There’s no right or wrong in art—but that doesn’t mean all art is quality.

Assigning value to art is tricky territory. What makes one person's expression better than another? Is a DJ less artistically valuable because they don't have the training of a concert pianist? Is Chopin better than deadMau5?

The concept of "quality" is explored exhaustively in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book reads more like a PhD dissertation than a novel, circling around what quality really means. Tl;dr — there's no great way to define what "quality" actually is in art.

Pirsig doesn’t offer a tidy definition—he kind of refuses to. He splits the world into two perspectives: the “classic” view, which looks at structure, logic, and form—and the “romantic” view, which is all feeling, intuition, and aesthetics. Quality, he argues, is what bridges the two. You can’t isolate it, and you can’t fake it. It’s what makes something click, even if you don’t know why.

Even though we can't pin it down with a definition, quality still feels important. When I see master musicians like Brad Mehldau or Joshua Bell in concert, their performance feels different than a high school jazz combo or orchestra.

Not all performances are equal in quality—or in value. Ironically, we’re sometimes more moved by a local unknown than by the finest, most polished performance money can buy.

I won’t out-philosophize Pirsig, but to me, quality in art feels like a paradox. Recognizing quality means understanding technique—while also knowing that technique alone isn't enough to constitute quality.

Somehow we know Pollock's paintings and Picasso's Cubist work are quality, even though the technique appears easier to execute than classical work—perhaps because we sense that these styles emerged after the rigor of classical training.

But the landscape is shifting. I once thought quality might rest in the work itself—the story of the artist, their journey, their craft. But now, with AI tools that can generate stunning images in seconds, that framework—the connection between effort, story, and artistic value—starts to unravel.

Where’s the story in a beautiful abstract painting from DALL-E, when it’s made from a single prompt in seconds? A DALL·E-generated abstract might look stunning, but it rarely carries the residue of struggle, doubt, or evolution—the human story that so often deepens our connection to the work.

Art isn’t the only realm where quality gets fuzzy. Take food, for example. When we eat delicious food, how do we know it's high quality? McDonald's might taste good—but is that the same as quality? Is it in the flavor? The scale of execution? Or in the care behind each ingredient—the sustainably raised cattle, the house-made bread, the aged cheese?

The more I try to define quality, the more it slips through my fingers. The more I try to define quality, the more it slips through my fingers. Maybe an overly simple heuristic is the antidote: quality isn’t the question at hand.

The question is whether the art moves you—that is its heuristic for quality.

And a piece of art may not move you until you understand it. But once you understand Picasso’s place in history, his evolution as an artist, and how he used that to capture the horrors of war—you may begin to sense the quality in his work.

So we may not be able to define quality, but we can use curiosity, intuition, and discernment to guide us in sensing what quality is in each piece of work.

We may never define quality in absolute terms—but we can sense it.

It lives in the moment when a piece of art moves us—when understanding clicks into place, and something inside us stirs.