6 ms·

always be careful of the following construction "I don't understand X, therefore I will assume that it's stupid." Better would be "I don't understand X, therefo

always be careful of the following construction "I don't understand X, therefore I will assume that it's stupid." Better would be "I don't understand X, therefore I will assume that I'm stupid (or under educated about the subject)." The second construction, based on humility, opens the mind for learning and makes you seem infinitely more thoughtful.

deogeo 7y ago
Modern art appreciation is all about seeming thoughtful.
- 77pt77 7y ago
  It's all perception and no substance
- arrrg 7y ago
  When you are talking about modern art you are talking about more than a century of work from thousands of different artists with probably hundreds of different approaches. Those approaches are only connected insofar as they remove traditions and experiment in new ways. That’s why I always think that a wholesale rejection of modern art is so ridiculous. You have to at least be more specific.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    I'll admit, I was glib - I just couldn't resist. And you're right - modern art shares the rejection of what came before, and experimentation in new ways. But rejection for its own sake, change for the sake of change, lost its novelty about a century ago. That leaves us with ugly art, that is doing its best to steal the oxygen from anything aesthetically pleasing.
    - goto11 7y ago
      In what way does it "steal oxygen"? There is enough room in the world for both Jackson Pollack and Norman Rockwell.
      - deogeo 7y ago
        There is, but modern art doesn't want to share. Contemporary galleries rarely display non-abstract/Modern art, and art schools are dropping classical techniques required for representational art (such as life drawing): The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. A distinguished British painter who taught at the Slade asked me, 'How did you learn how to do animation?' I answered that I was lucky enough to have done a lot of life drawing at art school, so without realizing it I got the feeling for weight which is so vital to animation. Then I said, 'What am I telling you for? You're teaching at the Slade and it's famous for its life drawing and excellent draftsmen.' 'If the students want to do that,' he said, 'then they've got to club together and hire themselves a model and do it in their own home.' At first I thought he was joking - but no! Life drawing as a subject went out years ago. It wasn't even on the curriculum! -- Animator's Survival Kit, page 32. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-OTUJDZcAzLcDhFbVN3TjdwUnc/view https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-OTUJDZcAzLcDhFbVN3TjdwUnc/...
        watwut 7y ago
        There are whole youtube channels for life drawing. Free. Both with simply models and with instructions.
        deogeo 7y ago
        Stealing oxygen does not imply life drawing was completely extinguished - but it was largely driven out of academia.
        watwut 7y ago
        It wasn't. Schools teach it, just google it. Even mentioned Slade school have classes on life drawing. Life drawing was never more accessible then today. For that matter, learning any drawing was never more accessible then today.
    - arrrg 7y ago
      Not everyone rejects everything and not everyone even rejects the same things. I even deliberately avoided using the term “rejection” since that’s not even what it is, in many cases. Even someone like Pollock uses paint, uses a canvas. His works are presented in museums the same way paintings from, say, the 17th century are. His paintings are recognizably painting-shaped. So there are some traditions he does not reject. So modern art is not some sort of wholesale rejection of everything that came before. People just allowed themselves to reject different things. That’s the big picture. However, like modernism as a whole, there certainly was a rejection of traditions and among the many approaches there were very dogmatic ones (but a single approach being dogmatic and rejecting things stringently still leads to diversity if other approaches accept those things and reject different things). Postmodernism has certainly been breaking that up, though. So to address your points: * Artists had reasons for picking their approaches. You might not agree with those reasons, but those reasons existed. I think you would be hard pressed to find artists that rejected traditions just because. * A rejection of things that are “aesthetically pleasing” is not a common theme among modern art, though declaring the goal of creating something “aesthetically pleasing” as not a goal or as just one possible goal is certainly an oft rejected tradition.
- flowerlad 7y ago
  Sometimes so is wine appreciation.
artsyca 7y ago
I apply this thinking to formal business dress very often -- People in our industry are notorious for dressing down to where the art of dressing up is lost to the silicon sands of time Most anyone you ask from an entry level to a manager, director, vice president all the way to Jack Dorsey himself will tell you dress is meaningless and unimportant to "getting things done and building great things" and I know it comes from a place of ignorance because I used to be the same way until I stumbled into a Brooks Brothers one day a few years back Dress is a lot like art in that one must master the classics but that too is becoming the exception in fail fast culture where the means exceedingly outweigh the ends So I ask myself what would Alan Turing do? And I know he'd dress formally and carry on because back then computer science really did save lives as opposed to now when the user is only worth the data that can be squeezed out of them -- I'm sure this is exactly the future the hippies in the Homebrew Computer Club envisioned when they convened in their dark garages by the light of their fluorescent vacuum tubes to worship their newfound digital deities dressed in jeans and printed T's /rant
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Back in the olden Zortech days, we decided on a company rule that staff could wear whatever they wanted to work, but had to wear a suit when visiting customers. This got some pushback, and some said they couldn't afford a suit. So we bought them suits. It was great. They loved wearing the suits (often their first suit) and opened a lot of doors for us with our customers. They were tired of tech people showing up in rags, and then we'd show up in suits. For a small business like ours, it was a game changer.
  - artsyca 7y ago
    I understand the sentiment and the intention and there are many layers of this onion to unwrap Formal wear unlocked some muscles your organization never even knew it had, and also some difficult conversations and investment dynamics which arose but were settled magnanimously enough and seem to have led to modest gains in morale despite initial skepticism and coercion / push & pushback The point is you got to somewhere you didn't know you'd go and now you have a taste for how the world actually works that's ever so slightly outside of the organizational event horizon i.e. the collective comfort zone that keeps you all locked in to a shared inertia I'd venture, not to harp on your example that the organization never quite reached the critical mass that would possibly have occurred had you followed down this road a ways, and perhaps the whole thing fizzled out after some new people got onboarded and the old guard began to drift away?
ianai 7y ago
Humility is a concept missing sorely in practice in the world today.

deogeo 7y ago

Modern art appreciation is all about seeming thoughtful.

77pt77 7y ago
It's all perception and no substance
arrrg 7y ago
When you are talking about modern art you are talking about more than a century of work from thousands of different artists with probably hundreds of different approaches. Those approaches are only connected insofar as they remove traditions and experiment in new ways. That’s why I always think that a wholesale rejection of modern art is so ridiculous. You have to at least be more specific.
- deogeo 7y ago
  I'll admit, I was glib - I just couldn't resist. And you're right - modern art shares the rejection of what came before, and experimentation in new ways. But rejection for its own sake, change for the sake of change, lost its novelty about a century ago. That leaves us with ugly art, that is doing its best to steal the oxygen from anything aesthetically pleasing.
  - goto11 7y ago
    In what way does it "steal oxygen"? There is enough room in the world for both Jackson Pollack and Norman Rockwell.
    - deogeo 7y ago
      There is, but modern art doesn't want to share. Contemporary galleries rarely display non-abstract/Modern art, and art schools are dropping classical techniques required for representational art (such as life drawing): The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. A distinguished British painter who taught at the Slade asked me, 'How did you learn how to do animation?' I answered that I was lucky enough to have done a lot of life drawing at art school, so without realizing it I got the feeling for weight which is so vital to animation. Then I said, 'What am I telling you for? You're teaching at the Slade and it's famous for its life drawing and excellent draftsmen.' 'If the students want to do that,' he said, 'then they've got to club together and hire themselves a model and do it in their own home.' At first I thought he was joking - but no! Life drawing as a subject went out years ago. It wasn't even on the curriculum! -- Animator's Survival Kit, page 32. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-OTUJDZcAzLcDhFbVN3TjdwUnc/view https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-OTUJDZcAzLcDhFbVN3TjdwUnc/...
      - watwut 7y ago
        There are whole youtube channels for life drawing. Free. Both with simply models and with instructions.
        deogeo 7y ago
        Stealing oxygen does not imply life drawing was completely extinguished - but it was largely driven out of academia.
        watwut 7y ago
        It wasn't. Schools teach it, just google it. Even mentioned Slade school have classes on life drawing. Life drawing was never more accessible then today. For that matter, learning any drawing was never more accessible then today.
  - arrrg 7y ago
    Not everyone rejects everything and not everyone even rejects the same things. I even deliberately avoided using the term “rejection” since that’s not even what it is, in many cases. Even someone like Pollock uses paint, uses a canvas. His works are presented in museums the same way paintings from, say, the 17th century are. His paintings are recognizably painting-shaped. So there are some traditions he does not reject. So modern art is not some sort of wholesale rejection of everything that came before. People just allowed themselves to reject different things. That’s the big picture. However, like modernism as a whole, there certainly was a rejection of traditions and among the many approaches there were very dogmatic ones (but a single approach being dogmatic and rejecting things stringently still leads to diversity if other approaches accept those things and reject different things). Postmodernism has certainly been breaking that up, though. So to address your points: * Artists had reasons for picking their approaches. You might not agree with those reasons, but those reasons existed. I think you would be hard pressed to find artists that rejected traditions just because. * A rejection of things that are “aesthetically pleasing” is not a common theme among modern art, though declaring the goal of creating something “aesthetically pleasing” as not a goal or as just one possible goal is certainly an oft rejected tradition.
flowerlad 7y ago
Sometimes so is wine appreciation.

artsyca 7y ago

I apply this thinking to formal business dress very often -- People in our industry are notorious for dressing down to where the art of dressing up is lost to the silicon sands of time Most anyone you ask from an entry level to a manager, director, vice president all the way to Jack Dorsey himself will tell you dress is meaningless and unimportant to "getting things done and building great things" and I know it comes from a place of ignorance because I used to be the same way until I stumbled into a Brooks Brothers one day a few years back Dress is a lot like art in that one must master the classics but that too is becoming the exception in fail fast culture where the means exceedingly outweigh the ends So I ask myself what would Alan Turing do? And I know he'd dress formally and carry on because back then computer science really did save lives as opposed to now when the user is only worth the data that can be squeezed out of them -- I'm sure this is exactly the future the hippies in the Homebrew Computer Club envisioned when they convened in their dark garages by the light of their fluorescent vacuum tubes to worship their newfound digital deities dressed in jeans and printed T's /rant

WalterBright 7y ago
Back in the olden Zortech days, we decided on a company rule that staff could wear whatever they wanted to work, but had to wear a suit when visiting customers. This got some pushback, and some said they couldn't afford a suit. So we bought them suits. It was great. They loved wearing the suits (often their first suit) and opened a lot of doors for us with our customers. They were tired of tech people showing up in rags, and then we'd show up in suits. For a small business like ours, it was a game changer.
- artsyca 7y ago
  I understand the sentiment and the intention and there are many layers of this onion to unwrap Formal wear unlocked some muscles your organization never even knew it had, and also some difficult conversations and investment dynamics which arose but were settled magnanimously enough and seem to have led to modest gains in morale despite initial skepticism and coercion / push & pushback The point is you got to somewhere you didn't know you'd go and now you have a taste for how the world actually works that's ever so slightly outside of the organizational event horizon i.e. the collective comfort zone that keeps you all locked in to a shared inertia I'd venture, not to harp on your example that the organization never quite reached the critical mass that would possibly have occurred had you followed down this road a ways, and perhaps the whole thing fizzled out after some new people got onboarded and the old guard began to drift away?

ianai 7y ago

Humility is a concept missing sorely in practice in the world today.