{"id":5642,"date":"2026-05-18T00:27:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T00:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=5642"},"modified":"2026-05-18T00:27:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T00:27:33","slug":"what-makes-art-great","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/18\/what-makes-art-great\/","title":{"rendered":"What Makes Art Great?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/nabeelqu.substack.com\/p\/what-makes-art-great\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/https3A2F2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com2Fpublic2Fimages2F59d7c90e-e065-43d3-b908-b835691aa8fc_695x537.jpg?w=625&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>I&#8217;m certainly not convinced that Qureshi has nailed the answer to this question, but I&#8217;m also not sure I could have done better, and it&#8217;s an interesting attempt.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This property of constantly destabilizing the reader is, I think, also a general property of great works of art. They are constantly breaking their own forms, subverting them, playing with the reader in a way that requires us to rise to their level. They are extremely strange. Think of the experience of reading <em>Moby Dick<\/em> and getting hit with sixteen pages of quotations about whales straight off the bat. New art finds new ways of doing this, which is why art is always this forward motion in which old forms get disrupted by new ones, and artists must continue finding ways to be original. Although I believe some texts are objectively better than others, and that this is demonstrable, I also believe that there will never be some exact recipe for generating more great texts, because one of the characteristics of greatness is that the next great work never looks like the last one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/nabeelqu.substack.com\/p\/what-makes-art-great\">What Makes Art Great?<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m certainly not convinced that Qureshi has nailed the answer to this question, but I&#8217;m also not sure I could have done better, and it&#8217;s an interesting attempt. This property of constantly destabilizing the reader is, I think, also a general property of great works of art. They are constantly breaking their own forms, subverting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1t0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5644,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5642\/revisions\/5644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}