and Present (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1964)
by Jakob Rosenberg
Princeton (Bollingen Series), 288, 168 plates pp., $10.00
A good race horse, one supposes, is one that wins races, a good chess player one who can beat his opponents; we can tell a good watchmaker by his skill in making or repairing watches which accurately show the time, and a good linguist by his testable mastery of foreign languages. But how can we tell what is a good work of art or who is a great artist? The question does not only arise in the auction room where genuine or sometimes spurious masterpieces change hands at astronomical prices. Every year countless art students in all civilized countries are admitted or rejected by art schools and colleges, receive degrees of varying grades or prizes for the best work; later they submit their productions to owners of galleries, to critics, and to the public on whose evaluation of their efforts they will depend for their livelihood. By what criteria are they judged? Is it all a matter of fashion and pretense? If it is not, why is there so much disagreement among critics, and, if it is, how can we explain the fact that hard-headed businessmen 'invest' in works of art?
Review, 3427 words
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