Art criticism is no different than any other field... it's completely baffling to people without education in it, and makes total and obvious sense to those who do.
I went to the University of Iowa, which has Jackson Pollock's Mural, his most important painting. It's worth about $250M. I'd just stare at it for long periods of time. It's extraordinary, breathtaking, a symphony of squiggly lines - but in no way random. The figures and sense of right-to-left motion are quite clear, but it's impossible to point to any little detail and see the whole. It's like trying to understand a symphony from one bar of what the second violins are doing, or trying to understand Thanksgiving dinner from a little smear of butter.
And it's an entirely different painting at different perspectives. Looking at it from 50 feet is a very different experience from looking at it from five feet. The tiny detail work is as extraordinary as the whole.
>Art criticism is no different than any other field... it's completely baffling to people without education in it, and makes total and obvious sense to those who do.
Many fields are not baffling to people without specialized education.
But this really boils down to a distrust of intellectualism, and the idea that Joe Sixpack's off-the-shelf opinion is more valid than the opinion of someone who actually studies the subject seriously - that the real student is merely an elitist snob who uses their study to lord over the cretins. Sigh.
I agree with you here but would just add that this line of thinking has limits. I am not a serious student of astrology but feel perfectly comfortable dismissing the validity of horoscopes and the authority of those who peddle them.
The trouble is if you assume an entire field is garbage then you're assuming the authorities of that field are either dishonest or deluded and you dismiss anything they say as self-sustaining nonsense. When that's the case, how do you change somebody's mind?
And that's pretty much what all this "Pollock paintings are stupid" stuff gets to, right? That anyone who likes his work or claims to find special value in it is "dishonest or deluded". You can find quotes to that effect all over this post.
Right, but what the parent comment is arguing (I think) is that there actually are fields where you can say that people who find special value in it are dishonest or deluded (astrology). The challenge comes in distinguishing which are valid and which aren't.
For the record, I like Pollock and find art history/criticism much more valuable than astrology. But, how would you explain that to someone who just sees it as paint smears?
Art has nothing to do with intellectualism. And many subfields of art, even that with experts contemplating brush strokes, are very anti-intellectual in their core.
Note that comic doesn't claim that those differences aren't real, just that they're not visible or interesting to most people, which is pretty close to what the parent comment said.
You're right, it doesn't say that they aren't real. It says that they're dumb and meaningless and very real to the poor ignorant souls who think they're real.
I'm pretty snobby about a handful of things, but I'm well aware that it's pure snobbery and that I don't have some sort of intellectual blah blah blah than makes me better than the ignorant plebian next to me on the subway.
Art snobs are no different than wine snobs, comic book snobs, cigar snobs, film snobs, anime snobs, whiskey snobs, dog show snobs, foodie snobs, beer snobs, you name it. But modern art snobs are somewhat unique in claiming to be better than the rest of us.
I can listen to a model train snob talk about their stupid thing for however long and just vicariously enjoy their enthusiasm for the topic. I hear them talk and I just hear, "this thing is so cool!" and in that moment I think it's cool too. I listen to a modern art snob talk about Jackson Pollock or whatever and I just hear, "I'm so much more intellectual, cultured, and sophisticated than you!"
Some people are objectively worse than others, and modern art snobs are objectively worse than nearly all other snobs. I'll marry a stamp collector or a buckeye, but I wouldn't marry a modern art snob with no self awareness about their snobbery.
Text editors. I'm snobby about text editors. Emacs is best. fite me. /s
> It says that they're dumb and meaningless and very real to the poor ignorant souls who think they're real.
Taking joy in something doesn't make you ignorant or dumb. Whether you choose to be a smug asshole about it is orthogonal to the object of interest.
> But modern art snobs are somewhat unique in claiming to be better than the rest of us. [...] I listen to a modern art snob talk about Jackson Pollock or whatever and I just hear, "I'm so much more intellectual, cultured, and sophisticated than you!"
Are you getting this from beat's comment above? Because I definitely don't see it. I've never seen it IRL, either. It sounds like you're taking your dislike of modern art, and maybe a couple of encounters with unpleasant fans, and projecting it onto the entire field.
I'll explain. Most people who criticize contemporary are, usually use a combination of its just a bunch of random lines or a "5 year old could have painted that" - as if the complexity of difficulty of an art piece its what makes it valuable. But nothing is further from the truth, a simple piece, with a strong composition such as Number 17a, could look simple but its quite powerful and complex.
Let me use an analogy you can better understand. I am sure you can appreciate music. Most people who listen to the Marriage of Figaro by Mozart, can understand it's a master piece. Yet, it isn't the most difficult balad Mozart composer and many other musicians have created far more complex balads. Also a gifted 5 year old could probably learn to play it and reproduce it quite accurately. Does that diminish its value because a 5 year old can play it? It's even possible for an average 5 year old to invent a similar balad after listening to it. But could an average 5 year old create something like the Marriage of Figaro from scratch without ever hearing it? It takes a pretty special 5 year old, like Mozart to produce something like that. And its the whole composition that matters, not just a few notes - anyone can play a few notes.
The same happens with Pollock. He was the first drip painter. And while an average 5 year old could drip some paint in a canvas (play a few notes), they won't be able to create a powerful composition of colors that mirrors a full Pollock composition. Sure, there are amazing reproductions of Pollock made by very trained art forgers - yet that doesn't diminish the value of Pollock just because someone else after analyzing his technique is able to reproduce it.
The value is another story. It's worth $200M because of its size and scarcity. Pollock wasn't a big art producers and thus there aren't many paintings around. Yet there are many people who love his work and want to buy it. Supply and demand dictates the price. Sure you can buy something similar from an art forger, but its not the same, the same way that listening to a album on a set of speakers is not the same as having the artist play live for you.
Realistic drawings are not considered difficult, not by artists. It is called fundamentals and you learn it in school. It takes effort to learn, but effectively it is just that.
Which is why more abstract drawings raised into prominence. And they are not so easy either - as much as five years old scribble, they don't create same effect not pleasing composition of colors or structures.
Complexity is not exclusively visual. The complexity of modern art largely comes in the form of the effect it has on the observer and the meaning they derive from it.
It doesn't take much to forge Pollock. It's like an author taking the output of monkeys pounding on typewriters and publishing it. Not hard to forge compared to JRRT.
Modern art is a sham. I only appreciate art that I recognize takes skill above my own to create. Anyone can come up with random novel "art". For example, I could buy a SpaceX rocket and launch a piece of feces into low earth orbit. "Poop in Orbit" would be extremely novel and random piece of modern "art".
Michaelangelo blows my mind. Pollock makes me roll my eyes.
I can draw stick figures and call them forgeries of Michaelangelo. That doesn't make them good forgeries. Read the original article for some sense of the technical difficulty of forging Pollock in a way that couldn't be easily spotted by a Pollock expert.
Yes, and I could hire a team of "umvi experts" that study 1000 samples of my written signature. Then it would be really hard for people to forge my signature because I have a team of experts that have studied me to the point they know my subconscious nuances. That doesn't mean I have any skill whatsoever, it just means people wasted time training their neural nets to recognize my idiosyncrasies in order to prevent forgeries.
So basically, you're saying that Pollock is easy to forge, as long as no one understand what makes his paintings distinctive?
I mean, I could probably spot an amateurish Pollock forgery, and I'm no expert. And while forging his general style would be difficult, forging specific works would be nearly impossible - the layers are very specific. It would be even harder to forge drip technique paintings, where his direct control of the "brush" was limited.
> So basically, you're saying that Pollock is easy to forge, as long as no one understand what makes his paintings distinctive?
I'm saying it's easy to make Pollock-esque paintings. I bet you could study Pollock for a few hours and then make a Pollock-esque painting that would fool 99.9% of the population. You can't do that with Michelangelo.
> forging specific works would be nearly impossible - the layers are very specific.
Obviously. That's like me throwing a fistful of sand on the floor and taking a picture of it and saying it would be very hard for someone to forge the picture because the sand grain positioning is very specific - which is technically true.
Why don't you provide some evidence for your claim, since you believe all the evidence in the OP is invalid?
I could claim that whatever it is you do (including your HN comment) is no more complex or interesting than monkeys banging on typewriters.
Saying that careless sprinkling sand is as good as a Pollack is very nearly the same as saying picking numbers off the top of your head is as good as a secure RNG for crypto. It's not, in ways only an ingorant person fails to understand.
>I only appreciate art that I recognize takes skill above my own to create
Even if you had the skill to create a passable forgery of a Pollock, which you probably do not, you're attributing no value to the importance of concept and initial creation. A kid performing a Beethoven piece at a recital is not Beethoven.
I let you study Michelangelo's sculptures for 24 hours using any resources you want. I then hand you a block of marble and a chisel and ask you to create a Michaelangelo-style scupture.
We then present your sculpture alongside an authentic Michelangelo sculpture and ask 50 random people on the street to identify which one was made by you and which was made by Michelangelo. I would wager 100% would reject your sculpture as inauthentic (based on an obvious lack of skill).
Now we repeat the same experiment but with Pollock. I would wager 50% would reject your painting as inauthentic and 50% would reject the Pollock painting as inauthentic (people would randomly choose).
Pollock paintings require no skill, just a large canvas and a few contrasting colors to splatter and drip. There is no dexterity or experience required to make a painting in the style of Pollock, unlike Michelangelo sculptures.
1) You’re responding to a point about you attributing no value to concept by doubling down on the importance of realist technique and ignoring everything else. Even pieces that truly don’t require technical skill can still have value, which you don’t seem to grasp. A realistic portrait is far less interesting to many than something abstract that makes you reflect.
2) Please try to replicate a Pollock. I think you’ll be surprised.
> Even pieces that truly don’t require technical skill can still have value, which you don’t seem to grasp.
No, I understand. The Japanese flag is a red circle on a white rectangle. Takes no skill to design or draw. But I still think it's has value as a symbol. But I wouldn't pay $200M for it
and I certainly wouldn't prop up the person who made it as some sort of highly skilled artistic juggernaut. I would think "neat concept, but I could've done that" and that would be it.
> Please try to replicate a Pollock. I think you’ll be surprised.
Please try and replicate my signature. I think you'll be surprised at how difficult it is (I've been perfecting it for 20+ years signing documents) and that should cause you to respect me much more, right? If not, please explain why not and in doing so you'll understand why I don't care for Pollock or his work.
Anyone can just make up a new form of art and "perfect" it by just doing it over and over (like your signature). I could invent a new form of music by randomly mashing keys on a piano in a way unique to me. So what? There is no negative feedback loop so therefore the "perfection" process is completely nebulous and arbitrary and takes no real effort because there is no defined destination.
Can we at least acknowledge the massive skill gap between learning to play a Chopin piano piece and pioneering a Pollock-esque field of art where there are no rules or negative feedback loops to correct you?
I don’t think Pollock’s drips are art either. But I do think Picasso’s cubist paintings are art. And yet some of Picasso’s paintings are easy to re-create so would fail your test.
> Sure you can buy something similar from an art forger, but its not the same, the same way that listening to a album on a set of speakers is not the same as having the artist play live for you.
That's not a double-blind standard - you are comparing pipes to chairs. Although I can understand that one may care for the homeopathy or placebo effect of having the "real" item.
But I believe that there are artists that could make a better Pollock than Pollock himself.
I am no expert, but I think the value of art is based on what someone is willing to pay for it. Art collectors and galleries will estimate this value based on a variety of factors like: How wealthy are the potential buyers? In what context is the artwork being released? Have there been other works by artists which went for a similar price? Etc. etc.
Also, art can be looked at as a science experiment where the artist performs an experiment and shares their results with the world. Expressionism is one such "field of research" with Jackson Pollock being a prominent researcher. His body of work is like a groundbreaking experiment and each painting is an artifact of that experiment. In other words buying a Jackson Pollock is sort of like buying one of Einsteins papers.
The economic value of art is based on what someone is willing to pay for it. That's very different from value in general.
Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is probably the most valuable painting in the world, a canonical work recognized instantly by probably half the world's population. Van Gogh died penniless. He gave away his paintings for food and wine.
Does that mean "Starry Night" was worthless when Van Gogh painted it, just because no one would pay him for it? Or is the intrinsic value of the painting distinct from its economic value?
And yet, his suicide and mental problems helped to his popularity after death. Had he drew same pictures without such fascinating story, he would be known less.
Intrinsic value is about what you value. Which may be million different things and changes over time.
When you are in a philosophical vacuum, generalizing value is useful. However, markets concertize value. The question of "why has this been so valuable" is firmly answered by "this is how much someone payed for it".
"What is value?" is an excellent philosophical question. "Why is (some item) so valuable?" is easily answered by a simple analysis of history and statistics.
There are a lot of things the general public do not understand about art. One of those is that to some artists, especially ones that create non-representative art, the process of creating their art is just as or even more important than the final product.
To a consumer, viewer, or critic of art, the value of a work of art may be in the final product, but the artist may not view it that way at all, and it could be valuable to them because of, say, the way the process made them feel at the time, or how it helped them work through some personal issues they were going through.
So, yeah, you might feel like some abstract work of art is "garbage", or think that "my 2 year old could do that" or something, but your reaction is really irrelevant to some artists. Some artists want to be seen, recognized, acknowledged, and appreciated by the public, while others work just for themselves and really couldn't care less what you or anyone else thinks of their work.
As an abstract, visual artist myself, I find my work to be very meditative for me, and akin sometimes to digging through layers of earth and excavating something buried within, which can be fun, intriguing, or therapeutic for me. I do strive to make the final result pleasing to myself, but to me the process of creating the work itself has value, and what some random person off the street thinks of it is really of no consequence to me.
As for what a painting is worth on the art market, you have to realize that for many art buyers, these paintings are seen as investments, and their price is determined by what people are willing to pay for them (which is often determined by what they think these paintings will be worth to other investors in the future), not necessarily by them having any "objective value".
Also, what's often valued in art market and to academic critics is someone doing something first, or stretching the boundaries of what is considered art. The first "blue canvas" or whatever, is worth a lot of money even though it took absolutely no skill to create, while anyone else creating a "blue canvas" today would be ignored because they're neither being original nor pushing the boundaries of what's considered art.
As Salvador Dali once said, "The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."
On the other hand, the value of art in the art market is a testament to Any Warhol's definition of art: "Art is anything you can get away with."
I actually developed my own understanding of art after seeing a Pollock painting in person. Like the statue of David, the painting was huge, which surprised me.
I then realized art isn't just about whether you could have done something, but would you have done it. Whenever I look at art now I ask myself both questions: Could I have painted like Rembrandt? No. Would I ever have thought to drip paint onto a massive canvas and call it art? No. Both are equally as a valid. This applies to music and books and movies, etc. Would I ever have thought of the plot to Reservoir Dogs? Never.
Art, in my opinion, still has to evoke emotion, and be the result of a creative effort. So a music piece generated by a computer doesn't really count, but the code written to program it definitely does.
Of course art is art and everyone has their opinion about it, this is just my way of looking at it.
A novel in a foreign language is just squiggly lines on paper too.
Part of abstract art not understood is just that, a foreign language. Part of it is a navel gazing community congratulating itself. Part of it is a popularity contest with random winners.
It’s the problem with a specialty which is tending towards a singularity: quality becomes ever harder to judge and by ever fewer people who must dedicate ever more time to even understand. There are lots of hangers on who have only vague ideas about the quality and as a result the field gets overrun with nonsense. That doesn’t mean there is nothing there.
I'm sure the irony isn't lost on you that not too long ago Van Gogh was decidedly "new school" and considered random colors and squiggly lines that most people didn't see the value in.
This is the tragic comedy of people who espouse "conservative" values but don't put intellectual effort into it. There worldview is that whatever was canon before they were born is unassailable, and everything else and after is devoid of merit, but they can't explain why without appealing to authorities.
> I am curious as to what an art critic's view of such abstract paintings are. Like, in what way is Number 17a worth 200 million?
Art criticism has almost nothing to do with how much a piece is worth at auction. The price of a painting essentially comes down to the "fine art" world being a popularity contest.
Pollock is a famous name. How many people want to own a famous name, just for pride? How many Pollocks exist? (Or even, how many "big name" art pieces exist?) The first number is considerably larger. That's why the price is high.
> Like, in what way is Number 17a worth 200 million?
That's not a fair question to ask an art critic.
I mean, if you asked me why it's worth forty of your minutes to listen to Gyo:rgy Ligeti's Violin Concerto, I'd take a shot at it.
But if Ligeti's music happened to be tied to an international black market such that his scores were being bought and sold for a quarter of a billion dollars what could I possibly say?
Like, in what way is Number 17a worth 200 million?
I don't know if you mean this painting specifically, or paintings in general, but obviously, art is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Now, there are many reasons a person might pay a lot for a piece, or how a piece might end up selling for more than an expert would expect. Here are just a handful:
1. Someone buys expensive art and donates it to a museum for a nice tax deduction. The more the painting is, the more the deduction. The person who bought Number 17A immediately donated it to a museum.
2. Two collectors are both really rich and both really interested in a piece and get into a bidding war. It only takes two, but sometimes there are many people who want a particular piece or a piece from a particular artist.
3. A collector (or dealer) might try to spur interest in an artist by overpaying for a piece to try and reset the price for said artist.
4. You can launder money by buying or selling art at auction.
Just wanted to point out that point 1 is very rarely valid; while you do get a tax break from donating to charity, what you save in taxes is not offset by the cost of the donation. The only case I can really think of where that is the case is if you have some property appraised at a value significantly higher than what you can actually sell it for on the market.
I’m not an art critic and I don’t know what the paintings are worth, but what I do know, for what it’s worth, is that each and every time I look a “squiggly lines” and think “wow this looks great” it turns out to be a painting by Jackson Pollack. So, for me, there is something there. Something that impressionism doesn’t have.
I have zero artistic ability. My father is a very accomplished amateur artist. I've got into this discussion with him several times. Rather than Pollock's work, the best exemplar supporting the argument that artistic value is arbitrary is, in my opinion, Rothko's color field paintings [1]. My father explained to me that the reason it's in the Smithsonian is because he did something no one else had ever done before, he reduced the traditional landscape painting to it's absolute minimum. Same thing for Pollock, he did something no one else had ever done before. At least according to a very small clique of New York Jews. (Joking. Kind of. Not being anti-semitic, I'm an atheist Jew.)
Of course, the fact that this guy [2] is not also in the Smithsonian is strong evidence that it is in fact completely arbitrary.
Association of Jews with modern art is one of things that really really irritated nazi in Germany. They believed that Jews are intentionally destroying German culture by doing and promoting non traditional art.
But like, while somewhat over represented in Vienna modern circles, they were no majority at any point nor only the ones liking it. Probably not even more likely to like it.
First off, Van Gogh is not even close to old school, he painted less than 150 years ago. Second, the main reason for high valuations in modern art is because the artists were well-connected and got to their ideas first. Modern art is about concepts, not representation of real-life. Thus, you have a blank white canvas next to the greatest "old school" Van Gogh Monet masterpieces in NYC and Paris.
Consider, those blank white canvases take very little skill and creativity to produce. What they are a snapshot of a moment in art where very rich, well connected artists got to the idea of a blank white canvas as a message "first." Thus, they staked their flag in the ground and claimed that signpost in the long road of art history, and their rich, well-connected art selling friends probably convinced some gullible curators and collectors that those completely contentless abstractions are somehow valuable.
I'll give Pollock and others their due, that is some very interesting technique. However, as an oil painter myself, I believe the solid color canvasses hanging in museums are a slap in the face to the craftsmanship and sheer genius of the great painters, Pollock included.
Would you count Rothko under the solid colour canvasses? On paper they don't look like much, but the few that I've seen in real life somehow still really left an impression on me.
They are aesthetically pleasing to me. I might even hang some prints on a wall, but it would be to add some color, not because I find them to be a superior display of artistic ability.
To be fair a lot of simple looking art like this is produced by artists with a sound understanding of composition and color theory. For some of them everything they do is done with intention and thought. However, having a sound understanding of color theory and composition are just two basic skills any good artist will possess in addition to a multitude of other skills.
Note that I'm not saying that artists have to adhere to standard color theory and composition. I'm saying that when people deviate from them usually the good ones do it in an intentional way with a full understanding, and the specific way they break the rules is well thought out and so it works.
"I believe the solid color canvasses hanging in museums are a slap in the face to the craftsmanship and sheer genius of the great painters, Pollock included."
While I'm not a fan of solid color canvasses myself, I don't object to them on the grounds of lack of craftsmanship, as I've seen plenty of paintings with masterful craftsmanship which I find don't move me in the least and which I find utterly boring and without value (such as Chuck Close paintings or other hyper/photorealist work). Conversely, I'm a great fan of children's artwork -- art that almost by definition completely lacks any skill or craftsmanship at all. I find it a lot more refreshing and original than much art by highly educated and skilled adult artists.
The same goes for some "naive" or "outsider" art, art of the mentally ill, and "primitive" art. All of these vary in skill level, of course, but even those created without much if any skill are often very powerful and show me a new and different way of looking at the world than what I get in traditional academic or popular art.
Second, the main reason for high valuations in modern art is because the artists were well-connected and got to their ideas first.
I think this is what gets under my skin. I don't really have a problem with the artists, anybody who is able to fleece a few million from the super rich is doing a public service as far as I'm concerned.
It's the people in the galleries, auction houses and general art world that get up my nose. The ones that tell you you are a philistine because you can't appreciate a somewhat random splattering of paint or an unmade bed. We already have empirical evidence[1] that wine snobs don't know what they are talking about, perhaps we should try and find the same for art snobs.
Agree. I didn't really pay much attention to art until I visited the Rijksmuseum during the renovation and saw the Night Watch in person in an empty, quiet room. It transformed what I understood about art (the dynamic range of that painting, as well as the characters who inhabit it, are both extraordinary). That led me down the rabbit hole of classic Dutch Masters and when I see things like Pollock, I really wonder if I'm missing some extraordinary thing that separates his work from that of a 3 year old flinging paint.
Have you seen the painting in question live? If you haven't I really recommend it. I didn't really get it either until I got a chance to really see some of his works up close. The the scale and details and layers and dynamism and the way the paint is sculpted into a 3D surface just doesn't come across on a computer screen.
You don't have to like it, but there is no way you can in good faith study a Pollock and come away believing a 3 year old could have done that.
Fair enough. I had the same experience with Van Gogh (the 3D paint scuplting). But I expect that even the zoomed-out version looks like something I'd care about, like a flower, not abstract.
Please note that all my lines written above are polite and do not belitte anybody. Instead, they are statements about what I feel and believe based on my experiences.
Agreed. I apologize for the way that came out. But will you conceded that saying a 3 year old could to that does come off as dismissive. There is skill and technique in what Pollock did even if you think the end result is shit.
Again, I apologize if I can off as confrontational last night. All I'm really asking as do you give Pollock just the same few minutes of up close study you gave Rembrandt that first time in the Rijksmuseum, before you write him off. Personally I might recommend Greyed Rainbow at the Chicago Art Institute. I know I felt pretty much the way you did until I actually got to really see some of his works in person and up close.
> Like, in what way is Number 17a worth 200 million?
>To me all I see is squiggly lines and random colors.
I favor the Bitcoin hypothesis - a consensus derived worth for a portable, mostly anonymous, value store of no intrinsic utility - just slightly ahead of gold and diamonds really ...
(Only usefully available to the really rich, though)
A lot of art is just "squiggly lines and random colors" - the inherently interesting thing is what kind of feeling or atmosphere the actual arrangement provokes
The incredible prices for some art does not correspond to appreciation by art critics. It is investment objects so the prices correspond to what the investors think they will be able to sell them for in the future which in turn depends on things like name recognition and perceived staying power.
It is certainly not art critics that decided that a Pollock should cost 200M. But is considered worth 200M because some billionaire will pay that much for it.
This is a really interesting article, and reinforces just how wrong the common conception that he was just "throwing paint at canvas" is. Drip technique, the way Pollock did it, is technically very difficult and required substantial time and effort to perfect.
> and required substantial time and effort to perfect.
Perfect what, exactly? What's the end goal of the perfection? There's no way to measure it.
Signing my name is technically very difficult - I've been perfecting it for 20+ years on various random documents and I can 100% tell if someone other than me signed my name (you can too if you study my signature for a few years at a college).
Does that automatically make my signature praiseworthy and worth millions? What if I put my signature in the center of a football field sized canvas and name it "Football Sig 100.1ZZZ"?
> What if I put my signature in the center of a football field sized canvas and name it "Football Sig 100.1ZZZ”
In all seriousness, a signature of that scale would be art. It’s the ultimate expression of ego and people may well want to see it, because you had a point for all that labor involved (even if the point was proving how stupid art can be).
Modern art rejects the notion that technical difficulty can be used to judge a work (one of the few things I agree with it about) - so why should we care?
No one said you should care. But you shouldn't dismiss it based on the invalid argument that it is easy to create.
There are people (including a Prager propaganda video featuring a jealous painting peofessor) who claim that art like Pollack's isn't art or isn't good because it looks like paint thoughtlessly splattered on a floor or a smock. The point is, it doesn't, and the way it doesn't (chaotic yet balanced multiscale patterns of colors) is interesting.
I guess I wonder why people shouldn’t dismiss whatever they don’t find pleasing.
The most important part of a painting to the audience is how it looks and how it makes them feel. And to a lot of people Pollock works look lazy, and it makes people feel kind of ripped off, like they paid $25 to get into this museum and they are looking at what looks like pure randomness (even if it’s truly not, even if it truly took massive amounts of talent to create).
And inevitably defenders come out and insist that it’s actually groundbreaking and the first of its kind. And inevitably they look like snobs.
Pollock paintings are like that rare movie on Rotten Tomatoes that has a 100% critic score and a 10% viewer score. It’s really hard not to side with the viewers.
Or maybe Pollock paintings are like a Mitsubishi Mirage. Sure, it took hundreds of engineers great skill and hours to make one, certainly I could never make one, but that doesn’t change the fact that most people consider it a hella shitty car. And I’m sure someone’s out there praising its low price and great fuel economy.
People shouldn't dismiss whatever they don't find pleasing. Whether or not you like something is a separate question from whether it's actually good. I mean, I hate eggs, I think they're disgusting. But I don't think they're bad. I don't think people who claim to like them are lying in order to look cool, or that people who offer me eggs are scamming me.
In the case of art, I think art has value that is at least somewhat objective. Liking art, on the other hand, is almost purely subjective. But since recognizing the objective value of art requires some study and effort, people generally aren't in a position to judge.
So instead, we get this weird leap where "Pollock paintings are simple and stupid"... but that collides with virtually everyone with some education in art saying "No, he was a genius". So do people think "Huh, maybe there's something here I don't understand"? No. Instead, we get "Pollock is bad art, and anyone who thinks it's good is either pretending to be cool or trying to scam us".
This is why "dismiss whatever they don't find pleasing" is a bad policy.
The idea that anyone actually thinks a cia backed/touted[1] meme-tier "modern artist" like Pollock has any value beyond money laundering[2] in current year is delicately amusing to me. Then again, I guess some people think CNN is a news agency.
If the CIA was indeed promoting modern art as an expression of American cultural "soft power" then thats probably the best and most forward thinking thing they ever did. Pollock was an excellent artist (who did more than just the drip stuff he's most known for) and I'm glad that our government had a hand in promoting art like his.
I scored 100% on your quiz. I imagine it's pretty easy for anyone who has spent a bit of time studying the abstract expressionist movement. The respecting of space/the canvas is telling.
WRT Abstract Expressionism being promoted by the CIA, I fail to find why that means the art is neither good nor valuable. Can you expand on why that matters? If the CIA backed/touted an artist you _do_ respect, would that immediately set them in the "meme-tier"?
FWIIW I scored 100% on the quiz also: I studied art history.
>WRT Abstract Expressionism being promoted by the CIA, I fail to find why that means the art is neither good nor valuable.
I like socialist realism, so I don't really care if it's government funded; or even genocidal government funded as long as it's good art. Abstract expressionism was and always will be a meme tier regime loyalty test; literally emperor clothes. Show the socialist realism "tin tits" over Kiev's skyline to a caveman and he'll understand it. It takes a KWA-Soviet bureaucrat type, initiated into inhuman ugliness, to "understand" Pollock.
Slightly off topic, but I had a Jackson Pollock party in my garage where some friends and I got wine drunk and danced around the garage splattering paint everywhere (preferably on canvases on the ground). We didn't exactly produce anything worth $200M but it was tons of fun and I would highly recommend it.
One thing I did learn though was that it would take a lot of effort to get anything close to actual Pollock. His stuff really is more than "random paint splashes".
Look, if you want to hold up the mans work as an example of good art then at least make an effort to read what real experts thought. To make some strawman claim that his craftsmanship cannot be matched does no favors to you or pollock and it’s simply not true. Art is easy to forge and pollock is certainly easier than to mimic than Goya or Rembrandt.
1992: Author John Briggs published a book featuring the first observation that Jackson Pollock’s poured paintings have the appearance of fractal patterns (Fractals, Touchstone Publishers, 1992)
1997-8: Physicist Richard Taylor built a chaotic pendulum called the “Pollockizer” to generate fractal paintings using the pouring technique (Physics World, 76, November 1997, New Scientist, vol. 2144, 30, 1998 and The Art of Science documentary, ABC, May 1998)
1998: Mathematician Richard Voss conducted the first fractal analysis of an artwork. He used the analysis to distinguish between illustrative paintings by different Chinese artists (Fractal Image Encoding and Analysis, Springer, 1998)
1999: Taylor’s group published the first fractal analysis of Pollock’s paintings (Nature, vol. 399, 422, 1999. See also Scientific American, vol. 287, 116-121, 2002 and Leonardo, vol. 35, 203-207, 2002)
1999: Taylor introduced the term “Fractal Expressionism” to describe fractal art generated by humans rather than computers (Physics World, 25, October 1999)
1999: Art conservator Jim Coddington proposed that fractal analysis should be explored as a technique to help authenticate Pollock paintings
2003: Psychologist Branka Spehar collaborated with Taylor to demonstrate that Pollock’s fractals induce the same physiological responses in observers as nature’s fractals and computer-generated fractals (Chaos and Graphics, vol. 27, 813, 2003)
2004-5: Physicist Jonas Mureika’s group quantified Pollock’s fractals using a multi-fractal analysis technique (Physical Review E, vol. 72, 046101-1-15, 2005 and Chaos, vol. 15, 043702-1-6, 2005).
2005: Taylor’s group used a dimensional interplay fractal analysis to distinguish 14 authentic Pollock paintings from 51 non-Pollock paintings with 100% accuracy (Pattern Recognition Letters, vol. 28, 695-702, 2005)
2005: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation asked Taylor to perform a fractal analysis on the “Matter paintings” found in a New York storage locker (Nature, 439, 648, 2006). The analysis identified “significant deviations from Pollock’s characteristics.” Taylor cautioned that the results should be “coupled with other important information such as provenance, connoisseurship and materials analysis.” Two years later, materials scientists showed that pigments on the paintings dated from after Pollock’s death
2006: Physicist Kate Jones-Smith and colleagues published a study of non-fractal star drawings and claimed that fractal analysis is flawed because their analysis falsely identified the stars as fractal (Nature, vol. 444, E9-10, 2006). In their rebuttal, Taylor’s group performed their own fractal analysis on the star patterns and showed that the stars were, in fact, not fractal (Nature, vol. 444, E10-11, 2006). Taylor reported further flaws in Jones-Smith’s analysis. Fractals expert Lansaros Gallos summed up: “What Jones-Smith has done is just a simple trick – this is bad science about fractals.” (ScienceNews, vol. 171, 122, 2007) Jones-Smith raised one valid issue: whether Pollock’s patterns occur over enough magnifications to be called fractal. However, she admitted she was at odds with the research community. She would have to dismiss half of all the investigations of fractals ever published based on this concern. Benoit Mandelbrot, inventor of the term fractal, summarized: “I do believe Pollocks are fractal.” (ScienceNews, vol. 171, 122, 2007).
2006-7: Computer Scientist Bruce Gooch’s group used computers to generate Pollock-like images by varying their fractal characteristics (Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering, 97-104, 2006 and Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, vol.1, 73-83, 2007)
2007: Art theorist Claude Cernuschi’s and colleagues presented an “arc-fractal” model of Pollock’s paintings (Pollock Matters, McMullen Museum of Art, 2007)
2007: Jones-Smith and colleagues announced to the press that they had submitted a ...
No, I meant art experts. My point was that I don’t think he is all that important as an aesthetic innovator. I see you perhaps disagree but I think his legacy was in insisting on the primacy of process. I think he would tell you that himself; his process was more important than the finished image.
Never said his craftsmanship couldn't be matched, I just said its harder than it looks to create something like that, and while he of course did not intend for every drop of paint to be just there like with traditional paintings, neither is it "random".
If I kept up with it for some time and gained more knowledge of the paint materials and how they worked together, I'm sure I could create something similar. Art doesn't have to be painstakingly "difficult" or require superhuman skill in order to be considered "good". Sure, some forms of art do require more skill than others, but that by no means translates 1-to-1 with cultural impact.
You mention elsewhere that Pollock's main contribution is art as "process" which I would agree with, its something that he shared with a few of his contemporaries. I'm also very interested in generative art, and he is an early example of this idea. I'm aware he didn't invent abstract art or anything like that.
It's fairly well documented and quite interesting that the only reason Pollock is acclaimed is that the coked out CIA hatched a long term plan to use taxpayer funds to bid up the price of the worst and most incoherent art works they could find in order to somehow confound the Communists. There's no evidence the Soviets fell for the ruse, but the western public sure did!
>the worst and most incoherent art works they could find
Even if either of the sources you cited suggested that the CIA specifically looked for low-quality art (spoiler: they don't), I'm not sure the CIA qualifies as the foremost authority on artistic achievement.
That is a total misunderstanding of the purpose behind CIA's promotion of abstract expressionism. The purpose was to win hearts and minds among intellectuals and the culturally inclined outside the US, and it worked very well. Together with stuff like jazz music it vastly increased the cultural prestige of the US during the cold war.
always be careful of the following construction "I don't understand X, therefore I will assume that it's stupid." Better would be "I don't understand X, therefore I will assume that I'm stupid (or under educated about the subject)." The second construction, based on humility, opens the mind for learning and makes you seem infinitely more thoughtful.
When you are talking about modern art you are talking about more than a century of work from thousands of different artists with probably hundreds of different approaches.
Those approaches are only connected insofar as they remove traditions and experiment in new ways. That’s why I always think that a wholesale rejection of modern art is so ridiculous. You have to at least be more specific.
And you're right - modern art shares the rejection of what came before, and experimentation in new ways. But rejection for its own sake, change for the sake of change, lost its novelty about a century ago. That leaves us with ugly art, that is doing its best to steal the oxygen from anything aesthetically pleasing.
There is, but modern art doesn't want to share. Contemporary galleries rarely display non-abstract/Modern art, and art schools are dropping classical techniques required for representational art (such as life drawing):
The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. A distinguished British painter who taught at the Slade asked me, 'How did you learn how to do animation?' I answered that I was lucky enough to have done a lot of life drawing at art school, so without realizing it I got the feeling for weight which is so vital to animation.
Then I said, 'What am I telling you for? You're teaching at the Slade and it's famous for its life drawing and excellent draftsmen.'
'If the students want to do that,' he said, 'then they've got to club together and hire themselves a model and do it in their own home.' At first I thought he was joking - but no! Life drawing as a subject went out years ago. It wasn't even on the curriculum!
The demand for draftsmanship have greatly diminished from the "golden age" of illustration. Ads and magazines used to abound with hand drawn illustration, but this have largely disappeared. But not because it has been replaced with abstract impressionism! It has been killed by photography and Photoshop. Animation have also largely abandoned hand drawing - but again this can't be blamed on modern art. Blame it on Pixar.
Not everyone rejects everything and not everyone even rejects the same things. I even deliberately avoided using the term “rejection” since that’s not even what it is, in many cases.
Even someone like Pollock uses paint, uses a canvas. His works are presented in museums the same way paintings from, say, the 17th century are. His paintings are recognizably painting-shaped. So there are some traditions he does not reject.
So modern art is not some sort of wholesale rejection of everything that came before. People just allowed themselves to reject different things. That’s the big picture.
However, like modernism as a whole, there certainly was a rejection of traditions and among the many approaches there were very dogmatic ones (but a single approach being dogmatic and rejecting things stringently still leads to diversity if other approaches accept those things and reject different things). Postmodernism has certainly been breaking that up, though.
So to address your points:
* Artists had reasons for picking their approaches. You might not agree with those reasons, but those reasons existed. I think you would be hard pressed to find artists that rejected traditions just because.
* A rejection of things that are “aesthetically pleasing” is not a common theme among modern art, though declaring the goal of creating something “aesthetically pleasing” as not a goal or as just one possible goal is certainly an oft rejected tradition.
I apply this thinking to formal business dress very often --
People in our industry are notorious for dressing down to where the art of dressing up is lost to the silicon sands of time
Most anyone you ask from an entry level to a manager, director, vice president all the way to Jack Dorsey himself will tell you dress is meaningless and unimportant to "getting things done and building great things" and I know it comes from a place of ignorance because I used to be the same way until I stumbled into a Brooks Brothers one day a few years back
Dress is a lot like art in that one must master the classics but that too is becoming the exception in fail fast culture where the means exceedingly outweigh the ends
So I ask myself what would Alan Turing do? And I know he'd dress formally and carry on because back then computer science really did save lives as opposed to now when the user is only worth the data that can be squeezed out of them -- I'm sure this is exactly the future the hippies in the Homebrew Computer Club envisioned when they convened in their dark garages by the light of their fluorescent vacuum tubes to worship their newfound digital deities dressed in jeans and printed T's /rant
Back in the olden Zortech days, we decided on a company rule that staff could wear whatever they wanted to work, but had to wear a suit when visiting customers. This got some pushback, and some said they couldn't afford a suit. So we bought them suits.
It was great. They loved wearing the suits (often their first suit) and opened a lot of doors for us with our customers. They were tired of tech people showing up in rags, and then we'd show up in suits. For a small business like ours, it was a game changer.
I understand the sentiment and the intention and there are many layers of this onion to unwrap
Formal wear unlocked some muscles your organization never even knew it had, and also some difficult conversations and investment dynamics which arose but were settled magnanimously enough and seem to have led to modest gains in morale despite initial skepticism and coercion / push & pushback
The point is you got to somewhere you didn't know you'd go and now you have a taste for how the world actually works that's ever so slightly outside of the organizational event horizon i.e. the collective comfort zone that keeps you all locked in to a shared inertia
I'd venture, not to harp on your example that the organization never quite reached the critical mass that would possibly have occurred had you followed down this road a ways, and perhaps the whole thing fizzled out after some new people got onboarded and the old guard began to drift away?
Zortech did very well, and was on a nice upward trajectory, and so became a very attractive investment opportunity for Symantec, which acquired it.
> now you have a taste for how the world actually works
I've known that since college, I just was lackadaisical about applying it.
Dressing better is a big part of being more successful. My advice to anyone who feels their talents are underappreciated and overlooked is to consider upgrading their wardrobe. Billionaires can dress like slobs, but the rest of us can't really afford to. Dressing better won't close the deal, but it can open up opportunities one wasn't aware of.
Working on one's speech patterns is effective, too.
I view everything in the world as a conversation essentially -- there are indeed 3 sides to every story but perhaps a little different than what the general consensus in my opinion
There's what we say, what we mean, and what to intend
The conversation has gotten so mixed up its hard for anyone to know anything especially with people with whom one is unfamiliar and in large groups
Dress is very much part of that conversation and is a great heuristic of where the conversation is going; as a very stark generalization I'd venture that people with advanced dress sense also have advanced conversation skills
Don't get me wrong I'm sure that people exist who don't fit this but that's why it's just a heuristic
And before you mention judging a book by its cover I'm not being judgemental I'm simply stating that humans still need all the help they can get -- we can't all be Kurt Cobains because there are simply some conversations that can't be had in certain milieus
The distinction between dressing up and not dressing up is not as big as those who dress with intention and purpose and those who don't. I've seen people wear very expensive suits but they look terrible because they are illfitting and poorly matched. I've seen people in brown pants and a button down shirt looking good because they have their leathers matching and have given some thought to their appearance. so wear suits by all means, but even more important, learn how to put together a set of clothes that speak well for you.
I agree that your dress can make a big difference. But I'm not convinced dressing up is necessarily the way to go.
Sometimes dressing down is purposeful projection of success. It's like playing hard to get. Or "I'm so good at what I do that I don't even need to dress well to earn business."
> Sometimes dressing down is purposeful projection of success. It's like playing hard to get. Or "I'm so good at what I do that I don't even need to dress well to earn business."
Hence the stereotypical billionaire dressing like a slob. But that don't work so well for the rest of us.
For a fictional example, see the TV series "Billions". Axe, the head of the hedge fund, dresses like a slob while his minions all dress to the nines.
In the real world the so called minions will each dress to mimic their so called leader and pretty soon you'll have a culture of undress at the expense of the client
Nothing worse than a bunch of no-necktie success mimics bluffing each other out in business sitting around sending false signals of importance through unbuttoned necklines
Sometimes it's a toxic humble brag, sometimes it's simple indifference and complacency, sometimes it's baked into an organization and in all cases it serves little useful propose to have casual Friday on a Monday
Even to those who believe his famous drip paintings require no talent, works like Birth and Portrait and a Dream very clearly show that he was a talented artist in more of an immediately obvious to the Sunday museum-goer kind of way.
But then again, those aren’t his most famous works are they? Something more famous like Mural looks like something your one-year-old would spit up.
I think the outsized monetary and historical value lies in the controversy, and the story behind the art, not the art itself.
I can completely understand why it’s both loved and hated. The end result looks random and doesn’t convey any particular meaning, basically a defiant statement against interpretation, but it’s also just planned enough to send you searching for patterns and meaning. I can see why it could be pleasing and impactful to the right person.
To detractors it’s like modern art gone too far: it’s just nonsense that’s fucking with you, like the artistic version of an Internet troll.
Irvine Kershner (director of empire strikes back) talked about meeting with and joshing Pollock's work at the time. He then goes on to explain that Pollock was making a sense of depth without using perspective or other traditional tools. They call it plastic depth.
The interpretation game is just the 'retail front' for art.
To those who claim this technique is "extremely difficult" so would be any BS "technique" an individual person comes up with according to his own combination of moves in random sequence ...
The reason why "modern art" is about "abstracts," "concepts" or whatever dealers and fooled enthusiasts use is because this leaves room for marketing to BS people into believing it is actually "hard" Just notice the sales copies are as abstract as some of these BS paintings.
And if that fails you can always use shame "you just don't understand modern art you pleb" ... and sure just because your scribbles and splashes you tried at home don't look like Pollock's that doesn't make Pollock's technique any more "harder" ... I equally doubt Pollock would emulate your scribbles and splashes ... I doubt any great artist Velasquez or Rembrandt or non-artist would be able to emulate it either.
It's easy, once you perform a highly repetitive task very high number of times, you will start to follow a certain pattern as to save brain output.
Thus anyone splashing paints for such a long time would fall into his own "signature" routine. You don't need to use intellect, deep thought or inspiration.
And once it's legitimised by "specific foot distance" and nonsense like that that he (likely entirely randomly) and equations nobody will ever verify you can safely continue making money not worrying about other BS "artists" overcrowding the space.
While you are correct i think with the observation of "own way of doing it is hard to emulate and develops naturally by performing it a lot", i see absolutely no reason to call people like Pollock "BS artists" for it.
I honestly don't know why non-photorealistic paintings always inspire this sort of expressions of disgust. For me, an admitted non-connoisseur, there's always a tale there of some sort, a little story, and it's enmeshed with the feeling of the time. So it's referring to a concept and turning it around or subverting a method or inventing one. I find that enjoyable to see. That idea of something novel or subverting expectations is not really all that different in concept from something like https://www.reddit.com/r/surrealmemes/comments/88qmx2/half_n... in concept.
As for the other bit: In the end, you're part of it as much as anyone else is. So if you see nothing there, then there is nothing there for you. So be it. Onward to the next one. Till you feel emotion evoked. For me, Diebenkorn's Window makes me feel this longing for this particular life I had briefly. And that's it for me. I've walked through halls of paintings that are some repulsive, lots boring, and some just incredibly magnetic. And some of the 'ugly' ones are famous and some of the ones I like aren't and that's it.
Jackson Pollock had a quaint
Way of saying to his sibyl,
'Shall I dribble?
Should I paint?'
And with never an instant's quibble,
Sibyl always answered,
'Dribble.'
137 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadTo me all I see is squiggly lines and random colors.
I do enjoy art, but mostly old school art, say Van Gogh. Paintings that depict expressions, humans, situations, etc.
I went to the University of Iowa, which has Jackson Pollock's Mural, his most important painting. It's worth about $250M. I'd just stare at it for long periods of time. It's extraordinary, breathtaking, a symphony of squiggly lines - but in no way random. The figures and sense of right-to-left motion are quite clear, but it's impossible to point to any little detail and see the whole. It's like trying to understand a symphony from one bar of what the second violins are doing, or trying to understand Thanksgiving dinner from a little smear of butter.
And it's an entirely different painting at different perspectives. Looking at it from 50 feet is a very different experience from looking at it from five feet. The tiny detail work is as extraordinary as the whole.
https://www.wikiart.org/en/jackson-pollock/mural-1943-1
Many fields are not baffling to people without specialized education.
Your description of Pollock’s mural reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/915/
But this really boils down to a distrust of intellectualism, and the idea that Joe Sixpack's off-the-shelf opinion is more valid than the opinion of someone who actually studies the subject seriously - that the real student is merely an elitist snob who uses their study to lord over the cretins. Sigh.
The trouble is if you assume an entire field is garbage then you're assuming the authorities of that field are either dishonest or deluded and you dismiss anything they say as self-sustaining nonsense. When that's the case, how do you change somebody's mind?
For the record, I like Pollock and find art history/criticism much more valuable than astrology. But, how would you explain that to someone who just sees it as paint smears?
And many fields are. I feel like at this point you're nitpicking their phrasing ("any" instead of "many") instead of addressing their point.
> Your description of Pollock’s mural reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/915/
Note that comic doesn't claim that those differences aren't real, just that they're not visible or interesting to most people, which is pretty close to what the parent comment said.
I'm pretty snobby about a handful of things, but I'm well aware that it's pure snobbery and that I don't have some sort of intellectual blah blah blah than makes me better than the ignorant plebian next to me on the subway.
Art snobs are no different than wine snobs, comic book snobs, cigar snobs, film snobs, anime snobs, whiskey snobs, dog show snobs, foodie snobs, beer snobs, you name it. But modern art snobs are somewhat unique in claiming to be better than the rest of us.
I can listen to a model train snob talk about their stupid thing for however long and just vicariously enjoy their enthusiasm for the topic. I hear them talk and I just hear, "this thing is so cool!" and in that moment I think it's cool too. I listen to a modern art snob talk about Jackson Pollock or whatever and I just hear, "I'm so much more intellectual, cultured, and sophisticated than you!"
Some people are objectively worse than others, and modern art snobs are objectively worse than nearly all other snobs. I'll marry a stamp collector or a buckeye, but I wouldn't marry a modern art snob with no self awareness about their snobbery.
Text editors. I'm snobby about text editors. Emacs is best. fite me. /s
Taking joy in something doesn't make you ignorant or dumb. Whether you choose to be a smug asshole about it is orthogonal to the object of interest.
> But modern art snobs are somewhat unique in claiming to be better than the rest of us. [...] I listen to a modern art snob talk about Jackson Pollock or whatever and I just hear, "I'm so much more intellectual, cultured, and sophisticated than you!"
Are you getting this from beat's comment above? Because I definitely don't see it. I've never seen it IRL, either. It sounds like you're taking your dislike of modern art, and maybe a couple of encounters with unpleasant fans, and projecting it onto the entire field.
Let me use an analogy you can better understand. I am sure you can appreciate music. Most people who listen to the Marriage of Figaro by Mozart, can understand it's a master piece. Yet, it isn't the most difficult balad Mozart composer and many other musicians have created far more complex balads. Also a gifted 5 year old could probably learn to play it and reproduce it quite accurately. Does that diminish its value because a 5 year old can play it? It's even possible for an average 5 year old to invent a similar balad after listening to it. But could an average 5 year old create something like the Marriage of Figaro from scratch without ever hearing it? It takes a pretty special 5 year old, like Mozart to produce something like that. And its the whole composition that matters, not just a few notes - anyone can play a few notes.
The same happens with Pollock. He was the first drip painter. And while an average 5 year old could drip some paint in a canvas (play a few notes), they won't be able to create a powerful composition of colors that mirrors a full Pollock composition. Sure, there are amazing reproductions of Pollock made by very trained art forgers - yet that doesn't diminish the value of Pollock just because someone else after analyzing his technique is able to reproduce it.
The value is another story. It's worth $200M because of its size and scarcity. Pollock wasn't a big art producers and thus there aren't many paintings around. Yet there are many people who love his work and want to buy it. Supply and demand dictates the price. Sure you can buy something similar from an art forger, but its not the same, the same way that listening to a album on a set of speakers is not the same as having the artist play live for you.
But it is true. Of course it is not the whole story, but complexity and difficulty influence how humans interpret and value things.
Which is why more abstract drawings raised into prominence. And they are not so easy either - as much as five years old scribble, they don't create same effect not pleasing composition of colors or structures.
Modern art is a sham. I only appreciate art that I recognize takes skill above my own to create. Anyone can come up with random novel "art". For example, I could buy a SpaceX rocket and launch a piece of feces into low earth orbit. "Poop in Orbit" would be extremely novel and random piece of modern "art".
Michaelangelo blows my mind. Pollock makes me roll my eyes.
I mean, I could probably spot an amateurish Pollock forgery, and I'm no expert. And while forging his general style would be difficult, forging specific works would be nearly impossible - the layers are very specific. It would be even harder to forge drip technique paintings, where his direct control of the "brush" was limited.
I'm saying it's easy to make Pollock-esque paintings. I bet you could study Pollock for a few hours and then make a Pollock-esque painting that would fool 99.9% of the population. You can't do that with Michelangelo.
> forging specific works would be nearly impossible - the layers are very specific.
Obviously. That's like me throwing a fistful of sand on the floor and taking a picture of it and saying it would be very hard for someone to forge the picture because the sand grain positioning is very specific - which is technically true.
I could claim that whatever it is you do (including your HN comment) is no more complex or interesting than monkeys banging on typewriters.
Saying that careless sprinkling sand is as good as a Pollack is very nearly the same as saying picking numbers off the top of your head is as good as a secure RNG for crypto. It's not, in ways only an ingorant person fails to understand.
Even if you had the skill to create a passable forgery of a Pollock, which you probably do not, you're attributing no value to the importance of concept and initial creation. A kid performing a Beethoven piece at a recital is not Beethoven.
I let you study Michelangelo's sculptures for 24 hours using any resources you want. I then hand you a block of marble and a chisel and ask you to create a Michaelangelo-style scupture.
We then present your sculpture alongside an authentic Michelangelo sculpture and ask 50 random people on the street to identify which one was made by you and which was made by Michelangelo. I would wager 100% would reject your sculpture as inauthentic (based on an obvious lack of skill).
Now we repeat the same experiment but with Pollock. I would wager 50% would reject your painting as inauthentic and 50% would reject the Pollock painting as inauthentic (people would randomly choose).
Pollock paintings require no skill, just a large canvas and a few contrasting colors to splatter and drip. There is no dexterity or experience required to make a painting in the style of Pollock, unlike Michelangelo sculptures.
2) Please try to replicate a Pollock. I think you’ll be surprised.
No, I understand. The Japanese flag is a red circle on a white rectangle. Takes no skill to design or draw. But I still think it's has value as a symbol. But I wouldn't pay $200M for it and I certainly wouldn't prop up the person who made it as some sort of highly skilled artistic juggernaut. I would think "neat concept, but I could've done that" and that would be it.
> Please try to replicate a Pollock. I think you’ll be surprised.
Please try and replicate my signature. I think you'll be surprised at how difficult it is (I've been perfecting it for 20+ years signing documents) and that should cause you to respect me much more, right? If not, please explain why not and in doing so you'll understand why I don't care for Pollock or his work.
Anyone can just make up a new form of art and "perfect" it by just doing it over and over (like your signature). I could invent a new form of music by randomly mashing keys on a piano in a way unique to me. So what? There is no negative feedback loop so therefore the "perfection" process is completely nebulous and arbitrary and takes no real effort because there is no defined destination.
Can we at least acknowledge the massive skill gap between learning to play a Chopin piano piece and pioneering a Pollock-esque field of art where there are no rules or negative feedback loops to correct you?
That's not a double-blind standard - you are comparing pipes to chairs. Although I can understand that one may care for the homeopathy or placebo effect of having the "real" item.
But I believe that there are artists that could make a better Pollock than Pollock himself.
Also, art can be looked at as a science experiment where the artist performs an experiment and shares their results with the world. Expressionism is one such "field of research" with Jackson Pollock being a prominent researcher. His body of work is like a groundbreaking experiment and each painting is an artifact of that experiment. In other words buying a Jackson Pollock is sort of like buying one of Einsteins papers.
Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is probably the most valuable painting in the world, a canonical work recognized instantly by probably half the world's population. Van Gogh died penniless. He gave away his paintings for food and wine.
Does that mean "Starry Night" was worthless when Van Gogh painted it, just because no one would pay him for it? Or is the intrinsic value of the painting distinct from its economic value?
Intrinsic value is about what you value. Which may be million different things and changes over time.
When you are in a philosophical vacuum, generalizing value is useful. However, markets concertize value. The question of "why has this been so valuable" is firmly answered by "this is how much someone payed for it".
"What is value?" is an excellent philosophical question. "Why is (some item) so valuable?" is easily answered by a simple analysis of history and statistics.
I think it's very important to consider value independently of money, and Van Gogh's paintings are an excellent example of that.
To a consumer, viewer, or critic of art, the value of a work of art may be in the final product, but the artist may not view it that way at all, and it could be valuable to them because of, say, the way the process made them feel at the time, or how it helped them work through some personal issues they were going through.
So, yeah, you might feel like some abstract work of art is "garbage", or think that "my 2 year old could do that" or something, but your reaction is really irrelevant to some artists. Some artists want to be seen, recognized, acknowledged, and appreciated by the public, while others work just for themselves and really couldn't care less what you or anyone else thinks of their work.
As an abstract, visual artist myself, I find my work to be very meditative for me, and akin sometimes to digging through layers of earth and excavating something buried within, which can be fun, intriguing, or therapeutic for me. I do strive to make the final result pleasing to myself, but to me the process of creating the work itself has value, and what some random person off the street thinks of it is really of no consequence to me.
As for what a painting is worth on the art market, you have to realize that for many art buyers, these paintings are seen as investments, and their price is determined by what people are willing to pay for them (which is often determined by what they think these paintings will be worth to other investors in the future), not necessarily by them having any "objective value".
Also, what's often valued in art market and to academic critics is someone doing something first, or stretching the boundaries of what is considered art. The first "blue canvas" or whatever, is worth a lot of money even though it took absolutely no skill to create, while anyone else creating a "blue canvas" today would be ignored because they're neither being original nor pushing the boundaries of what's considered art.
As Salvador Dali once said, "The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."
On the other hand, the value of art in the art market is a testament to Any Warhol's definition of art: "Art is anything you can get away with."
I then realized art isn't just about whether you could have done something, but would you have done it. Whenever I look at art now I ask myself both questions: Could I have painted like Rembrandt? No. Would I ever have thought to drip paint onto a massive canvas and call it art? No. Both are equally as a valid. This applies to music and books and movies, etc. Would I ever have thought of the plot to Reservoir Dogs? Never.
Art, in my opinion, still has to evoke emotion, and be the result of a creative effort. So a music piece generated by a computer doesn't really count, but the code written to program it definitely does.
Of course art is art and everyone has their opinion about it, this is just my way of looking at it.
Part of abstract art not understood is just that, a foreign language. Part of it is a navel gazing community congratulating itself. Part of it is a popularity contest with random winners.
It’s the problem with a specialty which is tending towards a singularity: quality becomes ever harder to judge and by ever fewer people who must dedicate ever more time to even understand. There are lots of hangers on who have only vague ideas about the quality and as a result the field gets overrun with nonsense. That doesn’t mean there is nothing there.
It's just more CIA-based nonsense.
I'm sure the irony isn't lost on you that not too long ago Van Gogh was decidedly "new school" and considered random colors and squiggly lines that most people didn't see the value in.
Art criticism has almost nothing to do with how much a piece is worth at auction. The price of a painting essentially comes down to the "fine art" world being a popularity contest.
That's not a fair question to ask an art critic.
I mean, if you asked me why it's worth forty of your minutes to listen to Gyo:rgy Ligeti's Violin Concerto, I'd take a shot at it.
But if Ligeti's music happened to be tied to an international black market such that his scores were being bought and sold for a quarter of a billion dollars what could I possibly say?
and possibly communism http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20161004-was-modern-art-a-w...
I don't know if you mean this painting specifically, or paintings in general, but obviously, art is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Now, there are many reasons a person might pay a lot for a piece, or how a piece might end up selling for more than an expert would expect. Here are just a handful:
1. Someone buys expensive art and donates it to a museum for a nice tax deduction. The more the painting is, the more the deduction. The person who bought Number 17A immediately donated it to a museum.
2. Two collectors are both really rich and both really interested in a piece and get into a bidding war. It only takes two, but sometimes there are many people who want a particular piece or a piece from a particular artist.
3. A collector (or dealer) might try to spur interest in an artist by overpaying for a piece to try and reset the price for said artist.
4. You can launder money by buying or selling art at auction.
Of course, the fact that this guy [2] is not also in the Smithsonian is strong evidence that it is in fact completely arbitrary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_field [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owSZs7H24UY
But like, while somewhat over represented in Vienna modern circles, they were no majority at any point nor only the ones liking it. Probably not even more likely to like it.
Consider, those blank white canvases take very little skill and creativity to produce. What they are a snapshot of a moment in art where very rich, well connected artists got to the idea of a blank white canvas as a message "first." Thus, they staked their flag in the ground and claimed that signpost in the long road of art history, and their rich, well-connected art selling friends probably convinced some gullible curators and collectors that those completely contentless abstractions are somehow valuable.
I'll give Pollock and others their due, that is some very interesting technique. However, as an oil painter myself, I believe the solid color canvasses hanging in museums are a slap in the face to the craftsmanship and sheer genius of the great painters, Pollock included.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-many-deaths-of-a-...
To be fair a lot of simple looking art like this is produced by artists with a sound understanding of composition and color theory. For some of them everything they do is done with intention and thought. However, having a sound understanding of color theory and composition are just two basic skills any good artist will possess in addition to a multitude of other skills.
Note that I'm not saying that artists have to adhere to standard color theory and composition. I'm saying that when people deviate from them usually the good ones do it in an intentional way with a full understanding, and the specific way they break the rules is well thought out and so it works.
While I'm not a fan of solid color canvasses myself, I don't object to them on the grounds of lack of craftsmanship, as I've seen plenty of paintings with masterful craftsmanship which I find don't move me in the least and which I find utterly boring and without value (such as Chuck Close paintings or other hyper/photorealist work). Conversely, I'm a great fan of children's artwork -- art that almost by definition completely lacks any skill or craftsmanship at all. I find it a lot more refreshing and original than much art by highly educated and skilled adult artists.
The same goes for some "naive" or "outsider" art, art of the mentally ill, and "primitive" art. All of these vary in skill level, of course, but even those created without much if any skill are often very powerful and show me a new and different way of looking at the world than what I get in traditional academic or popular art.
I think this is what gets under my skin. I don't really have a problem with the artists, anybody who is able to fleece a few million from the super rich is doing a public service as far as I'm concerned.
It's the people in the galleries, auction houses and general art world that get up my nose. The ones that tell you you are a philistine because you can't appreciate a somewhat random splattering of paint or an unmade bed. We already have empirical evidence[1] that wine snobs don't know what they are talking about, perhaps we should try and find the same for art snobs.
[1] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...
You don't have to like it, but there is no way you can in good faith study a Pollock and come away believing a 3 year old could have done that.
>To me all I see is squiggly lines and random colors.
I favor the Bitcoin hypothesis - a consensus derived worth for a portable, mostly anonymous, value store of no intrinsic utility - just slightly ahead of gold and diamonds really ...
(Only usefully available to the really rich, though)
It is certainly not art critics that decided that a Pollock should cost 200M. But is considered worth 200M because some billionaire will pay that much for it.
Perfect what, exactly? What's the end goal of the perfection? There's no way to measure it.
Signing my name is technically very difficult - I've been perfecting it for 20+ years on various random documents and I can 100% tell if someone other than me signed my name (you can too if you study my signature for a few years at a college).
Does that automatically make my signature praiseworthy and worth millions? What if I put my signature in the center of a football field sized canvas and name it "Football Sig 100.1ZZZ"?
In all seriousness, a signature of that scale would be art. It’s the ultimate expression of ego and people may well want to see it, because you had a point for all that labor involved (even if the point was proving how stupid art can be).
There are people (including a Prager propaganda video featuring a jealous painting peofessor) who claim that art like Pollack's isn't art or isn't good because it looks like paint thoughtlessly splattered on a floor or a smock. The point is, it doesn't, and the way it doesn't (chaotic yet balanced multiscale patterns of colors) is interesting.
The most important part of a painting to the audience is how it looks and how it makes them feel. And to a lot of people Pollock works look lazy, and it makes people feel kind of ripped off, like they paid $25 to get into this museum and they are looking at what looks like pure randomness (even if it’s truly not, even if it truly took massive amounts of talent to create).
And inevitably defenders come out and insist that it’s actually groundbreaking and the first of its kind. And inevitably they look like snobs.
Pollock paintings are like that rare movie on Rotten Tomatoes that has a 100% critic score and a 10% viewer score. It’s really hard not to side with the viewers.
Or maybe Pollock paintings are like a Mitsubishi Mirage. Sure, it took hundreds of engineers great skill and hours to make one, certainly I could never make one, but that doesn’t change the fact that most people consider it a hella shitty car. And I’m sure someone’s out there praising its low price and great fuel economy.
In the case of art, I think art has value that is at least somewhat objective. Liking art, on the other hand, is almost purely subjective. But since recognizing the objective value of art requires some study and effort, people generally aren't in a position to judge.
So instead, we get this weird leap where "Pollock paintings are simple and stupid"... but that collides with virtually everyone with some education in art saying "No, he was a genius". So do people think "Huh, maybe there's something here I don't understand"? No. Instead, we get "Pollock is bad art, and anyone who thinks it's good is either pretending to be cool or trying to scam us".
This is why "dismiss whatever they don't find pleasing" is a bad policy.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves-at...
Never gets old: http://reverent.org/an_artist_or_an_ape.html
WRT Abstract Expressionism being promoted by the CIA, I fail to find why that means the art is neither good nor valuable. Can you expand on why that matters? If the CIA backed/touted an artist you _do_ respect, would that immediately set them in the "meme-tier"?
>WRT Abstract Expressionism being promoted by the CIA, I fail to find why that means the art is neither good nor valuable.
I like socialist realism, so I don't really care if it's government funded; or even genocidal government funded as long as it's good art. Abstract expressionism was and always will be a meme tier regime loyalty test; literally emperor clothes. Show the socialist realism "tin tits" over Kiev's skyline to a caveman and he'll understand it. It takes a KWA-Soviet bureaucrat type, initiated into inhuman ugliness, to "understand" Pollock.
Proven false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Brassau
One thing I did learn though was that it would take a lot of effort to get anything close to actual Pollock. His stuff really is more than "random paint splashes".
Try it if you don't believe me.
1992: Author John Briggs published a book featuring the first observation that Jackson Pollock’s poured paintings have the appearance of fractal patterns (Fractals, Touchstone Publishers, 1992)
1997-8: Physicist Richard Taylor built a chaotic pendulum called the “Pollockizer” to generate fractal paintings using the pouring technique (Physics World, 76, November 1997, New Scientist, vol. 2144, 30, 1998 and The Art of Science documentary, ABC, May 1998)
1998: Mathematician Richard Voss conducted the first fractal analysis of an artwork. He used the analysis to distinguish between illustrative paintings by different Chinese artists (Fractal Image Encoding and Analysis, Springer, 1998)
1999: Taylor’s group published the first fractal analysis of Pollock’s paintings (Nature, vol. 399, 422, 1999. See also Scientific American, vol. 287, 116-121, 2002 and Leonardo, vol. 35, 203-207, 2002)
1999: Taylor introduced the term “Fractal Expressionism” to describe fractal art generated by humans rather than computers (Physics World, 25, October 1999)
1999: Art conservator Jim Coddington proposed that fractal analysis should be explored as a technique to help authenticate Pollock paintings
2003: Psychologist Branka Spehar collaborated with Taylor to demonstrate that Pollock’s fractals induce the same physiological responses in observers as nature’s fractals and computer-generated fractals (Chaos and Graphics, vol. 27, 813, 2003)
2004-5: Physicist Jonas Mureika’s group quantified Pollock’s fractals using a multi-fractal analysis technique (Physical Review E, vol. 72, 046101-1-15, 2005 and Chaos, vol. 15, 043702-1-6, 2005).
2005: Taylor’s group used a dimensional interplay fractal analysis to distinguish 14 authentic Pollock paintings from 51 non-Pollock paintings with 100% accuracy (Pattern Recognition Letters, vol. 28, 695-702, 2005)
2005: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation asked Taylor to perform a fractal analysis on the “Matter paintings” found in a New York storage locker (Nature, 439, 648, 2006). The analysis identified “significant deviations from Pollock’s characteristics.” Taylor cautioned that the results should be “coupled with other important information such as provenance, connoisseurship and materials analysis.” Two years later, materials scientists showed that pigments on the paintings dated from after Pollock’s death
2006: Physicist Kate Jones-Smith and colleagues published a study of non-fractal star drawings and claimed that fractal analysis is flawed because their analysis falsely identified the stars as fractal (Nature, vol. 444, E9-10, 2006). In their rebuttal, Taylor’s group performed their own fractal analysis on the star patterns and showed that the stars were, in fact, not fractal (Nature, vol. 444, E10-11, 2006). Taylor reported further flaws in Jones-Smith’s analysis. Fractals expert Lansaros Gallos summed up: “What Jones-Smith has done is just a simple trick – this is bad science about fractals.” (ScienceNews, vol. 171, 122, 2007) Jones-Smith raised one valid issue: whether Pollock’s patterns occur over enough magnifications to be called fractal. However, she admitted she was at odds with the research community. She would have to dismiss half of all the investigations of fractals ever published based on this concern. Benoit Mandelbrot, inventor of the term fractal, summarized: “I do believe Pollocks are fractal.” (ScienceNews, vol. 171, 122, 2007).
2006-7: Computer Scientist Bruce Gooch’s group used computers to generate Pollock-like images by varying their fractal characteristics (Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering, 97-104, 2006 and Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, vol.1, 73-83, 2007)
2007: Art theorist Claude Cernuschi’s and colleagues presented an “arc-fractal” model of Pollock’s paintings (Pollock Matters, McMullen Museum of Art, 2007)
2007: Jones-Smith and colleagues announced to the press that they had submitted a ...
If I kept up with it for some time and gained more knowledge of the paint materials and how they worked together, I'm sure I could create something similar. Art doesn't have to be painstakingly "difficult" or require superhuman skill in order to be considered "good". Sure, some forms of art do require more skill than others, but that by no means translates 1-to-1 with cultural impact.
You mention elsewhere that Pollock's main contribution is art as "process" which I would agree with, its something that he shared with a few of his contemporaries. I'm also very interested in generative art, and he is an early example of this idea. I'm aware he didn't invent abstract art or anything like that.
https://medium.com/@MichaelMcBride/how-jackson-pollock-and-t...
https://www.christopherhallart.com/blog/2015/2/10/jackson-po...
Even if either of the sources you cited suggested that the CIA specifically looked for low-quality art (spoiler: they don't), I'm not sure the CIA qualifies as the foremost authority on artistic achievement.
Those approaches are only connected insofar as they remove traditions and experiment in new ways. That’s why I always think that a wholesale rejection of modern art is so ridiculous. You have to at least be more specific.
And you're right - modern art shares the rejection of what came before, and experimentation in new ways. But rejection for its own sake, change for the sake of change, lost its novelty about a century ago. That leaves us with ugly art, that is doing its best to steal the oxygen from anything aesthetically pleasing.
The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. A distinguished British painter who taught at the Slade asked me, 'How did you learn how to do animation?' I answered that I was lucky enough to have done a lot of life drawing at art school, so without realizing it I got the feeling for weight which is so vital to animation.
Then I said, 'What am I telling you for? You're teaching at the Slade and it's famous for its life drawing and excellent draftsmen.'
'If the students want to do that,' he said, 'then they've got to club together and hire themselves a model and do it in their own home.' At first I thought he was joking - but no! Life drawing as a subject went out years ago. It wasn't even on the curriculum!
-- Animator's Survival Kit, page 32. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-OTUJDZcAzLcDhFbVN3TjdwUnc/...
Life drawing was never more accessible then today. For that matter, learning any drawing was never more accessible then today.
Even someone like Pollock uses paint, uses a canvas. His works are presented in museums the same way paintings from, say, the 17th century are. His paintings are recognizably painting-shaped. So there are some traditions he does not reject.
So modern art is not some sort of wholesale rejection of everything that came before. People just allowed themselves to reject different things. That’s the big picture.
However, like modernism as a whole, there certainly was a rejection of traditions and among the many approaches there were very dogmatic ones (but a single approach being dogmatic and rejecting things stringently still leads to diversity if other approaches accept those things and reject different things). Postmodernism has certainly been breaking that up, though.
So to address your points: * Artists had reasons for picking their approaches. You might not agree with those reasons, but those reasons existed. I think you would be hard pressed to find artists that rejected traditions just because. * A rejection of things that are “aesthetically pleasing” is not a common theme among modern art, though declaring the goal of creating something “aesthetically pleasing” as not a goal or as just one possible goal is certainly an oft rejected tradition.
People in our industry are notorious for dressing down to where the art of dressing up is lost to the silicon sands of time
Most anyone you ask from an entry level to a manager, director, vice president all the way to Jack Dorsey himself will tell you dress is meaningless and unimportant to "getting things done and building great things" and I know it comes from a place of ignorance because I used to be the same way until I stumbled into a Brooks Brothers one day a few years back
Dress is a lot like art in that one must master the classics but that too is becoming the exception in fail fast culture where the means exceedingly outweigh the ends
So I ask myself what would Alan Turing do? And I know he'd dress formally and carry on because back then computer science really did save lives as opposed to now when the user is only worth the data that can be squeezed out of them -- I'm sure this is exactly the future the hippies in the Homebrew Computer Club envisioned when they convened in their dark garages by the light of their fluorescent vacuum tubes to worship their newfound digital deities dressed in jeans and printed T's /rant
It was great. They loved wearing the suits (often their first suit) and opened a lot of doors for us with our customers. They were tired of tech people showing up in rags, and then we'd show up in suits. For a small business like ours, it was a game changer.
Formal wear unlocked some muscles your organization never even knew it had, and also some difficult conversations and investment dynamics which arose but were settled magnanimously enough and seem to have led to modest gains in morale despite initial skepticism and coercion / push & pushback
The point is you got to somewhere you didn't know you'd go and now you have a taste for how the world actually works that's ever so slightly outside of the organizational event horizon i.e. the collective comfort zone that keeps you all locked in to a shared inertia
I'd venture, not to harp on your example that the organization never quite reached the critical mass that would possibly have occurred had you followed down this road a ways, and perhaps the whole thing fizzled out after some new people got onboarded and the old guard began to drift away?
> now you have a taste for how the world actually works
I've known that since college, I just was lackadaisical about applying it.
Dressing better is a big part of being more successful. My advice to anyone who feels their talents are underappreciated and overlooked is to consider upgrading their wardrobe. Billionaires can dress like slobs, but the rest of us can't really afford to. Dressing better won't close the deal, but it can open up opportunities one wasn't aware of.
Working on one's speech patterns is effective, too.
There's what we say, what we mean, and what to intend
The conversation has gotten so mixed up its hard for anyone to know anything especially with people with whom one is unfamiliar and in large groups
Dress is very much part of that conversation and is a great heuristic of where the conversation is going; as a very stark generalization I'd venture that people with advanced dress sense also have advanced conversation skills
Don't get me wrong I'm sure that people exist who don't fit this but that's why it's just a heuristic
And before you mention judging a book by its cover I'm not being judgemental I'm simply stating that humans still need all the help they can get -- we can't all be Kurt Cobains because there are simply some conversations that can't be had in certain milieus
Unfortunately day after day for a year say, it becomes quite apparent that some people dress without intention, intentionally and that hurts morale
Sometimes dressing down is purposeful projection of success. It's like playing hard to get. Or "I'm so good at what I do that I don't even need to dress well to earn business."
Hence the stereotypical billionaire dressing like a slob. But that don't work so well for the rest of us.
For a fictional example, see the TV series "Billions". Axe, the head of the hedge fund, dresses like a slob while his minions all dress to the nines.
That's my point. I don't think that is always true. I think it might actually work in some cases
You'd wonder what would happen if the military went casual?
It's ironic our corporations use the military C&C structure but not the military's attention to dress details
https://img0.etsystatic.com/004/0/6939617/il_fullxfull.39168...
But then again, those aren’t his most famous works are they? Something more famous like Mural looks like something your one-year-old would spit up.
I think the outsized monetary and historical value lies in the controversy, and the story behind the art, not the art itself.
I can completely understand why it’s both loved and hated. The end result looks random and doesn’t convey any particular meaning, basically a defiant statement against interpretation, but it’s also just planned enough to send you searching for patterns and meaning. I can see why it could be pleasing and impactful to the right person.
To detractors it’s like modern art gone too far: it’s just nonsense that’s fucking with you, like the artistic version of an Internet troll.
Personally, I just can’t come around to it.
The interpretation game is just the 'retail front' for art.
I'm not really sure what, but that suggested to me that there is something there.
The reason why "modern art" is about "abstracts," "concepts" or whatever dealers and fooled enthusiasts use is because this leaves room for marketing to BS people into believing it is actually "hard" Just notice the sales copies are as abstract as some of these BS paintings.
And if that fails you can always use shame "you just don't understand modern art you pleb" ... and sure just because your scribbles and splashes you tried at home don't look like Pollock's that doesn't make Pollock's technique any more "harder" ... I equally doubt Pollock would emulate your scribbles and splashes ... I doubt any great artist Velasquez or Rembrandt or non-artist would be able to emulate it either.
It's easy, once you perform a highly repetitive task very high number of times, you will start to follow a certain pattern as to save brain output.
Thus anyone splashing paints for such a long time would fall into his own "signature" routine. You don't need to use intellect, deep thought or inspiration.
And once it's legitimised by "specific foot distance" and nonsense like that that he (likely entirely randomly) and equations nobody will ever verify you can safely continue making money not worrying about other BS "artists" overcrowding the space.
As for the other bit: In the end, you're part of it as much as anyone else is. So if you see nothing there, then there is nothing there for you. So be it. Onward to the next one. Till you feel emotion evoked. For me, Diebenkorn's Window makes me feel this longing for this particular life I had briefly. And that's it for me. I've walked through halls of paintings that are some repulsive, lots boring, and some just incredibly magnetic. And some of the 'ugly' ones are famous and some of the ones I like aren't and that's it.
I'm not sure if there's a connection between that and this new paper; perhaps it's taken a while to get it published?
https://www.collidingworlds.org/how-fractals-science-and-tec...
I can't copy-paste, but there are a few gems in these pages.
Hilarious!