13 ms·

Show HN: While painting this, I had nothing in mind

146 points by hemmert 4y ago

hemmert 4y ago
Here's a little side project: I love to paint! And I don't want to interfere with people interpreting my works, so I thought about marking them as painted with no artistic intent. I'd love to hear your opinions on that!
- pwatsonwailes 4y ago
  What a wonderful concept. Feels like the sort of thing Yves Klein would have done. The stamp in particular is a wonderful guesture. I wonder to what extent do you think that the viewers appreciation of, or interpretation of the work is based on them coming to it with no particular conception in mind either, or do you take a more constructivist view that there has to be a frame or context brought to it from the observer by their experiences and life?
  - hemmert 4y ago
    I guess the latter – the piece could remind them of a feeling, or stimulate them to think something new. I just don't want to interfere with that. They shouldn't waste their resources on trying to figure out what I was thinking.
JimDesigns 4y ago
this reminds me of an artist that used to juts use a random motion with his pencil to paint. And that was it
hemmert 4y ago
(Of course, the provocation here is: Is it possible to paint something without having anything in mind.)
- Lacerda69 4y ago
  I thought its more about really feeling as a viewer what the painting stirs in your own soul and not what the painters feeling/intention/state of mind was when he created the painting. Like dont read the art critic interpretation (or not only) but rather really feel what the art invokes in you - a unique feeling.
  - hemmert 4y ago
    Thank you!
- inanutshellus 4y ago
  "Do not think of a pink elephant"
dstala 4y ago
To my surprise, some are astonishingly attractive, some look like AI generated (so much of GPT off late), and some just vague! But it's just about "nothing in my mind" play. True art could get lost amidst all the AI stuffs! Long live true artists. Long live those who follow their passion amidst all the chaos! Hail hemmert!
- hemmert 4y ago
  I swear I painted them by myself :-) It is a side project which I simply enjoy (painting the paintings) – but our walls were getting too full, so I thought I could also start selling them. (In a sense, then it is also about me having a feeling - fun - while painting, which differentiates it from AI-generated 'works'.) Thank you!
  - yootyootr 4y ago
    As someone who has no idea at all about art but wants to hang all of these up on my walls, can I afford these pieces? are they ¢000s? ¢000,000s?
unrealp 4y ago
this reminds me, there is a principle from the book - the courage to be disliked. its about task seperation. basically you do your task and let others do their task. you dont let others meddle in your tasks and you dont meddle in tasks of others. For a singer for example, the singer's task is to sing well, focus on improving their voice, style, learn voice related skills and improve them. The critic has the task to love/hate the singing, comment, praise, do marketing (good or bad). The singer shouldnt manipulate what the critic does, its the critic's task. i think this applies to all art/expression. this manupulation pandemic and image management of today's world is making artists slaves of critics. great paintings!
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you –for the comment and the appreciation of the paintings themselves!
trumbitta2 4y ago
As a former poet (haven't written in 15 years) I strongly disagree. Figurative art might be about what you feel when you look at an art piece (still debatable), but art per se is not. Every single poem or song I wrote had a very precise meaning and a message in it and my choice of words, rhyme, and rhythm was deliberate and meant to be aiding me in conveying that message.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Yes, perhaps the statement about 'Art is ...' and 'Art is not ...' is too big. It's what I try to achieve here, but this is, of course, not true for all art. Thank you!
  - lancesells 4y ago
    As an artist I don't agree with your statement either, but that's according to my own philosophy and what I set out to do. I'm glad to see other ideas and points of view, and I do think you should keep exploring the statement. You could probably go pretty far with it.
    - hemmert 4y ago
      Thank you – it's formulated too bold indeed. It's one approach to art, and I get the feeling that exploring this might be really interesting. It's also funny to see how the stamp on the backside gets all the attention. I thought I was a painter, but I'm chasing meaninglessness.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  I really wish I knew exactly which statements you were disagreeing with.
  - hemmert 4y ago
    I guess it was the rather large statements about art, but I'd love to learn more, too.
yantrams 4y ago
Very much in line with what the Dadaists had to say about this topic. Remove the artist and their intentions from the equation and let the viewers experience art in itself. A particular group of them, in Zurich I believe, went to the extant of signing each other's pieces or with pseudonyms to distance themselves from the art they created.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you, will check it out!
  - yantrams 4y ago
    You are welcome. https://ubu.com/papers/index.html https://ubu.com/papers/index.html is a treasure trove of ruminations on this and art in general. Here's a playful and provocative Dadaist manifesto by Tristan Tzara https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.pdf https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.... > What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding. Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centers. Its chains kill, it is an enormous centipede stifling independence. Married to logic, art would live in incest, swallowing, engulfing its own tail, still part of its own body, fornicating within itself, and passion would become a nightmare tarred with protestantism, a monument, a heap of ponderous gray entrails.
- pwatsonwailes 4y ago
  Interesting comparison. The Dadaists looked at a similar idea but at a social scale - what is art in society? Or what does society consider art, and how do we value it? There's a mockery of the social conceptions of art in their work, which this feels like a different take on. This feels like a personalisation of that - not "we should attack the idea that the socially constructed narrative of art is the correct one", but "the individually constructed narrative of this art is always a valid one".
  - yantrams 4y ago
lloydatkinson 4y ago
I can absolutely get behind this sentiment and the custom stamp is the icing on top. It seems that for both study of English language/literature and art at schools is 80%-90% analysis of "what the author/artist was thinking or meaning when creating this" and then expecting the students to either agree with this ideology and pass the assignment/exam or disagree and fail the assignment/exam. This is an incredibly narrow angle of study and allows little room for creativity or even the idea that the author literally meant nothing or left it up to interpretation and seems to be teaching rote thought only. See also: http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2013/03/5-reasons-i-absolutely-hate-that-what.html http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2013/03/5-reasons-i-absolutely-... https://www.tumblr.com/austinsirkin/180007505784/the-blue-door-symbolizes-sadness-lies-your https://www.tumblr.com/austinsirkin/180007505784/the-blue-do... https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/dghmrf/im_in_english_rn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/dghmrf/im_in_eng... I'm in the UK and this is the type of crap they were and still are teaching: https://madameanglaise.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/aqa-gcse-english-paper-1-question-2-how-to-make-the-best-comments-on-effect/ https://madameanglaise.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/aqa-gcse-eng...
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you very much! I had similar feelings during my education. Perhaps this is now the reaction to this ;) (It's also often that people ask me 'What did you want to express while painting this?')
- simonh 4y ago
  I know little about this subject, but let me take the devil's advocate position. In that last example, how are teachers of English expected to teach writing styles, choice of words and phrases, language features and techniques or sentence forms if they can't analyse such choices in examples from literature? I know there's a movement in artistic circles that denies intent in the artist, but some artists do actually have an intent. Art is used as a medium for communication and therefore can have meaningful content. It's important to their artistic expression. It seems to me that not all art is semiotically vacant. Is that therefore bad art? Should it not be studied in those terms? I'm an outsider, I have zero artistic training or background so the chances I have any idea what I'm talking about are extremely low. The only reason I even know what semiotics means is because a flat mate of mine studied contemporary dance and I helped her with an essay on it once a long time ago, as English wasn't her first language.
hrnnnnnn 4y ago
There's an excellent song by the band 22 about this subject called "You Are Creating", which puts the creation of the art in the subjective experience of the listener, rather than in the artist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eXQjgcGOWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eXQjgcGOWc Everybody's feeling like "Oh my, that's my song" And it is because You're hearing yourself By means of us There's no quote unquote You're creating this note
- hemmert 4y ago
  Oh, thank you! I didn't know that one!
hemmert 4y ago
The thing I was wondering: When I put the stamp on the back of the painting, THAT is something that communicates an intent, actually. It's almost a Hofstaedter (Gödel/Escher/Bach) loop, or a prisoner's dilemma. Or Watzlawick's 'We cannot not communicate.'
- praptak 4y ago
  I think that "You intended to create a painting, gotcha!" is a lazy dismissal on a technicality. Yes, there are obvious limits to not having anything in mind while doing anything but we can be more charitable when interpreting this. Like "nothing besides the obvious stuff but this disclaimer would make it too long to fit on the stamp" :-)
  - hemmert 4y ago
    That would make a great new stamp, with lots of fine print and ever shrinking font size ;-)
HL33tibCe7 4y ago
You did have something in mind: the fact that you (supposedly) didn’t have anything in mind.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Yes, I guess I didn't think about that! (Oh, that proves me wrong, right? ;))
- dgb23 4y ago
  I understood it as the artist not aiming for you to feel a particular thing or interpret their art in a specific way.
  - hemmert 4y ago
    Yes, exactly!
  - deathanatos 4y ago
    Aiming for not producing a particular feeling is in itself, still an intention. The artist purposefully painted in a particular way, hoping to evoke feelings in the viewer, albeit particular unspecified and viewer dependent feelings. But that's the intent! To produce whatever feelings are yours. I think TFA conflates two things a bit: "While painting this picture, I had nothing in mind." — let's grant that as true. "All my works [… have] been painted with no intention at all." — that's different: my point (and I think the parent comment's) is that painting with nothing in mind is an intentional decision. While I granted the statement about painting with an empty mind, I also wonder if that's true: if the point of art is, as TFA states, "be about the feelings it creates in you. The viewer." then did the artist not have feelings about the art as the art was being produced? Can you separate yourself from the process? Can one have an empty mind, especially while trying to do a focused task such as painting, and for long enough to complete the work? It seems close to trying to not think about a thing, which becomes all the more impossible to do the more you try to do it. I also think there's a leap from "Art is about the feelings it creates" and "I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong." The artist might be able to say, "there is no interpretation of this art that is right or wrong", as that's their intent … but there is definitely art out there the intent of which is to produce a particular reaction within its viewership, so I think the statement is a bit too broad. But what do I know, I'm a software engineer.
chki 4y ago
Firstly, I like this project and the art itself. As others have said this is not a new thing in art but I think the presentation, the stamp and everything are quite nice. Now secondly, obviously the premise is also completely untrue and almost impossible to achieve: The artist did have something in mind when painting these pictures: to paint pictures where only the viewer is meant to decipher the meaning while the artist themself has nothing in mind. He or she also did paint something aesthetically pleasing so there seems to be a lot of intention on that part as well. Painting something without any intention at all seems almost completely impossible to me. (Maybe you could trick somebody else into painting something without them knowing about it – but even then you are still the artist with an intention). Finally I wanted to address the criticism by some other comments that art critique and galleries are always looking for an artistic intention even if there is none. I don't think that's completely true – I have seen plenty of exhibitions where it is explained that the artist "was just experimenting with form/colors".
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you! Actually, the longest part of building this was finding the right wording. Here are some previous attempts: - When painting this, I had no artistic intent - When painting this, there was nothing I wanted to express with the picture - When painting this, I wanted to express nothing In German, there's a nice ambiguity: "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is somewhere between 'I was not thinking' and 'I wanted to express nothing.'. It's also the reason why I went with a German stamp (which is my mother tongue) and not an English one. It is SO complicated to say that I wasn't up to anything with these pictures.
  - chki 4y ago
    Thanks for the added explanation! German is my mother tongue as well and I also think "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is very elegant and basically not translatable.
    - runlaszlorun 4y ago
      I’ve grown to greatly appreciate those phrases that don’t translate. Admittedly, as someone who got competent in formal programming languages before I was ever competent in a second human one- it took me a while to appreciate the “syntax error”… lol. Aber für Deutsch, brauche iche mehr ubung! :)
scandox 4y ago
The Death of The Author (1967) by Roland Barthes might interest you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author Personally I think an artist without intention would not interest me, though I agree that his intent is not necessarily of greater significance than the viewer's reaction.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Oh interesting! I hadn't come across that one. Will check it out! Thank you!
ocimbote 4y ago
Interesting concept. I particularly appreciate how much it allows to untangle in the trio artist <-> art piece <-> viewer. It has to be noted though that it is very difficult to "just like" a piece of art for good reasons. Art historically had a function: religious, mystic, political... and we're still stuck with this legacy. The function of art has only recently been deemed to be a raw trigger of raw emotions. For better or for worse, I can't say. Probably both. It also seems to me that "having nothing in mind" is polysemic and I'd be interested in knowing which prevails or how they coexist for the artist. "I had no intention", "I had no goal" and "My mind was blank" (is it even possible?) draw 3 very different intentions. Again, it's a very interesting approach. One might argue that it is too formalized, elaborate and sophisticated of an approach only to claim that the creation process is "with nothing in mind", but I don't think that the intensity of the concept and the outcome have to align in all points. The only certainty. here is that it cannot be categorized as naive. Which brings us to the audience. The audience for this project clearly is an educated one, one that met the struggles of having to comment and understand a piece of art and the ridiculous situations and discussions that often ensue to battle over who has the biggest one (brains, I mean). And look at my own comment... full of gibberish and not a single word on the art pieces themselves. I quite like them though. Shapes, colors, textures, they're beautiful.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you for the very thoughtful comment! I'm indeed not an English native speaker, so I wasn't fully aware of the different possible meanings of 'nothing in mind', but you're right. The German stamp has exactly the same ambiguity, which I thankfully took as a way out of the impossible situation of 'thinking nothing. It's also very notable that the back of the paintings receives way more attention than the paintings themselves – but I guess that's what HN is all about (and what I like about it!), pondering the intellectual and philosophical problems of not thinking ;-)
  - hemmert 4y ago
    (But I do appreciate the feedback loop as in Gödel's theorem 'This statement is wrong.')
pedrobadkarma 4y ago
[dead]
bowsamic 4y ago
I don't like it at all. I want the artist to use the art to try to connect to me in some way. I don't want it to be a still piece of abstract nothingness that is supposed to only reflect my perception. May as well be randomly generated noise, or AI art. Though, it doesn't really matter, because what this artist is claiming is impossible anyway, but I'm glad it is. Their idea is nauseating and gross. My only reaction to this is disgust and revulsion. Maybe that's the point? But I doubt it
- hemmert 4y ago
  It's great to see that the idea causes some controversy – thank you for sharing your thoughts!
martopix 4y ago
When I was in high school, we had an (excellent!) teacher of Italian literature who always interpreted texts according to a specific key, which she tried to explain through the historical and philosophical background of the era. At some point she gave an interpretation of a novel and, rumour has it, because it was the time of the rise of social media, one of her students contacted the author on Facebook and asked if the interpretation was correct. And, rumour has it, he said no. We were all outraged at the teacher! However, it's difficult to talk about any artwork without ever discussing an interpretation. By saying "I had nothing in particular in mind", we risk having the opposite effect, that of forbidding any kind of interpretation or discussion. It should be made clear that this means "you are free to interpret", not "there is no interpretation whatsoever". Finally, a remark: the author is saying they had nothing in particular in mind, but this is not true. Not that they're lying - they are fooling themselves.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Hello, and thank you for the excellent comment! I love the conclusion that I successfully fooled myself into thinking I wasn't thinking anything. That would also make a nice stamp ;-)
dw-im-here 4y ago
I do the same when I post comments on hacker news
thih9 4y ago
I wish the prices weren't enquiry only. Does anyone have a reference price point?
- soared 4y ago
  If you have to ask..
jcynix 4y ago
Nothing in mind? Go read Marvin Minsky's excellent "The Society of Mind" and reconsider this statement ... According to Minsky the mind is composed of tiny "components" (which form the "subsconscious" one might say) and only some reach "consciousness" levels of attention.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you, it's been on my list anyway! (Even if I'll have to cross off the stamp on the back after reading it ...)
  - jcynix 4y ago
    IMO "The Society of Mind" is one of the most intriguing concepts, and should be required reading for discussions of consciousness, free will, etc. Gruss aus dem Rheinland ...
somberi 4y ago
This school that espouses that art is what viewer feels, not the artist conceives - this was the mainstay of Marcel Duchamp and his ilk. "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” Ref: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp.
emptybits 4y ago
> "Art is not what I think when I'm painting. It's what you feel when you're looking." I love this definition of art and it's why some of the recent knee-jerk rejection of AI-generated artwork (sometimes citing its inhumanity or lack of human backstory) is premature IMO. More importantly, that's beautiful art. Thank you for sharing, OP.
- neogodless 4y ago
  I came here to discuss this pair of statements. To me, it seems like the artist at least has this particular sentiment in mind - if not while doing the physical act of painting, at least at some time before or after, or while sharing the works of art themselves. To me, I often sense I don't "get" art, because I don't feel anything looking at it, and I am wholly preoccupied with wondering why the artist created what they did, and what they had in mind at the time. To me... that's what art is. Wholly contradicting what this particular artist defines it as. Who is right?
  - hemmert 4y ago
    I once read that art gets our brain hemispheres into a discussion. This could be it? ;)
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  >More importantly, that's beautiful art. // When you say "that" you appear to disagree with the quote.
  - emptybits 4y ago
    I like his art and his definition of art.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you for your comment and the appreciation of that definition - and the paintings! I also don't know what to think about AI-generated art yet, either. All of my paintings, I just keep painting until I have the feeling that they're finished. But: in my head, don't I simply remix previous things I saw and found beautiful, pigment and scratch movements that worked well, and all these things? Where's the difference? :-) (I enjoy the act of smearing paint on canvasses, which makes a lot of difference for me – and there is no prompt.)
grugagag 4y ago
Very nice output but I bet the experience you go through beats anything. From my experience, when you enter flow state you can let it take over intent and then anything goes as long as it’s at the same tempo as the flow. I paint too and similary just take whatever direction the work wants to go while clearing my mind. There is a slight adjustments to the flow here and there but the decisions largely come into being by chance. I get a bonus dopamine hit when work is completed. I work on 10 to 20 works at a time so as not to linger for too long on decisions or interrupt the flow. I do this first as a form of therapy and don’t care to display or show the world my works as I feel knowing there was an audience would interfere with my process, would make me more self conscious perhaps wanting to please a perceived audience. I applied the same philosophy to music making.
irthomasthomas 4y ago
Refreshingly honest of you, and a nice exploration of colour and texture. The CIA would be pleased.[0] My favourite abstract art is that which conveys something of an idea or commentary on our society. It deconstructs reality and reassembles it in strange and unique ways that hopefully reveal something of the invisible ideas and processes that shape us all. Like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2, inspired by the first moving picture.[1] Or The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, inspired by J.J. Thomson's discovery of the electron.[2] [0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_No._2#/media/File:Duchamp_-_Nude_Descending_a_Staircase.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_N... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marcel_Duchamp,_1912,_Le_Roi_et_la_Reine_entour%C3%A9s_de_Nus_vites_%28The_King_and_Queen_Surrounded_by_Swift_Nudes%29,_oil_on_canvas,_114.6_x_128.9_cm,_Philadelphia_Museum_of_Art.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marcel_Duchamp,_1912,_Le_...
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you for the appreciation, and the interesting links! I heard about the CIA story, and how they sought to quantify creativity as a person's 'ability'.
karaterobot 4y ago
I'm in the camp that holds that the artists needs to be trying to communicate something for the work to be art in the first place. There are other words for when you're making things and not trying to communicate: illustration, decoration, design, etc. These words aren't insults (I'm an illustrator and a designer), they are just different things and it's useful have different terms for different things, and use the most apt one. > “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.” That's Tolstoy's definition, and it's basically the one I stick with because it filters out the most things that don't seem to be art, and leaves the most things in which seem to be. It's an ad hoc, imperfect definition, but to me it's better than the one that says "anything is art, and art means whatever I want it to". In terms of interpretation, I believe most art is open to a pretty wide range of interpretations, and you can make a strong case for the meaning to be something other than the most literal reading. Artists have subconscious minds too. But, in my opinion there are wrong interpretations, and the easiest ones to identify are ones that have no textual evidence ("Macbeth is actually about radio astronomy") so I don't agree with statements like: > I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong. Because where does that leave us? A world where art has a lot less value because it can just be anything to anybody. If it can mean anything, it effectively means nothing. Hard to find common ground or have a shared cultural language when you operate like that.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
Intention to not provide a reason for creation of a work _is_ having something in mind. To recapitulate, they had in mind creation of a work with no intrinsic meaning. Accidental art, if it is possible, has been of interest to me for a decade or so; my conclusion (limited as it is) is that it is not art. However, finding an object and imbuing it with meaning is an artistic endeavour, so if the painter were able to produce work devoid of intrinsic meaning then it would become art if a person finds the work and imprints a meaning on it. Quintessential postmodernity, I guess. It's an interesting area. It reminds me of reading a poet's reaction to reading an analysis an educational organisation had applied to that poet's work: you know the sort of thing 'the poet used the darkness of the sky to highlight the sense of foreboding of the hero'. The poet did not recognise any of their motivations in the analysis that was (IIRC) being taught to schoolchildren. Consciously they had been very plain in their approach of recording a (fictional) event ... of course they might have subconsciously made choices in language that would follow the analysis given ...
secondcoming 4y ago
I'm fascinated by Art Brut, because I like to try imagine what was going through the artist's mind that made them create what they did; especially if that artist has/had psychological problems. I value art that's made for the artist themselves higher than art made for other people.
- hemmert 4y ago
  That's a good measure, too. It doesn't even have to count for any viewer, it can be only for the artist – even if they don't ever view the painting after making it.
pmontra 4y ago
A printer I was using in the 90s messed up and printed something that I liked a lot. I framed it and hanged it at home. This painter maybe agrees with me that this is art but no other artist or philosopher agreed with me. To be art, they say, it must be made by man. Maybe intention is not important but no intention at all is impossible: the choice of color, direction of paint, etc is intentional. If it's random, then my printer was an artist too.
SaintSeiya84 4y ago
Is just random plasters of paint on a canvas then. Art needs intention. Next!
motohagiography 4y ago
When literally everything in an indoor or other artificial environment is freighted with intrinsic symbolic meaning, something without meaning may be the complimentary thing that completes it. Even machine or electric noise is the artifact of human intent. Denying meaning doesn't annhialite it. Finding meaninglessness may be even more challenging than the search for meaning itself. This artist may also have made a monoply on authentically meaningless art, since anything informed by it is a coherent reflection. I'd ask the artist, of what can meaninglessness be the effect?
- hemmert 4y ago
  I'd describe it as follows: The paintings are the side effect of me having an evening painting. For me, it's all about enjoying a nice evening, seeing the art come into being – with nothing I want to depict, express or evoke – and trying not to ruin the car with wet paint afterward. (As you can see from the paintings, I'm not the most tidy/cleanly person.) BUT then comes the meaninglessness stamp, and this really gives the entire thing meaning – the meaning of meaninglessness. I'm a huge fan of Douglas Hofstaedter's work (if you haven't read it, I can highly recommend his book 'I am a strange loop') and self-referential statements and things. And this is somehow what happened here: I only wanted to get out of the way, people should interpret the works as they like, it's about them feeling something. But HN, as HN is what we love it for, escalated this into a logic discussion.
phailhaus 4y ago
> I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong. This is objectively wrong. The Girl Wearing a Pearl Earring is not a statement about fascism. The Spotify logo is not a depiction of child labor. Now, this artist may feel that way about their own work (and that's neat!), but it is a huge overreach to apply it to all others. Every artist is different. I am so tired of these conversations about art as if it's a mystical monolith. No, you don't get to make blanket statements about literally all art.
- sophacles 4y ago
  Why does the artist get to dictate my response to their work? Why should they get to dictate my understanding of it? Those should be the role of the viewer. (BTW, my statement cannot be disagreed with - I am the creator here and you are merely a consumer of it, therefore the very notion that you get an opinion or response is objectively wrong).
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    > BTW, my statement cannot be disagreed with - I am the creator here and you are merely a consumer of it, therefore the very notion that you get an opinion or response is objectively wrong Nice try, but you can still disagree with the artist. But if I said "your statement is clearly defending murderers", you could say that my interpretation of your statement is wrong.
    - sophacles 4y ago
      Why do you get to dictate my response to an artist. Why do you get to dictate what I meant when I'm the artist? You get to interpret it and understand it as a defense of murderers. I find that to be an unreasonable interpretation, born of a mind that is desperately trying to force the world to conform to it, rather than existing in the world as it comes. But that's my response, not a dictation what you meant when you said it. Maybe you meant something else, maybe you found that it reminded you of a murderer you met once at a bar, or maybe it reminds you of stuff you said prior to committing murder, or maybe you're just being silly. Maybe you just think that way. I dunno - I often find that what I intend to create and what I actually create differ quite often, even in a medium I'm fairly good at (code or food for example). It makes me doubt that I can dictate what it's really about to me - let alone what its supposed to be about to you. (honestly try it out sometime, see how many people can guess what you were thinking before you wrote that gnarly bit of code, or if they can say what you're thinking about it after it's done). There's a lot of brain science out there that suggests a lot of "why i did that" is post-hoc rationalization rather than a true "why i did that". I don't see why creation is exempt from that.
anigbrowl 4y ago
So as the artist, allow me to remove myself from the equation. Bullshit marketing stunt. Artists who wish to do this (and there are plenty of them) just put their work out in the world and don't sign it. There is a grain of truth to it, insofar as abstract or figurative paintings do not need to be 'about' something, and most art talk is just hype. But making abstract art in the first place is an expression of sensual glee over color, form, composition and so on. I like this guy's art, but he's using flattery to market it.
- Zetice 4y ago
  The way the human mind works makes it basically impossible to declare something like this, so when someone does anyway, it makes me suspicious. So yeah, I guess I feel suspicion when looking at this art, like the artist concocted a world that lets us control our own brains as a… idk, way of introducing control where there is none? I guess that’s the point, but was it one worth making?
- michaelteter 4y ago
  There are other forms of art which humans make apparently without conscious thought. Some written words, poetry, dance, and music can be made this way. Why not painted art?
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    I don't think 'conscious thought' and 'deliberation' are synonymous. You can create spontaneously while still being quite conscious of what you're doing and having feelings about it as you're doing it.
_benj 4y ago
I love this project and generally agree with the idea that art is up to the viewer. At the same time, I believe that artist have can often have a unique ability to see/perceive reality in a way that escapes the general population, and can convey those perceptions to the rest of us through art. I’ve been blown away by how an artist is able to portray a situation in a way that it’s never occurred to me and the enlightenment resulting from it is very valuable to me. So, I think that both are needed, art that gives freedom to the observer to makes sense of it, and also art that conveys such deep perceptions/insights that artists seems to have more often that the rest of us and thus enlightened us too!
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you, that's a great differentiation, too. I went for the former, but the latter is equally important, too, of course!
whywhywouldyou 4y ago
The fact that the artist had nothing in mind makes a lot of sense when looking at the paintings. They appear as meaningless noise, and the only thing it evokes in me is disinterest. Knowing that the mind of the artist was intentionally devoid of emotional or rational content during their creation validates that response. In other words, this is a human doing their best impression of procedurally generated art with a computer. Maybe nice to look at, but ultimately meaningless.
- gamacodre 4y ago
  Looking a the other comments, it seems like there's some meta-commentary on the social and commercial positioning of art going on here. Along the lines of "taking no position is really bold," which is supposed to make this an interesting performative exercise... maybe? To me it's kind of interesting that this person's stream of consciousness results in such visually coherent stuff, but that's about it. One might need to be more plugged in to modern art culture to get anything "moving" out of the meta.
- hipshaker 4y ago
  Well you took the time to comment on your feelings towards his art, so there’s that. I would argue you are proving his point. It is not meaningless enough that you just scrolled past it without mention.
  - hemmert 4y ago
    That wasn't my intention (as the artist), and perhaps we're lacking a good discussion of what art is. But I remember Scott McCloud defining it as 'everything that doesn't serve the preservance of the species'. So making people reflect about what they think what art is for them (and if it's by finding out that this isn't), would be.
- savanaly 4y ago
  I find great beauty in and spend a lot of time looking at the cliffsides underneath waterfalls, whenever I happen to pass by them on a hike. The somewhat random trickling down of water creates eddies of various sizes and shapes and I greatly enjoy just looking them over with my eyes. I'm sure you can relate, if not with cliffsides underneath waterfalls then with something that exists in nature that was created without artistic intent. Perhaps not in the natural world but in the world of the mind like with certain pleasing patterns in Math? In any case that is the level on which I feel I can enjoy these paintings and they do not merely create disinterest. I don't think the artistic intent being missing = disinterest.
abeppu 4y ago
> I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong. Is this true only of _this_ art? As general statement, it seems suspicious to me. If I say "Guernica celebrates nationalistic violence", isn't that wrong?
- jmmcd 4y ago
  Any comment intended to be true of all art is inevitably wrong. I believe the above comment is the only comment which is an exception to the above rule.
uneekname 4y ago
Oh man these comments are hilarious. It sounds like the artist's intent (or, claimed lack thereof) has done exactly what it set out to do! Saying that you had no artistic intent is art in of itself, my dudes. These paintings are visually appealing to me. I doubt I could afford any of them, but if I could you'd have a customer!
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you for summarizing! It's also really interesting (I'm the artist) to see that almost ALL comments refer to the stamp on the backsides of the paintings, not to the content of the pictures. :-)
GuB-42 4y ago
Does it validate AI-generated art? The computer doesn't have anything in mind, it is just random noise turned into something aesthetically pleasing. In fact, coupled with a random prompt, it is even more "nothing in mind". Here the artist has "nothing in mind" in mind, diffusion models have literally nothing in mind, in fact they don't even have a mind to put something in.
- hemmert 4y ago
  That's an interesting point that I didn't have in mind, but it's a very good question. From the discussion here I have the feeling that the mere statement 'I didn't have anything in mind while painting this' makes up for a lot of the discussion (and meaning?) here.
babayaga4 4y ago
[flagged]
- hemmert 4y ago
  No offense taken!
Nadya 4y ago
Seems better presented and quite adjacent to my own photography project: https://everythingcanbe.art/gallery https://everythingcanbe.art/gallery although the intent is clearly different as the statement made by me is a very pro-AI stance towards what "art" is. The angle I was coming from was not only the aesthetics/purpose behind the art but more so about the "effort" put into it by removing any effort from the creation. "Effort" being thinking about good composition or finding an interesting subject matter or waiting for the perfect time of day for the lighting to be just right. Instead I show up, press a button, and because I call it art it is even if I agree it isn't very good art (and that's also kind of the point - I would argue the act of curation is in and of itself an art form...) Also - you should make thumbnails of the art and link out to the larger pictures. Currently you're loading 2000~ px width images as 300~ px thumbnails and it is very slow to load due to that at the gallery near the bottom. This being HN I'm actually shocked nobody has mentioned the completely bloated and unnecessary file size of the images.
- hemmert 4y ago
  That's very nice, from the office curtain to the damaged poster board! :-) 'Effort' is an interesting factor – I won't neglect that I'm putting effort into the paintings. How do you decide when to press the camera's shutter? (This is a bit like a Libet experiment, in case you don't know it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Libet_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Libe...) Thanks also for the technical remark regarding the image sizes, I'll do that, good point. (Presentation-wise, my website is based on a template called 'ZeroOne' (https://www.thezero.club/demo/one/ https://www.thezero.club/demo/one/) for the Kirby CMS (https://getkirby.com/ https://getkirby.com/). Really nice to work with, especially if you want to create something gallery-like!)
alecnotthompson 4y ago
Nothing doesn't exist, friend. Beautiful paintings nonetheless.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you, for the appreciation and your comment. I was getting the feeling that the stamp on the backside gets more attention than the pictures themselves.
contingencies 4y ago
When an artist has no personal vision, what can he communicate on to the canvas? - Clifford Irving, 'F for Fake' (1973)
gnicholas 4y ago
How is this a Show HN? > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead. This cannot be tried out, except in the way that any website can be "tried out".
- hemmert 4y ago
  Oh, I wasn't aware of that! I thought that Show HN was for anything that I had made. I also wanted to invite people to discuss this with me (as the artist), but I could have disclosed that in the first comment, too, of course.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    It's a bit narrower than that, otherwise folks could post Show HNs for links to their photo galleries, blogs, etc. You can post these things, but they're supposed to be posted as regular links, not with the enticing "Show HN" prepended. The Show HN rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
- superb-owl 4y ago
  Honestly I disagree. I can engage with the art here same as I can with a clickable app. I think it fits with the spirit of Show HN
archarios 4y ago
What if my feelings looking at these is also nothing?
pacifika 4y ago
It is AI generated or it could be, if it has no meaning.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Modern art reminds me of cigar making. An artist creating a new work of art has an idea of what he wants to do based on the materials available to him. A cigar blender creating a new cigar has an idea of what he wants to do based on the raw materials available to him. An artist will poke and prod at their creation, adding details until they are happy with their work, and then take a step back to determine if anything new needs to be added because making art is a very subjective process. A cigar blender will combine tobacco he thinks will make a good cigar and also several other iterations using different blends because creating a cigar blend from scratch is a very subjective process. An artist will put his work into a gallery, where it will be judged by critics who will attempt to assign meaning to the work even if no meaning actually exists. A cigar blender will send his completed blend to reviewers where it will be judged by critics who will attempt to assign flavors to the cigar even if they're utterly ridiculous. I think the main difference between the two is that the artist usually doesn't have to get his art to perform well. A cigar blender can't just make a cigar that tastes great, he also has to pay attention to how well the cigar burns. I used to get plenty of pre-release samples to get my thoughts from manufacturers I knew, and some of the best domestic stogies I've ever tasted burned like trash and had to be disregarded when choosing the final blend.
Georgelemental 4y ago
If the artist doesn't matter—then if AI can produce the same output, it makes no difference to replace human artists with AI, right? https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1610674140310130689 https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1610674140310130689
- amelius 4y ago
  AI can only interpolate. Humans can extrapolate.
  - hemmert 4y ago
    Wow, that's something I hadn't thought about yet. I'm also not sure if that's true, but it'd be a satisfying, calming thought if it were. Can you perhaps elaborate?
  - gmfawcett 4y ago
    Truthy, but wrong. Of course AI's can extrapolate.
bartislartfast 4y ago
Side note - I love the scrolling effect on the grid!
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you, all credit goes to Branko Matic's fantastic Kirby theme 'ZeroOne" :-) https://www.thezero.club/demo/one/ https://www.thezero.club/demo/one/
inasmuch 4y ago
I feel as though I'm fighting an unwinnable battle by asking for more, not less intention in art. Most artists at least produce a statement to accompany their work, but I rarely find them substantive, despite their often turgid language. What I find particularly distasteful about this is the presentation of "art" as interior design products. This seems to be a trend among independent creators looking to make a living outside of the traditional gallery/fair/buyer system. I of course understand why they're doing it, but I'm using those disparaging quotation marks because that commercial contextualization commercializes the work itself. And at that point, it escapes my own nebulous boundaries for art and becomes something else. What exactly, I don't know. I'm not sure "design" qualifies here, even though we're being asked to appraise the work as we might a chair or credenza, because I'm not sure I believe "this wall feels empty" is a problem to be solved, in the design sense. So what is it then? Stuff? Just more stuff for people to buy and feel good about owning? Okay. (And no, I don't think this counts as me having a reaction to the art. I'm reacting to the creator, the marketing, and—sorry—the bullshit.)
- hemmert 4y ago
  I never liked artist's statements, either. Perhaps that was also what motivated me to do the stamp thing. I want to paint in peace :-)
- Nevermark 4y ago
  Well if the color, pattern and texture of fabric on furniture counts as design, certainly rectangles or other shapes of color, pattern, or texture, on a wall count as design. There is purpose behind design. It allows us to build up unique associations with a place, its people, its purpose. It keeps us from being bored. It gives us a break from other places. It sets a mood conducive to whatever a place is for. It expresses something about ourselves to others. Decorating our spaces and walls seems to address a deep need in our species. A wall with nothing on it creates tension. It isn't neutral. Nowhere in nature are there environments comparable to huge vertical flat surfaces of white, brick, or wood or other uniform material.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago
I wanted to download a painting app, but I was too cheap to pay the $19.99 demanded by American Airlines for the in-flight WiFi. As fortune would have it, Android comes equipped with a photo editing tool designed for quickly marking up a photo. I went to work and completed a rather pathetic landscape painting using palate of six colors and the pencil tool. As I tried in vain to improve the awful painting, I discovered highlighter tool could be used to blend and create an infinite array of colors! Inspired by uncomfortable seating and the music Drexcia, Anthony Rother and the Egypitan lover ... I present to you the convergence of modern budget airline travel, electro music and crappy Android phones. This amazing in-air gallery can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/3aql6rn https://imgur.com/a/3aql6rn For a limited time, available to only Hacker News readers you can purchase the original digital copy of the gallery for only $199.99. The lucky purchaser will receive the entire digital collection with a certificate of authenticity (basically, an email saying "Thanks, bud!"). Act now, because if there are no buyers the collection will be listed in Sky Mall for the full retail price of $1999.00
- jcynix 4y ago
  You could always convert them to NFTs ...
hemmert 4y ago
Interestingly, if I had put only the paintings online, without the stamp on the back and the statement, a line of criticism could have been 'This is meaningless art.' Now that I'm claiming it to be meaningless art, we're finding ourselves in a discussion that this can't be.
Mouthfeel 4y ago
[dead]
chillbill 4y ago
In the words of one of my favorite authors: “Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts”

146 points by hemmert 4y ago

Here's a little side project: I love to paint! And I don't want to interfere with people interpreting my works, so I thought about marking them as painted with no artistic intent. I'd love to hear your opinions on that!

pwatsonwailes 4y ago
What a wonderful concept. Feels like the sort of thing Yves Klein would have done. The stamp in particular is a wonderful guesture. I wonder to what extent do you think that the viewers appreciation of, or interpretation of the work is based on them coming to it with no particular conception in mind either, or do you take a more constructivist view that there has to be a frame or context brought to it from the observer by their experiences and life?
- hemmert 4y ago
  I guess the latter – the piece could remind them of a feeling, or stimulate them to think something new. I just don't want to interfere with that. They shouldn't waste their resources on trying to figure out what I was thinking.

JimDesigns 4y ago

this reminds me of an artist that used to juts use a random motion with his pencil to paint. And that was it

hemmert 4y ago

(Of course, the provocation here is: Is it possible to paint something without having anything in mind.)

Lacerda69 4y ago
I thought its more about really feeling as a viewer what the painting stirs in your own soul and not what the painters feeling/intention/state of mind was when he created the painting. Like dont read the art critic interpretation (or not only) but rather really feel what the art invokes in you - a unique feeling.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Thank you!
inanutshellus 4y ago
"Do not think of a pink elephant"

dstala 4y ago

To my surprise, some are astonishingly attractive, some look like AI generated (so much of GPT off late), and some just vague! But it's just about "nothing in my mind" play. True art could get lost amidst all the AI stuffs! Long live true artists. Long live those who follow their passion amidst all the chaos! Hail hemmert!

hemmert 4y ago
I swear I painted them by myself :-) It is a side project which I simply enjoy (painting the paintings) – but our walls were getting too full, so I thought I could also start selling them. (In a sense, then it is also about me having a feeling - fun - while painting, which differentiates it from AI-generated 'works'.) Thank you!
- yootyootr 4y ago
  As someone who has no idea at all about art but wants to hang all of these up on my walls, can I afford these pieces? are they ¢000s? ¢000,000s?

unrealp 4y ago

this reminds me, there is a principle from the book - the courage to be disliked. its about task seperation. basically you do your task and let others do their task. you dont let others meddle in your tasks and you dont meddle in tasks of others. For a singer for example, the singer's task is to sing well, focus on improving their voice, style, learn voice related skills and improve them. The critic has the task to love/hate the singing, comment, praise, do marketing (good or bad). The singer shouldnt manipulate what the critic does, its the critic's task. i think this applies to all art/expression. this manupulation pandemic and image management of today's world is making artists slaves of critics. great paintings!

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you –for the comment and the appreciation of the paintings themselves!

trumbitta2 4y ago

As a former poet (haven't written in 15 years) I strongly disagree. Figurative art might be about what you feel when you look at an art piece (still debatable), but art per se is not. Every single poem or song I wrote had a very precise meaning and a message in it and my choice of words, rhyme, and rhythm was deliberate and meant to be aiding me in conveying that message.

hemmert 4y ago
Yes, perhaps the statement about 'Art is ...' and 'Art is not ...' is too big. It's what I try to achieve here, but this is, of course, not true for all art. Thank you!
- lancesells 4y ago
  As an artist I don't agree with your statement either, but that's according to my own philosophy and what I set out to do. I'm glad to see other ideas and points of view, and I do think you should keep exploring the statement. You could probably go pretty far with it.
  - hemmert 4y ago
    Thank you – it's formulated too bold indeed. It's one approach to art, and I get the feeling that exploring this might be really interesting. It's also funny to see how the stamp on the backside gets all the attention. I thought I was a painter, but I'm chasing meaninglessness.
badcppdev 4y ago
I really wish I knew exactly which statements you were disagreeing with.
- hemmert 4y ago
  I guess it was the rather large statements about art, but I'd love to learn more, too.

yantrams 4y ago

Very much in line with what the Dadaists had to say about this topic. Remove the artist and their intentions from the equation and let the viewers experience art in itself. A particular group of them, in Zurich I believe, went to the extant of signing each other's pieces or with pseudonyms to distance themselves from the art they created.

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you, will check it out!
- yantrams 4y ago
  You are welcome. https://ubu.com/papers/index.html https://ubu.com/papers/index.html is a treasure trove of ruminations on this and art in general. Here's a playful and provocative Dadaist manifesto by Tristan Tzara https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.pdf https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.... > What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding. Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centers. Its chains kill, it is an enormous centipede stifling independence. Married to logic, art would live in incest, swallowing, engulfing its own tail, still part of its own body, fornicating within itself, and passion would become a nightmare tarred with protestantism, a monument, a heap of ponderous gray entrails.
pwatsonwailes 4y ago
Interesting comparison. The Dadaists looked at a similar idea but at a social scale - what is art in society? Or what does society consider art, and how do we value it? There's a mockery of the social conceptions of art in their work, which this feels like a different take on. This feels like a personalisation of that - not "we should attack the idea that the socially constructed narrative of art is the correct one", but "the individually constructed narrative of this art is always a valid one".
- yantrams 4y ago

lloydatkinson 4y ago

I can absolutely get behind this sentiment and the custom stamp is the icing on top. It seems that for both study of English language/literature and art at schools is 80%-90% analysis of "what the author/artist was thinking or meaning when creating this" and then expecting the students to either agree with this ideology and pass the assignment/exam or disagree and fail the assignment/exam. This is an incredibly narrow angle of study and allows little room for creativity or even the idea that the author literally meant nothing or left it up to interpretation and seems to be teaching rote thought only. See also: http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2013/03/5-reasons-i-absolutely-hate-that-what.html http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2013/03/5-reasons-i-absolutely-... https://www.tumblr.com/austinsirkin/180007505784/the-blue-door-symbolizes-sadness-lies-your https://www.tumblr.com/austinsirkin/180007505784/the-blue-do... https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/dghmrf/im_in_english_rn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/dghmrf/im_in_eng... I'm in the UK and this is the type of crap they were and still are teaching: https://madameanglaise.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/aqa-gcse-english-paper-1-question-2-how-to-make-the-best-comments-on-effect/ https://madameanglaise.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/aqa-gcse-eng...

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you very much! I had similar feelings during my education. Perhaps this is now the reaction to this ;) (It's also often that people ask me 'What did you want to express while painting this?')
simonh 4y ago
I know little about this subject, but let me take the devil's advocate position. In that last example, how are teachers of English expected to teach writing styles, choice of words and phrases, language features and techniques or sentence forms if they can't analyse such choices in examples from literature? I know there's a movement in artistic circles that denies intent in the artist, but some artists do actually have an intent. Art is used as a medium for communication and therefore can have meaningful content. It's important to their artistic expression. It seems to me that not all art is semiotically vacant. Is that therefore bad art? Should it not be studied in those terms? I'm an outsider, I have zero artistic training or background so the chances I have any idea what I'm talking about are extremely low. The only reason I even know what semiotics means is because a flat mate of mine studied contemporary dance and I helped her with an essay on it once a long time ago, as English wasn't her first language.

hrnnnnnn 4y ago

There's an excellent song by the band 22 about this subject called "You Are Creating", which puts the creation of the art in the subjective experience of the listener, rather than in the artist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eXQjgcGOWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eXQjgcGOWc Everybody's feeling like "Oh my, that's my song" And it is because You're hearing yourself By means of us There's no quote unquote You're creating this note

hemmert 4y ago
Oh, thank you! I didn't know that one!

hemmert 4y ago

The thing I was wondering: When I put the stamp on the back of the painting, THAT is something that communicates an intent, actually. It's almost a Hofstaedter (Gödel/Escher/Bach) loop, or a prisoner's dilemma. Or Watzlawick's 'We cannot not communicate.'

praptak 4y ago
I think that "You intended to create a painting, gotcha!" is a lazy dismissal on a technicality. Yes, there are obvious limits to not having anything in mind while doing anything but we can be more charitable when interpreting this. Like "nothing besides the obvious stuff but this disclaimer would make it too long to fit on the stamp" :-)
- hemmert 4y ago
  That would make a great new stamp, with lots of fine print and ever shrinking font size ;-)

HL33tibCe7 4y ago

You did have something in mind: the fact that you (supposedly) didn’t have anything in mind.

hemmert 4y ago
Yes, I guess I didn't think about that! (Oh, that proves me wrong, right? ;))
dgb23 4y ago
I understood it as the artist not aiming for you to feel a particular thing or interpret their art in a specific way.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Yes, exactly!
- deathanatos 4y ago
  Aiming for not producing a particular feeling is in itself, still an intention. The artist purposefully painted in a particular way, hoping to evoke feelings in the viewer, albeit particular unspecified and viewer dependent feelings. But that's the intent! To produce whatever feelings are yours. I think TFA conflates two things a bit: "While painting this picture, I had nothing in mind." — let's grant that as true. "All my works [… have] been painted with no intention at all." — that's different: my point (and I think the parent comment's) is that painting with nothing in mind is an intentional decision. While I granted the statement about painting with an empty mind, I also wonder if that's true: if the point of art is, as TFA states, "be about the feelings it creates in you. The viewer." then did the artist not have feelings about the art as the art was being produced? Can you separate yourself from the process? Can one have an empty mind, especially while trying to do a focused task such as painting, and for long enough to complete the work? It seems close to trying to not think about a thing, which becomes all the more impossible to do the more you try to do it. I also think there's a leap from "Art is about the feelings it creates" and "I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong." The artist might be able to say, "there is no interpretation of this art that is right or wrong", as that's their intent … but there is definitely art out there the intent of which is to produce a particular reaction within its viewership, so I think the statement is a bit too broad. But what do I know, I'm a software engineer.

chki 4y ago

Firstly, I like this project and the art itself. As others have said this is not a new thing in art but I think the presentation, the stamp and everything are quite nice. Now secondly, obviously the premise is also completely untrue and almost impossible to achieve: The artist did have something in mind when painting these pictures: to paint pictures where only the viewer is meant to decipher the meaning while the artist themself has nothing in mind. He or she also did paint something aesthetically pleasing so there seems to be a lot of intention on that part as well. Painting something without any intention at all seems almost completely impossible to me. (Maybe you could trick somebody else into painting something without them knowing about it – but even then you are still the artist with an intention). Finally I wanted to address the criticism by some other comments that art critique and galleries are always looking for an artistic intention even if there is none. I don't think that's completely true – I have seen plenty of exhibitions where it is explained that the artist "was just experimenting with form/colors".

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you! Actually, the longest part of building this was finding the right wording. Here are some previous attempts: - When painting this, I had no artistic intent - When painting this, there was nothing I wanted to express with the picture - When painting this, I wanted to express nothing In German, there's a nice ambiguity: "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is somewhere between 'I was not thinking' and 'I wanted to express nothing.'. It's also the reason why I went with a German stamp (which is my mother tongue) and not an English one. It is SO complicated to say that I wasn't up to anything with these pictures.
- chki 4y ago
  Thanks for the added explanation! German is my mother tongue as well and I also think "Bei diesem Bild habe ich mir nichts gedacht" is very elegant and basically not translatable.
  - runlaszlorun 4y ago
    I’ve grown to greatly appreciate those phrases that don’t translate. Admittedly, as someone who got competent in formal programming languages before I was ever competent in a second human one- it took me a while to appreciate the “syntax error”… lol. Aber für Deutsch, brauche iche mehr ubung! :)

scandox 4y ago

The Death of The Author (1967) by Roland Barthes might interest you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author Personally I think an artist without intention would not interest me, though I agree that his intent is not necessarily of greater significance than the viewer's reaction.

hemmert 4y ago
Oh interesting! I hadn't come across that one. Will check it out! Thank you!

ocimbote 4y ago

Interesting concept. I particularly appreciate how much it allows to untangle in the trio artist <-> art piece <-> viewer. It has to be noted though that it is very difficult to "just like" a piece of art for good reasons. Art historically had a function: religious, mystic, political... and we're still stuck with this legacy. The function of art has only recently been deemed to be a raw trigger of raw emotions. For better or for worse, I can't say. Probably both. It also seems to me that "having nothing in mind" is polysemic and I'd be interested in knowing which prevails or how they coexist for the artist. "I had no intention", "I had no goal" and "My mind was blank" (is it even possible?) draw 3 very different intentions. Again, it's a very interesting approach. One might argue that it is too formalized, elaborate and sophisticated of an approach only to claim that the creation process is "with nothing in mind", but I don't think that the intensity of the concept and the outcome have to align in all points. The only certainty. here is that it cannot be categorized as naive. Which brings us to the audience. The audience for this project clearly is an educated one, one that met the struggles of having to comment and understand a piece of art and the ridiculous situations and discussions that often ensue to battle over who has the biggest one (brains, I mean). And look at my own comment... full of gibberish and not a single word on the art pieces themselves. I quite like them though. Shapes, colors, textures, they're beautiful.

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you for the very thoughtful comment! I'm indeed not an English native speaker, so I wasn't fully aware of the different possible meanings of 'nothing in mind', but you're right. The German stamp has exactly the same ambiguity, which I thankfully took as a way out of the impossible situation of 'thinking nothing. It's also very notable that the back of the paintings receives way more attention than the paintings themselves – but I guess that's what HN is all about (and what I like about it!), pondering the intellectual and philosophical problems of not thinking ;-)
- hemmert 4y ago
  (But I do appreciate the feedback loop as in Gödel's theorem 'This statement is wrong.')

pedrobadkarma 4y ago

[dead]

bowsamic 4y ago

I don't like it at all. I want the artist to use the art to try to connect to me in some way. I don't want it to be a still piece of abstract nothingness that is supposed to only reflect my perception. May as well be randomly generated noise, or AI art. Though, it doesn't really matter, because what this artist is claiming is impossible anyway, but I'm glad it is. Their idea is nauseating and gross. My only reaction to this is disgust and revulsion. Maybe that's the point? But I doubt it

hemmert 4y ago
It's great to see that the idea causes some controversy – thank you for sharing your thoughts!

martopix 4y ago

When I was in high school, we had an (excellent!) teacher of Italian literature who always interpreted texts according to a specific key, which she tried to explain through the historical and philosophical background of the era. At some point she gave an interpretation of a novel and, rumour has it, because it was the time of the rise of social media, one of her students contacted the author on Facebook and asked if the interpretation was correct. And, rumour has it, he said no. We were all outraged at the teacher! However, it's difficult to talk about any artwork without ever discussing an interpretation. By saying "I had nothing in particular in mind", we risk having the opposite effect, that of forbidding any kind of interpretation or discussion. It should be made clear that this means "you are free to interpret", not "there is no interpretation whatsoever". Finally, a remark: the author is saying they had nothing in particular in mind, but this is not true. Not that they're lying - they are fooling themselves.

hemmert 4y ago
Hello, and thank you for the excellent comment! I love the conclusion that I successfully fooled myself into thinking I wasn't thinking anything. That would also make a nice stamp ;-)

dw-im-here 4y ago

I do the same when I post comments on hacker news

thih9 4y ago

I wish the prices weren't enquiry only. Does anyone have a reference price point?

soared 4y ago
If you have to ask..

jcynix 4y ago

Nothing in mind? Go read Marvin Minsky's excellent "The Society of Mind" and reconsider this statement ... According to Minsky the mind is composed of tiny "components" (which form the "subsconscious" one might say) and only some reach "consciousness" levels of attention.

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you, it's been on my list anyway! (Even if I'll have to cross off the stamp on the back after reading it ...)
- jcynix 4y ago
  IMO "The Society of Mind" is one of the most intriguing concepts, and should be required reading for discussions of consciousness, free will, etc. Gruss aus dem Rheinland ...

somberi 4y ago

This school that espouses that art is what viewer feels, not the artist conceives - this was the mainstay of Marcel Duchamp and his ilk. "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” Ref: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp.

emptybits 4y ago

> "Art is not what I think when I'm painting. It's what you feel when you're looking." I love this definition of art and it's why some of the recent knee-jerk rejection of AI-generated artwork (sometimes citing its inhumanity or lack of human backstory) is premature IMO. More importantly, that's beautiful art. Thank you for sharing, OP.

neogodless 4y ago
I came here to discuss this pair of statements. To me, it seems like the artist at least has this particular sentiment in mind - if not while doing the physical act of painting, at least at some time before or after, or while sharing the works of art themselves. To me, I often sense I don't "get" art, because I don't feel anything looking at it, and I am wholly preoccupied with wondering why the artist created what they did, and what they had in mind at the time. To me... that's what art is. Wholly contradicting what this particular artist defines it as. Who is right?
- hemmert 4y ago
  I once read that art gets our brain hemispheres into a discussion. This could be it? ;)
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
>More importantly, that's beautiful art. // When you say "that" you appear to disagree with the quote.
- emptybits 4y ago
  I like his art and his definition of art.
hemmert 4y ago
Thank you for your comment and the appreciation of that definition - and the paintings! I also don't know what to think about AI-generated art yet, either. All of my paintings, I just keep painting until I have the feeling that they're finished. But: in my head, don't I simply remix previous things I saw and found beautiful, pigment and scratch movements that worked well, and all these things? Where's the difference? :-) (I enjoy the act of smearing paint on canvasses, which makes a lot of difference for me – and there is no prompt.)

grugagag 4y ago

Very nice output but I bet the experience you go through beats anything. From my experience, when you enter flow state you can let it take over intent and then anything goes as long as it’s at the same tempo as the flow. I paint too and similary just take whatever direction the work wants to go while clearing my mind. There is a slight adjustments to the flow here and there but the decisions largely come into being by chance. I get a bonus dopamine hit when work is completed. I work on 10 to 20 works at a time so as not to linger for too long on decisions or interrupt the flow. I do this first as a form of therapy and don’t care to display or show the world my works as I feel knowing there was an audience would interfere with my process, would make me more self conscious perhaps wanting to please a perceived audience. I applied the same philosophy to music making.

irthomasthomas 4y ago

Refreshingly honest of you, and a nice exploration of colour and texture. The CIA would be pleased.[0] My favourite abstract art is that which conveys something of an idea or commentary on our society. It deconstructs reality and reassembles it in strange and unique ways that hopefully reveal something of the invisible ideas and processes that shape us all. Like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2, inspired by the first moving picture.[1] Or The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, inspired by J.J. Thomson's discovery of the electron.[2] [0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_No._2#/media/File:Duchamp_-_Nude_Descending_a_Staircase.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_N... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marcel_Duchamp,_1912,_Le_Roi_et_la_Reine_entour%C3%A9s_de_Nus_vites_%28The_King_and_Queen_Surrounded_by_Swift_Nudes%29,_oil_on_canvas,_114.6_x_128.9_cm,_Philadelphia_Museum_of_Art.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marcel_Duchamp,_1912,_Le_...

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you for the appreciation, and the interesting links! I heard about the CIA story, and how they sought to quantify creativity as a person's 'ability'.

karaterobot 4y ago

I'm in the camp that holds that the artists needs to be trying to communicate something for the work to be art in the first place. There are other words for when you're making things and not trying to communicate: illustration, decoration, design, etc. These words aren't insults (I'm an illustrator and a designer), they are just different things and it's useful have different terms for different things, and use the most apt one. > “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.” That's Tolstoy's definition, and it's basically the one I stick with because it filters out the most things that don't seem to be art, and leaves the most things in which seem to be. It's an ad hoc, imperfect definition, but to me it's better than the one that says "anything is art, and art means whatever I want it to". In terms of interpretation, I believe most art is open to a pretty wide range of interpretations, and you can make a strong case for the meaning to be something other than the most literal reading. Artists have subconscious minds too. But, in my opinion there are wrong interpretations, and the easiest ones to identify are ones that have no textual evidence ("Macbeth is actually about radio astronomy") so I don't agree with statements like: > I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong. Because where does that leave us? A world where art has a lot less value because it can just be anything to anybody. If it can mean anything, it effectively means nothing. Hard to find common ground or have a shared cultural language when you operate like that.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago

Intention to not provide a reason for creation of a work _is_ having something in mind. To recapitulate, they had in mind creation of a work with no intrinsic meaning. Accidental art, if it is possible, has been of interest to me for a decade or so; my conclusion (limited as it is) is that it is not art. However, finding an object and imbuing it with meaning is an artistic endeavour, so if the painter were able to produce work devoid of intrinsic meaning then it would become art if a person finds the work and imprints a meaning on it. Quintessential postmodernity, I guess. It's an interesting area. It reminds me of reading a poet's reaction to reading an analysis an educational organisation had applied to that poet's work: you know the sort of thing 'the poet used the darkness of the sky to highlight the sense of foreboding of the hero'. The poet did not recognise any of their motivations in the analysis that was (IIRC) being taught to schoolchildren. Consciously they had been very plain in their approach of recording a (fictional) event ... of course they might have subconsciously made choices in language that would follow the analysis given ...

secondcoming 4y ago

I'm fascinated by Art Brut, because I like to try imagine what was going through the artist's mind that made them create what they did; especially if that artist has/had psychological problems. I value art that's made for the artist themselves higher than art made for other people.

hemmert 4y ago
That's a good measure, too. It doesn't even have to count for any viewer, it can be only for the artist – even if they don't ever view the painting after making it.

pmontra 4y ago

A printer I was using in the 90s messed up and printed something that I liked a lot. I framed it and hanged it at home. This painter maybe agrees with me that this is art but no other artist or philosopher agreed with me. To be art, they say, it must be made by man. Maybe intention is not important but no intention at all is impossible: the choice of color, direction of paint, etc is intentional. If it's random, then my printer was an artist too.

SaintSeiya84 4y ago

Is just random plasters of paint on a canvas then. Art needs intention. Next!

motohagiography 4y ago

When literally everything in an indoor or other artificial environment is freighted with intrinsic symbolic meaning, something without meaning may be the complimentary thing that completes it. Even machine or electric noise is the artifact of human intent. Denying meaning doesn't annhialite it. Finding meaninglessness may be even more challenging than the search for meaning itself. This artist may also have made a monoply on authentically meaningless art, since anything informed by it is a coherent reflection. I'd ask the artist, of what can meaninglessness be the effect?

hemmert 4y ago
I'd describe it as follows: The paintings are the side effect of me having an evening painting. For me, it's all about enjoying a nice evening, seeing the art come into being – with nothing I want to depict, express or evoke – and trying not to ruin the car with wet paint afterward. (As you can see from the paintings, I'm not the most tidy/cleanly person.) BUT then comes the meaninglessness stamp, and this really gives the entire thing meaning – the meaning of meaninglessness. I'm a huge fan of Douglas Hofstaedter's work (if you haven't read it, I can highly recommend his book 'I am a strange loop') and self-referential statements and things. And this is somehow what happened here: I only wanted to get out of the way, people should interpret the works as they like, it's about them feeling something. But HN, as HN is what we love it for, escalated this into a logic discussion.

phailhaus 4y ago

> I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong. This is objectively wrong. The Girl Wearing a Pearl Earring is not a statement about fascism. The Spotify logo is not a depiction of child labor. Now, this artist may feel that way about their own work (and that's neat!), but it is a huge overreach to apply it to all others. Every artist is different. I am so tired of these conversations about art as if it's a mystical monolith. No, you don't get to make blanket statements about literally all art.

sophacles 4y ago
Why does the artist get to dictate my response to their work? Why should they get to dictate my understanding of it? Those should be the role of the viewer. (BTW, my statement cannot be disagreed with - I am the creator here and you are merely a consumer of it, therefore the very notion that you get an opinion or response is objectively wrong).
- phailhaus 4y ago
  > BTW, my statement cannot be disagreed with - I am the creator here and you are merely a consumer of it, therefore the very notion that you get an opinion or response is objectively wrong Nice try, but you can still disagree with the artist. But if I said "your statement is clearly defending murderers", you could say that my interpretation of your statement is wrong.
  - sophacles 4y ago
    Why do you get to dictate my response to an artist. Why do you get to dictate what I meant when I'm the artist? You get to interpret it and understand it as a defense of murderers. I find that to be an unreasonable interpretation, born of a mind that is desperately trying to force the world to conform to it, rather than existing in the world as it comes. But that's my response, not a dictation what you meant when you said it. Maybe you meant something else, maybe you found that it reminded you of a murderer you met once at a bar, or maybe it reminds you of stuff you said prior to committing murder, or maybe you're just being silly. Maybe you just think that way. I dunno - I often find that what I intend to create and what I actually create differ quite often, even in a medium I'm fairly good at (code or food for example). It makes me doubt that I can dictate what it's really about to me - let alone what its supposed to be about to you. (honestly try it out sometime, see how many people can guess what you were thinking before you wrote that gnarly bit of code, or if they can say what you're thinking about it after it's done). There's a lot of brain science out there that suggests a lot of "why i did that" is post-hoc rationalization rather than a true "why i did that". I don't see why creation is exempt from that.

anigbrowl 4y ago

So as the artist, allow me to remove myself from the equation. Bullshit marketing stunt. Artists who wish to do this (and there are plenty of them) just put their work out in the world and don't sign it. There is a grain of truth to it, insofar as abstract or figurative paintings do not need to be 'about' something, and most art talk is just hype. But making abstract art in the first place is an expression of sensual glee over color, form, composition and so on. I like this guy's art, but he's using flattery to market it.

Zetice 4y ago
The way the human mind works makes it basically impossible to declare something like this, so when someone does anyway, it makes me suspicious. So yeah, I guess I feel suspicion when looking at this art, like the artist concocted a world that lets us control our own brains as a… idk, way of introducing control where there is none? I guess that’s the point, but was it one worth making?
michaelteter 4y ago
There are other forms of art which humans make apparently without conscious thought. Some written words, poetry, dance, and music can be made this way. Why not painted art?
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  I don't think 'conscious thought' and 'deliberation' are synonymous. You can create spontaneously while still being quite conscious of what you're doing and having feelings about it as you're doing it.

_benj 4y ago

I love this project and generally agree with the idea that art is up to the viewer. At the same time, I believe that artist have can often have a unique ability to see/perceive reality in a way that escapes the general population, and can convey those perceptions to the rest of us through art. I’ve been blown away by how an artist is able to portray a situation in a way that it’s never occurred to me and the enlightenment resulting from it is very valuable to me. So, I think that both are needed, art that gives freedom to the observer to makes sense of it, and also art that conveys such deep perceptions/insights that artists seems to have more often that the rest of us and thus enlightened us too!

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you, that's a great differentiation, too. I went for the former, but the latter is equally important, too, of course!

whywhywouldyou 4y ago

The fact that the artist had nothing in mind makes a lot of sense when looking at the paintings. They appear as meaningless noise, and the only thing it evokes in me is disinterest. Knowing that the mind of the artist was intentionally devoid of emotional or rational content during their creation validates that response. In other words, this is a human doing their best impression of procedurally generated art with a computer. Maybe nice to look at, but ultimately meaningless.

gamacodre 4y ago
Looking a the other comments, it seems like there's some meta-commentary on the social and commercial positioning of art going on here. Along the lines of "taking no position is really bold," which is supposed to make this an interesting performative exercise... maybe? To me it's kind of interesting that this person's stream of consciousness results in such visually coherent stuff, but that's about it. One might need to be more plugged in to modern art culture to get anything "moving" out of the meta.
hipshaker 4y ago
Well you took the time to comment on your feelings towards his art, so there’s that. I would argue you are proving his point. It is not meaningless enough that you just scrolled past it without mention.
- hemmert 4y ago
  That wasn't my intention (as the artist), and perhaps we're lacking a good discussion of what art is. But I remember Scott McCloud defining it as 'everything that doesn't serve the preservance of the species'. So making people reflect about what they think what art is for them (and if it's by finding out that this isn't), would be.
savanaly 4y ago
I find great beauty in and spend a lot of time looking at the cliffsides underneath waterfalls, whenever I happen to pass by them on a hike. The somewhat random trickling down of water creates eddies of various sizes and shapes and I greatly enjoy just looking them over with my eyes. I'm sure you can relate, if not with cliffsides underneath waterfalls then with something that exists in nature that was created without artistic intent. Perhaps not in the natural world but in the world of the mind like with certain pleasing patterns in Math? In any case that is the level on which I feel I can enjoy these paintings and they do not merely create disinterest. I don't think the artistic intent being missing = disinterest.

abeppu 4y ago

> I believe that no interpretation of an artwork can be right or wrong. Is this true only of _this_ art? As general statement, it seems suspicious to me. If I say "Guernica celebrates nationalistic violence", isn't that wrong?

jmmcd 4y ago
Any comment intended to be true of all art is inevitably wrong. I believe the above comment is the only comment which is an exception to the above rule.

uneekname 4y ago

Oh man these comments are hilarious. It sounds like the artist's intent (or, claimed lack thereof) has done exactly what it set out to do! Saying that you had no artistic intent is art in of itself, my dudes. These paintings are visually appealing to me. I doubt I could afford any of them, but if I could you'd have a customer!

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you for summarizing! It's also really interesting (I'm the artist) to see that almost ALL comments refer to the stamp on the backsides of the paintings, not to the content of the pictures. :-)

GuB-42 4y ago

Does it validate AI-generated art? The computer doesn't have anything in mind, it is just random noise turned into something aesthetically pleasing. In fact, coupled with a random prompt, it is even more "nothing in mind". Here the artist has "nothing in mind" in mind, diffusion models have literally nothing in mind, in fact they don't even have a mind to put something in.

hemmert 4y ago
That's an interesting point that I didn't have in mind, but it's a very good question. From the discussion here I have the feeling that the mere statement 'I didn't have anything in mind while painting this' makes up for a lot of the discussion (and meaning?) here.

babayaga4 4y ago

[flagged]

hemmert 4y ago
No offense taken!

Nadya 4y ago

Seems better presented and quite adjacent to my own photography project: https://everythingcanbe.art/gallery https://everythingcanbe.art/gallery although the intent is clearly different as the statement made by me is a very pro-AI stance towards what "art" is. The angle I was coming from was not only the aesthetics/purpose behind the art but more so about the "effort" put into it by removing any effort from the creation. "Effort" being thinking about good composition or finding an interesting subject matter or waiting for the perfect time of day for the lighting to be just right. Instead I show up, press a button, and because I call it art it is even if I agree it isn't very good art (and that's also kind of the point - I would argue the act of curation is in and of itself an art form...) Also - you should make thumbnails of the art and link out to the larger pictures. Currently you're loading 2000~ px width images as 300~ px thumbnails and it is very slow to load due to that at the gallery near the bottom. This being HN I'm actually shocked nobody has mentioned the completely bloated and unnecessary file size of the images.

hemmert 4y ago
That's very nice, from the office curtain to the damaged poster board! :-) 'Effort' is an interesting factor – I won't neglect that I'm putting effort into the paintings. How do you decide when to press the camera's shutter? (This is a bit like a Libet experiment, in case you don't know it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Libet_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Libe...) Thanks also for the technical remark regarding the image sizes, I'll do that, good point. (Presentation-wise, my website is based on a template called 'ZeroOne' (https://www.thezero.club/demo/one/ https://www.thezero.club/demo/one/) for the Kirby CMS (https://getkirby.com/ https://getkirby.com/). Really nice to work with, especially if you want to create something gallery-like!)

alecnotthompson 4y ago

Nothing doesn't exist, friend. Beautiful paintings nonetheless.

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you, for the appreciation and your comment. I was getting the feeling that the stamp on the backside gets more attention than the pictures themselves.

contingencies 4y ago

When an artist has no personal vision, what can he communicate on to the canvas? - Clifford Irving, 'F for Fake' (1973)

gnicholas 4y ago

How is this a Show HN? > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead. This cannot be tried out, except in the way that any website can be "tried out".

hemmert 4y ago
Oh, I wasn't aware of that! I thought that Show HN was for anything that I had made. I also wanted to invite people to discuss this with me (as the artist), but I could have disclosed that in the first comment, too, of course.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  It's a bit narrower than that, otherwise folks could post Show HNs for links to their photo galleries, blogs, etc. You can post these things, but they're supposed to be posted as regular links, not with the enticing "Show HN" prepended. The Show HN rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
superb-owl 4y ago
Honestly I disagree. I can engage with the art here same as I can with a clickable app. I think it fits with the spirit of Show HN

archarios 4y ago

What if my feelings looking at these is also nothing?

pacifika 4y ago

It is AI generated or it could be, if it has no meaning.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

Modern art reminds me of cigar making. An artist creating a new work of art has an idea of what he wants to do based on the materials available to him. A cigar blender creating a new cigar has an idea of what he wants to do based on the raw materials available to him. An artist will poke and prod at their creation, adding details until they are happy with their work, and then take a step back to determine if anything new needs to be added because making art is a very subjective process. A cigar blender will combine tobacco he thinks will make a good cigar and also several other iterations using different blends because creating a cigar blend from scratch is a very subjective process. An artist will put his work into a gallery, where it will be judged by critics who will attempt to assign meaning to the work even if no meaning actually exists. A cigar blender will send his completed blend to reviewers where it will be judged by critics who will attempt to assign flavors to the cigar even if they're utterly ridiculous. I think the main difference between the two is that the artist usually doesn't have to get his art to perform well. A cigar blender can't just make a cigar that tastes great, he also has to pay attention to how well the cigar burns. I used to get plenty of pre-release samples to get my thoughts from manufacturers I knew, and some of the best domestic stogies I've ever tasted burned like trash and had to be disregarded when choosing the final blend.

Georgelemental 4y ago

If the artist doesn't matter—then if AI can produce the same output, it makes no difference to replace human artists with AI, right? https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1610674140310130689 https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1610674140310130689

amelius 4y ago
AI can only interpolate. Humans can extrapolate.
- hemmert 4y ago
  Wow, that's something I hadn't thought about yet. I'm also not sure if that's true, but it'd be a satisfying, calming thought if it were. Can you perhaps elaborate?
- gmfawcett 4y ago
  Truthy, but wrong. Of course AI's can extrapolate.

bartislartfast 4y ago

Side note - I love the scrolling effect on the grid!

hemmert 4y ago
Thank you, all credit goes to Branko Matic's fantastic Kirby theme 'ZeroOne" :-) https://www.thezero.club/demo/one/ https://www.thezero.club/demo/one/

inasmuch 4y ago

I feel as though I'm fighting an unwinnable battle by asking for more, not less intention in art. Most artists at least produce a statement to accompany their work, but I rarely find them substantive, despite their often turgid language. What I find particularly distasteful about this is the presentation of "art" as interior design products. This seems to be a trend among independent creators looking to make a living outside of the traditional gallery/fair/buyer system. I of course understand why they're doing it, but I'm using those disparaging quotation marks because that commercial contextualization commercializes the work itself. And at that point, it escapes my own nebulous boundaries for art and becomes something else. What exactly, I don't know. I'm not sure "design" qualifies here, even though we're being asked to appraise the work as we might a chair or credenza, because I'm not sure I believe "this wall feels empty" is a problem to be solved, in the design sense. So what is it then? Stuff? Just more stuff for people to buy and feel good about owning? Okay. (And no, I don't think this counts as me having a reaction to the art. I'm reacting to the creator, the marketing, and—sorry—the bullshit.)

hemmert 4y ago
I never liked artist's statements, either. Perhaps that was also what motivated me to do the stamp thing. I want to paint in peace :-)
Nevermark 4y ago
Well if the color, pattern and texture of fabric on furniture counts as design, certainly rectangles or other shapes of color, pattern, or texture, on a wall count as design. There is purpose behind design. It allows us to build up unique associations with a place, its people, its purpose. It keeps us from being bored. It gives us a break from other places. It sets a mood conducive to whatever a place is for. It expresses something about ourselves to others. Decorating our spaces and walls seems to address a deep need in our species. A wall with nothing on it creates tension. It isn't neutral. Nowhere in nature are there environments comparable to huge vertical flat surfaces of white, brick, or wood or other uniform material.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hahamrfunnyguy 4y ago

I wanted to download a painting app, but I was too cheap to pay the $19.99 demanded by American Airlines for the in-flight WiFi. As fortune would have it, Android comes equipped with a photo editing tool designed for quickly marking up a photo. I went to work and completed a rather pathetic landscape painting using palate of six colors and the pencil tool. As I tried in vain to improve the awful painting, I discovered highlighter tool could be used to blend and create an infinite array of colors! Inspired by uncomfortable seating and the music Drexcia, Anthony Rother and the Egypitan lover ... I present to you the convergence of modern budget airline travel, electro music and crappy Android phones. This amazing in-air gallery can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/3aql6rn https://imgur.com/a/3aql6rn For a limited time, available to only Hacker News readers you can purchase the original digital copy of the gallery for only $199.99. The lucky purchaser will receive the entire digital collection with a certificate of authenticity (basically, an email saying "Thanks, bud!"). Act now, because if there are no buyers the collection will be listed in Sky Mall for the full retail price of $1999.00

jcynix 4y ago
You could always convert them to NFTs ...

hemmert 4y ago

Interestingly, if I had put only the paintings online, without the stamp on the back and the statement, a line of criticism could have been 'This is meaningless art.' Now that I'm claiming it to be meaningless art, we're finding ourselves in a discussion that this can't be.

Mouthfeel 4y ago

[dead]

chillbill 4y ago

In the words of one of my favorite authors: “Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts”