Yes, people are also running faster than they used to, they play chess better than they used to, we've been pushing the limits (not me personally lol) of what is possible and it stands to reason that portraitists are also getting better.
The only objection to this I can imagine is rooted in the misconception that it's somehow irreverent to see today's students as better than the old masters. The brilliance of the past heroes consisted in pushing the needle of what was possible, and today's heroes are pushing it even further.
That’s a great point, it surprises nobody to see today’s students posting better performances than yesterday’s masters when it comes to sport, or have today’s grad students know more than trailblazers of 19th century science, but that seems a lot more alien when it comes to the arts (at least in the general public).
But as in sports, or sciences, or architecture, or engineering, what the old masters had to discover or invent then became part of the standard curriculum, and could be refined, built upon further, and better tooling could be designed and taught.
This is an intriguing proposition, but for the architecture we can trivially prove it false. Just go outside and look at the new developments going up, then go to the library and look at pictures of literal tenements from a hundred years ago.
I'd say architecture fits in a bit differently here, due to the extremely high barriers to entry (you have to secure property AND fund the design AND fund the construction) compared to almost any other form of artistic expression. American society (and much of the rest of the world) has become more profit-focused over time, and buildings are a huge cost. Therefore, they've been increasingly designed to be purpose-built. Aesthetics cost money, and rarely serve the purpose of whoever is paying for the building.
If you funded the most talented architects alive to create works of beauty, I bet you'd get it.
You're not wrong, but I think that's more a function of how one becomes a respected architect than the potentials of the students. I suspect it's an out growth of what Taleb called the 'expert problem' in that the best architects are anointed as such by other architects, rather than the public.
Not a whole lot going on. Back in the day, you always would have some kind of good war going on, for one. And then you had all of those other big cultural issues, you could always pump out a book about communism or three. Today, all we can do is to express our opinion on whether or not a man named Joe Rogan has a good podcast.
There are multiple wars going on right now? There was attempt to overthrow election results last year? You can write about terrorism, islamic, far right wing, incels, blm protests, drugs.
Many famous classics are about interpersonal issues and down to earth minor issues which is something that still goes on. You can write about good old alcoholism, abuse, love.
The crime still exists, so something like Crime and Punishment is super doable.
Do you subscribe to any poetry publication? Poetry, New Yorker, three penny review and plenty other big and small publications have great contemporary poems. I would rather argue we are much worse in reading poetry now.
Great contemporary poems, perhaps, but not contemporary great poems.
If we look at the current issue[0] of The Threepenny Review, the pathology is quite obvious. The three "poems" in the list all share certain features:
- A variable amount of syllables per line (e.g. no metre)
- No rhymes
- No other discernible differences from prose
At that point, why even bother calling it a poem? You might as well save yourself the time by opening up the day's newspaper in a text editor, clicking randomly, and pressing enter. When you feel there's enough line breaks, you're ready to publish.
A poem, by the Washington Post and Emacs auto-fill-mode:
Russian warships sailed toward
the Black Sea on Tuesday,
stoking alarm among U.S. and
European security officials
who warned that the final
capabilities for a large-scale
assault on Ukraine appeared to
be falling into place.
On a day of frantic shuttle
diplomacy by French President
Emmanuel Macron, who hopped
among capitals trying to avert
a conflict, Russian officials
gave little sign that the
French leader’s initiatives
had changed their
calculations.
"Do you subscribe to any poetry publication? Poetry, New Yorker, three penny review and plenty other big and small publications have great contemporary poems. I would rather argue we are much worse in reading poetry now."
This is all so subjective.
Very few poems resonate with me... maybe something like 1 out of 100, and almost always they're old poems, like those by Kabir, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost.
It's exceedingly rare for any contemporary poetry that I've read to come anywhere close to being as moving, interesting, or deep as some of these classics.
That said, 99% of old poetry doesn't move me either.
I'd read a lot more poetry if the signal to noise ratio was higher, but sadly for my taste it's not.
So that’s not about relative quality of poetry over time. It is about signal vs noise. Fundamentally this is a strategy of waiting for history to filter out the noise. With 1% you are taking a pretty low pass filter, though. In my experience, I enjoy about 20% of poems I read, the remaining 80% I will quickly skim so signal to noise in terms of my time is more like 90/10.
"People write worse poetry than they used to, the books are worse now, and all the architecture is terrible."
What percentage of newly created poetry, books, and architecture do you read or look at?
There's an absolute glut of information right now, and no human is capable of consuming more than a tiny fraction of it.
I'm absolutely sure that "great" creative work is being made right now, but it's going to take time for humanity to sift through everything out there to find the gold.
That's not to mention that one man's trash is another man's treasure, and plenty of people who we consider "great" now were completely ignored or even denigrated in their lifetimes.
Not a big poetry reader, but books are definitely not worse now. Some of the best books I've ever read have been published in the last 10-20 years, across various genres.
Not to mention the huge leap in quality of TV writing.
For me, a large part of what makes the art of the past so captivating is its historicity. It reflects and intervenes in a context
- politically, intellectually, economically, artistically - radically different to our own. Looking at great art from the past is an insight into different ways of thinking and being, and different moments in history. Reducing art to technique misses this.
I tend to believe that, given how intensive we train players these days, but are we actually certain that it is the case? I guess we could ask a chess engine to rate all available games but that would not be terribly convincing because they were playing a different style, against the players of their time (unlike a running competition, you really need two players to play a game of chess).
Also, for some past players we don't have that many games to begin with.
(Context: I'm a very bad chess player, but have been getting into it lately.)
I think we're fairly certain that chess players today would beat chess players of the past, in a regular 1 on 1 game. Assuming the old chess players didn't have time to prepare.
Chess programs can rate the accuracy of moves, so we can see how accurate past players were. In addition, a lot has been discovered about more correct opening theory - a grandmaster of the past would make many mistakes in the opening that a modern grandmaster would be able to take advantage of, simply because they didn't know those lines.
We've been pushing the limits of things which we care a lot about and invest a lot of time and money into. Is portrait painting one of those things? My impression is that it took a bit of a dip when the camera was invented, and the number of people doing it seriously today is fairly low. There are plenty of digital artists making images of human beings, but how many of them are traditional portraits? Probably not too many. So, it would not surprise me if the field had not increased as much as, say, chess or semi-conductor production.
There is so much talent out there due to increased accessibility that people who don't specialize in portraits are still extremely capable, many (arguably) more so than old masters. I think even more than sports, where physiology limits how much one can train / improve. Digital tools have allowed artists to accumulate much more practice. Literally not having to wait for paint to dry is a huge advantage.
Except, progress isn't guaranteed by the march of time.
Take something more objective than fine art, like Roman Concrete [1]. To this day the Pantheon is the largest freestanding dome in the world because of the concrete's disproportionately good durability and longevity. It puts modern mass produced concrete to shame.
the old masters were certainly talented but you could argue much of their fame comes from there being so few people who'd have had the means to pursue their art hundred of years ago whereas nowadays many people can find the means one way or another.
Are you sure 1922 was worst then 2022 for drawing? You could have had steady income from being a painter in the past afaik. People nowadays just don't buy originals, but they used to in the past.
People bought copies back in 1922 (and 1822, for that matter). Not everyone having artwork in their homes had originals. Some of those copies became so ubiquitous that sometimes they morphed into kitsch (see Dürer's "Praying Hands") much like modern art prints do today.
You could make a point that a lot less people back then had artwork in their homes back in the day, because living conditions of the masses were a lot more cramped and life was more difficult. But copies definitely were available and widespread.
I would think so, yes. Living off making paintings and selling them is not a thing anymore. Some outliers exists and some artists supplement income like that. World changed, economy changed.
Painting and portraits is something artists still learn, do as hobby or stunt (1 minute portrait drawings and such), but actually live off other things because market moved away from it.
Artists have much more flexibility today. They can create an original, have prints made to sell in the hundreds or thousands for $10, then sell the original to the one person willing to pay a few hundred bucks for it.
There's tons of original art available. I live in a small midwestern city and have no problem finding studios that "traditional" art. There are a few larger retail galleries where artists will rent out stalls to sell their work, some will set up shop next to an antique store and sell their work along with a card telling you to come next door to their gallery, and many just have their own retail store fronts. Usually in smaller, town squares.
University exhibitions are a great way to pick up original pieces for dirt cheap. Lots of university students are happy to get something for their work/assignments, and most students are already very talented by the time they get to uni.
> University exhibitions are a great way to pick up original pieces for dirt cheap. Lots of university students are happy to get something for their work/assignments, and most students are already very talented by the time they get to uni.
Yeah, but none of them is living off those paintings. It is some little extra money at best. You said it is dirt cheap, that means they earn much less then minimum wage on those paintings. I know you can buy cheap digital copies of good looking art. That does not make it easier to life off it then "hundred years ago". It makes it harder.
My point is not that it is hard to find good artists today. It is that past had many periods, including hundred years ago, in which market for painting specifically was better then market for paintings now. And it meant more people pursuing painting as a job.
You're ignoring the whole other segment of my post pointing out that there are dozens of art galleries in my tiny city where artists make money selling their traditional art work. And not just eking out a living money: they make enough money to have retail store fronts!
If it's this prevalent in a no-name city, places like NYC, Chicago, SF, etc must have hundreds or thousands of art galleries.
I have an entire house full of original paintings. Most of them were purchased in a retail gallery. It's not hard to find people who paint/draw for a living. The fact that original work can be subsidized through the sale of digital replicas make the field so much more economical than it was in the past. It's no longer the case that you need to be a wealthy family to have a painting commissioned. I've had several done.
I tend to disagree with the assessment that the an artists technique has anything to do with how good an artist is.
Case in point: in Picasso's formative years, he was a great realistic painter. He became a great artist because he pushed the boundary of abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work.
To me, Picasso was so good because he built a story (myth) around his work that resonated with so many people.
The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting because of the myth around it. It's a beautiful portait, but is it really the best portrait ever? I think in the same wing of the Louvre there are better paintings of Da Vinci on show, even though there is no crowd around it.
Recently, the myth builders have been (maybe they still are) Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, I think that's what makes them great artists.
Totally agree. There's a raft of modern realist painters who's work is so similar to photographs that they're utterly devoid of the main criteria of good art... feeling
A lot of this is compounded by the practice of working from high def photographs. Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos. As an illustration of this, try and take a photograph of a beautiful sunset and compare it to what you see
I always found that practice weird. When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas.
Yes there are many photos that you can call art, but if you're not the one that took the original photo it feels like most of the creative effort was not yours and you're just showing off your brush/pen technique.
As a disclaimer, I have 0 talent when it comes to drawing/painting so I'm pretty much clueless about the creative process of modern painting.
When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas.
There are lots of ways of using a photo as a source. A lot of the 'art' comes from choosing which techniques and paints and colors to use to capture the feeling you are after. You can also choose to make choices like adding/removing elements, changing the field of view or moving the point of view, playing with perspective etc. to make the composition more interesting.
You can give the same photo to 100 different artists and you will get back 100 different paintings with 100 different artistic choices, some of which will appeal to you on an artistic level a lot more than others.
Thank you for the details, and I agree that what you describe includes plenty of creative effort.
I guess my scenario was much more narrow, as I was thinking about doing an exact copy of a photo that you didn't take yourself. Doing an exact copy limits greatly the number of artistic choices you could make as most of the choices were made by the photographer.
Just found out this is actually a thing called photorealism where the artist is expected to also take the original photo. Feels good to read about something else than software and politics for a change :).
Is it weirder then trying to become good in literally any other craft or skill?
People spend hours trying to become good at coding competitions, games, sport, musical instrument, embroidery, hoby electronics ... you name it. Why would "trying to become as good as possible at creating realistic drawing" would be weirder then anything else? The technical skill involved in making it look hyper realistic is huge.
By "weird" I meant that having great technique doesn't automatically translate to great art. It could translate to greater craftsmanship, faster and more precise work, but by art I understand the process of applying your own creative filter and emotions to whatever you want to represent/imitate in whatever medium.
I feel like I'm going to deep into this "art" thing so time to get back to a domain where I have more experience, software development.
Being great at touch typing is an awesome skill that many people train but typing fast doesn't make you automatically a great developer/architect/manager.
I see the effort of exactly copying someone else's photo similar to how developers do "coding katas" to hone their fundamentals. It's basically practice, not really creative problem solving.
Nothing wrong with honing one skills, but in my book skills are tools to be used as part of a creative process. They don't replace the creative process, but they can elevate the end result.
Artists themselves do call it art tho. They value the technical skill on itself too, apparently. And talk about it a lot. And then it becomes separate field where you can try to excel or competition on itself. (Also, in subgenres like manga when they talk about quality of art, they typically mean technical skill more then ability to convey emotions.)
It makes it something you don't value or like, which is 100% valid. But it seems to be fairly within what artists themselves call art.
I understand that people can call art whatever they like.
One can argue that doing an exact copy of a photograph with the end result being indistinguishable from the original photo is some kind of "meta" art and the lack of creativity actually puts focus on the technical skill and the effort of the artist, as a kind of "anti-creativity statement" type of art, "there is no artist just paint and effort".
But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality.
Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort?
On that note, I think I'll stop. I feel I'm getting high just from all the meta-ideas I'm writing, lol.
> One can argue that doing an exact copy of a photograph with the end result being indistinguishable from the original photo is some kind of "meta" art and the lack of creativity actually puts focus on the technical skill and the effort of the artist, as a kind of "anti-creativity statement" type of art, "there is no artist just paint and effort".
I mean you can, but generally, artists would call this bullshit explanation. I am pretty sure you are aware of that too :). None of what I talked about was any meta. It was down to eath, pragmatically, "yeah art is also technical ability to make hyper realistic picture".
> But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality.
Again, yes, judged by insight and originality. But, it is not the only valid criterium for art work. Among other things, realistic portraits are pretty low in general if judged by creativity. The old master did not went for creativity there - the realism was actual ambition for many of them.
> Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort?
I dont understand why the result would had no value. You don't have to like it or find it interesting, that is 100%. This sort of stuff is subjective. What I found out was that many artists often do value technical skill and do see value in the resulting picture, actually.
You seems to insist on one definition of art, which is super strict and exclusive. And kinda excludes majority of drawings people produce. At least I think. Most of drawings are people trying to figure out how to draw the thing, again and again.
Art, as used currently or in history, does not have to include only super deep I have philosophical opinions or deep feelings or whatever. Plenty of times it is "look guys, I finally managed to draw a nose".
> I don't understand why the result would had no value.
I exaggerated that one, it has value, but to a lesser degree, imo. The value of the painting is in the skill of producing the copy, not really in having the creativity or insight that the original photographer had when taking the photo. The subject is already in 2d, perspective already frozen, and if you're replicating it perfectly you're not adding anything substantial, you're just changing the medium.
Can a copy be considered art? Sure it can, like I said previously anything can be art if framed in an artistic context. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic.
> You seems to insist on one definition of art, which is super strict and exclusive.
I don't think I've tried to define or limit what can/cannot be art in any of my comments. I'm just talking about my personal criteria for differentiating between different levels of artistic quality.
My top comment in this thread merely stated that using someone else's photographs to photocopy into a painting without applying your own insight is a less-creative form of art than if you are framing and taking a picture yourself and you use that as an intermediary medium before copying it to the canvas.
Me building a wooden chair by looking at a picture on ikea's site is a form of craftsmanship.
Can it be called art? Sure it can, I might even take a picture and post it on reddit.
Is it great art? By my criteria, no. I would say that a chair built by Gaudi has more artistic value than my chair, and please note I'm not saying that my chair isn't a piece of art, just a lesser one.
If someone finds my preserved wooden chair in 1000 years it's historical value would be great but I wouldn't be so sure about it's artistic value, unless it's the only remaining representation of a chair left from the 21st century in any kind of medium.
The painter themselves can take the photo. Photos can help if the subject or the scene is hard to be around long enough to paint. Say, an artist painting impressionistic city streets in the rain. It’s hard to stay in the rain and paint, but they can take a photo and paint at home, while recalling the feeling of being at the scene - the cold, the wetness, the sound of the splashing water, cars driving by, etc.
yep, I already addressed this in another comment, that's photorealism, and the artist always takes the picture so painting it is just the last step in the overall creative process.
my point was that it feels weird for me to call it art if you didn't take the photo and your just doing the last, arguably less creative, step.
Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser".
> Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser".
Yeah, it does in a certain way. Say, I take a picture then send it so someone to make a "painting" of it. I does feel a bit "lesser".
Of course, depending on the trend in art, it may be that's the whole point of the piece -- to highlight that everything is just a copy of a copy and so on. Basically, it could be a deliberate part of the process like say https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbel...
Funnily enough quite a lot of artists use early digital cameras, where the quality is described as 'grainy'
Its of just bad enough quality (and hasn't been altered by algorithms) that you can get a 'sense' of the scene without too much detail, being over/under-exposed, etc.
I think this is a perfect post to bring up the theory of Vermeer's work presented in this film, "Tim's Vermeer." The focus of the movie, Tim Jenison of NewTek, hypothesized the use of a mirror to allow an almost paint-by-numbers recreation of the sitting subject.
I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. In some part due to the difference in skill development required by using a photo for reference versus using live references or your imagination/memory/whatever, but mostly because of how much the technological conceits and limitations of that photography come to infect other media which don't suffer from them.
It's most obvious in paintings and videogames. Depth of field, bokeh, motion blur, perspective, lens distortion—even focal length and composition. Once you realize it, it becomes impossible to ignore, and it really compromises the work for me. So many of the most technically adept artists today are using all their skill to effectively simulate one form of art with another. It's an interesting exercise, sure, and I'll never dissuade someone from developing and refining a skill, but in the best-case scenario, I'm just left thinking I'd rather see the photo or the movie, or not see the image at all. And I'm someone who will gladly spend 20min+ standing in front of a Rembrandt.
I don't have any issue with realism in art and think it can be quite effective when used well. But so much of what makes something like The Night Watch incredible is how it feels both convincingly real and compellingly uncanny at the same time due to its rendering from some fuzzy approximation of what the artist observed from his models, conceived in his mind's eye, and meticulously sketched and reworked.
To me, it's the ability to capture and create something within/from that gray area that makes an artist great.
Yes, people confuse an accurate photograph of being as real as you can get. But in actuality the brain does a lot of work in order to compose a scene, as any optical illusion will reveal. So the accuracy of a photo becomes its downfall in feeling real.
The Impressionists understood this and used effects such as 'optical mixing' (from the scientific findings of Maxwell) to create works that felt more real
> I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference.
There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph. For instance, Ben Aronson (https://benaronson.net/), a contemporary impressionist painter I very much like, heavily uses photographic references to paint cityscapes that he just literally couldn't paint live (because, say, its in the middle of a busy downtown street, or way up in the air between buildings). But his paintings are far from "photorealistic", not only utilizing an impressionist style, but also often moving or adding buildings or landscape that don't actually exist in the photo.
> There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph
But of course. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. As I mentioned, my primary issue is with how heavy reliance on photo reference can result in a photo-like final painting.
As I mentioned in another comment, I have a secondary issue with how photo reference affects the process, but that's another discussion.
Depth of field, bokeh and perspective are things that aren't photographic, it's just physics and our eyes do it too. You can easily notice it in real life.
Focal length being variable has nothing to do with photography either. It has to do with screens that vary in size and distance. To be able to match the angle of view of our eyes, the camera in a video game needs to vary it's focal length. And of course, our eyes have a focal length too.
Our eyes feel motion blur too. It's just cut out when you saccade your eyes by the brain. Track a car with your eyes and notice the motion blur over the whole street. Now, for video games, it doesn't make much sense until you realize that we use 30/60fps screens. Motion blur is a crutch to minimize the obviousness of low frame rates. In a perfect world of course, you would want your screen to have 144+Hz of refresh rate and let your own eyes do the motion blur, but that's too expensive for now.
So you see, these things aren't actually there because of photography. They are things that our eyes do just as much as any camera. In fact, the only real difference between our eyes and cameras is that eyes operate continuously while cameras operate semi-discretely, though at 200fps+ this converges almost completely.
> Depth of field, bokeh and perspective are things that aren't photographic
They are, though (unless you think I'm saying that relative physical distances literally do not exist outside of photography?). You can say our eyes operate as more sophisticated lenses and are likewise constrained by physics and light, to be sure, but the experience of seeing something is very, very different from viewing that thing in a photograph or film.
With your eyes, you cannot study or capture or examine the blurred areas on the periphery of your vision; photography enables that. Similarly, photography enables the capture and examination and artistic presentation of motion blur. Photography creates that apprehension of the world. Painting from or to mimic that apprehension is, I feel, limiting. Even when your subject is not abstract.
What I'm taking issue with isn't the basic principles of light; it's painting a scene the way a camera captures it, rather than the way a painting can. If you truly don't see any representative differences between the paintings of the 'old masters' and the current paintings-of-or-like-photos to which I'm referring, then I think we're just not on the same page here, or I'm simply doing a poor job of explaining what I mean.
The problem is not really one of the technology, though. At some level, all we are doing in making representational visuals is copying proportions, either spatially by indicating shape and form, or by samples of light. Where the source material doesn't have those proportions we need, the artist is filling in gaps. You can still iterate into The Night Watch from photos by using intermediate sketches; it's just a process.
A big part of why abstraction took off at nearly the same time as photography is that the differentiation of an artist from a camera had to come from somewhere. Artists that make art that looks like cameras are simply drawing on their strongest reference and not doing much additional decision making.
Agreed. I don't mean to vilify the technology itself, but rather the ways in which many artists employ it. What bothers me is when that gap-filling you describe is either not being done or is being done in such a way that retains the character and forms of the reference medium. I similarly dislike it when photographers try to make their photos look like paintings.
I do have misgivings about how reference photography affects the process of certain forms of art-making, but that's another issue entirely. In this case, I'm just talking about effects on the product, not the process.
I met a local portraiture teacher, and all he did was take a nice photo of someone and copy it on canvas. His craft seemed great. But I didn't get the point of copying a photo exactly. Why not just print out the photo? But I guess he enjoyed the painting process.
What if a 3D scan were taken of the subject, and the artist then made the painting while viewing the 3D representation in some kind of augmented reality setup?
That would be 3D but still effectively painting from a "photo".
But then you're adding in several more processing layers away from reality: 1) the digital scan won't pick up the details sufficiently 2) the AR rendering will again strip a lot of detail
It'd also be incredibly difficult and straining for your eyes of focussing on a canvas and then on an AR image
his painting looked exactly like the photo. So it's like a painted version of the photo. It was very realistic. And like I mentioned, the craft of painting was great. But he took the time to take a nice portrait with a camera so he can paint it.
Since I'm a photographer, I guess I didn't get why he would need to copy a photo exactly.
An interesting argument... which could be extended to "why paint from life?" because you're just copying what you see.
In fact, some artists who paint completely from their imagination or who create nonrepresentational art have this exact objection to just painting what you see (even without photographic reference), which they don't find interesting because it's not creative enough for them.
Vermeer is highly regarded, yet there is evidence that he worked using technology that was something like a camera (though of course it was primitive by today's standards).
Photography is just another tool, and what matters is how you use it.
A Camera Obscura is worlds apart from copying a high-def image. The primitiveness allowed them to get dimensions correct for a sketch but then they'd have to use all of their artistic skill to pick the correct values, tones etc.
> abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work.
Strong disagree. Expertise often looks easy. He had to understand the rules on a fundamental level before he could break them as he did, to express not just pictures but the underlying form and composition.
In my opinion it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso did than it is to paint realistically.
I agree with this. It's harder because you have to have all the technique before you start picking and choosing what to leave out. An abstract painting becomes at least in part a story of what the painter decided to try, some unique combination of choices, at several levels of zoom. This is dangerous stuff because its easy to alienate a viewer this way. But done well you find a (substantially) new path to beauty and wonder.
You're, perhaps intentionally, mixing hard and hard. Could a child paint an abstract Picasso if it had him hanging behind a shoulder, saying what to do? Could it paint a realistic Picasso?
I personally find the art of children a lot more interesting than 99% of highly skilled adult artists who work in a "realistic" style.
Children's art usually has a freshness, originality, and vibrancy that's missing from highly skilled adult art.
I had to get over my worship of realism before I could appreciate it, though, and I find it very sad that most non-artists are still stuck at valuing art only by how realistic it looks.
Picasso's abstract work was only accepted because he proved he could master and reject the realistic style. It's similar to Norm MacDonald telling horrible old jokes. A huge part of the humor was the metajoke that he could be telling better jokes if he felt like it.
This is hard to judge from the outside. My wife is an art school graduate and serious amateur painter. There are some artists that she follow, where she is in absolute awe of what they do, and I just see some quite 'simple' paintings that are nowhere near as detailed or 'interesting' as some of what she paints. Yet she assures me that what those artists are doing is Really Hard, and far beyond what she is capable of.
That is something I became aware when practicing competitive programming as a teen: anyone would have an opinion on how nice/pretty the outcome was, but only the few thousands people actually involved in the competition would have an actual clue about what mattered, what was important and what was actually hard to achieve. It's hard not to notice the same pattern in any activity one is deeply involved with, be it sports or arts.
It is to be expected, after all, that specialization implies some form of impediment to communication.
The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself.
Picasso was a great self promotor and back before the internet the opportunities for proving him wrong we’re very limited indeed so the myth could persist. Nowadays, however, the stuff he did back when he was drilled by his father into being an artist can easily be found online and, guess what: it turns out to be fairly mediocre.
> The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself.
There are many examples of his early work online. His skill in classical realistic art is hardly deniable even if one might disagree that it reached the levels of Raphael to whom he once compared his pieces of that period. He also was partly educated at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando which wasn't some no-name school either.
Picasso twice completed copying the entire series of Bargue drawings, a set of 70 lithographs sold all over Europe in the 19th century as a course in academic drawing. His copies are excellent; he'd certainly mastered the academic realist techniques.
He failed to produce great realist work because he found those techniques boring, repetitive, and mechanical, and thus didn't try to work in that mode. He moved on to keep pace with the many radical departures from the French Academy that surrounded him. He had the skills, he just didn't use them.
Accurately copying Bargue perhaps qualifies Picasso as a serviceable mediocre realist. It doesn't mean he was "great," which was the assertion here. His early realist works were bland and uninspired, if technically proficient.
In other words, doing well in the technical aspects of a student drawing course is not even close to demonstrating that one is "great" on the same level as, say, Caravaggio or Rembrandt.
"doing well in the technical aspects of a student drawing course is not even close to demonstrating that one is "great" on the same level as, say, Caravaggio or Rembrandt"
I'm not sure the original poster meant "great" in the sense of Caravaggio or Rembrandt.
To a lot of people being technically proficient is all it takes to be a "great" artist, so by that standard Picasso would qualify.
> Accurately copying Bargue perhaps qualifies Picasso as a serviceable mediocre realist.
The things you read on this website sometimes... Accurately copying Bargue requires far more that mediocre skills. Caravaggio is a great painter in the sense that Mozart is a great composer. If that’s where you put the bar, I probably have enough fingers to count the great painters in the whole human history. Amusingly for this discussion Picasso might still be amongst them.
I think Bargue did the world a great service in collecting his set of plates, and I think the sight-size method has a lot of merit. I really wish I could escape for a few years into one of the ateliers that employ it to train artists. It would be a pleasant break from doing IT work in the defense industry. :)
That said, Bargue's process was intended for communicating good taste to 'lesser' commercial and decorative artists as much as it was used for training fine artists. It's a method that essentially boils down to copying pictures of sculptures which are twice removed from nature.
Before and since Bargue, we've had great artists who gained their chops by being students of nature. Many of them never saw a Bargue plate. Many of them didn't use the sight-size method. And there were a lot of skilled Bargue disciples who never had any real impact on art history.
All that to say, I don't think the parent comment is at all out of line. Copying Bargue plates is a fine warm-up or substitute for life drawing, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient to becoming a great realist (we had those long before Bargue). Plus, the world has churned out countless nobodies skilled in the art of copying Bargue plates (which I say as someone who would like to be one of those countless nobodies). It's just not as important as people think.
Arguably, Bargue accelerated the decline of the French Academy. Once his drawing course started reliably producing skilled draughtsmen, skilled draughting became less interesting and important as in fine art. It's a common observation in the field of art history that the 19th century, in "perfecting" academic realism, set the stage for the 20th century's rejection of it, since there was nothing left to say with it.
Regardless, I've done several Bargue drawings, and they're wonderfully meditative once you get into them. You don't need an atelier, though it would help. You can find copies of the plates online, and many videos of artists doing one, to show you the method. If you want further guidance, email me (look in my profile) and I'll set you up. I've actually run lunchtime classes at work making Bargue drawings.
You can't judge whether someone was "great" in a particular field if they didn't actually practice in that field. Bargue drawings are very technically demanding, but they're exercises. They don't even count as works of art in themselves.
Just as we can't really say he was a great realist, we can't say he was a mediocre one. He didn't make realist art. We can say that he mastered the skills, so if he'd worked as a realist, he'd probably have been pretty great, if only because once he found a preferable mode of expression, he was actually great.
As to whether his early or late works were great or mediocre, that's not something that can be pronounced from on high, but I do think it's fair to say he was proficient in the techniques of his era before branching out.
> The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself.
What? The source of Picasso being a good realistic painter is the paintings Picasso made when he was a teenager of which most have survived. You can see multiple of them at the Picasso museum in Paris or by simply googling it as you point yourself. Science and Charity which he painted at fifteen is in every way a descent classical paintings and Child with dove is a perfectly fine work in the post-impressionist style. It’s not revolutionary like the work he did later but the idea that Picasso is a mediocre painter is so demonstrably false it gets funny.
"[Picasso] became a great artist because he pushed the boundary of abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work."
This reminds me of the old joke about the customer who got upset at having to pay $100 to a mechanic who fixed his car by hitting the engine with a hammer. The mechanic replies that he only charges $1 for the hammer hit, but $99 for knowing where to hit.
So it is with Picasso. His mature style is easier on a technical level than some more photorealistic work, but I challenge you or anyone else who thinks it's "easy" to paint something with even half the emotional impact of Guernica, or to come up with a novel style that's as innovative as Picasso's was when he created it.
Picasso wasn't copying anyone else's style. He was innovating and pushing art forward... that's why he gets pride of place in the art history books and artists who just copy his style don't.
As in science, you get a lot of credit in the art world for being first.
The art world also appreciates being shown the world in a different light, which you don't necessarily need great technical skill to accomplish (as Picasso and many artists before and after him showed).
This whole debate about the need for technical skill in "art" actually predates Picasso, and was hashed out before him about the Impressionists, who were already accused of sloppy technique by Academy artists.
Impressionism is no longer controversial, and most people can appreciate it, even though on a technical level it's arguably no better than cubism (the style that Picasso is most well known for).
The greatness of Picasso's formal skills can be seen in one genre: his prints for the Vollard Suite. His lines are quick and delicate and invoke a whole body and its suppleness. The economy of line is astonishing.
Damien Hirst is a salesman who makes shit art. Jeff Koons makes things that are at least amusing. I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future.
"I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future."
You're an optimist.
It's more likely we'll slide towards an Idiocracy future, where it's garbage that'll be praised to the heavens.
The contemporary art world has been sliding that direction for a long time, and outside the art world kitsch dominates, and it's probably only going to get worse over time.
> The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting because of the myth around it. It's a beautiful portait, but is it really the best portrait ever? I think in the same wing of the Louvre there are better paintings of Da Vinci on show, even though there is no crowd around it.
That's not a good example to affirm your point : it's a painting that was historically know for its technical qualities, representing the pinnacle of Leonardo's sfumato. But it's also been extremely damaged to the point these qualities are heavily lacking now.
Picasso was a hack who contributed to the downfall of a thousand year old tradition of craftsmanship. The modernists destroyed university casts and ruined academic drawing programs so completely that they have not recovered to this day.
We are very fortunate that image sharing on the internet has revealed that the art establishment has no clothes and people enjoy representational works. Artists like Will St. John, Colleen Barry, Ramon Alex Hurtado, Jeremy Lipking and others are reviving academic figurative traditions.
If I sound upset, it's because I am. In highschool I took AP art and all the other art classes I could. I visited all the nearby art associations and establishments that people revered. I wanted to paint people, wanted to make great paintings like the ones I saw in museums. I attended one of the best-ranked public highschools in my state and my teachers with art degrees didn't even know there was an academic path out there because their colleges just taught them about the greatness of conceptual garbage. I wound up giving up on that dream and floundering through the last decade with constructive methods like loomis and bridgman in my spare time. Now I have a degree I'm not passionate about and enough debt that pursuing academic training is out of the question.
Warhol's soup cans are neat and abstract movements were a refreshing breath of fresh air in art history, sure. You might admire works of lesser craftsmanship for their "philosophical" achievements, but consider the destruction that philosophy wreaked upon education and the cultural-nuclear-crater left behind.
Google Sargent, Repin, Bouguereau, and Homer. Then look again at Koons, Hirst, Twombly, etc. and try to convince yourself a grave error and loss has not occurred.
There’s a lot to unpack here. But Picasso wasn’t a hack. Overrated, sure. But he approached his subject matter and technique with as much focus and detail as any artist that came before him. You aren’t required to appreciate his contribution to the artistic conversation; but calling him a hack is dismissive and purposely neglectful of his substantial impact.
Picasso did what he did, and created what he created because of photography. In a world where capturing likeness, and form was basically free - what do you do with painting? Certainly not attempt to capture likeness and form - perhaps you make an Ernest attempt to capture or project the emotional response of form and subject. Picasso’s facial structure was modeled after African war masks, which were at the time ignored by the art world. And his composition and color and repetition were inspired by the Japanese print makers. A lot of the art from that era was inspired by what was coming out of Japan at that time. The product of Picasso was a mashup of influences, like all impactful art.
The backlash against likeness and form was certain way before Picasso. But the fact that he rode that style to such fame is what made the art world dramatically over correct so drastically.
At the time of the shift away from traditional fine art, there was a big shift in how art was marketed and style itself probably did not have as much influence as people think.
Academy art was very expensive because it took a long time to make (so artists only made a hand full of work), and there were fewer artists at that level because it took so much training to get to the level of a Bouguereau or Sargent. Up until this point the people buying this kind of art were wealthy or powerful enough to afford it.
At the turn of the century, there was an increased demand of art from the new burgeoning middle class, however there simply was not enough supply, and it was all expensive academy art. Because of this, art dealers were incentivized to promote impressionists because they were already academy rejects so they were outsiders with chips on their shoulders, and the work they did was by design easier and quicker to make, so they were able to produce way more art that dealers could sell to the middle class who were less discerning than the traditional art world.
The new mass market ended up being far more profitable for dealers, the demographic so much larger, that it really just drove what kind of art was created and marketed afterwards. Bouguereau died at 80 and made less than a thousand works over his lifetime, Picasso made tens of thousands. Picasso's true genius is in his ability to produce and market his works.
Google WW2, the Berlin Wall, Crystal Pepsi, Walmart, Donald Trump and then you may understand why Warhol reflects the contemporary zeitgeist and academic neoclassical art does not. (By the way, Twombly is totally unlike those other two artists. There is in fact a subtle classicism to his work.)
Anyone with functioning eyes ought to watch that and be able to immediately see that the "expert" is not wearing any clothing. They've got classical violin music playing to add a sense of prestige, it's grotesque. It would be more appropriate to accompany the video with "zen music"[0], the musical analog to twombly's work: https://youtu.be/uOOtJcWAk-A
His work is often read as an archaic, pre-verbal poetics of the classical world:
https://www.bastian-gallery.com/ausstellungen/cy-twombly-a-m... The scribblings draw from the walls of Pompeii, soft whites and blood reds evoke a certain Greco-Roman pallette etc. Scribbles but more than scribbles.
I really like the "standing on the shoulders of giants" quote because it brings into perspective the fact that direct comparison doesn't make a lot of sense, especially in fields that are continuously growing and evolving (like science and art) and every generation starts where the previous ones left off.
Is Einstein a greater scientist than Newton? Are both of them better than Galileo? Now that would be a fun discussion at the pub, but with no real value. All of these guys benefited from previous work done by other "masters" and this helped them reach even greater heights.
Even in sports like chess, where it's a lot easier to compare matches and ratings across decades and even centuries you could debate that the old masters had a fraction of the resources available to current masters so the comparison doesn't really hold.
> A portrait of the Grand Master Sardone by Evolve Artist Founder and master portraitist Kevin Murphy
Ok so this piece is content marketing for a self-proclaimed master portraitist who gives art lessons. Guess what? He thinks the current generation is taking art to a "whole new level" (I wouldn't be surprised if the quoted artists are former students). I'll take that with a pinch of salt.
OP. Yeah, I guess I can see that now. Honestly, I did a search for Salvator Tuesday after a friend mentioned it, saw this link, thought the examples shown were interesting and the question intriguing. It’s one I’ve asked about music, literature and other topics many times.
Agree, his analysis is very limited. The better not to scare off any potential customers, I suppose. If anyone knows of a more academically sound paper or exhibition on these lines, I’d click that.
As an artist, I can tell you that "realism" is something that we can all agree on, but that art isn't really about portraying something (or someone) realistically. In the old days, it was the only way to preserve our likeness, but these days, a camera will do a much better job than even many of the most skilled artists, if you look for realism.
There are some awesome "hyper-realist" artists out there[0], [1]. It can be argued that they are even better than cameras, as there is an element of emotional interpretation, and the artist can do things like play with the context.
But there are many that would argue that this isn't necessarily "art," as art is an interpretation of an emotional experience, as opposed to simple documentation.
Piacsso's Portrait of Igor Stravinsky[2] is considered one of the better portraits out there, and it's not really much to look at, if you are looking for realism, but it will sell for a heck of a lot more than some of the hyper-realistic works in the previous links.
Art is a story, not just a document, and that story includes many components, including the artist's own story.
I know that one of my favorite artists, is Roger Dean[3], who is not particularly realistic. I have never really been a fan of Boris Vallejo[4], who is probably a much more skilled draftsman.
I'd say that the question "Is one artist better than another?" is almost meaningless.
> As an artist, I can tell you that "realism" is something that we can all agree on, but that art isn't really about portraying something (or someone) realistically. In the old days, it was the only way to preserve our likeness, but these days, a camera will do a much better job than even many of the most skilled artists, if you look for realism.
As an artist, you should know that a camera does not represent reality, it flattens and distorts it in such subtle ways that often art of the thing is a better likeness than the actual thing. It's one of the most basic steps in any art class -- to draw reality, not what the camera gives you, and is the reason why Botanical Artwork is still highly favoured over images (along with other reasons, like being able to represent the most important parts of the plant accurately in a general sense as opposed to a specific specimen).
Hyper-realism, in my experience, also tends to be based off of images and still has that "unreal" skewed/distorted perspective thing going on.
That’s a fair point, but the implied slap (“As an artist, you should know”), wasn’t particularly called for. We don’t do that kind of thing, hereabouts. In fact, the HN Ts&Cs advise against that behavior, quite explicitly.
Most of the people I've seen on here tend to downvote based on opinion not quality (against the T&C's / guidelines), and the 'implied verbal slap' (I disagree that it is that, but what the hell, I'll humour you) barely qualifies, after I've seen anti-vaccine, holocaust denying, brutal and weird tin-foil hat disagreements rise to the top. If you pay attention to the content that is posted on this site that gets upvoted, you'll realise the guidelines below are very literally guidelines, and that the "small verbal quip" was done for a small amount of emphasis and as a turn of phrase, not specifically to smite you or meant as anything of the derogatory sort.
So I'm sorry that you took offence from it, but it seems like one of the least important things one could take offence at on this website
The skill for "realism" is still relevant despite the prevalence of photographs imo. Fantasy or science fiction art for example. If you can make real something that doesn't exist... that's something photographs can never do.
I feel there's a lot of snobbery among artists and collectors and they look down on this kind of thing tho.
Art if about whatever you want it to be. My kid painting a dinosaur that looks like a scribble is art. A masterful recreation of a photograph in oil paint is art. T shaped lines on a page that have 'hidden meaning' is art.
Portraying someone realistically is as much art as throwing paint at a canvas with a particular meaning in mind is art.
It's all art. There's nothing wrong with enjoying art that doesn't have some hidden meaning. I love realism for the skill involved. I love abstract art for the ideas involved and the thought it provokes.
Enjoyment of visual art is entirely subjective, you like it or you don't, but it's still art.
There is so much of a "gatekeeping" sense when it comes to the question of "what is art", especially in the sense that "if you don't understand it your not appreciating it". You are allowed to like it just because of the way it looks.
Well, I've sold a few pieces (not for megabucks). I also don't feel at all "snooty" about it, as it's been a long time, since I did any real art. I have had training, but I have family that has far more training than I. My wife is a very good photographer and watercolor artist. She is also more in touch with the structure of the art community, than I am (I went geek).
It does, however, give me some insight into the community and mindset.
> Enjoyment of visual art is entirely subjective, you like it or you don't, but it's still art.
100% agree.
In my heyday[0], I was actually considering becoming a professional artist, but I knew that there are a ton of folks out there, that could blow me away, and didn't have programming to fall back on, so I went geek.
I used to get sneered at a lot. Fantasy art isn't really considered "art."
[0] http://littlegreenviper.com/art (I did these in the late 1980s. There's a bunch more, and I might end up putting more of them up there. My FB page has them. Feel free to judge whether or not I qualify as "artist." I couldn't do this again, right now. I'm out of practice).
I was getting at the points I've quoted below [1] - it may not even be your opinion, you say "there are many that would argue", but in my opinion art does not need a story or any emotion to still be art.
Some amazing artworks are just people trying their best to create something that looks good.
[1]
"But there are many that would argue that this isn't necessarily "art," as art is an interpretation of an emotional experience, as opposed to simple documentation.
Not. The main difference is in the pre-painting work
1) The medium. Old masters must made their own paint and then paint the portrait. And this is double of the effort that modern masters need to do. This is not necessary anymore. you just buy it exactly made, in the exact amounts and the exact color tone, all the times.
This means to grind the pigments to a fine dust (and many are poisonous), filter it, discard the extra materials until you have a pure paint. Mix it with eggs, or linem oil, or water and gum. Paint it and then let it dry for many months avoiding cracks in the painting. Paint products today have stuff to dry faster and more uniform. Using those you can accelerate the dry process or made it much more long, as you need.
2) Modern masters also copy, a lot, from photographs. All is done yet in a photograph. All the points and precise measures are here at the exact distance. This is much easier than building the structure slowly in your mind and improving it by iteration.
3) The eyes. With internet your work is seen by everybody in real time. If is good is good. You can use a lot of tricks to build a myth or spread your work. It was not so easy in the old ages.
This article feels superficial to me. The only explanation he gives is that the paintings look more realistic? Was that it? I guess he mentions the craft, so I'm assuming he's only talking about the craft of portraiture, not the art.
OP. Agree, the article was light, but I liked the many examples, which did show a range of styles and approaches. I thought the question would make for an interesting discussion. I haven’t had a chance to read all the way through the comments, but I hope people veered off into other fields — music, literature, etc.
Also keep in mind today's portraitists have photographs to copy from. They have tracing paper and other gadgets that help them produce an even more accurate portrait.
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[ 1.0 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadThe only objection to this I can imagine is rooted in the misconception that it's somehow irreverent to see today's students as better than the old masters. The brilliance of the past heroes consisted in pushing the needle of what was possible, and today's heroes are pushing it even further.
But as in sports, or sciences, or architecture, or engineering, what the old masters had to discover or invent then became part of the standard curriculum, and could be refined, built upon further, and better tooling could be designed and taught.
Grant that they don't have anything interesting to write about and it's too expensive to build decent buildings, but the poetry is indisputable.
Even their industrial buildings looked good!
If you funded the most talented architects alive to create works of beauty, I bet you'd get it.
Many famous classics are about interpersonal issues and down to earth minor issues which is something that still goes on. You can write about good old alcoholism, abuse, love.
The crime still exists, so something like Crime and Punishment is super doable.
If we look at the current issue[0] of The Threepenny Review, the pathology is quite obvious. The three "poems" in the list all share certain features:
- A variable amount of syllables per line (e.g. no metre)
- No rhymes
- No other discernible differences from prose
At that point, why even bother calling it a poem? You might as well save yourself the time by opening up the day's newspaper in a text editor, clicking randomly, and pressing enter. When you feel there's enough line breaks, you're ready to publish.
[0]: https://www.threepennyreview.com/current.html
This is all so subjective.
Very few poems resonate with me... maybe something like 1 out of 100, and almost always they're old poems, like those by Kabir, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost.
It's exceedingly rare for any contemporary poetry that I've read to come anywhere close to being as moving, interesting, or deep as some of these classics.
That said, 99% of old poetry doesn't move me either.
I'd read a lot more poetry if the signal to noise ratio was higher, but sadly for my taste it's not.
What percentage of newly created poetry, books, and architecture do you read or look at?
There's an absolute glut of information right now, and no human is capable of consuming more than a tiny fraction of it.
I'm absolutely sure that "great" creative work is being made right now, but it's going to take time for humanity to sift through everything out there to find the gold.
That's not to mention that one man's trash is another man's treasure, and plenty of people who we consider "great" now were completely ignored or even denigrated in their lifetimes.
Not to mention the huge leap in quality of TV writing.
I tend to believe that, given how intensive we train players these days, but are we actually certain that it is the case? I guess we could ask a chess engine to rate all available games but that would not be terribly convincing because they were playing a different style, against the players of their time (unlike a running competition, you really need two players to play a game of chess). Also, for some past players we don't have that many games to begin with.
I think we're fairly certain that chess players today would beat chess players of the past, in a regular 1 on 1 game. Assuming the old chess players didn't have time to prepare.
Chess programs can rate the accuracy of moves, so we can see how accurate past players were. In addition, a lot has been discovered about more correct opening theory - a grandmaster of the past would make many mistakes in the opening that a modern grandmaster would be able to take advantage of, simply because they didn't know those lines.
There is so much talent out there due to increased accessibility that people who don't specialize in portraits are still extremely capable, many (arguably) more so than old masters. I think even more than sports, where physiology limits how much one can train / improve. Digital tools have allowed artists to accumulate much more practice. Literally not having to wait for paint to dry is a huge advantage.
Take something more objective than fine art, like Roman Concrete [1]. To this day the Pantheon is the largest freestanding dome in the world because of the concrete's disproportionately good durability and longevity. It puts modern mass produced concrete to shame.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
You could make a point that a lot less people back then had artwork in their homes back in the day, because living conditions of the masses were a lot more cramped and life was more difficult. But copies definitely were available and widespread.
You could argue perhaps that the proportion is lower, but then we have a lot more people bopping around...
Yeah, that is what I meant. Amount of people buying actual drawings as gifts or to decorate office/house is smaller.
Painting and portraits is something artists still learn, do as hobby or stunt (1 minute portrait drawings and such), but actually live off other things because market moved away from it.
There's tons of original art available. I live in a small midwestern city and have no problem finding studios that "traditional" art. There are a few larger retail galleries where artists will rent out stalls to sell their work, some will set up shop next to an antique store and sell their work along with a card telling you to come next door to their gallery, and many just have their own retail store fronts. Usually in smaller, town squares.
University exhibitions are a great way to pick up original pieces for dirt cheap. Lots of university students are happy to get something for their work/assignments, and most students are already very talented by the time they get to uni.
Yeah, but none of them is living off those paintings. It is some little extra money at best. You said it is dirt cheap, that means they earn much less then minimum wage on those paintings. I know you can buy cheap digital copies of good looking art. That does not make it easier to life off it then "hundred years ago". It makes it harder.
My point is not that it is hard to find good artists today. It is that past had many periods, including hundred years ago, in which market for painting specifically was better then market for paintings now. And it meant more people pursuing painting as a job.
If it's this prevalent in a no-name city, places like NYC, Chicago, SF, etc must have hundreds or thousands of art galleries.
I have an entire house full of original paintings. Most of them were purchased in a retail gallery. It's not hard to find people who paint/draw for a living. The fact that original work can be subsidized through the sale of digital replicas make the field so much more economical than it was in the past. It's no longer the case that you need to be a wealthy family to have a painting commissioned. I've had several done.
Case in point: in Picasso's formative years, he was a great realistic painter. He became a great artist because he pushed the boundary of abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work. To me, Picasso was so good because he built a story (myth) around his work that resonated with so many people.
The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting because of the myth around it. It's a beautiful portait, but is it really the best portrait ever? I think in the same wing of the Louvre there are better paintings of Da Vinci on show, even though there is no crowd around it.
Recently, the myth builders have been (maybe they still are) Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, I think that's what makes them great artists.
A lot of this is compounded by the practice of working from high def photographs. Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos. As an illustration of this, try and take a photograph of a beautiful sunset and compare it to what you see
Yes there are many photos that you can call art, but if you're not the one that took the original photo it feels like most of the creative effort was not yours and you're just showing off your brush/pen technique.
As a disclaimer, I have 0 talent when it comes to drawing/painting so I'm pretty much clueless about the creative process of modern painting.
There are lots of ways of using a photo as a source. A lot of the 'art' comes from choosing which techniques and paints and colors to use to capture the feeling you are after. You can also choose to make choices like adding/removing elements, changing the field of view or moving the point of view, playing with perspective etc. to make the composition more interesting.
You can give the same photo to 100 different artists and you will get back 100 different paintings with 100 different artistic choices, some of which will appeal to you on an artistic level a lot more than others.
I guess my scenario was much more narrow, as I was thinking about doing an exact copy of a photo that you didn't take yourself. Doing an exact copy limits greatly the number of artistic choices you could make as most of the choices were made by the photographer.
Just found out this is actually a thing called photorealism where the artist is expected to also take the original photo. Feels good to read about something else than software and politics for a change :).
People spend hours trying to become good at coding competitions, games, sport, musical instrument, embroidery, hoby electronics ... you name it. Why would "trying to become as good as possible at creating realistic drawing" would be weirder then anything else? The technical skill involved in making it look hyper realistic is huge.
I feel like I'm going to deep into this "art" thing so time to get back to a domain where I have more experience, software development.
Being great at touch typing is an awesome skill that many people train but typing fast doesn't make you automatically a great developer/architect/manager.
I see the effort of exactly copying someone else's photo similar to how developers do "coding katas" to hone their fundamentals. It's basically practice, not really creative problem solving.
Nothing wrong with honing one skills, but in my book skills are tools to be used as part of a creative process. They don't replace the creative process, but they can elevate the end result.
It makes it something you don't value or like, which is 100% valid. But it seems to be fairly within what artists themselves call art.
One can argue that doing an exact copy of a photograph with the end result being indistinguishable from the original photo is some kind of "meta" art and the lack of creativity actually puts focus on the technical skill and the effort of the artist, as a kind of "anti-creativity statement" type of art, "there is no artist just paint and effort".
But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality.
Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort?
On that note, I think I'll stop. I feel I'm getting high just from all the meta-ideas I'm writing, lol.
I mean you can, but generally, artists would call this bullshit explanation. I am pretty sure you are aware of that too :). None of what I talked about was any meta. It was down to eath, pragmatically, "yeah art is also technical ability to make hyper realistic picture".
> But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality.
Again, yes, judged by insight and originality. But, it is not the only valid criterium for art work. Among other things, realistic portraits are pretty low in general if judged by creativity. The old master did not went for creativity there - the realism was actual ambition for many of them.
> Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort?
I dont understand why the result would had no value. You don't have to like it or find it interesting, that is 100%. This sort of stuff is subjective. What I found out was that many artists often do value technical skill and do see value in the resulting picture, actually.
You seems to insist on one definition of art, which is super strict and exclusive. And kinda excludes majority of drawings people produce. At least I think. Most of drawings are people trying to figure out how to draw the thing, again and again.
Art, as used currently or in history, does not have to include only super deep I have philosophical opinions or deep feelings or whatever. Plenty of times it is "look guys, I finally managed to draw a nose".
I exaggerated that one, it has value, but to a lesser degree, imo. The value of the painting is in the skill of producing the copy, not really in having the creativity or insight that the original photographer had when taking the photo. The subject is already in 2d, perspective already frozen, and if you're replicating it perfectly you're not adding anything substantial, you're just changing the medium.
Can a copy be considered art? Sure it can, like I said previously anything can be art if framed in an artistic context. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic.
> You seems to insist on one definition of art, which is super strict and exclusive.
I don't think I've tried to define or limit what can/cannot be art in any of my comments. I'm just talking about my personal criteria for differentiating between different levels of artistic quality.
My top comment in this thread merely stated that using someone else's photographs to photocopy into a painting without applying your own insight is a less-creative form of art than if you are framing and taking a picture yourself and you use that as an intermediary medium before copying it to the canvas.
Me building a wooden chair by looking at a picture on ikea's site is a form of craftsmanship. Can it be called art? Sure it can, I might even take a picture and post it on reddit. Is it great art? By my criteria, no. I would say that a chair built by Gaudi has more artistic value than my chair, and please note I'm not saying that my chair isn't a piece of art, just a lesser one.
If someone finds my preserved wooden chair in 1000 years it's historical value would be great but I wouldn't be so sure about it's artistic value, unless it's the only remaining representation of a chair left from the 21st century in any kind of medium.
my point was that it feels weird for me to call it art if you didn't take the photo and your just doing the last, arguably less creative, step.
Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser".
Yeah, it does in a certain way. Say, I take a picture then send it so someone to make a "painting" of it. I does feel a bit "lesser".
Of course, depending on the trend in art, it may be that's the whole point of the piece -- to highlight that everything is just a copy of a copy and so on. Basically, it could be a deliberate part of the process like say https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbel...
What if you use a camera obscura, as many of the “old masters” are believed to have done?
Its of just bad enough quality (and hasn't been altered by algorithms) that you can get a 'sense' of the scene without too much detail, being over/under-exposed, etc.
Edit: also see the use of a 'black mirror' https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
It's most obvious in paintings and videogames. Depth of field, bokeh, motion blur, perspective, lens distortion—even focal length and composition. Once you realize it, it becomes impossible to ignore, and it really compromises the work for me. So many of the most technically adept artists today are using all their skill to effectively simulate one form of art with another. It's an interesting exercise, sure, and I'll never dissuade someone from developing and refining a skill, but in the best-case scenario, I'm just left thinking I'd rather see the photo or the movie, or not see the image at all. And I'm someone who will gladly spend 20min+ standing in front of a Rembrandt.
I don't have any issue with realism in art and think it can be quite effective when used well. But so much of what makes something like The Night Watch incredible is how it feels both convincingly real and compellingly uncanny at the same time due to its rendering from some fuzzy approximation of what the artist observed from his models, conceived in his mind's eye, and meticulously sketched and reworked.
To me, it's the ability to capture and create something within/from that gray area that makes an artist great.
The Impressionists understood this and used effects such as 'optical mixing' (from the scientific findings of Maxwell) to create works that felt more real
There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph. For instance, Ben Aronson (https://benaronson.net/), a contemporary impressionist painter I very much like, heavily uses photographic references to paint cityscapes that he just literally couldn't paint live (because, say, its in the middle of a busy downtown street, or way up in the air between buildings). But his paintings are far from "photorealistic", not only utilizing an impressionist style, but also often moving or adding buildings or landscape that don't actually exist in the photo.
But of course. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. As I mentioned, my primary issue is with how heavy reliance on photo reference can result in a photo-like final painting.
As I mentioned in another comment, I have a secondary issue with how photo reference affects the process, but that's another discussion.
Focal length being variable has nothing to do with photography either. It has to do with screens that vary in size and distance. To be able to match the angle of view of our eyes, the camera in a video game needs to vary it's focal length. And of course, our eyes have a focal length too.
Our eyes feel motion blur too. It's just cut out when you saccade your eyes by the brain. Track a car with your eyes and notice the motion blur over the whole street. Now, for video games, it doesn't make much sense until you realize that we use 30/60fps screens. Motion blur is a crutch to minimize the obviousness of low frame rates. In a perfect world of course, you would want your screen to have 144+Hz of refresh rate and let your own eyes do the motion blur, but that's too expensive for now.
So you see, these things aren't actually there because of photography. They are things that our eyes do just as much as any camera. In fact, the only real difference between our eyes and cameras is that eyes operate continuously while cameras operate semi-discretely, though at 200fps+ this converges almost completely.
They are, though (unless you think I'm saying that relative physical distances literally do not exist outside of photography?). You can say our eyes operate as more sophisticated lenses and are likewise constrained by physics and light, to be sure, but the experience of seeing something is very, very different from viewing that thing in a photograph or film.
With your eyes, you cannot study or capture or examine the blurred areas on the periphery of your vision; photography enables that. Similarly, photography enables the capture and examination and artistic presentation of motion blur. Photography creates that apprehension of the world. Painting from or to mimic that apprehension is, I feel, limiting. Even when your subject is not abstract.
What I'm taking issue with isn't the basic principles of light; it's painting a scene the way a camera captures it, rather than the way a painting can. If you truly don't see any representative differences between the paintings of the 'old masters' and the current paintings-of-or-like-photos to which I'm referring, then I think we're just not on the same page here, or I'm simply doing a poor job of explaining what I mean.
A big part of why abstraction took off at nearly the same time as photography is that the differentiation of an artist from a camera had to come from somewhere. Artists that make art that looks like cameras are simply drawing on their strongest reference and not doing much additional decision making.
I do have misgivings about how reference photography affects the process of certain forms of art-making, but that's another issue entirely. In this case, I'm just talking about effects on the product, not the process.
That would be 3D but still effectively painting from a "photo".
It'd also be incredibly difficult and straining for your eyes of focussing on a canvas and then on an AR image
Since I'm a photographer, I guess I didn't get why he would need to copy a photo exactly.
An interesting argument... which could be extended to "why paint from life?" because you're just copying what you see.
In fact, some artists who paint completely from their imagination or who create nonrepresentational art have this exact objection to just painting what you see (even without photographic reference), which they don't find interesting because it's not creative enough for them.
Photography is just another tool, and what matters is how you use it.
Strong disagree. Expertise often looks easy. He had to understand the rules on a fundamental level before he could break them as he did, to express not just pictures but the underlying form and composition.
In my opinion it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso did than it is to paint realistically.
I agree with this. It's harder because you have to have all the technique before you start picking and choosing what to leave out. An abstract painting becomes at least in part a story of what the painter decided to try, some unique combination of choices, at several levels of zoom. This is dangerous stuff because its easy to alienate a viewer this way. But done well you find a (substantially) new path to beauty and wonder.
No. Could a child paint something that to their own parent seems similar? Maybe.
Children's art usually has a freshness, originality, and vibrancy that's missing from highly skilled adult art.
I had to get over my worship of realism before I could appreciate it, though, and I find it very sad that most non-artists are still stuck at valuing art only by how realistic it looks.
This is hard to judge from the outside. My wife is an art school graduate and serious amateur painter. There are some artists that she follow, where she is in absolute awe of what they do, and I just see some quite 'simple' paintings that are nowhere near as detailed or 'interesting' as some of what she paints. Yet she assures me that what those artists are doing is Really Hard, and far beyond what she is capable of.
That is something I became aware when practicing competitive programming as a teen: anyone would have an opinion on how nice/pretty the outcome was, but only the few thousands people actually involved in the competition would have an actual clue about what mattered, what was important and what was actually hard to achieve. It's hard not to notice the same pattern in any activity one is deeply involved with, be it sports or arts.
It is to be expected, after all, that specialization implies some form of impediment to communication.
Picasso was a great self promotor and back before the internet the opportunities for proving him wrong we’re very limited indeed so the myth could persist. Nowadays, however, the stuff he did back when he was drilled by his father into being an artist can easily be found online and, guess what: it turns out to be fairly mediocre.
There are many examples of his early work online. His skill in classical realistic art is hardly deniable even if one might disagree that it reached the levels of Raphael to whom he once compared his pieces of that period. He also was partly educated at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando which wasn't some no-name school either.
He failed to produce great realist work because he found those techniques boring, repetitive, and mechanical, and thus didn't try to work in that mode. He moved on to keep pace with the many radical departures from the French Academy that surrounded him. He had the skills, he just didn't use them.
In other words, doing well in the technical aspects of a student drawing course is not even close to demonstrating that one is "great" on the same level as, say, Caravaggio or Rembrandt.
I'm not sure the original poster meant "great" in the sense of Caravaggio or Rembrandt.
To a lot of people being technically proficient is all it takes to be a "great" artist, so by that standard Picasso would qualify.
The things you read on this website sometimes... Accurately copying Bargue requires far more that mediocre skills. Caravaggio is a great painter in the sense that Mozart is a great composer. If that’s where you put the bar, I probably have enough fingers to count the great painters in the whole human history. Amusingly for this discussion Picasso might still be amongst them.
That said, Bargue's process was intended for communicating good taste to 'lesser' commercial and decorative artists as much as it was used for training fine artists. It's a method that essentially boils down to copying pictures of sculptures which are twice removed from nature.
Before and since Bargue, we've had great artists who gained their chops by being students of nature. Many of them never saw a Bargue plate. Many of them didn't use the sight-size method. And there were a lot of skilled Bargue disciples who never had any real impact on art history.
All that to say, I don't think the parent comment is at all out of line. Copying Bargue plates is a fine warm-up or substitute for life drawing, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient to becoming a great realist (we had those long before Bargue). Plus, the world has churned out countless nobodies skilled in the art of copying Bargue plates (which I say as someone who would like to be one of those countless nobodies). It's just not as important as people think.
Regardless, I've done several Bargue drawings, and they're wonderfully meditative once you get into them. You don't need an atelier, though it would help. You can find copies of the plates online, and many videos of artists doing one, to show you the method. If you want further guidance, email me (look in my profile) and I'll set you up. I've actually run lunchtime classes at work making Bargue drawings.
Just as we can't really say he was a great realist, we can't say he was a mediocre one. He didn't make realist art. We can say that he mastered the skills, so if he'd worked as a realist, he'd probably have been pretty great, if only because once he found a preferable mode of expression, he was actually great.
As to whether his early or late works were great or mediocre, that's not something that can be pronounced from on high, but I do think it's fair to say he was proficient in the techniques of his era before branching out.
What? The source of Picasso being a good realistic painter is the paintings Picasso made when he was a teenager of which most have survived. You can see multiple of them at the Picasso museum in Paris or by simply googling it as you point yourself. Science and Charity which he painted at fifteen is in every way a descent classical paintings and Child with dove is a perfectly fine work in the post-impressionist style. It’s not revolutionary like the work he did later but the idea that Picasso is a mediocre painter is so demonstrably false it gets funny.
This reminds me of the old joke about the customer who got upset at having to pay $100 to a mechanic who fixed his car by hitting the engine with a hammer. The mechanic replies that he only charges $1 for the hammer hit, but $99 for knowing where to hit.
So it is with Picasso. His mature style is easier on a technical level than some more photorealistic work, but I challenge you or anyone else who thinks it's "easy" to paint something with even half the emotional impact of Guernica, or to come up with a novel style that's as innovative as Picasso's was when he created it.
Picasso wasn't copying anyone else's style. He was innovating and pushing art forward... that's why he gets pride of place in the art history books and artists who just copy his style don't.
As in science, you get a lot of credit in the art world for being first.
The art world also appreciates being shown the world in a different light, which you don't necessarily need great technical skill to accomplish (as Picasso and many artists before and after him showed).
This whole debate about the need for technical skill in "art" actually predates Picasso, and was hashed out before him about the Impressionists, who were already accused of sloppy technique by Academy artists.
Impressionism is no longer controversial, and most people can appreciate it, even though on a technical level it's arguably no better than cubism (the style that Picasso is most well known for).
Damien Hirst is a salesman who makes shit art. Jeff Koons makes things that are at least amusing. I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future.
You're an optimist.
It's more likely we'll slide towards an Idiocracy future, where it's garbage that'll be praised to the heavens.
The contemporary art world has been sliding that direction for a long time, and outside the art world kitsch dominates, and it's probably only going to get worse over time.
You are of course correct that art is more than raw technique. And you are of course correct that art appreciation is no stranger to fads and hype.
But, you seem to suggest there is nothing else to it at all.
Is that what you mean to say?
That's not a good example to affirm your point : it's a painting that was historically know for its technical qualities, representing the pinnacle of Leonardo's sfumato. But it's also been extremely damaged to the point these qualities are heavily lacking now.
We are very fortunate that image sharing on the internet has revealed that the art establishment has no clothes and people enjoy representational works. Artists like Will St. John, Colleen Barry, Ramon Alex Hurtado, Jeremy Lipking and others are reviving academic figurative traditions.
If I sound upset, it's because I am. In highschool I took AP art and all the other art classes I could. I visited all the nearby art associations and establishments that people revered. I wanted to paint people, wanted to make great paintings like the ones I saw in museums. I attended one of the best-ranked public highschools in my state and my teachers with art degrees didn't even know there was an academic path out there because their colleges just taught them about the greatness of conceptual garbage. I wound up giving up on that dream and floundering through the last decade with constructive methods like loomis and bridgman in my spare time. Now I have a degree I'm not passionate about and enough debt that pursuing academic training is out of the question.
Warhol's soup cans are neat and abstract movements were a refreshing breath of fresh air in art history, sure. You might admire works of lesser craftsmanship for their "philosophical" achievements, but consider the destruction that philosophy wreaked upon education and the cultural-nuclear-crater left behind.
Google Sargent, Repin, Bouguereau, and Homer. Then look again at Koons, Hirst, Twombly, etc. and try to convince yourself a grave error and loss has not occurred.
Picasso did what he did, and created what he created because of photography. In a world where capturing likeness, and form was basically free - what do you do with painting? Certainly not attempt to capture likeness and form - perhaps you make an Ernest attempt to capture or project the emotional response of form and subject. Picasso’s facial structure was modeled after African war masks, which were at the time ignored by the art world. And his composition and color and repetition were inspired by the Japanese print makers. A lot of the art from that era was inspired by what was coming out of Japan at that time. The product of Picasso was a mashup of influences, like all impactful art.
The backlash against likeness and form was certain way before Picasso. But the fact that he rode that style to such fame is what made the art world dramatically over correct so drastically.
Academy art was very expensive because it took a long time to make (so artists only made a hand full of work), and there were fewer artists at that level because it took so much training to get to the level of a Bouguereau or Sargent. Up until this point the people buying this kind of art were wealthy or powerful enough to afford it.
At the turn of the century, there was an increased demand of art from the new burgeoning middle class, however there simply was not enough supply, and it was all expensive academy art. Because of this, art dealers were incentivized to promote impressionists because they were already academy rejects so they were outsiders with chips on their shoulders, and the work they did was by design easier and quicker to make, so they were able to produce way more art that dealers could sell to the middle class who were less discerning than the traditional art world.
The new mass market ended up being far more profitable for dealers, the demographic so much larger, that it really just drove what kind of art was created and marketed afterwards. Bouguereau died at 80 and made less than a thousand works over his lifetime, Picasso made tens of thousands. Picasso's true genius is in his ability to produce and market his works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G8UfISpb0I
Please enlighten me. The man made literal scribbles:
https://youtu.be/X-nJNcE4uKs
Anyone with functioning eyes ought to watch that and be able to immediately see that the "expert" is not wearing any clothing. They've got classical violin music playing to add a sense of prestige, it's grotesque. It would be more appropriate to accompany the video with "zen music"[0], the musical analog to twombly's work: https://youtu.be/uOOtJcWAk-A
[0]: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13248549
He was actually criticized for not adhering to postmodernist scripture: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/10...
See also: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691170725/re...
The bullfight paintings define to me how a master can do so much with so little:
https://www.pablopicasso.org/images/paintings/bullfight-3.jp...
Is Einstein a greater scientist than Newton? Are both of them better than Galileo? Now that would be a fun discussion at the pub, but with no real value. All of these guys benefited from previous work done by other "masters" and this helped them reach even greater heights.
Even in sports like chess, where it's a lot easier to compare matches and ratings across decades and even centuries you could debate that the old masters had a fraction of the resources available to current masters so the comparison doesn't really hold.
And Laura In Black really knocked me back in my chair.
Ok so this piece is content marketing for a self-proclaimed master portraitist who gives art lessons. Guess what? He thinks the current generation is taking art to a "whole new level" (I wouldn't be surprised if the quoted artists are former students). I'll take that with a pinch of salt.
OP. Yeah, I guess I can see that now. Honestly, I did a search for Salvator Tuesday after a friend mentioned it, saw this link, thought the examples shown were interesting and the question intriguing. It’s one I’ve asked about music, literature and other topics many times.
Agree, his analysis is very limited. The better not to scare off any potential customers, I suppose. If anyone knows of a more academically sound paper or exhibition on these lines, I’d click that.
I’m not being sarcastic; who is walking around talking about a coherent, optimistic and appealing future?
There are some awesome "hyper-realist" artists out there[0], [1]. It can be argued that they are even better than cameras, as there is an element of emotional interpretation, and the artist can do things like play with the context.
But there are many that would argue that this isn't necessarily "art," as art is an interpretation of an emotional experience, as opposed to simple documentation.
Piacsso's Portrait of Igor Stravinsky[2] is considered one of the better portraits out there, and it's not really much to look at, if you are looking for realism, but it will sell for a heck of a lot more than some of the hyper-realistic works in the previous links.
Art is a story, not just a document, and that story includes many components, including the artist's own story.
I know that one of my favorite artists, is Roger Dean[3], who is not particularly realistic. I have never really been a fan of Boris Vallejo[4], who is probably a much more skilled draftsman.
I'd say that the question "Is one artist better than another?" is almost meaningless.
[0] https://www.boredpanda.com/hyper-realistic-art/
[1] https://artincontext.org/hyperrealism-art/
[2] https://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/work-117.php
[3] https://rogerdean.com
[4] https://www.borisjulie.com/product-category/prints/boris-pri...
As an artist, you should know that a camera does not represent reality, it flattens and distorts it in such subtle ways that often art of the thing is a better likeness than the actual thing. It's one of the most basic steps in any art class -- to draw reality, not what the camera gives you, and is the reason why Botanical Artwork is still highly favoured over images (along with other reasons, like being able to represent the most important parts of the plant accurately in a general sense as opposed to a specific specimen).
Hyper-realism, in my experience, also tends to be based off of images and still has that "unreal" skewed/distorted perspective thing going on.
So I'm sorry that you took offence from it, but it seems like one of the least important things one could take offence at on this website
I feel there's a lot of snobbery among artists and collectors and they look down on this kind of thing tho.
These sort of phases have always bothered me.
Art if about whatever you want it to be. My kid painting a dinosaur that looks like a scribble is art. A masterful recreation of a photograph in oil paint is art. T shaped lines on a page that have 'hidden meaning' is art.
Portraying someone realistically is as much art as throwing paint at a canvas with a particular meaning in mind is art.
It's all art. There's nothing wrong with enjoying art that doesn't have some hidden meaning. I love realism for the skill involved. I love abstract art for the ideas involved and the thought it provokes.
Enjoyment of visual art is entirely subjective, you like it or you don't, but it's still art.
There is so much of a "gatekeeping" sense when it comes to the question of "what is art", especially in the sense that "if you don't understand it your not appreciating it". You are allowed to like it just because of the way it looks.
It does, however, give me some insight into the community and mindset.
> Enjoyment of visual art is entirely subjective, you like it or you don't, but it's still art.
100% agree.
In my heyday[0], I was actually considering becoming a professional artist, but I knew that there are a ton of folks out there, that could blow me away, and didn't have programming to fall back on, so I went geek.
I used to get sneered at a lot. Fantasy art isn't really considered "art."
[0] http://littlegreenviper.com/art (I did these in the late 1980s. There's a bunch more, and I might end up putting more of them up there. My FB page has them. Feel free to judge whether or not I qualify as "artist." I couldn't do this again, right now. I'm out of practice).
I was getting at the points I've quoted below [1] - it may not even be your opinion, you say "there are many that would argue", but in my opinion art does not need a story or any emotion to still be art.
Some amazing artworks are just people trying their best to create something that looks good.
[1] "But there are many that would argue that this isn't necessarily "art," as art is an interpretation of an emotional experience, as opposed to simple documentation.
...
Art is a story, not just a document, and that story includes many components, including the artist's own story." https://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/work-117.php
[3] https://rogerdean.com
[4] https://www.borisjulie.com/product-category/prints/boris-pri...
1) The medium. Old masters must made their own paint and then paint the portrait. And this is double of the effort that modern masters need to do. This is not necessary anymore. you just buy it exactly made, in the exact amounts and the exact color tone, all the times.
This means to grind the pigments to a fine dust (and many are poisonous), filter it, discard the extra materials until you have a pure paint. Mix it with eggs, or linem oil, or water and gum. Paint it and then let it dry for many months avoiding cracks in the painting. Paint products today have stuff to dry faster and more uniform. Using those you can accelerate the dry process or made it much more long, as you need.
2) Modern masters also copy, a lot, from photographs. All is done yet in a photograph. All the points and precise measures are here at the exact distance. This is much easier than building the structure slowly in your mind and improving it by iteration.
3) The eyes. With internet your work is seen by everybody in real time. If is good is good. You can use a lot of tricks to build a myth or spread your work. It was not so easy in the old ages.
Who are "the best artists"?
According to who?
And what makes you think "the best artists" have to follow fashion?