Good and Bad Art

A long time ago, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that he couldn’t define it but “I know it when I see it.” I could write a thousand words here on why this postcard of the Manhattan Bridge captures its appearance well and makes it look good and this one does not but in the end, all my arguments boil down to I know it when I see it. The bridge has notably slender steel towers and a nice curve to its cables (neither too steep not too shallow) and the second postcard manages to both make the towers look top-heavy and the cables look almost like straight lines. The first also card has, in 1910, a plane flying over the East River. Either that or the world’s largest box kite, but I suspect the people who created these postcards took their work more seriously than I am now. In the first card, the plane is clearly recognizable for what it is, an immediate descendant of the Wright Flyer. In the post card below, the plane is so badly rendered that I thought at…