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Neat. Art snobs always defend Pollock by claiming it's actually really difficult to forge a true Pollock and that even though it looks easy, real Pollock painti

• GGfpc 6y ago
  I tend to think that art should be admired because it's beautiful and not because it's difficult to reproduce
  • Dirlewanger 6y ago
    People find it and other post-modernist works "beautiful" mainly because it pisses off the previous generation of artists. It has no other reason for existing otherwise. It's bereft of any soul or meaning. David Foster Wallace highlights this best.
    • erulabs 6y ago
      I can't think of less meaningful information than why someone believes why someone else believes something is beautiful. How could you possibly know that?
    • Bodell 6y ago
      This reeks of literal illiteracy, as well as a lack of visual aesthetic literacy. I'm not trying to sling mud here but I'd be really embarrassed by this if I were you. This is near saying that jazz music is just noise, despite whoever saying it likely not being able to even keep up with a basic chord chart. Or possibly it would be more appropriate, to imagine someone able to do a quick and dirty script in python, not understanding that CPU architecture is more nuanced and complicated simply because they know nothing about it. One is not necessarily better than the other, but you yourself are the one losing out from your inability to appreciate things outside of your comfort zone.
  • munificent 6y ago
    I tend to think art should encompass all of the many ways it can provoke an interesting, thoughtful reaction in the viewer. If we reduce art to just pretty things, then consuming art will rarely help us grow as people.
• ttymck 6y ago
  > I say... who cares. Does this make you an "Art Snob Snob"?
• jrsdav 6y ago
  You’re right; if it looks good, it is good. But don’t diminish Pollock’s hard earned technical ability that was necessary for his breakthrough in abstract expressionism. It can be difficult for artists to get past the hurdle of mastering their medium so they can arrive at a place where they can really begin to express their intuitions. Acknowledging and admiring this does not make it snobbish.
  • pmoriarty 6y ago
    "don’t diminish Pollock’s hard earned technical ability" What technical ability was that? I view Pollock's success as more of a result of stumbling in to a bit of the art world's search space that hadn't been explored before, and his championing by a highly influential art critic that liked his work. After that there was a Life magazine spread that brought him to popular attention. None of this had anything to do with his technical ability, and I would be very surprised if even Pollock himself claimed that his paintings were technically difficult to accomplish.
    • jrsdav 6y ago
      The use of pigments and their combination to form a palette, the way he held the brush and moved his body, the amount of force he applied, the viscosity of paint... As someone who works extensively in an art medium (ceramics), I relate to these as technical challenges. It's very time consuming to reign in control over these factors to the point where they become "right", however subjective, to the artist. The consistency of Pollock's work, to me, shows that he had a systematic approach to how he technically achieved his work (fractal analysis also seems to prove this [1]). I won't argue if it made his work more successful, but he clearly had a level of intention and skill that I personally admire. [1] https://blogs.uoregon.edu/richardtaylor/2016/02/08/fractal-analysis-of-jackson-pollocks-poured-paintings/ https://blogs.uoregon.edu/richardtaylor/2016/02/08/fractal-a...
      • pmoriarty 6y ago
        "The use of pigments and their combination to form a palette, the way he held the brush and moved his body, the amount of force he applied, the viscosity of paint. As someone who works extensively in an art medium (ceramics), I relate to these as technical challenges." I make art in various media myself, but don't look at the elements you list as technical challenges as much as they are expressive choices which provide a sort of a "fingerprint" or signature on an artist's work. In contrast, technical challenges that require a high amount of skill would be the creation, purely by hand and without mechanical assistance, of something like Albrecht Durer's Meloncolia[1], Michelangelo's Moses[2] or Sistine Chapel, to name but a few. These works require not just the artist's personal distinctive "fingerprint" but the skill to create great verisimilitude in approximating the appearance of living beings and other things in the "external", "real" world. Any number of mistakes, from proportion to lighting to texture to anatomy, could have been made that would have made their work look "wrong". The same couldn't be said of Pollock's work. Whether he chose to fling his paint right or left, up or down, would have resulted in more or less the same splatter effect, as long as he kept to pretty much the same paint density and color scheme. That's really not much of a skill compared to the master draftsmen like Michelangelo and Durer. I also don't believe being systematic is evidence of skill. It's just evidence of organization. Don't get me wrong, though. I like Pollock myself and consider that at its best his work achieves a high level of energy and harmony that is appealing to me. However, I believe that if just about anyone makes enough random splatter paintings, then those kinds of happy accidents are bound to come along eventually. It really doesn't take much, if any, skill in my eyes. He just happened to do it first. [1] - http://www.albrechtdurerblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/melencolia_i.jpg http://www.albrechtdurerblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/... [2] - https://i2.wp.com/befrontmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/99cb15ab5e3426e119ec304ff40eb028.jpg https://i2.wp.com/befrontmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/...
• ianai 6y ago
  The worlds already plenty hypercritical-against art, but more than just art. Really wondering what progress this is meant to do for society. I’d suggest anyone genuinely interested in experiencing art to just do some exploration. The Artsy app has been great for this. No purchase necessary to simply see what’s out there and some valuations. (Note that the art business is seemingly used for not just selling art but other nefarious things - so laugh at the prices as they’re possibly representative of more than just the art.) I find much of his work beautiful. It clearly stands out amongst the crowd.
• gowld 6y ago
  Art is subjective, of course, but Pollack isn't easy to imitate and get 90+% of the way with no skill or practice. Cheap imitations don't look similar. The jacksonpollack.org website is a silly farce.
  • zlidka 6y ago
    farce but I like it.
  • umvi 6y ago
    If you picked random people on the street and asked them to choose between a picture of a real pollock and a picture generated from this website, what % of people would choose the correct painting? My guess: 50%
• mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  Art <> difficulty level. Something can be easy and magnificent. Something can be hard and not worth a damn.
• quicklime 6y ago
  There was a discussion on HN not long ago about things that are obvious in hindsight[1], and I think Pollock's work might fit this category. Beyond the aesthetics, and even if his artworks were easy to reproduce, there's some value not just in the art itself but the discussion that it sparked in the community, and the impact that it had on perceptions of modern art. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24229269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24229269
  • everdrive 6y ago
    If the point is the conversation it generates, then it's not really art. Tt's either meta-art, or performance art, or something like that.
    • hilbertseries 6y ago
      Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that meta art or performance art, are not themselves art. This is quite a strange argument. Perhaps you should read about conceptual art, like Duchamps fountain, which is certainly art. Or if you really want to get upset read about Cattelan’s latest piece involving a banana and a piece of duct tape.
    • ianai 6y ago
      Just my casual interaction with the art world tells me the conversation art inspires is always a value add to the art.
• Bodell 6y ago
  "Did you see that painting what Rothko did?, Looks like it was painted by a two year old kid, Hot air, Hot air, Ignorance is bliss, yeah?, Well I'm not pleased, Because you spread your opinion like a rectal disease, Hot air, Hot air, Did you see that photo what Bellingham took?, He needs to take a leaf out the screensaver book, Hot air, Hot air, If all photos were as you wanted them to be, That would be page three as far as the eye could see, Hot air, Hot air, Forgive me you sound stupid, Here lies the one I love, Forgive me you sound stupid, Here lies the one I love" --Stendhal Syndrome by IDLES
• munificent 6y ago
  This is the quintessential HN comment. Completely dismiss an entire region of the human experience and entire field of experts by assuming that your own unfamiliarity means there must be nothing there worth learning. An equivalent claim is, "Windows 95 can do 90% of what Linux can do already. Operating system programmers aren't worth admiring." If I've learned anything in my life, it's that when a group of people take something very seriously that seems pointless to me, 99% of the time, it is my own ignorance preventing me from seeing what they see.
  • routerl 6y ago
    What you've described is especially pernicious over multiple iterations. Windows 95 can do 90% of what Linux can. Windows 3.1 can do 90% of what Windows 95 can. DOS can do 90% of what Window 3.1 can. In this (contrived and counter-chronological) example, at each iteration we lost something that was only ever valuable to connoisseurs. In the case of software, we're talking about developers and power users. But yeah, let's all keep mocking Pollock, and the art history students who cherish the work, until we end up with nothing but the most commercial, easily-digestible, and trite art. Oh wait...
    • virtue3 6y ago
      shhh, you'll wake up Andy Warhol from his grave lol.
  • ResearchCode 6y ago
    An equivalent claim could also be that some collection of 3-line Python scripts is among the most important accomplishments in computer science and engineering. Being clearly trivial, it probably isn't that great. So another possibility is that there indeed is such a thing as an emperor without clothes, and he might show up in abstract art.
    • munificent 6y ago
      The Y-combinator is an even smaller script in an even simpler programming language. It must be completely trivial and not worth admiring in the least.
• deleted 6y ago
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• leejoramo 6y ago
  Really? Let’s change context: vi, emacs, BBEdit, Notepad++, Sublime, VSCode, TextMate all produce the same plain text. Is it the same? I can write simple code in Python, Perl, C, PHP, swift, rebol, basic, rexx, JavaScript and do the same thing. Is the end result the only thing? I have learned a huge amount from studying other programmers simple programs that I could have written. Even inexperienced programmers have taught me. I have learned a huge amount watching other people paint walls of a house while I am painting the same wall the same color. There is much more to art than paint on a canvas. Much more.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• _jal 6y ago
  >I say... who cares. That's fine, of course you're not obligated to like or admire anything in particular. Generally, if I don't see value in something a large number of people do, it causes me to reflect a little to try to figure out what I'm missing. And indeed, frequently I find I don't care (pick any pop star of the last few decades, for instance). But sometimes it opens up a whole world I've been missing.
  • umvi 6y ago
    > Generally, if I don't see value in something a large number of people do, it causes me to reflect a little to try to figure out what I'm missing I do as well. But a lot of times I come to the conclusion that everyone is just participating in a social meta-game aka "the emperor's new clothes". The art community (in my opinion) is especially vulnerable to these social meta-games (because there is no way to objectively measure art in a way everyone agrees on), where you have to pretend to like and admire stuff to curry favor with peers and critics. Criticize Pollock and you stand to lose a lot of social standing. Praise him and show your learnedness and you climb the social ladder. And as you climb the ladder pretty soon you've fully bought into the status quo yourself.
    • _jal 6y ago
      There are a lot of games in the art world, no question. Mostly comes from the fact that money flows are super opaque and most folks aren't making any. Anyway, I dunno. I don't think I've ever lost social favor for not liking some dead artist. (Live ones are like everyone else, and tribal bullshit applies. Just like in any other group of humans.) One thing to be aware of is most folks with an interest in art aren't going to find "I could do that" to be meaningful criticism. Yeah, and? You didn't. Someone other than Armstrong could have been the first man on the Moon, but they weren't, either.
• dillondoyle 6y ago
  Ability to reproduce - or imitate - has very little relation to the cultural 'value' or 'goodness' of art. Viewing art as simply technical skill alone is meaningless when you have a photograph, a printer, or a robot. Think about the introduction of photography. Like you said, the ability to imitate something (in this case 100%) with no skill or practice. That's photography. And it changed everything. Impressionism came from this period. And I think it's interesting when placing Pollock on this timeline, he only did the drip paintings for a couple years of his career. But a lot of people would place these paintings towards the start of AbEx. Which some define as an opposing reaction to encroaching government, McCarthyism, lack of individuality and conformity, communism, etc. It's not just one technique or style. It's a way of expressing individuality and emotion. Pollock's drip paintings and that type of 'action painting' directly tears apart that narrow view of art you expressed. These pieces purposely make the individual 'building blocks' visible. the brush strokes, paint etc. What art was before is now being broken down, the parts put on display. One has to view it in the context of the time. Think about the Hollywood blacklist, USSR, control and conformity built from fear. And Pollock goes and does that. It was a protest of individuality and expression and is about SO much much more than reproducibility.
  • ianai 6y ago
    This would be like going through the full material of calculus (1,2,3) and saying “it’s trivial and therefore not impressive nor worth learning” after every single proof, derivation, lecture, and homework problem. You can do it, but you’ve not actually demonstrated any knowledge of the material. Nor would such refutation actually prove that calculus doesn’t contribute greatly to the modern world.
• pmoriarty 6y ago
  My favorite "Pollock is easy" critique is The Connoisseur by Norman Rockwell.[1] Of course, what Rockwell was missing is doing a Pollock-style action painting first. After Pollock, any paintings in his style are just worthless imitations. It doesn't matter how "easy" it is, getting there first and pushing the boundaries of what is considered art still has a lot of value in the art world. Norman Rockwell did not push any boundaries of art, and that's why he will always be a minor footnote in the history of art, no matter how much more technically accomplished his paintings in a realistic style are compared to some much more significant but technically "easy" abstract art. [1] - http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3535/1896/1600/rockwell_sep13mar62.jpg http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3535/1896/1600/rockwell_s...
  • umvi 6y ago
    Look at me, I invented a new form of ascii art: sdaf;lkajdfahvpo8xcuvx0cvu43nkQ#$%0digf09dsvsdfgsdfgdfg 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003.1415hhh sdaf;lkajdfahvpo8xcuvx0cvu43nkQ#$%0digf09dsvsdfgsdfgdfg 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003.1415hhhs daf;lkajdfahvpo8xcuvx0cvu43nkQ#$%0digf09dsvsdfgsdfgdfg 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003.1415hhh sdaf;lkajdfahvpo8xcuvx0cvu43nkQ#$%0digf09dsvsdfgsdfgdfg 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003.1415hhl I did it first, so admire me for pushing the boundaries of ascii art. Also, you'll never be able to truly reproduce this type of ascii art unless you spend 4 years at art school studying stylometry to be able to identify my unique technique. You can imitate it, but there are subtleties only connoisseurs will recognize.
    • arthurcolle 6y ago
      This is highly derivative. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjS6bQ5OQ-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjS6bQ5OQ-o)
    • pmoriarty 6y ago
      You're at least 100 years too late for your random art to be considered novel. Mozart was creating random compositions with dice as far back as 1792.[1] Pollock was playing with randomness in painting in the 1940's, around the same time that John Cage was innovating with randomness in musical compositions. The use of randomness in the arts and music has been going on for a long time, so something like your ascii art is probably not going to raise an eyebrow today, though maybe if you did it 100 years ago and managed to get it in to a museum or gallery it might have looked novel then. That said, I wouldn't put it past some galleries to display it anyway, especially if you do it in a large quantity -- say having random text cover all the gallery walls, or make the font really gigantic. I'm sure some people will love it and consider it some kind of profound statement on the mechanization of modern life or something. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_Würfelspiel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_Würfelspiel
• a9entroy 6y ago
  You're not the audience. I think art has always been a game of finding something unique in the sea of mainstream. If there were 50 other artists who made art similar to Pollock, he would never have achieved this fame. I'm sure you've encountered someone saying something along the lines of "Oh, I like it a lot but it's so common, literally every other person has it.". That's the kind of audience art is targeted towards. It's easy to classify if art is good or bad: 1. Is unique. If something is very similar to other famous and sought-after pieces of art then it's not good. 2. Is popular in the art-community and sought after among the rich. If something satisfies these two requirements then it's good art. Otherwise it's not. Remember the $120,000 banana? It satisfies both conditions. So it was "good art". It also got three buyers apparently.
• chki 6y ago
  I found this 6 minute YouTube video titled "I could do that" to be an excellent response to this "standard" critique of some modern art: https://youtu.be/67EKAIY43kg https://youtu.be/67EKAIY43kg Basically there are good reasons that modern art sometimes does not display a lot of technical skill. It might for example exactly be the point of the artwork, that it can't be sold or reproduced.