>You look at something, and it makes you feel a certain way, think a certain way, say to yourself - wow, I've never seen anything like this before - isn't this a big part of artistic merit?
No. That's how much you like something. A mountain can provoke emotions in you, and it has zero artistic merit.
>What is artistic merit?
Simply put (or at least this is how I use the term), it's the measure of how difficult it is to recreate an artistic work, or something very similar to it, especially without having seen it before. For example, a pattern of 3x3 tiles made by choosing one of two possible colors for each one has very little artistic merit, because the medium imposes so many restrictions that it's inevitable that someone else will recreate it by accident. Likewise if you take a digitized image and you postprocess it with wacky colors again and again (or as in TFA you play with a bucket fill) until what it shows is barely recognizable, it will almost invariably tend towards a certain aesthetic simply by the nature of how the filters work. That's not you putting your personal touch into your work, that's the program doing what it does. If someone else started from the same digitized images and used the same software, would they be able to make something similar to what you made just by accident? Then what you made has little artistic merit.
No. That's how much you like something. A mountain can provoke emotions in you, and it has zero artistic merit.
>What is artistic merit?
Simply put (or at least this is how I use the term), it's the measure of how difficult it is to recreate an artistic work, or something very similar to it, especially without having seen it before. For example, a pattern of 3x3 tiles made by choosing one of two possible colors for each one has very little artistic merit, because the medium imposes so many restrictions that it's inevitable that someone else will recreate it by accident. Likewise if you take a digitized image and you postprocess it with wacky colors again and again (or as in TFA you play with a bucket fill) until what it shows is barely recognizable, it will almost invariably tend towards a certain aesthetic simply by the nature of how the filters work. That's not you putting your personal touch into your work, that's the program doing what it does. If someone else started from the same digitized images and used the same software, would they be able to make something similar to what you made just by accident? Then what you made has little artistic merit.