Eight lines into the world, a poem can already ask who is being foolish. Dave Bonta's "Artless" is a short, unpunctuated piece that sets a viewer's failure to see against an art that wants nothing more than to be left alone. Its central idea is a question about where worth in art actually sits: in the work, in the maker, or in the eye of whoever is looking.
Start with the title. "Artless" can mean lacking art, a cruel verdict, but it can also mean free of artifice, innocent and unaffected. The poem never says which it intends, and the body of the text keeps both meanings alive. The opening line, "difficult to see anything," is a pun on the verb. Seeing can be literal, as in looking at a picture, or it can mean understanding and valuing. The speaker doesn't say there is nothing to see. He says it is difficult to see anything, which puts the trouble in the act of looking as much as in the object. Then comes "the art of the foolish," a phrase that splits too. It could mean art made by fools, or the skill of being foolish. Either way, the speaker has already half-judged what he claims he can't see.
The break between the two stanzas, a couplet followed by a tercet, works like a turn of the head from viewer to artwork. Line three, "an art content," is the shortest line in the poem, and its line break does a lot of work. Read on its own, "content" is an adjective meaning satisfied. Read forward, it hints at the noun, the substance of the art. The next line settles the matter in favor of contentment: this art is happy "with the canvas as is." The phrase is wonderfully ambiguous. The canvas may be blank, or it may be left unimproved, with no corrections or pretension. A blank canvas is both the emptiest thing in the studio and the most open, and the poem declines to say whether this art has nothing to show or simply doesn't need to show anything.
The last line is where the poem gets sharpest: "making up nobody but themselves." "Making up" means inventing, but it also echoes cosmetics, putting on a face. "Nobody" works both as "no other person" and as "a nobody." So these artists invent no one but themselves, or they dress up no one but themselves, or they make themselves into nobodies. The grammar adds to the slipperiness. The sentence begins with a singular "art" and ends with a plural "themselves," so the art quietly turns into the people who make it. The judgment moves from the work to the makers without announcing it. The verdict could be scornful, with vanity and self-regard as the only subject matter. It could also be admiring, since these artists don't fabricate characters or stories and are content to be what they are.
The shape of the poem supports this doubleness. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines run from about eight syllables to four and back to eight, so the tiny third line sits like a pause between a complaint and a description. Lowercase letters and the absence of punctuation mean the reader decides where each thought stops, which fits a poem about the difficulty of deciding what counts. The key words also frame it neatly. The poem opens on "anything" and closes on "nobody," so the vague promise of something to see ends in no one at all. The word "art" appears twice in the text and a third time, wrapped in "less," in the title, as though the poem were turning the idea over in different lights.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without arguing. It never defends the foolish artists or mocks them, and it never tells us whether the speaker's blindness is a flaw in them or in himself. Judging from the text, the poem is also a small joke on itself, since a handful of spare lines is a kind of art content with an almost empty page. Readers are left holding the same uncertainty as the speaker: whether the canvas is empty, or whether they haven't yet learned to see what is on it.