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"Fine art factory" is an oxymoron. It's a human-powered printing machine.
by calebm 10y ago
"Fine art factory" is an oxymoron. It's a human-powered printing machine.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- 3chelon 10y agoYou're absolutely right. It must still be cheaper to use human skill, but I see no technical reason this cannot be done using image processing (e.g. a Photoshop filter), robotics and/or 3D printing. Clearly, the whole question of art as product has been endlessly addressed by Duchamp, Warhol and others - indeed, the whole Conceptual Art movement is in one sense a response to this question. But the sheer scale - and chutzpah - of this operation is staggering, and the fact it is using human skill and not automation makes it - oddly - appear quite modern and "disruptive" to Western eyes. But... and this begs even more questions: I was talking to a well-known British painter just two days ago, and he was telling me his biggest (and most lucrative) market is China. So China is exporting cheap mass-produced art, and importing expensive, original art!
- 2bitencryption 10y agoI would much prefer to buy something hand-painted (even mass-produced hand-painted). Because I want to know a person painted it. I want to know they put their brush in a big tin paint bin slobbered and muddy with old paint and then pushed the brush against the canvass to make the lines. An intelligent image processing filter would be cool to, but I would want it for different reasons.
- crooked-v 10y agoEven if talking about totally automated processes, "a robot arm painted this based on a photo" would be a higher-status product than "a printer printed out this image-processed photo".
- SiVal 10y agoI see no technical reason this cannot be done using image processing (e.g. a Photoshop filter), robotics and/or 3D printing. In Japan, I watched a robot paint portraits of live models. A person would sit on a bench, the robot would look at him, then dip a traditional horsehair brush in black ink and paint on paper on an easel. It was outline brushwork with different pressures creating variations in line thickness. The result was quite good--very clearly the live model in front of us. This was in Tsukuba "Science City"... 32 years ago.
- detaro 10y agoI'm not so sure it is. Just because steps of the process are "industrialized" doesn't necessarily mean something isn't fine art anymore. Fine art photography nowadays often involves an industrial inkjet printer. Assistants painting dots after dots still makes a Damien Hirst for some reason. There probably is a line somewhere, but it's far from clear where, and highly depends on your definition of "fine art". That the service discussed here is not "fine art" IMHO is easier to argue, but depends a lot on how much leeway the artists actually are given, less so on how many there are or how much they paint.
- 3chelon 10y agoI think most artists would agree that the line is drawn when a customer gives you a picture of their pet and says "paint that, exactly like the picture." Certainly many, many artists throughout the centuries have painted commissioned work to survive, but when the customer demands an exact copy of the photo in another medium and the artist is allowed no subjective interpretation of the subject matter it ceases to be fine art.
- detaro 10y agoI would agree (except of course if the artist is doing exactly this on purpose...), but I wanted to make the point that a lot of the process can be factory-like, as long as that "artistic freedom" of someone, not necessarily the one actually doing the work, is expressed. Just because there is a factory doesn't mean it isn't fine art, so there could be a "fine art factory". In general, not talking about this specific service.
- 3chelon 10y agoYes, the process is irrelevant to the "fine art" quality (whatever that is).
- anigbrowl 10y agoIt's not fine art because the artist isn't choosing the subject and presentation. If you commission me to do a portrait of you, that's fine art. If you hire me to make a copy of an existing image in paint, that's strictly a commercial task. The basic aspect of art is that I as the artist make the decisions about what the painting is going to look like. Damien Hirst is a fine artist, his assistants are not (while they're working on his paintings obviously).
- JasonInSeattle 10y agoRight; the multiple refererences to instapainting's product as "art" really irk me. It's decorative wallhangings at best...