I just spent a few weeks in Beijing for an art collaboration and I do think that there's a certain level of difference between how Asians and Americans/Europeans treat the making of art. Before I say anymore I just want to preface this by saying that much of my post here includes broad generalizations which are based on my experience through my artistic education and through the little time I had working with my Chinese collaborator(s) and that anything I say here shouldn't be taken as the end-all, be-all comparison (in fact, if you have experiences that contradict the ones I'm listing here, feel free to share!). I'm going to choose to frame my post based on "techniques" (and later on "concepts") as a way to more concretely explain some of the trends in art making to illustrate what I believe are some of the differences in thought between American/European and Asian art education, but also beware that framing things purely with technique doesn't allow some of the other nuances to show through...
I think both Western and Eastern artists (forgive me for even making such a binary divide) do have sets of criteria for "judging" art that both include technique, and we can loosely define a technique as any form of strategy that is meant to convey specific information. When making a realistic drawing or painting, many of the techniques you listed earlier such as perspective and modeling of depth are completely valid and can be praiseworthy across cultures. Other times, certain techniques are maybe slightly more culturally slanted in their appreciation, as I would hazard a guess that many Chinese ink or watercolor paintings and Japanese woodblock prints hold a "technique" of a balance of information between detailed painted areas, vague areas, and large empty spaces that might read similarly to a musical rhythm with resting periods (and we often don't see this level of detail/emptiness contrast in western art).
The word "postmodernism" has been thrown around this thread for quite some time, but in art one of the biggest implications of postmodernism that hasn't really been talked about here is the removal of "medium specificity" and the consequent blending together of the arts. This blend allowed different art forms to inform one another and allowed for the techniques of one art to be put into another. While often he's linked more with modernism than postmodernism, Pollock's techniques for painting were very kinetic and action-based if not outright performative, something that wasn't in the tool-set of painting techniques very often prior to him. In the wake of postmodernism, many of the famous artists of the 1960s and 1970s began really messing around with borrowing techniques from other art forms and the case has been made that even the boundaries between art and life had been blurred too (and in the 90s, the clear emergence of "social art" can be seen that makes this latter blurring even more obvious). Techniques used to be arguably medium specific, but when medium specificity collapsed a weird fusion of new material was available to be etched with new techniques, both literally as mark-making and more figuratively in terms of applying mental techniques from one art (or one field of life) to another. Writing, theater, painting, performance, sculpture, architecture, etc could be combined and re-articulated into new forms and in the modern art world we now have the term "installation" for works of art that combine objects (paintings, sculptures, furniture, etc) with space (architecture/rooms or other defined or undefined volumes). Within installations, there are still the techniques for making an object that are necessary for the work, but the techniques of how to display the object are very much needed as well. Technique cross-pollination greatly expanded or re-expanded the forms of art making and I think this is a very key point to make when discussing cultural attitudes towards art making.
The early stages of my personal art education was almost entirely based on learning techniques for a specific medium. However, as I moved through undergrad, there was a much greater room for experimentation and for the blending of techniques and mediums to occur. There might be the idea of a "traditional" American college having art programs that allow for a student to focus on one specific medium to learn and master the techniques that belong to it. My undergrad and definitely my current grad school do not follow this build and instead actively promote the cross pollination of the arts and their techniques, and from my understanding it is the current trend for art schools in America to operate more like this and it is rarer to find programs that are entirely medium specific (and those who teach at inter-medium schools tend to scoff at those who go to a single medium program and follow a list of techniques religiously).
At the same time, a school that has single medium classifications within their program also have a very clear and easy to understand structure throughout the education process; if you're a painting student, you learn how to paint and you learn painting techniques and you keep on painting and your education is to get better at painting. These educational goals obviously cannot transfer and remain intact within the inter-medium system and what usually ends up happening is that after teaching basic techniques across a number of media, the educational process shifts to teaching students how to develop artistic "concepts." A concept is sometimes a loose term but generally it means what the work of art is supposed to be about or the processes that are informing its creation. If you really boil it down, the concept is often the work of art minus any physical objects or spaces that eventually will be made; it is the idea that the artist works with to eventually make the work. Now, of course you can easily say that medium-specific artworks have ideas too! (And you'd be correct.) If you're painting a history painting of some sort of event, the event itself is often a huge part of the concept. But
why are you painting the event? Say an artist is painting the bombing of Hiroshima; that's the
theme but not the
concept or the
why. The concept in this instance could be an emotional reaction such as grief or anger or it could be an intellectual contemplation such as the analysis of political power. In any case, once an artist is armed with a concept, he/she can then start to engineer how to make their artwork and oftentimes the medium of choice has a connection with the concept itself (and so a single artist making multiple works and each work having a unique concept is often better off having preliminary introductions into the techniques of a wide variety of media rather than mastering one medium so that he/she can pick different materials the fit a concept and be able to work with them).
My personal experience is that my American (or Canadian) classmates are able to work with these concepts and can use them to create a wide array of social, personal, or aesthetic artworks. My personal experience with the recent 2+ weeks with my Chinese collaborators however found that they were more comfortable talking about techniques and were less comfortable talking about concepts (which is similar to my experience with my American friends who went through medium-specific art programs, which makes me think the educational process is an important element beyond just cultural differences, and my Chinese collaborators seem to have claimed that medium-specific programs are the norm in China). To some degree I think part of this just might be a cultural dissonance between some concepts fitting an American audience but not a Chinese audience. I also don't think that my Chinese collaborators were completely devoid of an understanding of concept. But more often than not, the concept-technique relationship seemed inversed in which my American classmates and I would want to start projects with ideas and concepts and figure out techniques later whereas our Chinese collaborators seemed to have a greater connection with using techniques and themes first and coming up with concepts later.
Now, how does this all loop back to "good art/bad art" and "right art/wrong art"? I think that phrases like "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" or "art is subjective and anyone is allowed to like any art they like" have a subtext that recognizes what an "artistic concept" is. We might hear phrases like "well the artist's intent was not to be realistic, so we shouldn't judge his/her painting on realism" but this only then begs the question of what the intent actually was. And in many cases, the intent is also synonymous with the concept. And I think in modern art criticism, there is a multi-step process for evaluation:
Can the viewer identify the concept? (probably the first question that a Westerner versed in arts/criticism would ask, but maybe not the first question people from other cultures or backgrounds would ask)
Is the concept personally relevant/interesting to the viewer?
Are the techniques sufficient / show skill / show "aesthetics"?
Are the techniques aligned with the concept?
Now, these questions each individually allow for individual interpretation or subjectivity, but their collective "rubric" or thought process of arriving at the conclusion is fairly logical. This is to say that though art is subjective and up to the individual's interpretation, it does not mean that evaluation (by the individual) is a useless and illogical pursuit. Art is a form of communication and for the art to communicate its concept and appeal to a viewer shows a successful result to that viewer, and for an artwork not to convey these to one viewer doesn't mean it can't be successful with another.
There's also weird instances where a viewer might really like the techniques or overall aesthetics of an artwork but may dislike the concept (or not be able to identify the concept at all) or when a viewer really likes the concept but dislikes the overall look or composition of techniques. In such cases, these criteria could be used to point of "failings" of an artwork to critique it or justify an opinion.
Anyway sorry for my very long post and sorry if things don't make much sense but I could spend hours trying to say more or to edit more but at some point I just have to stop...
Cresselia~~ I know you started this thread by asking questions and though you've responded to other people's answers I oddly feel like I haven't heard a lot about your personal opinions regarding appropriate judgement (or lack thereof) in art. I'm curious to hear more from you : )