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I don't get into these kinds of discussions with people anymore, because they're not socially palatable. I try to stay open minded too about perspectives that a

• deleted 5y ago
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• UncleMeat 5y ago
  I do always find it funny that billionaires finally finally get on board with the "labor is what makes something valuable" idea when comparing abstract art and other art.
  • forgetfulness 5y ago
    Hackers did have things in common with painters after all, or at least the ones that self promote have that in common.
    • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
  • CompelTechnic 5y ago
    You could still spend 1,000 hours painting a blue dot on a white canvas if you used a tiny paintbrush. The pareto frontier of possible artworks approaches higher quality with increased labor input. This doesn't mean the Labor Theory of Value isn't totally bonkers.
• forgetfulness 5y ago
  Now I'm no art fancy man like the ones you're describing, but I'm fairly certain that people who like the dot also like the Sistine Chapel, it's just that the Sistine Chapel has been... _done_, and your reproduction of the Sistine Chapel will be enjoyable but forgettable because it will never be as good or as important as the real one. So, people talk about works that are memorable. Like that one abstract dot of historical interest, or the original paintings from the old masters that perfected the techniques that artists emulate.
• ppod 5y ago
  The whole point of conceptual art is that reproduction of figurative art is trivial now, so we move up a level. It's easy to reproduce the dot, but it's the conceptual move to dotness that's non-trivial. These ideas are 60 years old (Walter Benjamin) and you're doing a bit of a Two Cultures in reverse by being this simplistic about it.
  • stephencanon 5y ago
    Nit: Benjamin died 80 years ago. Time flies!
  • lr4444lr 5y ago
    Fine. Then ask a totally unskilled person to reproduce both and let's see how many fans can be fooled.
• pengstrom 5y ago
  The context of art extends beyond the artifact. I image both PhDs would have trouble contributing meaningful novel work.
• fsloth 5y ago
  Paul did not discuss the merits of academic art versus modern art. He simply attempted to proof that it is "less wrong" to say there can be good taste, than that there is no taste. The argument works in any recognized genre or art - the claim is "In a particular chosen genre, a person can be more skilled than an 8 year old who has no idea what they are doing". The genre can be whatever that has no known established numeric metric. I.e. sports do not generally qualify for this argument as they most of the time have a metric that is more or less objective, and you can say based on numbers who is better without the need for "taste". To my understanding, Paul is familiar with academic art so he feels confident in using it as the example genre as he is comfortable in discussing it's nuances.
  • dagw 5y ago
    sports do not generally qualify for this argument as they most of the time have a metric that is more or less objective You see arguments about aesthetics and taste all the time in sport. "Team A may have won the championship, but they have a very ugly style. Team B played a much more beautiful game" or "I love watching Team C play even if they lose almost all the time, because they have such a fun and interesting way of playing". In some sports like MMA you have fighters with near perfect records and impressive win streaks against the best in the league, but no one watches them because they're "boring". Essentially there are two ways of viewing sport. From the player/teams point of view where it is all about winning, or from the spectators point of view where the primary goal is to be entertained.
• TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
• ritchiea 5y ago
  It's really not that anyone prefers an abstract dot on a white canvas over the Sistine Chapel. It helps to think of art as a historical dialogue with other art, as well as an exploration of how our senses experience the world. Minimalist abstract art (Ad Reinhardt is one of the more famous practitioners) was pushing viewers to pay attentions to subtleties and small differences in our perceptions of color and shapes. That type of art isn't even fashionable or popular anymore (though many works from the 60s-80s are still revered, exhibited and expensive because of how they contributed to the art canon), in part because, as you can imagine after a while it was no longer fresh and new and making people think differently about art. What's hip now is video, multi-media sculpture and art that makes more of a comment on the state of world. Also a lot of art that uses new technologies. And a lot of irony. Feel free to not like any of it, it is subjective, that's the point. You shouldn't let anyone tell you what art to like. Group think is bad in the art world as well (though it can be good for art dealers). But I thought it was worth the time to speak up against your characterization of the values of the art world. I have my own critiques of the art world but it's absolutely unfair to generalize that people see no difference between minimalist abstract art and the Sistine Chapel. And I believe it is interesting to understand why people consider particular works of art important even if that doesn't mean you should also subjectively like the piece.
  • Brian_K_White 5y ago
    Like is the wrong word. I think the closest appropriate idea is "appreciate". You probably should not "like" some of the best art at all, because it should have made you uncomfortable and think things you would rather not. Of course I say "some", because art has all kinds of different purposes or intents, and that is only the purpose of some art, not all art. So I think recognize, acknowledge, or appreciate are the kinds of words to apply rather than like. And art can even be good even if you not only don't like it but don't even appreciate it. It can be skillfully effective on you whether or not you like it or even have the background or perception to recognize it's quality. So even "appreciate" isn't really a valid metric.
    • ritchiea 5y ago
      It's perfectly reasonable to appreciate a piece of art, recognize its importance and subjectively dislike it. I believe it's going in the wrong direction to try to completely disconnect your subjective like or dislike of art in an effort to better understand or recognize its value. If anything I try to go the other direction and acknowledge my subjective like/dislike/etc sense experience and then intellectualize from there.
• dagw 5y ago
  might validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas No one prefers a random dot on a random piece of canvas. They prefer a very particular dot on a very particular canvas made by a very particular person at a very particular point in history. Remove any one one those and it loses all meaning and value. And even the most ardent fan of that work would never argue that that artist was a greater painter or even artist than Michaelangelo. At the end of the day the "Art" is not in the craft and as such art cannot be reproduced. The world is full of Sistine Chapel pastiches on rich peoples ceilings, painted by great craftsmen, many whom might be talented artists in their own rights, and no one is in awe by them.
  • lr4444lr 5y ago
    But it doesn't hold up the other way when you remove one piece. I'd wager most people would select a Michaelangelo replica even if they were directly told it was a replica than the dot on the canvas if told it was a replica of whatever artist made it.
    • watwut 5y ago
      Select for what? Art students nowdays can create Michealengelo like art. Not just reproduction, but own pieces with same style. They are not admired nor anything like that. Also, I would not picked any of those for living room. Might pick dot for background screen. And this choice have nothing to do with actual value of either.
      • lr4444lr 5y ago
        Art students, yes. But not the average guy off the street as compare to a single dot on a canvas.
        • watwut 5y ago
          Yes and? I honestly don't know what it is supposed to argue.
        • dagw 5y ago
• throwaway14356 5y ago
  My definition grew into this immutable formula: The only relevant skill an artist can have is to capture their emotions in their work in such a way that the audience of it is made to both experience and ponder those. Extra points for complex compositions. There is something to be said about the kind of feeling you chose to share. You can be a dick about it while stil perfecting the challange. The white dot on canvas or the entirely white canvas are simpel displays of arrogance mixed with some prestige. Not a particularly refined combination of and it reduces to anger in many viewers. It doesnt enrich the spectators life, they know those emotions well enough which, like love songs, makes it poor taste.
• asoneth 5y ago
  The skill required to create a thing is not the sole arbiter of its value, whether in art, physics, or business. After all, it would be foolish to claim that the most useful discoveries in physics were the ones that required the most difficult advanced math or that the most valuable companies are the ones that require the most skill to manage. There are many technically skilled artists, physicists, and entrepreneurs whose names you will never learn because the never ended up doing anything particularly original. (And of course there are many original thinkers who will never be known because they're just not technically skilled enough to execute on their vision.) In my opinion, value in many fields ends up being the cross product of "doing the thing right" and "doing the right thing".
• watwut 5y ago
  > But I can't shake the feeling that much as someone might validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, That is straw position. > who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce Michaelangelo's work or vice versa? There are many artist capable to reproduce Michaelangelo's work. They are not impressing people who admire Michaelangelo or classical art. People who admire Michaelangelo typically fully understand that people after Michaelangelo learned from him. They also understand Michaelangelo was working, learning and studying having limitations we don't have.
  • lr4444lr 5y ago
    You're missing my point: it isn't that Michaelangelo himself is unsurpassable. It's that his style insofar as it's appreciated for its quality cannot be reproduced in a convincing way to people with an eye for that without some much higher minimum skill as opposed to the minimum level it takes to impress a connoisseur of abstract art with the painter's alleged talent. At least, this is my unshakable feeling.
    • watwut 5y ago
      But that is not the same thing as "validly prefering". The "how much skill and effort it takes to reproduce it" is completely different criteri then "which one do you prefer".
• not_fin_advice 5y ago
  > pitting a group of PhD physicists vs. French lit. PhDs in a contest to reproduce each other's work better - whom would you bet on? I know that Thiel is clearly trying to get the audience to go "oh wow, physics is harder than lit!" But strangely enough this runs counter to my personal experience. While not physics in particular, I know far more lit/classics/humanities people doing advanced/research work in technical areas than I do technically trained people excelling in anything humanities related. My experience has also been that most physicists, when confronted with challenging French critical theory, simply dismiss it as nonsense rather than taking any time to understand it. I have met far more people who were trained on reading Derrida who can converse casually about advanced calculus topics than the reverse. Additionally I find something like Lagrangian mechanics to take far less time to under stand than not just learning French, but learning French well enough to engage deeply with texts and theory spanning a fairly broad period of history. As to your question: > Sistine Chapel ceiling, who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce Michaelangelo's work or vice versa? That's a combination of a straw man and a false equivalency. First the "dot on a white canvas" represents a very, very narrow part of a very specific field of Modern art which the vast majority of trained academic artists and theorists will agree is not particularly their taste. There's plenty of niche physicists doing work that most physicists find questionable. A better example of postmodern art is Pulp Fiction, and I think if you polled the general public on whether or not they wanted to see the Sistine chapter or watch Pulp Fiction you'd find a bigger split, and likewise each artist would have an equally hard time. The false equivalency is that you're comparing Michelangelo to some imagined Modernist painting that I'm guessing you don't have a name for. This is a bit like comparing Einstein to an imaginary string theorist a liberal arts college.
  • TimPC 5y ago
    You’ve substantially moved the goalposts. Your argument about the French Lit. PhDs involves understanding the field at a roughly undergraduate level not producing new work. Developing a deep enough understanding of physics to create novel ideas in it is far harder than this. I’d argue that producing relevant new work in French Lit. is easier because of the high degree of subjectivity creating a low bar for relevance. The low bar for relevance makes it far easier to be novel since one can explore almost any tangential point of the work one can imagine. It’s far harder to come up with new interesting ideas in a field where ideas have standards of correctness than in a field where it’s sufficient to be novel and vaguely relevant.