Good Art Carries High Density of Choice
mental-model folk
Source: Visual Arts Practice
Categories: arts-and-culturephilosophy
From: Bannard Aphorisms on Art and Craft
Transfers
The aphorism is associated with the American painter and critic Darby Bannard, who used it to articulate what separates accomplished painting from competent painting. His observation was not about effort or technique in isolation but about something more specific: the number of deliberate decisions per unit of finished surface. A master’s brushstroke encodes choices about color, value, temperature, edge quality, direction, thickness, and placement — simultaneously. A student’s brushstroke typically addresses one or two of these dimensions and defaults on the rest.
Key structural parallels:
-
Decisions per unit, not effort per unit — the principle’s most important distinction. A painting can take thousands of hours and still be low-density if most of those hours were spent on mechanical execution (filling in, smoothing, copying). Conversely, a painting done in a single session can be high-density if every stroke was a genuine decision. This metric — decisions per unit of output, not time per unit — transfers directly to writing. Poetry is denser than prose because every word is chosen; prose permits filler. A well-written legal brief is denser than a verbose one. A well-designed API is denser than a sprawling one.
-
Effortlessness as compression, not absence — when a viewer says a painting “looks effortless,” they are describing the successful compression of many decisions into a result that does not display its labor. This is not the absence of effort but the invisibility of it. The same structure appears in athletic performance (the great athlete looks relaxed because every micro-adjustment is automatic), in prose style (Hemingway’s “simple” sentences compress extensive editorial judgment), and in code (a well-factored function that “just works” compresses extensive architectural reasoning).
-
Convention as the zero-choice default — the model implies that for every decision point, there is a default (the conventional response) and an active choice. When an artist uses the conventional color, the expected composition, the standard technique, they are making zero choices at those points. The density drops. This explains why technically proficient academic painting can feel “dead”: every element is correct but none was chosen. The same applies to writing that uses cliches (zero-choice language), to architecture that uses standard floor plans (zero-choice spatial design), and to software that uses boilerplate patterns without adapting them (zero-choice engineering).
-
Quality as information — there is an implicit information-theoretic structure. High-density choice is high-entropy: each element carries information because it could have been otherwise. Low-density choice is low-entropy: each element is predictable from convention. The viewer’s experience of “interest” or “richness” correlates with encountering decisions they did not expect. This transfers to any domain where quality is judged by engagement rather than by compliance with specification.
Limits
-
Choice-density is necessary but not sufficient — a painting can be saturated with deliberate decisions and still fail. Every color chosen, every edge considered, every value relationship weighed — and the result is incoherent, overwrought, or simply ugly. The model provides no quality criterion for the choices themselves, only a quantity metric. Maximalism can be high-density and terrible.
-
Biased toward trained-artist aesthetics — outsider art, folk art, children’s art, and naive art can be powerfully affecting precisely because they lack the self-conscious decision-making the model privileges. A Grandma Moses painting is not dense with deliberate choices in Bannard’s sense, yet it communicates something that highly trained work sometimes does not. The model cannot account for this without expanding “choice” to include unconscious or intuitive decisions, which stretches the concept past its usefulness.
-
Invisible to the untrained viewer — the model implies that quality is recognizable through its density, but untrained viewers often cannot perceive the decisions that make a work dense. A layperson may prefer a low-density illustration (clear, clean, conventionally pretty) over a high-density painting (complex, ambiguous, demanding). The model describes a real structural property but one that requires trained perception to detect.
-
Conflates kinds of choices — a choice about color temperature and a choice about subject matter are different kinds of decisions operating at different scales. The model treats all choices as equivalent units to be counted, but some choices cascade (a compositional decision constrains hundreds of subsequent brushwork decisions) while others are local. Total decision count may matter less than the quality of a few high-leverage decisions.
Expressions
-
“Good art carries high density of choice” — Bannard’s formulation, common in painting criticism and MFA studio critiques
-
“Every mark is a decision” — the studio-instruction variant, used to push students past default mark-making
-
“Kill your darlings” — the writing corollary (attributed to various sources), which implies that if you cannot justify a sentence’s presence as a deliberate choice, it should be cut
-
“There are no neutral choices in a poem” — the poetics version, asserting that every word, line break, and sound pattern is a decision-carrying element
-
“Opinionated design” — the software and product-design adaptation: a framework or product that encodes strong choices at every level rather than deferring decisions to the user
-
“God is in the details” — Mies van der Rohe’s architecture principle, which locates quality in the density of micro-level decisions rather than in the overall concept
References
- Bannard, D. “Aphorisms for Artists.” artblog.net and personal notebooks — the source of the aphorism and its intellectual context
- Arnheim, R. Art and Visual Perception. University of California Press, 1954 — the perceptual basis for distinguishing deliberate from default visual organization
- Gombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion. Phaidon, 1960 — on the role of convention and schema in visual art, which provides the theoretical background for “zero-choice defaults”
Related Entries
Structural Neighbors
Entries from different domains that share structural shape. Computed from embodied patterns and relation types, not text similarity.
- Ecological Footprint (ecology/metaphor)
- Old Growth vs. Clear-Cut (ecology/metaphor)
- Code Smell (embodied-experience/metaphor)
- Lollapalooza Effect (physics/mental-model)
- Audit Trails Are Forensic Footprints (forensics/metaphor)
- Felt Sense (/mental-model)
- Bayesian Updating (probability/mental-model)
- Prosperity Is Plant Growth (horticulture/metaphor)
Structural Tags
Patterns: scalesurface-depthaccretion
Relations: accumulateselect
Structure: emergence Level: generic
Contributors: agent:metaphorex-miner