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I tend to disagree with the assessment that the an artists technique has anything to do with how good an artist is. Case in point: in Picasso's formative years

I tend to disagree with the assessment that the an artists technique has anything to do with how good an artist is. Case in point: in Picasso's formative years, he was a great realistic painter. He became a great artist because he pushed the boundary of abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work. To me, Picasso was so good because he built a story (myth) around his work that resonated with so many people. The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting because of the myth around it. It's a beautiful portait, but is it really the best portrait ever? I think in the same wing of the Louvre there are better paintings of Da Vinci on show, even though there is no crowd around it. Recently, the myth builders have been (maybe they still are) Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, I think that's what makes them great artists.

jack_riminton 5y ago
Totally agree. There's a raft of modern realist painters who's work is so similar to photographs that they're utterly devoid of the main criteria of good art... feeling A lot of this is compounded by the practice of working from high def photographs. Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos. As an illustration of this, try and take a photograph of a beautiful sunset and compare it to what you see
- cntainer 5y ago
  I always found that practice weird. When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas. Yes there are many photos that you can call art, but if you're not the one that took the original photo it feels like most of the creative effort was not yours and you're just showing off your brush/pen technique. As a disclaimer, I have 0 talent when it comes to drawing/painting so I'm pretty much clueless about the creative process of modern painting.
  - dagw 5y ago
    When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas. There are lots of ways of using a photo as a source. A lot of the 'art' comes from choosing which techniques and paints and colors to use to capture the feeling you are after. You can also choose to make choices like adding/removing elements, changing the field of view or moving the point of view, playing with perspective etc. to make the composition more interesting. You can give the same photo to 100 different artists and you will get back 100 different paintings with 100 different artistic choices, some of which will appeal to you on an artistic level a lot more than others.
    - cntainer 5y ago
      Thank you for the details, and I agree that what you describe includes plenty of creative effort. I guess my scenario was much more narrow, as I was thinking about doing an exact copy of a photo that you didn't take yourself. Doing an exact copy limits greatly the number of artistic choices you could make as most of the choices were made by the photographer. Just found out this is actually a thing called photorealism where the artist is expected to also take the original photo. Feels good to read about something else than software and politics for a change :).
  - watwut 5y ago
    Is it weirder then trying to become good in literally any other craft or skill? People spend hours trying to become good at coding competitions, games, sport, musical instrument, embroidery, hoby electronics ... you name it. Why would "trying to become as good as possible at creating realistic drawing" would be weirder then anything else? The technical skill involved in making it look hyper realistic is huge.
    - cntainer 5y ago
      By "weird" I meant that having great technique doesn't automatically translate to great art. It could translate to greater craftsmanship, faster and more precise work, but by art I understand the process of applying your own creative filter and emotions to whatever you want to represent/imitate in whatever medium. I feel like I'm going to deep into this "art" thing so time to get back to a domain where I have more experience, software development. Being great at touch typing is an awesome skill that many people train but typing fast doesn't make you automatically a great developer/architect/manager. I see the effort of exactly copying someone else's photo similar to how developers do "coding katas" to hone their fundamentals. It's basically practice, not really creative problem solving. Nothing wrong with honing one skills, but in my book skills are tools to be used as part of a creative process. They don't replace the creative process, but they can elevate the end result.
      - watwut 5y ago
        Artists themselves do call it art tho. They value the technical skill on itself too, apparently. And talk about it a lot. And then it becomes separate field where you can try to excel or competition on itself. (Also, in subgenres like manga when they talk about quality of art, they typically mean technical skill more then ability to convey emotions.) It makes it something you don't value or like, which is 100% valid. But it seems to be fairly within what artists themselves call art.
        cntainer 5y ago
        I understand that people can call art whatever they like. One can argue that doing an exact copy of a photograph with the end result being indistinguishable from the original photo is some kind of "meta" art and the lack of creativity actually puts focus on the technical skill and the effort of the artist, as a kind of "anti-creativity statement" type of art, "there is no artist just paint and effort". But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality. Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort? On that note, I think I'll stop. I feel I'm getting high just from all the meta-ideas I'm writing, lol.
  - yanmaani 5y ago
    What's wrong with brush/pen technique?
    - cntainer 5y ago
      Nothing, it's a great skill to have, and one that I never invested in.
  - rdtsc 5y ago
    The painter themselves can take the photo. Photos can help if the subject or the scene is hard to be around long enough to paint. Say, an artist painting impressionistic city streets in the rain. It’s hard to stay in the rain and paint, but they can take a photo and paint at home, while recalling the feeling of being at the scene - the cold, the wetness, the sound of the splashing water, cars driving by, etc.
    - cntainer 5y ago
      yep, I already addressed this in another comment, that's photorealism, and the artist always takes the picture so painting it is just the last step in the overall creative process. my point was that it feels weird for me to call it art if you didn't take the photo and your just doing the last, arguably less creative, step. Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser".
      - rdtsc 5y ago
        > Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser". Yeah, it does in a certain way. Say, I take a picture then send it so someone to make a "painting" of it. I does feel a bit "lesser". Of course, depending on the trend in art, it may be that's the whole point of the piece -- to highlight that everything is just a copy of a copy and so on. Basically, it could be a deliberate part of the process like say https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbells-soup-cans-1962/ https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbel...
- jacobolus 5y ago
  > Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos What if you use a camera obscura, as many of the “old masters” are believed to have done?
  - jack_riminton 5y ago
    Funnily enough quite a lot of artists use early digital cameras, where the quality is described as 'grainy' Its of just bad enough quality (and hasn't been altered by algorithms) that you can get a 'sense' of the scene without too much detail, being over/under-exposed, etc. Edit: also see the use of a 'black mirror' https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror/ https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror...
  - rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
    I think this is a perfect post to bring up the theory of Vermeer's work presented in this film, "Tim's Vermeer." The focus of the movie, Tim Jenison of NewTek, hypothesized the use of a mirror to allow an almost paint-by-numbers recreation of the sitting subject. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
- inasmuch 5y ago
  I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. In some part due to the difference in skill development required by using a photo for reference versus using live references or your imagination/memory/whatever, but mostly because of how much the technological conceits and limitations of that photography come to infect other media which don't suffer from them. It's most obvious in paintings and videogames. Depth of field, bokeh, motion blur, perspective, lens distortion—even focal length and composition. Once you realize it, it becomes impossible to ignore, and it really compromises the work for me. So many of the most technically adept artists today are using all their skill to effectively simulate one form of art with another. It's an interesting exercise, sure, and I'll never dissuade someone from developing and refining a skill, but in the best-case scenario, I'm just left thinking I'd rather see the photo or the movie, or not see the image at all. And I'm someone who will gladly spend 20min+ standing in front of a Rembrandt. I don't have any issue with realism in art and think it can be quite effective when used well. But so much of what makes something like The Night Watch incredible is how it feels both convincingly real and compellingly uncanny at the same time due to its rendering from some fuzzy approximation of what the artist observed from his models, conceived in his mind's eye, and meticulously sketched and reworked. To me, it's the ability to capture and create something within/from that gray area that makes an artist great.
  - jack_riminton 5y ago
    Yes, people confuse an accurate photograph of being as real as you can get. But in actuality the brain does a lot of work in order to compose a scene, as any optical illusion will reveal. So the accuracy of a photo becomes its downfall in feeling real. The Impressionists understood this and used effects such as 'optical mixing' (from the scientific findings of Maxwell) to create works that felt more real
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    > I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph. For instance, Ben Aronson (https://benaronson.net/ https://benaronson.net/), a contemporary impressionist painter I very much like, heavily uses photographic references to paint cityscapes that he just literally couldn't paint live (because, say, its in the middle of a busy downtown street, or way up in the air between buildings). But his paintings are far from "photorealistic", not only utilizing an impressionist style, but also often moving or adding buildings or landscape that don't actually exist in the photo.
- meowzero 5y ago
  I met a local portraiture teacher, and all he did was take a nice photo of someone and copy it on canvas. His craft seemed great. But I didn't get the point of copying a photo exactly. Why not just print out the photo? But I guess he enjoyed the painting process.
  - jack_riminton 5y ago
    Yes it'll never turn out as good because you're no longer painting a face; you're painting a poorer 2D representation of a face
    - meowzero 5y ago
      his painting looked exactly like the photo. So it's like a painted version of the photo. It was very realistic. And like I mentioned, the craft of painting was great. But he took the time to take a nice portrait with a camera so he can paint it. Since I'm a photographer, I guess I didn't get why he would need to copy a photo exactly.
    - HPsquared 5y ago
      What if a 3D scan were taken of the subject, and the artist then made the painting while viewing the 3D representation in some kind of augmented reality setup? That would be 3D but still effectively painting from a "photo".
      - jack_riminton 5y ago
        But then you're adding in several more processing layers away from reality: 1) the digital scan won't pick up the details sufficiently 2) the AR rendering will again strip a lot of detail It'd also be incredibly difficult and straining for your eyes of focussing on a canvas and then on an AR image
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "Why not just print out the photo?" An interesting argument... which could be extended to "why paint from life?" because you're just copying what you see. In fact, some artists who paint completely from their imagination or who create nonrepresentational art have this exact objection to just painting what you see (even without photographic reference), which they don't find interesting because it's not creative enough for them.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Vermeer is highly regarded, yet there is evidence that he worked using technology that was something like a camera (though of course it was primitive by today's standards). Photography is just another tool, and what matters is how you use it.
  - jack_riminton 5y ago
    A Camera Obscura is worlds apart from copying a high-def image. The primitiveness allowed them to get dimensions correct for a sketch but then they'd have to use all of their artistic skill to pick the correct values, tones etc.
LordAtlas 5y ago
This is true of many things in life. The branding and marketing is more important than actual quality. :)
lordfoom 5y ago
> abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work. Strong disagree. Expertise often looks easy. He had to understand the rules on a fundamental level before he could break them as he did, to express not just pictures but the underlying form and composition. In my opinion it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso did than it is to paint realistically.
- javajosh 5y ago
  >it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso I agree with this. It's harder because you have to have all the technique before you start picking and choosing what to leave out. An abstract painting becomes at least in part a story of what the painter decided to try, some unique combination of choices, at several levels of zoom. This is dangerous stuff because its easy to alienate a viewer this way. But done well you find a (substantially) new path to beauty and wonder.
- hoseja 5y ago
  You're, perhaps intentionally, mixing hard and hard. Could a child paint an abstract Picasso if it had him hanging behind a shoulder, saying what to do? Could it paint a realistic Picasso?
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    > Could a child paint an abstract Picasso [...]? No. Could a child paint something that to their own parent seems similar? Maybe.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    I personally find the art of children a lot more interesting than 99% of highly skilled adult artists who work in a "realistic" style. Children's art usually has a freshness, originality, and vibrancy that's missing from highly skilled adult art. I had to get over my worship of realism before I could appreciate it, though, and I find it very sad that most non-artists are still stuck at valuing art only by how realistic it looks.
HWR_14 5y ago
Picasso's abstract work was only accepted because he proved he could master and reject the realistic style. It's similar to Norm MacDonald telling horrible old jokes. A huge part of the humor was the metajoke that he could be telling better jokes if he felt like it.
dagw 5y ago
arguably easier to paint than his earlier work. This is hard to judge from the outside. My wife is an art school graduate and serious amateur painter. There are some artists that she follow, where she is in absolute awe of what they do, and I just see some quite 'simple' paintings that are nowhere near as detailed or 'interesting' as some of what she paints. Yet she assures me that what those artists are doing is Really Hard, and far beyond what she is capable of.
- rixed 5y ago
  I'm not surprised. That is something I became aware when practicing competitive programming as a teen: anyone would have an opinion on how nice/pretty the outcome was, but only the few thousands people actually involved in the competition would have an actual clue about what mattered, what was important and what was actually hard to achieve. It's hard not to notice the same pattern in any activity one is deeply involved with, be it sports or arts. It is to be expected, after all, that specialization implies some form of impediment to communication.
mtts 5y ago
The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself. Picasso was a great self promotor and back before the internet the opportunities for proving him wrong we’re very limited indeed so the myth could persist. Nowadays, however, the stuff he did back when he was drilled by his father into being an artist can easily be found online and, guess what: it turns out to be fairly mediocre.
- pell 5y ago
  > The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself. There are many examples of his early work online. His skill in classical realistic art is hardly deniable even if one might disagree that it reached the levels of Raphael to whom he once compared his pieces of that period. He also was partly educated at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando which wasn't some no-name school either.
- fatbird 5y ago
  Picasso twice completed copying the entire series of Bargue drawings, a set of 70 lithographs sold all over Europe in the 19th century as a course in academic drawing. His copies are excellent; he'd certainly mastered the academic realist techniques. He failed to produce great realist work because he found those techniques boring, repetitive, and mechanical, and thus didn't try to work in that mode. He moved on to keep pace with the many radical departures from the French Academy that surrounded him. He had the skills, he just didn't use them.
  - pjlegato 5y ago
    Accurately copying Bargue perhaps qualifies Picasso as a serviceable mediocre realist. It doesn't mean he was "great," which was the assertion here. His early realist works were bland and uninspired, if technically proficient. In other words, doing well in the technical aspects of a student drawing course is not even close to demonstrating that one is "great" on the same level as, say, Caravaggio or Rembrandt.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"[Picasso] became a great artist because he pushed the boundary of abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work." This reminds me of the old joke about the customer who got upset at having to pay $100 to a mechanic who fixed his car by hitting the engine with a hammer. The mechanic replies that he only charges $1 for the hammer hit, but $99 for knowing where to hit. So it is with Picasso. His mature style is easier on a technical level than some more photorealistic work, but I challenge you or anyone else who thinks it's "easy" to paint something with even half the emotional impact of Guernica, or to come up with a novel style that's as innovative as Picasso's was when he created it. Picasso wasn't copying anyone else's style. He was innovating and pushing art forward... that's why he gets pride of place in the art history books and artists who just copy his style don't. As in science, you get a lot of credit in the art world for being first. The art world also appreciates being shown the world in a different light, which you don't necessarily need great technical skill to accomplish (as Picasso and many artists before and after him showed). This whole debate about the need for technical skill in "art" actually predates Picasso, and was hashed out before him about the Impressionists, who were already accused of sloppy technique by Academy artists. Impressionism is no longer controversial, and most people can appreciate it, even though on a technical level it's arguably no better than cubism (the style that Picasso is most well known for).
pradn 5y ago
The greatness of Picasso's formal skills can be seen in one genre: his prints for the Vollard Suite. His lines are quick and delicate and invoke a whole body and its suppleness. The economy of line is astonishing.
cosmojg 5y ago
I'd add that Banksy is another modern artist who's done a pretty good job developing his own mythology.
ahartmetz 5y ago
>Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst Damien Hirst is a salesman who makes shit art. Jeff Koons makes things that are at least amusing. I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future." You're an optimist. It's more likely we'll slide towards an Idiocracy future, where it's garbage that'll be praised to the heavens. The contemporary art world has been sliding that direction for a long time, and outside the art world kitsch dominates, and it's probably only going to get worse over time.
JohnBooty 5y ago
This is a weirdly bleak assessment. You are of course correct that art is more than raw technique. And you are of course correct that art appreciation is no stranger to fads and hype. But, you seem to suggest there is nothing else to it at all. Is that what you mean to say?
Bayart 5y ago
> The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting because of the myth around it. It's a beautiful portait, but is it really the best portrait ever? I think in the same wing of the Louvre there are better paintings of Da Vinci on show, even though there is no crowd around it. That's not a good example to affirm your point : it's a painting that was historically know for its technical qualities, representing the pinnacle of Leonardo's sfumato. But it's also been extremely damaged to the point these qualities are heavily lacking now.
boppo1 5y ago
Picasso was a hack who contributed to the downfall of a thousand year old tradition of craftsmanship. The modernists destroyed university casts and ruined academic drawing programs so completely that they have not recovered to this day. We are very fortunate that image sharing on the internet has revealed that the art establishment has no clothes and people enjoy representational works. Artists like Will St. John, Colleen Barry, Ramon Alex Hurtado, Jeremy Lipking and others are reviving academic figurative traditions. If I sound upset, it's because I am. In highschool I took AP art and all the other art classes I could. I visited all the nearby art associations and establishments that people revered. I wanted to paint people, wanted to make great paintings like the ones I saw in museums. I attended one of the best-ranked public highschools in my state and my teachers with art degrees didn't even know there was an academic path out there because their colleges just taught them about the greatness of conceptual garbage. I wound up giving up on that dream and floundering through the last decade with constructive methods like loomis and bridgman in my spare time. Now I have a degree I'm not passionate about and enough debt that pursuing academic training is out of the question. Warhol's soup cans are neat and abstract movements were a refreshing breath of fresh air in art history, sure. You might admire works of lesser craftsmanship for their "philosophical" achievements, but consider the destruction that philosophy wreaked upon education and the cultural-nuclear-crater left behind. Google Sargent, Repin, Bouguereau, and Homer. Then look again at Koons, Hirst, Twombly, etc. and try to convince yourself a grave error and loss has not occurred.
- jiggliemon 5y ago
  There’s a lot to unpack here. But Picasso wasn’t a hack. Overrated, sure. But he approached his subject matter and technique with as much focus and detail as any artist that came before him. You aren’t required to appreciate his contribution to the artistic conversation; but calling him a hack is dismissive and purposely neglectful of his substantial impact. Picasso did what he did, and created what he created because of photography. In a world where capturing likeness, and form was basically free - what do you do with painting? Certainly not attempt to capture likeness and form - perhaps you make an Ernest attempt to capture or project the emotional response of form and subject. Picasso’s facial structure was modeled after African war masks, which were at the time ignored by the art world. And his composition and color and repetition were inspired by the Japanese print makers. A lot of the art from that era was inspired by what was coming out of Japan at that time. The product of Picasso was a mashup of influences, like all impactful art. The backlash against likeness and form was certain way before Picasso. But the fact that he rode that style to such fame is what made the art world dramatically over correct so drastically.
m463 5y ago
I think some of Picasso's paintings were exceptional. The bullfight paintings define to me how a master can do so much with so little: https://www.pablopicasso.org/images/paintings/bullfight-3.jpg https://www.pablopicasso.org/images/paintings/bullfight-3.jp...

jack_riminton 5y ago

Totally agree. There's a raft of modern realist painters who's work is so similar to photographs that they're utterly devoid of the main criteria of good art... feeling A lot of this is compounded by the practice of working from high def photographs. Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos. As an illustration of this, try and take a photograph of a beautiful sunset and compare it to what you see

cntainer 5y ago
I always found that practice weird. When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas. Yes there are many photos that you can call art, but if you're not the one that took the original photo it feels like most of the creative effort was not yours and you're just showing off your brush/pen technique. As a disclaimer, I have 0 talent when it comes to drawing/painting so I'm pretty much clueless about the creative process of modern painting.
- dagw 5y ago
  When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas. There are lots of ways of using a photo as a source. A lot of the 'art' comes from choosing which techniques and paints and colors to use to capture the feeling you are after. You can also choose to make choices like adding/removing elements, changing the field of view or moving the point of view, playing with perspective etc. to make the composition more interesting. You can give the same photo to 100 different artists and you will get back 100 different paintings with 100 different artistic choices, some of which will appeal to you on an artistic level a lot more than others.
  - cntainer 5y ago
    Thank you for the details, and I agree that what you describe includes plenty of creative effort. I guess my scenario was much more narrow, as I was thinking about doing an exact copy of a photo that you didn't take yourself. Doing an exact copy limits greatly the number of artistic choices you could make as most of the choices were made by the photographer. Just found out this is actually a thing called photorealism where the artist is expected to also take the original photo. Feels good to read about something else than software and politics for a change :).
- watwut 5y ago
  Is it weirder then trying to become good in literally any other craft or skill? People spend hours trying to become good at coding competitions, games, sport, musical instrument, embroidery, hoby electronics ... you name it. Why would "trying to become as good as possible at creating realistic drawing" would be weirder then anything else? The technical skill involved in making it look hyper realistic is huge.
  - cntainer 5y ago
    By "weird" I meant that having great technique doesn't automatically translate to great art. It could translate to greater craftsmanship, faster and more precise work, but by art I understand the process of applying your own creative filter and emotions to whatever you want to represent/imitate in whatever medium. I feel like I'm going to deep into this "art" thing so time to get back to a domain where I have more experience, software development. Being great at touch typing is an awesome skill that many people train but typing fast doesn't make you automatically a great developer/architect/manager. I see the effort of exactly copying someone else's photo similar to how developers do "coding katas" to hone their fundamentals. It's basically practice, not really creative problem solving. Nothing wrong with honing one skills, but in my book skills are tools to be used as part of a creative process. They don't replace the creative process, but they can elevate the end result.
    - watwut 5y ago
      Artists themselves do call it art tho. They value the technical skill on itself too, apparently. And talk about it a lot. And then it becomes separate field where you can try to excel or competition on itself. (Also, in subgenres like manga when they talk about quality of art, they typically mean technical skill more then ability to convey emotions.) It makes it something you don't value or like, which is 100% valid. But it seems to be fairly within what artists themselves call art.
      - cntainer 5y ago
        I understand that people can call art whatever they like. One can argue that doing an exact copy of a photograph with the end result being indistinguishable from the original photo is some kind of "meta" art and the lack of creativity actually puts focus on the technical skill and the effort of the artist, as a kind of "anti-creativity statement" type of art, "there is no artist just paint and effort". But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality. Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort? On that note, I think I'll stop. I feel I'm getting high just from all the meta-ideas I'm writing, lol.
- yanmaani 5y ago
  What's wrong with brush/pen technique?
  - cntainer 5y ago
    Nothing, it's a great skill to have, and one that I never invested in.
- rdtsc 5y ago
  The painter themselves can take the photo. Photos can help if the subject or the scene is hard to be around long enough to paint. Say, an artist painting impressionistic city streets in the rain. It’s hard to stay in the rain and paint, but they can take a photo and paint at home, while recalling the feeling of being at the scene - the cold, the wetness, the sound of the splashing water, cars driving by, etc.
  - cntainer 5y ago
    yep, I already addressed this in another comment, that's photorealism, and the artist always takes the picture so painting it is just the last step in the overall creative process. my point was that it feels weird for me to call it art if you didn't take the photo and your just doing the last, arguably less creative, step. Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser".
    - rdtsc 5y ago
      > Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser". Yeah, it does in a certain way. Say, I take a picture then send it so someone to make a "painting" of it. I does feel a bit "lesser". Of course, depending on the trend in art, it may be that's the whole point of the piece -- to highlight that everything is just a copy of a copy and so on. Basically, it could be a deliberate part of the process like say https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbells-soup-cans-1962/ https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbel...
jacobolus 5y ago
> Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos What if you use a camera obscura, as many of the “old masters” are believed to have done?
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  Funnily enough quite a lot of artists use early digital cameras, where the quality is described as 'grainy' Its of just bad enough quality (and hasn't been altered by algorithms) that you can get a 'sense' of the scene without too much detail, being over/under-exposed, etc. Edit: also see the use of a 'black mirror' https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror/ https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror...
- rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
  I think this is a perfect post to bring up the theory of Vermeer's work presented in this film, "Tim's Vermeer." The focus of the movie, Tim Jenison of NewTek, hypothesized the use of a mirror to allow an almost paint-by-numbers recreation of the sitting subject. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
inasmuch 5y ago
I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. In some part due to the difference in skill development required by using a photo for reference versus using live references or your imagination/memory/whatever, but mostly because of how much the technological conceits and limitations of that photography come to infect other media which don't suffer from them. It's most obvious in paintings and videogames. Depth of field, bokeh, motion blur, perspective, lens distortion—even focal length and composition. Once you realize it, it becomes impossible to ignore, and it really compromises the work for me. So many of the most technically adept artists today are using all their skill to effectively simulate one form of art with another. It's an interesting exercise, sure, and I'll never dissuade someone from developing and refining a skill, but in the best-case scenario, I'm just left thinking I'd rather see the photo or the movie, or not see the image at all. And I'm someone who will gladly spend 20min+ standing in front of a Rembrandt. I don't have any issue with realism in art and think it can be quite effective when used well. But so much of what makes something like The Night Watch incredible is how it feels both convincingly real and compellingly uncanny at the same time due to its rendering from some fuzzy approximation of what the artist observed from his models, conceived in his mind's eye, and meticulously sketched and reworked. To me, it's the ability to capture and create something within/from that gray area that makes an artist great.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  Yes, people confuse an accurate photograph of being as real as you can get. But in actuality the brain does a lot of work in order to compose a scene, as any optical illusion will reveal. So the accuracy of a photo becomes its downfall in feeling real. The Impressionists understood this and used effects such as 'optical mixing' (from the scientific findings of Maxwell) to create works that felt more real
- technothrasher 5y ago
  > I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph. For instance, Ben Aronson (https://benaronson.net/ https://benaronson.net/), a contemporary impressionist painter I very much like, heavily uses photographic references to paint cityscapes that he just literally couldn't paint live (because, say, its in the middle of a busy downtown street, or way up in the air between buildings). But his paintings are far from "photorealistic", not only utilizing an impressionist style, but also often moving or adding buildings or landscape that don't actually exist in the photo.
meowzero 5y ago
I met a local portraiture teacher, and all he did was take a nice photo of someone and copy it on canvas. His craft seemed great. But I didn't get the point of copying a photo exactly. Why not just print out the photo? But I guess he enjoyed the painting process.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  Yes it'll never turn out as good because you're no longer painting a face; you're painting a poorer 2D representation of a face
  - meowzero 5y ago
    his painting looked exactly like the photo. So it's like a painted version of the photo. It was very realistic. And like I mentioned, the craft of painting was great. But he took the time to take a nice portrait with a camera so he can paint it. Since I'm a photographer, I guess I didn't get why he would need to copy a photo exactly.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    What if a 3D scan were taken of the subject, and the artist then made the painting while viewing the 3D representation in some kind of augmented reality setup? That would be 3D but still effectively painting from a "photo".
    - jack_riminton 5y ago
      But then you're adding in several more processing layers away from reality: 1) the digital scan won't pick up the details sufficiently 2) the AR rendering will again strip a lot of detail It'd also be incredibly difficult and straining for your eyes of focussing on a canvas and then on an AR image
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "Why not just print out the photo?" An interesting argument... which could be extended to "why paint from life?" because you're just copying what you see. In fact, some artists who paint completely from their imagination or who create nonrepresentational art have this exact objection to just painting what you see (even without photographic reference), which they don't find interesting because it's not creative enough for them.
pmoriarty 5y ago
Vermeer is highly regarded, yet there is evidence that he worked using technology that was something like a camera (though of course it was primitive by today's standards). Photography is just another tool, and what matters is how you use it.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  A Camera Obscura is worlds apart from copying a high-def image. The primitiveness allowed them to get dimensions correct for a sketch but then they'd have to use all of their artistic skill to pick the correct values, tones etc.

LordAtlas 5y ago

This is true of many things in life. The branding and marketing is more important than actual quality. :)

lordfoom 5y ago

> abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work. Strong disagree. Expertise often looks easy. He had to understand the rules on a fundamental level before he could break them as he did, to express not just pictures but the underlying form and composition. In my opinion it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso did than it is to paint realistically.

javajosh 5y ago
>it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso I agree with this. It's harder because you have to have all the technique before you start picking and choosing what to leave out. An abstract painting becomes at least in part a story of what the painter decided to try, some unique combination of choices, at several levels of zoom. This is dangerous stuff because its easy to alienate a viewer this way. But done well you find a (substantially) new path to beauty and wonder.
hoseja 5y ago
You're, perhaps intentionally, mixing hard and hard. Could a child paint an abstract Picasso if it had him hanging behind a shoulder, saying what to do? Could it paint a realistic Picasso?
- jacobolus 5y ago
  > Could a child paint an abstract Picasso [...]? No. Could a child paint something that to their own parent seems similar? Maybe.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  I personally find the art of children a lot more interesting than 99% of highly skilled adult artists who work in a "realistic" style. Children's art usually has a freshness, originality, and vibrancy that's missing from highly skilled adult art. I had to get over my worship of realism before I could appreciate it, though, and I find it very sad that most non-artists are still stuck at valuing art only by how realistic it looks.

HWR_14 5y ago

Picasso's abstract work was only accepted because he proved he could master and reject the realistic style. It's similar to Norm MacDonald telling horrible old jokes. A huge part of the humor was the metajoke that he could be telling better jokes if he felt like it.

dagw 5y ago

arguably easier to paint than his earlier work. This is hard to judge from the outside. My wife is an art school graduate and serious amateur painter. There are some artists that she follow, where she is in absolute awe of what they do, and I just see some quite 'simple' paintings that are nowhere near as detailed or 'interesting' as some of what she paints. Yet she assures me that what those artists are doing is Really Hard, and far beyond what she is capable of.

rixed 5y ago
I'm not surprised. That is something I became aware when practicing competitive programming as a teen: anyone would have an opinion on how nice/pretty the outcome was, but only the few thousands people actually involved in the competition would have an actual clue about what mattered, what was important and what was actually hard to achieve. It's hard not to notice the same pattern in any activity one is deeply involved with, be it sports or arts. It is to be expected, after all, that specialization implies some form of impediment to communication.

mtts 5y ago

The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself. Picasso was a great self promotor and back before the internet the opportunities for proving him wrong we’re very limited indeed so the myth could persist. Nowadays, however, the stuff he did back when he was drilled by his father into being an artist can easily be found online and, guess what: it turns out to be fairly mediocre.

pell 5y ago
> The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself. There are many examples of his early work online. His skill in classical realistic art is hardly deniable even if one might disagree that it reached the levels of Raphael to whom he once compared his pieces of that period. He also was partly educated at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando which wasn't some no-name school either.
fatbird 5y ago
Picasso twice completed copying the entire series of Bargue drawings, a set of 70 lithographs sold all over Europe in the 19th century as a course in academic drawing. His copies are excellent; he'd certainly mastered the academic realist techniques. He failed to produce great realist work because he found those techniques boring, repetitive, and mechanical, and thus didn't try to work in that mode. He moved on to keep pace with the many radical departures from the French Academy that surrounded him. He had the skills, he just didn't use them.
- pjlegato 5y ago
  Accurately copying Bargue perhaps qualifies Picasso as a serviceable mediocre realist. It doesn't mean he was "great," which was the assertion here. His early realist works were bland and uninspired, if technically proficient. In other words, doing well in the technical aspects of a student drawing course is not even close to demonstrating that one is "great" on the same level as, say, Caravaggio or Rembrandt.

pmoriarty 5y ago

"[Picasso] became a great artist because he pushed the boundary of abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work." This reminds me of the old joke about the customer who got upset at having to pay $100 to a mechanic who fixed his car by hitting the engine with a hammer. The mechanic replies that he only charges $1 for the hammer hit, but $99 for knowing where to hit. So it is with Picasso. His mature style is easier on a technical level than some more photorealistic work, but I challenge you or anyone else who thinks it's "easy" to paint something with even half the emotional impact of Guernica, or to come up with a novel style that's as innovative as Picasso's was when he created it. Picasso wasn't copying anyone else's style. He was innovating and pushing art forward... that's why he gets pride of place in the art history books and artists who just copy his style don't. As in science, you get a lot of credit in the art world for being first. The art world also appreciates being shown the world in a different light, which you don't necessarily need great technical skill to accomplish (as Picasso and many artists before and after him showed). This whole debate about the need for technical skill in "art" actually predates Picasso, and was hashed out before him about the Impressionists, who were already accused of sloppy technique by Academy artists. Impressionism is no longer controversial, and most people can appreciate it, even though on a technical level it's arguably no better than cubism (the style that Picasso is most well known for).

pradn 5y ago

The greatness of Picasso's formal skills can be seen in one genre: his prints for the Vollard Suite. His lines are quick and delicate and invoke a whole body and its suppleness. The economy of line is astonishing.

cosmojg 5y ago

I'd add that Banksy is another modern artist who's done a pretty good job developing his own mythology.

ahartmetz 5y ago

>Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst Damien Hirst is a salesman who makes shit art. Jeff Koons makes things that are at least amusing. I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future.

pmoriarty 5y ago
"I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future." You're an optimist. It's more likely we'll slide towards an Idiocracy future, where it's garbage that'll be praised to the heavens. The contemporary art world has been sliding that direction for a long time, and outside the art world kitsch dominates, and it's probably only going to get worse over time.

JohnBooty 5y ago

This is a weirdly bleak assessment. You are of course correct that art is more than raw technique. And you are of course correct that art appreciation is no stranger to fads and hype. But, you seem to suggest there is nothing else to it at all. Is that what you mean to say?

Bayart 5y ago

> The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting because of the myth around it. It's a beautiful portait, but is it really the best portrait ever? I think in the same wing of the Louvre there are better paintings of Da Vinci on show, even though there is no crowd around it. That's not a good example to affirm your point : it's a painting that was historically know for its technical qualities, representing the pinnacle of Leonardo's sfumato. But it's also been extremely damaged to the point these qualities are heavily lacking now.

boppo1 5y ago

Picasso was a hack who contributed to the downfall of a thousand year old tradition of craftsmanship. The modernists destroyed university casts and ruined academic drawing programs so completely that they have not recovered to this day. We are very fortunate that image sharing on the internet has revealed that the art establishment has no clothes and people enjoy representational works. Artists like Will St. John, Colleen Barry, Ramon Alex Hurtado, Jeremy Lipking and others are reviving academic figurative traditions. If I sound upset, it's because I am. In highschool I took AP art and all the other art classes I could. I visited all the nearby art associations and establishments that people revered. I wanted to paint people, wanted to make great paintings like the ones I saw in museums. I attended one of the best-ranked public highschools in my state and my teachers with art degrees didn't even know there was an academic path out there because their colleges just taught them about the greatness of conceptual garbage. I wound up giving up on that dream and floundering through the last decade with constructive methods like loomis and bridgman in my spare time. Now I have a degree I'm not passionate about and enough debt that pursuing academic training is out of the question. Warhol's soup cans are neat and abstract movements were a refreshing breath of fresh air in art history, sure. You might admire works of lesser craftsmanship for their "philosophical" achievements, but consider the destruction that philosophy wreaked upon education and the cultural-nuclear-crater left behind. Google Sargent, Repin, Bouguereau, and Homer. Then look again at Koons, Hirst, Twombly, etc. and try to convince yourself a grave error and loss has not occurred.

jiggliemon 5y ago
There’s a lot to unpack here. But Picasso wasn’t a hack. Overrated, sure. But he approached his subject matter and technique with as much focus and detail as any artist that came before him. You aren’t required to appreciate his contribution to the artistic conversation; but calling him a hack is dismissive and purposely neglectful of his substantial impact. Picasso did what he did, and created what he created because of photography. In a world where capturing likeness, and form was basically free - what do you do with painting? Certainly not attempt to capture likeness and form - perhaps you make an Ernest attempt to capture or project the emotional response of form and subject. Picasso’s facial structure was modeled after African war masks, which were at the time ignored by the art world. And his composition and color and repetition were inspired by the Japanese print makers. A lot of the art from that era was inspired by what was coming out of Japan at that time. The product of Picasso was a mashup of influences, like all impactful art. The backlash against likeness and form was certain way before Picasso. But the fact that he rode that style to such fame is what made the art world dramatically over correct so drastically.

m463 5y ago

I think some of Picasso's paintings were exceptional. The bullfight paintings define to me how a master can do so much with so little: https://www.pablopicasso.org/images/paintings/bullfight-3.jpg https://www.pablopicasso.org/images/paintings/bullfight-3.jp...