[sloowm]

Judging the quality is possible to an extent IMHO. You can see if an artist practiced their skills and techniques and you can see if precise pieces were done with care for instance.

From the pictures it looks like there are parts that show real care but other parts that are kind of messy and maybe more half finished projects.

[jmull]

But isn't it just your opinion that a quality work of art should appear to have a certain consistent high level of care throughout?

It seems possible, if not likely, these were unfinished pieces that were in-progress when the artist died. Perhaps many of these would never have been finished no matter how long the artist lived. You might look at one and see what had gotten a lot of attention and what hadn't, maybe even see what had gotten attention first and what later, and wonder about exactly why. It's pretty interesting, IMO.

Probably one good way to value art is its impact on the viewer. So that's obviously very subjective. But surely a variety is good. Or put it this way... the skillfully and richly crafted masterworks that you view in a museum are certainly worthy works of art. But if skillfully and richly crafted masterworks that you view in a museum are one of only a small set of forms of worthy works of art, you're putting art in a small, confining pen. That would really limit the impact it can have. Which, I think, means that's just a far too limiting a view of art.

[mrtksn]

That's just production precision, which I appreciate but many significant art pieces don't have much of that. If you don't like it, you don't like it(I don't like it too, I value mastery) but that doesn't say much about the quality or more importantly significance of the art.

[sloowm]

Production precision is just one of the examples I gave. There are other things that can indicate the quality as well. In this particular case the art is painting and sculpting and those can be done with more and less quality.

Of course there is modern art where it can seem like anything can be considered art but even in those cases there is often work and talent involved. Maybe it's through the selection of which works to make public or the storytelling with the art pieces or coming up with new experiments.

[MichaelZuo]

Having at least one objective characteristic somewhere, somehow, is more than zero though.

[mrtksn]

I don't know, it's like a having an essay with no grammatical errors. Does it make the essay any good? Sure, having a great essay written with lots of typos and grammatical errors can be hard to consume but on the other hand we, in the internet age, have some great stories called "copypasta" written horribly and people love those. They are culturally significant artefacts of a time period of the internet culture and their production is not so good.

We have "HODL" which is a cultural phenomenon, which itself is a typo.

We have numerous memes images of cultural significance which is made with very low production value because their original makers had a great idea but not very good image editing skills.

I don't think that "production correctness" or "precision" is a metric that art can be evaluated on.

[sloowm]

In the case of an essay the quality can maybe be seen in correct grammar but mostly by the writer being able to convey the story well, make sentences people want read and other things.

A cultural phenomenon is not art in my opinion. I think things can be made by people and found interesting and well liked without them being art just as a natural phenomenon can be interesting and well liked.