I don't live in SV, but I've been on HN for a few years. One thing that is certain is that few if any participants in the "art world" (technical term for the a

I don't live in SV, but I've been on HN for a few years. One thing that is certain is that few if any participants in the "art world" (technical term for the active professional business of mediating art via museums, galleries, magazines, etc.) would find the way art is discussed here to be impressive or relevant. It's a specialized field, but Swisher is right that tech folks tend both to be fairly uninformed about the humanities, and also to overestimate their ability to discern what is going on in other people's areas of specialization. I've got a postgraduate degree in contemporary art and I follow it pretty closely. It's not cynical to dismiss much of the art world as vacuous. At the same time, successful art speaks to current human concerns in a way that's undeniable. Unfortunately, the art scene reflects the anti-intellectual character of contemporary life. There are critics and art intellectuals, but their role is somewhat trivialized, because nobody really takes the intellectual side of art that seriously (because the artists don't). So, in an anti-intellectual milieu, "intellectuals" are stuck playing a bit of a two-dimensional, token performance of seriousness. Art on HN, I would say, plays a role that is similarly circumscribed and trivialized. It's present, but it's not taken seriously—it performs a stereotyped function in the discourse. There's discussion of art, but it's not integrated with the actual critical canon. It's almost like a 19th C blackface minstrel performance rather than the involvement of an actual black person (if that's an OK analogy to use).