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Everything About Art Explained:

How to Make Better Art

by Chris Sunami

Assess your strengths and weaknesses in relationship to the three basic qualities of art: Tension, Consonance and Verity.

Someone who is creative is generally strong in the area of Tension. Someone who is technically skilled will excel in Consonance, and someone with artistic sensitivity will be strong in the area of Verity. If your work is described as garish, flamboyant, kitschy or campy, it probably means your work has a lot of Tension and Consonance, but not enough Verity. Such an artwork may potentially gain a high degree of popularity but experience little critical acclaim. A good example is drag performer RuPaul, or any number of popular children's television shows.

If your work evokes strongly positive reactions in a few people and strongly negative reactions in many others, then you probably have a lot of Tension and Verity, but not enough Consonance. A rare state, such work is generally produced when a talented artist favors creativity over craft. Often, the seemingly unconsonant artwork has hidden consonances of a type with which the audience may be unfamiliar or unaware. It may initially appear unattractive, but have an odd, undefinable beauty or appeal. The audience will often disagree sharply about such work, but their impressions will tend to improve with familiarity. A good example is the music of Tom Waits.

If your work is received positively but without much excitement by everyone, then you probably have good Consonance and Verity, but not enough Tension. This is often a result of an artist following too closely in another artist’s shoes, or of an artist passing his or her prime and losing creativity. Such an artwork will be perceived as pleasant or pretty, but forgettable. The effect produced on the audience is ranges from lazy pleasure to boredom and critical dismissal, as in the music of Michael Bolton.

These are all problems that can be solved. The secret to increasing Tension is to choose more challenging or disturbing subjects, to experiment more with form and genre, and to pay more attention to your dreams and nightmares. The secret to improving Consonance is to put in time and hard work into technical study. The secret to improving Verity is to become more deeply observant and simultaneously less judgmental, in order to perceive your subjects as they are rather than as you wish them to be.

In addition to these difficult and labor-intensive ways of improving yourself as an artist, however, you can also improve your art through the quicker and easier method of targeted collaboration. By choosing an artist whose strengths and weaknesses complement your own as your inspiration, model, mentor, collaborator, producer, protégé or source of material, you can potentially produce art that the best qualities of your own artwork with the best qualities of the artwork of the other contributor.

This path is followed particularly often in the field of music, which is an artform well suited to collaboration. Examples of fruitful collaborations between an entertainer or craftsman (high Consonance, low Tension), and an iconoclastic eccentric (high Tension, low Consonance) include the partnerships of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, Big Boi and Andre 3000 (of Outkast)and even Salieri and Mozart (although admittedly, Mozart had all qualities with or without Salieri). In each case, the collaboration was especially successful because one partner's devotion to craft and audience was matched by the other's commitment to originality and experimentation.

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Everything About Art Explained:

How to Make Better Art

by Chris Sunami

Musicians: Outkast

Musicians: The Beatles