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Is it really a work of art if it doesn't include the obligatory ridiculous description? Something like "Opus #4, in mixed media. Through a re-imagining of the i

Is it really a work of art if it doesn't include the obligatory ridiculous description? Something like "Opus #4, in mixed media. Through a re-imagining of the interaction between form and light, the artist challenges our preconceived notions regarding the interplay of history, science, and religion, transgressing the boundaries imposed by our own engagement in a patriarchal society, and forcing us to reconsider the role of art as a medium for change."

jonplackett 7y ago
I thought about this the other day while at the Louvre. Someone needs to make thisartworkdescriptiondoesnotexist.com
- earthbound19 7y ago
  Any markov chain generator working on a large enough input can simulate such gibberish. I linked to static output from one I made (in another thread).
- amoebaarriba 7y ago
  Thisemotionalreactiontoartworkdoesnotexist.com This is silly
- stubish 7y ago
  Yes. So often I've seen art that is completely devoid of meaning without the label, and it isn't obvious if the label is supposed to apply to a nearby pedestal or the wall it is affixed to. The label is the actual art work.
notahacker 7y ago
You nailed it. I mean, my first thought on looking at the output was it's shit. But I'm pretty sure that with some meaningless verbiage generated from a corpus of art criticism (thisartcommentarydoesnotexist?) as a caption, it wouldn't look out of place in some modern art galleries and some collector would lap it up.
- fcbrooklyn 7y ago
  I have friends who are (modestly) successful fine artists, and they uniformly hate having to write that dreck. But you wanna pay the bills, you pick up a pen and write.
  - earthbound19 7y ago
    It is hard for me to believe that there is an absolute imperative connection between writing International Art English and being paid. https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_ar... I coded a verbal recombobulator that generates such statements to mock such statements. Please point your friends to it if they're ever stuck. http://earthbound.io/gibberish-artist-statements/index.php http://earthbound.io/gibberish-artist-statements/index.php
- nineteen999 7y ago
  > it wouldn't look out of place in some modern art galleries and some collector would lap it up Sure, if you were dishonest about its origin, and that says a lot about the pretentiousness of the modern "fine art" industry. If you told them it took 0.00001 cents worth of electricity/compute power to create both the artwork and the description from an algorithm and some random numbers, I doubt most collectors would be prepared to lap it up at any price.
  - pharke 7y ago
    Charitably, you could say they are paying for the artist's ability to synthesize art from their experiences but then you could argue that the NN is doing the same thing but is just more efficient at painting. If that's the case then why should there be a difference in value? Are collectors just paying for the blood, sweat, and tears of a human artist regardless of what they produce?
    - nineteen999 7y ago
      If you're honest about it, and the customer is prepared to pay your asking price for the computer generated art, then it's no issue. All collectors are individuals - you'd have to ask them whether/how much they are prepared to pay if they know the art is synthesized. All I'm saying is that pretending it's generated directly by a human instead of a human-driven algorithm is unethical. Whether they can tell the difference or not on their own is beside the point.
GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
artists rarely write their own descriptions, usually left up to the museum curator's interpretation.
- fcbrooklyn 7y ago
  sounds like a job for thismuseumcuratordoesnotexist.com.
deanCommie 7y ago
I know it's popular to hate on modern art, and your post will be the most upvoted (and I upvoted you too, so that my response would be more visible), but I want to offer an alternative view. Art is about the artist attempting to generate an emotional response in an audience. Books, painting, music, are all there to create joy, sadness, melancholy, laughter, suspense, excitement. Human emotions are universal, which is the beauty of art. But humans themselves are not. What one person finds funny, another finds disgusting. What one finds sad, another finds pathetic. Which is why we need so many genres of art. This is why we need both Classical Music, and Heavy Metal, and Country. Dramas and Comedies. But what happens when art ceases to generate an emotional response? Does it even have value? This is what happened to the classical art world at the turn of the impressionism. Classic "Renaissance"-style painting styles perfected the human form to the point that there was nothing exciting any more about the form. Nothing stimulating the viewer. And besides, photo-realistic representations of scenery was about to be improved and replaced with...photography. So the artists went back to the drawing board, started challenging the status quo, and came up with Impressionism. Cubism. And a million other *isms that I, an uneducated rube, can't even begin to name or speak about with competency. But each one isn't meant to be universal, to generate an emotional response in the audience. You can walk through a museum, and see a 100 paintings, and feel nothing. And that's okay! What's worth it is the one painting you see that causes you to feel something. Then it worked. "Modern art" (which itself can be exploded into a million different categories falls into a bit of that. And it simply cannot be appreciated with a simple low-resolution gif on a monitor. For one, it sits on the context of what came before. It responds to art that preceded it. You can get mad about that and think it should stand on it's own, but consider how much of mass media depends on an implicit understanding of the culture and what preceded it. For another, it's frequently a 3 dimensional medium. Seeing the brushstrokes of an impressionist painting must be seen in person to truly marvel at the incredible ability to make something appear out of nothing ("This brush stroke is a dog. It's clearly a dog. but when you look up close, it's just a single simple brush stroke.") Finally, and this brings me full circle to your point, sometimes you need to actively place yourself into a position to feel something. Consider the difference between listening to a new song on earbuds on a loud subway train, vs on high quality headphones on your beanbag chair at home alone, vs with an audience in a magnificent concert hall. Your emotional response is going to be entirely different. So when you see something like "Opus #4, in mixed media. Through a re-imagining of the interaction between form and light, the artist challenges our preconceived notions regarding the interplay of history, science, and religion, transgressing the boundaries imposed by our own engagement in a patriarchal society, and forcing us to reconsider the role of art as a medium for change.", you could default to "Wow, whoever painted this must be a giant gasbag". You could scoff and say "My 4 year old niece could have painted that, and I wouldn't put it on my fridge" You could say "What does this millennial know about the role of art as a medium for change." Or you could stop, clear your head, and actually think about the words. How do you feel about society? How does the art before you make you feel? How does it feel to stand on the shoulders of giants?" Maybe you'll feel nothing and move along, and that's okay. But maybe you'll actually get some insights or an emotional repsonse from the piece, which is what the author hoped you would.
vernie 7y ago
This is the take I expect from a software engineering and related entrepreneurship forum.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
abiogenesis 7y ago
Now that's a hard problem to solve. AI generated text is usually more readable. I don't know of an algorithm that can dumb it down similar to your example.
braindongle 7y ago
It is right and good to poke fun at artists describing nonrepresentational work as being about something. It's endemic in contemporary art music as well. One can still dig the work itself, though. Forget the words around it. Talking about art is like dancing about architecture.
- nineteen999 7y ago
  - Frank Zappa
  - braindongle 7y ago
    It's unclear. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music...
    - nineteen999 7y ago
      The more you know! Thanks for sharing that.

jonplackett 7y ago

I thought about this the other day while at the Louvre. Someone needs to make thisartworkdescriptiondoesnotexist.com

earthbound19 7y ago
Any markov chain generator working on a large enough input can simulate such gibberish. I linked to static output from one I made (in another thread).
amoebaarriba 7y ago
Thisemotionalreactiontoartworkdoesnotexist.com This is silly
stubish 7y ago
Yes. So often I've seen art that is completely devoid of meaning without the label, and it isn't obvious if the label is supposed to apply to a nearby pedestal or the wall it is affixed to. The label is the actual art work.

notahacker 7y ago

You nailed it. I mean, my first thought on looking at the output was it's shit. But I'm pretty sure that with some meaningless verbiage generated from a corpus of art criticism (thisartcommentarydoesnotexist?) as a caption, it wouldn't look out of place in some modern art galleries and some collector would lap it up.

fcbrooklyn 7y ago
I have friends who are (modestly) successful fine artists, and they uniformly hate having to write that dreck. But you wanna pay the bills, you pick up a pen and write.
- earthbound19 7y ago
  It is hard for me to believe that there is an absolute imperative connection between writing International Art English and being paid. https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_ar... I coded a verbal recombobulator that generates such statements to mock such statements. Please point your friends to it if they're ever stuck. http://earthbound.io/gibberish-artist-statements/index.php http://earthbound.io/gibberish-artist-statements/index.php
nineteen999 7y ago
> it wouldn't look out of place in some modern art galleries and some collector would lap it up Sure, if you were dishonest about its origin, and that says a lot about the pretentiousness of the modern "fine art" industry. If you told them it took 0.00001 cents worth of electricity/compute power to create both the artwork and the description from an algorithm and some random numbers, I doubt most collectors would be prepared to lap it up at any price.
- pharke 7y ago
  Charitably, you could say they are paying for the artist's ability to synthesize art from their experiences but then you could argue that the NN is doing the same thing but is just more efficient at painting. If that's the case then why should there be a difference in value? Are collectors just paying for the blood, sweat, and tears of a human artist regardless of what they produce?
  - nineteen999 7y ago
    If you're honest about it, and the customer is prepared to pay your asking price for the computer generated art, then it's no issue. All collectors are individuals - you'd have to ask them whether/how much they are prepared to pay if they know the art is synthesized. All I'm saying is that pretending it's generated directly by a human instead of a human-driven algorithm is unethical. Whether they can tell the difference or not on their own is beside the point.

GaryNumanVevo 7y ago

artists rarely write their own descriptions, usually left up to the museum curator's interpretation.

fcbrooklyn 7y ago
sounds like a job for thismuseumcuratordoesnotexist.com.

deanCommie 7y ago

I know it's popular to hate on modern art, and your post will be the most upvoted (and I upvoted you too, so that my response would be more visible), but I want to offer an alternative view. Art is about the artist attempting to generate an emotional response in an audience. Books, painting, music, are all there to create joy, sadness, melancholy, laughter, suspense, excitement. Human emotions are universal, which is the beauty of art. But humans themselves are not. What one person finds funny, another finds disgusting. What one finds sad, another finds pathetic. Which is why we need so many genres of art. This is why we need both Classical Music, and Heavy Metal, and Country. Dramas and Comedies. But what happens when art ceases to generate an emotional response? Does it even have value? This is what happened to the classical art world at the turn of the impressionism. Classic "Renaissance"-style painting styles perfected the human form to the point that there was nothing exciting any more about the form. Nothing stimulating the viewer. And besides, photo-realistic representations of scenery was about to be improved and replaced with...photography. So the artists went back to the drawing board, started challenging the status quo, and came up with Impressionism. Cubism. And a million other *isms that I, an uneducated rube, can't even begin to name or speak about with competency. But each one isn't meant to be universal, to generate an emotional response in the audience. You can walk through a museum, and see a 100 paintings, and feel nothing. And that's okay! What's worth it is the one painting you see that causes you to feel something. Then it worked. "Modern art" (which itself can be exploded into a million different categories falls into a bit of that. And it simply cannot be appreciated with a simple low-resolution gif on a monitor. For one, it sits on the context of what came before. It responds to art that preceded it. You can get mad about that and think it should stand on it's own, but consider how much of mass media depends on an implicit understanding of the culture and what preceded it. For another, it's frequently a 3 dimensional medium. Seeing the brushstrokes of an impressionist painting must be seen in person to truly marvel at the incredible ability to make something appear out of nothing ("This brush stroke is a dog. It's clearly a dog. but when you look up close, it's just a single simple brush stroke.") Finally, and this brings me full circle to your point, sometimes you need to actively place yourself into a position to feel something. Consider the difference between listening to a new song on earbuds on a loud subway train, vs on high quality headphones on your beanbag chair at home alone, vs with an audience in a magnificent concert hall. Your emotional response is going to be entirely different. So when you see something like "Opus #4, in mixed media. Through a re-imagining of the interaction between form and light, the artist challenges our preconceived notions regarding the interplay of history, science, and religion, transgressing the boundaries imposed by our own engagement in a patriarchal society, and forcing us to reconsider the role of art as a medium for change.", you could default to "Wow, whoever painted this must be a giant gasbag". You could scoff and say "My 4 year old niece could have painted that, and I wouldn't put it on my fridge" You could say "What does this millennial know about the role of art as a medium for change." Or you could stop, clear your head, and actually think about the words. How do you feel about society? How does the art before you make you feel? How does it feel to stand on the shoulders of giants?" Maybe you'll feel nothing and move along, and that's okay. But maybe you'll actually get some insights or an emotional repsonse from the piece, which is what the author hoped you would.

vernie 7y ago

This is the take I expect from a software engineering and related entrepreneurship forum.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

abiogenesis 7y ago

Now that's a hard problem to solve. AI generated text is usually more readable. I don't know of an algorithm that can dumb it down similar to your example.

braindongle 7y ago

It is right and good to poke fun at artists describing nonrepresentational work as being about something. It's endemic in contemporary art music as well. One can still dig the work itself, though. Forget the words around it. Talking about art is like dancing about architecture.

nineteen999 7y ago
- Frank Zappa
- braindongle 7y ago
  It's unclear. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music...
  - nineteen999 7y ago
    The more you know! Thanks for sharing that.