There's nothing objectively "beautiful" in Bacon's paintings, it's just some mangled faces who look objectively ugly (one could make a reference to Baudelaire and say that "ugly is beautiful", not sure if the article does that because it is behind a paywall for me) and, more importantly, those faces happened to be painted by a English-speaking white man in the mid- to late-20th century, when the powers that be needed paintings by English-speaking white men in order to better colonize the cultural landscape.
Always nice to see some art pop up on HN and Im sure the article is a beautifully constructed piece of prose. I also just personally have had some moments where Ive really been inspired by Bacon's work and Ive seen his work empower a lot of young art students. Maybe more than any other individual artist (not totally sure why).
BUT Im extremely happy to see someone calling out an article made by a magazine so obviously (historically) for a primarily white male audience by a primarily white male staff featuring a white male artist who has been written about and gushed over ad nauseam from a cultural / historical moment of unrivaled white male domination. As if Bacon, Van Gogh were the only two humans to ever make art. Stop turning dead people into part of your decrepit 20th century subjugation spectacle machine.
All humans are artists, including software engineers and HN trolls.
That said I didn't read the article and Im a white male artist.
Please don't take HN threads into predictable, tedious flamewars; post shallow dismissals of other people's work; or post unsubstantive comments generally.
It's not about "cannot criticize", it's about comment quality. Low-information, high-indignation comments are not what we want here.
Thoughtful critique is welcome, but that is not what you posted—you posted a shallow, reflexive dismissal ("just some mangled faces") followed by an egregious flamewar tangent. You get a point for Baudelaire but that was not enough to redeem what you posted there.
I remember a quote from one of his documentaries - “How can you cut the flesh open and join with the other person? It’s an impossibility. You may love somebody very much but how near can you get to them? You’re always, unfortunately, sort of strangers.” It’s profound and captures the essence of his view of the world. It was so deeply animalistic and visceral. Bacon is one of my favorite artists - from motif, substance, contrast, beauty, gore, etc to the realization into thick impasto style, composition, giant canvas, color harmony and his technique of “painting by chance” as he describes it - exceptional and extraordinary on many levels.
For anyone that hasn’t discovered a new mathematical formula or founded a billion dollar startup by age 22, take heart. Bacon didn’t really start painting until his late twenties and his first breakthrough came in his mid thirties. Now he’s probably in the top 20 of well-known 20th century artists.
Another interesting aspect of Bacon was his work schedule. It’s a miracle he lived as long as he did (to age 82.)
From Daily Rituals:
To the outside observer, Bacon appeared to thrive on disorder. His studios were environments of extreme chaos, with paint smeared on the walls and a knee-high jumble of books, brushes, papers, broken furniture, and other detritus piled on the floor. (More agreeable interiors stifled his creativity, he said.) And when he wasn’t painting, Bacon lived a life of hedonistic excess, eating multiple rich meals a day, drinking tremendous quantities of alcohol, taking whatever stimulants were handy, and generally staying out later and partying harder than any of his contemporaries.
Edit: just adding to this, because I’m sure someone will mention it. Bacon did indeed paint in his early twenties and even had an exhibition or two, but reviews were bad and he gave up art for a ~decade. So, I count that as “not really painting.”
For anyone who hasn't started a billion dollar startup by 22, you're probably not going to
The tech industry has this weird habit of "inspiring" people to get into tech because they could build the next facebook or google.
In reality, engineering/software can land you in a very comfortable lifestyle if you're good at it and I think more people should be focusing their efforts on becoming better engineers for that middle class lifestyle, rather than trying and failing to create the next big thing all the time.
> I think more people should be focusing their efforts on becoming better engineers for that middle class lifestyle
That's a perfectly acceptable plan if it fits into your personal vision for yourself.
Some people want to create things and make a business out of it. They want the full gamut of experience, including the hard times that can come with it.
I'm one of those people. I left a very well paid gig to bootstrap my company and grind it out. I've learned so much and I employ 10 people. I value that and it gives me a lot of satisfaction. It's just how I have fun and get enjoyment out of life.
I would advise against chasing "a billion dollars" though. Chasing that kind of money is more likely than not an ego play (catering to your ego rarely leads anywhere of value), and yes, the odds are against you.
You can, with reasonable odds, build a good business. I recently read somewhere that most successful businesses are started by people in their 40s, which makes sense.
Wait, is this considered old now? I recognize that you're fighting the good fight against ageism and giving up. But by painting Bacon as an exceptional case, you're also helping reinforce the myth that of you're not wildly successful by 35, you've missed the boat.
I have a hard time believing that Bacon's case is such an outlier. I never collected the data but i know of plenty artists and entrepreneurs who started in their thirties, forties and older.
And he was 36 when he published general relativity.
Which was his last really big achievement. Of course he still continued to produce a ton of work, many individual pieces of which would be considered a capstone achievement for many ordinary physicists.
But a lot of his effort was spent on a unified field theory that never really came together. And a lot was spent on trying to prove that quantum mechanics was incomplete -- which turned out to have some useful discoveries that largely affirm that QM is complete (at least within its domain).
In other words, he kinda was a model of somebody who did his best work before his mid-30s, and spent the rest of his career merely being very, very smart.
I don't know about artists, but I do know that the median successful entrepreneur is a middle-aged veteran of their industry who set up a company that nobody outside the field will ever know about.
Bacon (the artist) shouldn't have been allowed to overload that name. He should have been forced to use, say, Francis L. Bacon (yes, I realise he didn't have a middle name).
But why? It was his actual birth name. He also wasn't knighted so you could use the title "Sir" to distinguish the other Francis Bacon from him, though I've noticed Americans don't use the title generally when referring to those knighted in the UK (and presumably other countries as well).
Francis Bacon certainly ranks high on my list of artists who could be serial killers. I saw his exhibit at the Pompidou and man, it's fascinating but utterly brutal.
Apropos of nothing, I've wondered if there's a sly Bacon joke in Killing Eve. In the second season, Villanelle sees a painting of a man hung upside down, insides slit open. She comments that "they look like bacon". While from the character's perspective it's likely that she's just comparing the people to food, it does work well as an art joke cause the painting truly does have the same macabre feel of a Francis Bacon
I'm not sure what makes you think he could have been a serial killer, but if it's the subject matter of his art I wonder what you think of horror authors and filmmakers, or authors of true-crime novels and filmmakers, or the hundreds of millions of people who are their fans.
Just because one finds such dark visions of humanity fascinating doesn't mean you want to hurt anyone. I've never seen a shred of evidence that such people are any more prone to violence (much less serial killing) than anyone else.
If anything, there's an argument to be made for the cathartic value of such art, and its those who don't have such an outlet who I'd be more worried about.
I had this morbid curiosity about Bacon's work and life a long while ago and I happened to find a YouTube documentary[0] about him. Pretty interesting and sad at the same time. It's worth a watch, IMO.
I got sucked into watching that last night. It's brutal and engrossing and hard to tear away from. Same with the Bragg-Bacon interview linked elsewhere in the thread.
40 comments
[ 151 ms ] story [ 474 ms ] threadAnd here we are. The powers that be need foot soldiers like you in order to better colonize the cultural landscape with white ethno-masochism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
BUT Im extremely happy to see someone calling out an article made by a magazine so obviously (historically) for a primarily white male audience by a primarily white male staff featuring a white male artist who has been written about and gushed over ad nauseam from a cultural / historical moment of unrivaled white male domination. As if Bacon, Van Gogh were the only two humans to ever make art. Stop turning dead people into part of your decrepit 20th century subjugation spectacle machine.
All humans are artists, including software engineers and HN trolls.
That said I didn't read the article and Im a white male artist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thoughtful critique is welcome, but that is not what you posted—you posted a shallow, reflexive dismissal ("just some mangled faces") followed by an egregious flamewar tangent. You get a point for Baudelaire but that was not enough to redeem what you posted there.
I see what you did there.
For me, BTW, bacon is one of those mouthgasm foods that make it impossible to think coherently.
Another interesting aspect of Bacon was his work schedule. It’s a miracle he lived as long as he did (to age 82.)
From Daily Rituals:
To the outside observer, Bacon appeared to thrive on disorder. His studios were environments of extreme chaos, with paint smeared on the walls and a knee-high jumble of books, brushes, papers, broken furniture, and other detritus piled on the floor. (More agreeable interiors stifled his creativity, he said.) And when he wasn’t painting, Bacon lived a life of hedonistic excess, eating multiple rich meals a day, drinking tremendous quantities of alcohol, taking whatever stimulants were handy, and generally staying out later and partying harder than any of his contemporaries.
Edit: just adding to this, because I’m sure someone will mention it. Bacon did indeed paint in his early twenties and even had an exhibition or two, but reviews were bad and he gave up art for a ~decade. So, I count that as “not really painting.”
The tech industry has this weird habit of "inspiring" people to get into tech because they could build the next facebook or google.
In reality, engineering/software can land you in a very comfortable lifestyle if you're good at it and I think more people should be focusing their efforts on becoming better engineers for that middle class lifestyle, rather than trying and failing to create the next big thing all the time.
That's a perfectly acceptable plan if it fits into your personal vision for yourself.
Some people want to create things and make a business out of it. They want the full gamut of experience, including the hard times that can come with it.
I'm one of those people. I left a very well paid gig to bootstrap my company and grind it out. I've learned so much and I employ 10 people. I value that and it gives me a lot of satisfaction. It's just how I have fun and get enjoyment out of life.
I would advise against chasing "a billion dollars" though. Chasing that kind of money is more likely than not an ego play (catering to your ego rarely leads anywhere of value), and yes, the odds are against you.
You can, with reasonable odds, build a good business. I recently read somewhere that most successful businesses are started by people in their 40s, which makes sense.
> For anyone who hasn't started a billion dollar startup, you're probably not going to
Wait, is this considered old now? I recognize that you're fighting the good fight against ageism and giving up. But by painting Bacon as an exceptional case, you're also helping reinforce the myth that of you're not wildly successful by 35, you've missed the boat.
I have a hard time believing that Bacon's case is such an outlier. I never collected the data but i know of plenty artists and entrepreneurs who started in their thirties, forties and older.
And he was 36 when he published general relativity.
Which was his last really big achievement. Of course he still continued to produce a ton of work, many individual pieces of which would be considered a capstone achievement for many ordinary physicists.
But a lot of his effort was spent on a unified field theory that never really came together. And a lot was spent on trying to prove that quantum mechanics was incomplete -- which turned out to have some useful discoveries that largely affirm that QM is complete (at least within its domain).
In other words, he kinda was a model of somebody who did his best work before his mid-30s, and spent the rest of his career merely being very, very smart.
It juxtaposes the source material Bacon used for his paintings (pictures, film, other painting mostly by Velazquez etc.) with the eventual paintings.
This is briefly mentioned in the New Yorker article but a fascinating aspect of his work: he was remixing / paraphrasing all the time!
Apropos of nothing, I've wondered if there's a sly Bacon joke in Killing Eve. In the second season, Villanelle sees a painting of a man hung upside down, insides slit open. She comments that "they look like bacon". While from the character's perspective it's likely that she's just comparing the people to food, it does work well as an art joke cause the painting truly does have the same macabre feel of a Francis Bacon
Just because one finds such dark visions of humanity fascinating doesn't mean you want to hurt anyone. I've never seen a shred of evidence that such people are any more prone to violence (much less serial killing) than anyone else.
If anything, there's an argument to be made for the cathartic value of such art, and its those who don't have such an outlet who I'd be more worried about.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgrO5za0lSY