4 ms·

I have a MA in art and am currently on a commision that selects a painting professor for one of the prolific central european art schools. I have never heard of

by atoav 3y ago

I have a MA in art and am currently on a commision that selects a painting professor for one of the prolific central european art schools. I have never heard of the guy. There is a lot of art that is basically just crafts. Technically skilled and beautiful to many people who have been to a museum once or twice (and there are many of those!) — people are baffled by the fact that someone can paint realistically — ignoring a rich art history that should make clear that doing just that is the bare minimum and clearly not the point of good art. But in the end all those works are more or less uninteresting beyond that. They lack the stuff that makes Mona Lisa's smile famous, the stuff that Hopper has in his pictures, the crows over the fields in Van Goghs paintings, Yves Kleins blue etc. If your art lacks the art while delivering technical skill it will still remain ultimately hollow. And if your ownly impact your art makes on the world is fighting your critics you should wonder why you are doing it.

hoffs 3y ago
It's kinda clickbait, but at the start of an article it's laid out as this: > He is, by some measures, the most famous artist in the world, with many millions of social media followers
- atoav 3y ago
  Yeah this is what I mean. And I am certainly not a snob that thinks only what the upper class or academics see as art is actual art. In fact bad taste in art is equally common in the upper class. Just have a look at how Silvio Berlusconi's heirs are struggling to sell the stuff he considered art for example. Being known doesn't mean you are exemplary of what you are doing. If you have a famous youtube tutorial channel for javascript, you might be one of the most widely known javascript programmers — but that doesn't automatically mean you are the "best" (or even a half-way decent) programmer. It still might mean that you are a stellar teacher and an exceptional communicator, which worth a lot, but if you confuse yourself for something that you are not this is where the problems start. To the general public that guy might be what they think a good Javascript-Dev looks like, but ultimatly he isn't. I had to think of Bob Ross: A legendary communicator, a good ambassador for the arts and a good human being, but I wouldn't buy his art if I found it at a thrift store. But Bob Ross knew that his skill was being a communicator for the arts and didn't confuse himself with the painters who managed to get their works into the big art instutions.
nikanj 3y ago
Not sure if bare minimum is the right expression, when so many of the famous pieces could be easily replicated by my 5-yo niece - who could never reach said ”minimum”
- camoufleur 3y ago
  That's like saying you can "replicate" Shakespeare because you can type. Copying something that's already been done is surely the bare minimum here.
- atoav 3y ago
  I am someone who does a lot of things many people feel are hard. I solder SMD on component level, I play fretless instruments, I program. Yet the hard part is never what you can just imitate. Soldering SMD is something I can teach a non-electronic person in a few hours, for example. The hard part is knowing what to solder and when. Similarily learning to do the pure technical act of drawing or painting photorealistically can be learned. To paint motifs that are worth doing so and result in a "good picture" are something different entirely. Maybe you have to take my word for it, as someone who in his life went through hundreds of art school applications, but there will be a difference between some abstract thing a person with true skill and talent did, and something your five year old neice did (nothing against her, maybe she has talent, who knows). Something being (seemingly, to the layperson) easy to copy does not mean that it is. Very often there will be much more behind the work than it seems on first glance. A lot of the very abstract stuff you will find in the museums for example was done in a time where nearly nobody dared to do this. So if your neice wanted to copy that, she needed to go back in time, grow up there and do it back when nobody did it. So yeah she could maybe do it. But she didn't. When comparing abstract and concrete painting there is a lot to be discussed, but trust me when I say that people in the art scene probably look at art just in a different way that most people. Many people have misconceptions about art a la "what does the artist want to tell us" and then there is just a bunch of splashes on the canvas. The artist can sometimes be a trickster and the art understood from the context in which it was created. Sometimes art also just is and in a world where everything has to be about money, efficiency, entertainment, etc it can serve as a room of reflection with something that is beyond simple answers. I am not going to give a grand defense of abstract art here, I am not a painter and if I were it would probably not be purely abstract. Now historically painters went into the abstraction when photography came around, which could create the photorealistic image very easily. Nowadays photorealistic painters often just take a photograph and (like your neice), copy it to the pixel. That is of course a lot of work, and maybe there is even a bit of art or rebellion in that amount of work itself, but I find it more interesting when people pull out things from seemingly nowhere in their very own and unique ways. But I am a musician and I work a lot with harsh noises many people hate to hear. I don't think there is any need for me to even attempt to defend what I like to do and so shouldn't painters.
sideshowb 3y ago
Isn't the craft part harder than the art part though? Far too much craftless art out there imo.
- atoav 3y ago
  A comparison for the tech crowd would be the difference between being able to learn and write complex syntax and writing a clear, concise, bug-free software. To non-software people the syntax is what seems impossibly hard and in their view writing a software that works, reliably is what should be easy. The truth is just the opposite. So to non-software people, someone writing Hello World in brainfuck would seem crazier than someone writing a good piece of software that solves a hard problem. So judging the craft can be hard if you are not doing the craft yourself. A painter like Picasso could draw completely realistic at age 19 and spent the following decades doing more abstract things. Not because the realistic stuff was hard and he was lazy, but quite the other way around. Writing a complicated program with obscure syntax and many million lines is possible, but it takes a true master to do the same thing in a very readable, maintainable way, while making it shorter. Art can, at times, be very similar.
  - sideshowb 3y ago
    I don't think the coding analogy holds at all. To me, writing good working maintainable software of non trivial complexity is craft, and to call it that is high praise indeed. I'm not entirely sure what art is, but I think it tends to happen when someone wants to create for the sake of creating, rather than maximising commercial gain, status, or whatever. It's orthogonal to craft. I enjoyed the Picasso museum in Barcelona and it was indeed eye opening to see his conventional but excellent architectural drawings ;-)
    - atoav 3y ago
      Picasso for example was a master because he understood that beyond the technical is where the real callenge lies. Now the question would be whether that beyond is part of the craft or not. Ultimately this isn't that important, my point was rather about technicality. Technicality alone doesn't make a great master, just like syntax knowledge alone doesn't make you a great software engineer. But in coding the goal is typically to write good software and the criteria for good software are pretty clear — compared to what makes good art at least. Now as an artist you can totally suck at many things but be good at one specific thing that you did in a very specific and novel way and this alone can make the difference. One could say with our subway painter that the special thing about him are not the paintings but how he medializes their creation. But just painting realistically is something many people can do, and many also can do better.
Tade0 3y ago
I think his art is actually not the paintings, but the performance around creating this world where such spontaneous interactions repeatedly happen. It's all fake, but people are captivated by the story and suspend their disbelief. Plenty of creators like him and I think his career will be a short one, but for now he gets to be the world's most famous bullshit storyteller. It's accidentally a profound statement on how visual arts are seen by the general public.
- atoav 3y ago
  I think you are 100% on point.
- dahdum 3y ago
  Yes, his celebrity and fame stem from the performance, not the art. He could still have a long and successful celebrity career, periodically making waves with more commercialized and staged performances. Like Banksy, but with a good face and real backstory.
tgv 3y ago
> Yves Kleins blue I do question calling those art. Monochromes were absolutely not new when Klein does a blue one. That's already quite mediocre. But then he makes more of the same painting. How is that art?
- lores 3y ago
  My considered opinion is "if it's not purely functional, it's art". Every other definition ends up self-contradictory. Screwdriver handles are art - 1,000 models of screwdrivers, all doing their job just fine, yet all with different handles. That's the designer putting forward his ideas of what evokes comfort, power, notability, progress, and whatever else, and in turn two different screwdrivers will generate different feelings in their owners. That's art; it may not be art that appeals to millions, or endures centuries, but very little does.
  - tgv 3y ago
    I know the definition (natural nor functional), but the post I'm replying to makes quite a distinction. It calls the work (there's another term for you) from the article not art. But Klein's Blue is one of the things that stands out to me as falling in the category "mediocre idea, mediocre execution." The idea was a cliche, the artist failed in conveying it in the execution, and the execution of the work itself was as good as the wall I painted last year. Why isn't my wall art?
    - gizajob 3y ago
      Because it's a wall, and you're not an artist.
      - tgv 3y ago
        There are walls that are considered art, which only leaves the circular explanation: only artists can make art.
        atoav 3y ago
lores 3y ago
But uninteresting to an art specialist like you does not make it uninteresting to his many, many fans. Of course what he does is art, what meaningful line can you put between art and craft? I'd even argue that he has far more impact on the world by bringing a little aesthetic happiness to millions than even a Turner-prize winning artist like Tai Shani, who's meaningful only to a few.
- atoav 3y ago
  I am not an art specialist. I studied art, but my field was film, not painting. My mother is a painter so maybe that counts who knows. I did not say anything about his role in society and whether it is okay to like him or not. It is. It was also great for Bob Ross for example to do what he did in communicating art: His paintings are not stellar examples of landscape painting, but he managed to inspire many people to go for the journey and that is worth a lot. Subjectively, to me as someone who has a closer background to arts than most I find it lacks something — and that something might make all the difference between lasting love or forgetting him in a few years time. Other people might have differing opinions. Think of any field you know something of. E.g. if you are in tech there might be some celebrity non-tech people see as a tech genius. But you know they are mediocre at best. That doesn't takw away from their ability to reach people, but it is not the same as being stellar in their field.
underwater 3y ago
That was the point the author was making. His popularity has come completely from outside the establishment.
underwater 3y ago
Establishment art is just technical proficiency mixed with good marketing. In fact, you can do what artists like Jeff Koons do and just skip the skip the technical proficiency step. I don't see how, at its core, it is any different from what this TikToker is doing.

by atoav 3y ago

hoffs 3y ago

It's kinda clickbait, but at the start of an article it's laid out as this: > He is, by some measures, the most famous artist in the world, with many millions of social media followers

atoav 3y ago
Yeah this is what I mean. And I am certainly not a snob that thinks only what the upper class or academics see as art is actual art. In fact bad taste in art is equally common in the upper class. Just have a look at how Silvio Berlusconi's heirs are struggling to sell the stuff he considered art for example. Being known doesn't mean you are exemplary of what you are doing. If you have a famous youtube tutorial channel for javascript, you might be one of the most widely known javascript programmers — but that doesn't automatically mean you are the "best" (or even a half-way decent) programmer. It still might mean that you are a stellar teacher and an exceptional communicator, which worth a lot, but if you confuse yourself for something that you are not this is where the problems start. To the general public that guy might be what they think a good Javascript-Dev looks like, but ultimatly he isn't. I had to think of Bob Ross: A legendary communicator, a good ambassador for the arts and a good human being, but I wouldn't buy his art if I found it at a thrift store. But Bob Ross knew that his skill was being a communicator for the arts and didn't confuse himself with the painters who managed to get their works into the big art instutions.

nikanj 3y ago

Not sure if bare minimum is the right expression, when so many of the famous pieces could be easily replicated by my 5-yo niece - who could never reach said ”minimum”

camoufleur 3y ago
That's like saying you can "replicate" Shakespeare because you can type. Copying something that's already been done is surely the bare minimum here.
atoav 3y ago
I am someone who does a lot of things many people feel are hard. I solder SMD on component level, I play fretless instruments, I program. Yet the hard part is never what you can just imitate. Soldering SMD is something I can teach a non-electronic person in a few hours, for example. The hard part is knowing what to solder and when. Similarily learning to do the pure technical act of drawing or painting photorealistically can be learned. To paint motifs that are worth doing so and result in a "good picture" are something different entirely. Maybe you have to take my word for it, as someone who in his life went through hundreds of art school applications, but there will be a difference between some abstract thing a person with true skill and talent did, and something your five year old neice did (nothing against her, maybe she has talent, who knows). Something being (seemingly, to the layperson) easy to copy does not mean that it is. Very often there will be much more behind the work than it seems on first glance. A lot of the very abstract stuff you will find in the museums for example was done in a time where nearly nobody dared to do this. So if your neice wanted to copy that, she needed to go back in time, grow up there and do it back when nobody did it. So yeah she could maybe do it. But she didn't. When comparing abstract and concrete painting there is a lot to be discussed, but trust me when I say that people in the art scene probably look at art just in a different way that most people. Many people have misconceptions about art a la "what does the artist want to tell us" and then there is just a bunch of splashes on the canvas. The artist can sometimes be a trickster and the art understood from the context in which it was created. Sometimes art also just is and in a world where everything has to be about money, efficiency, entertainment, etc it can serve as a room of reflection with something that is beyond simple answers. I am not going to give a grand defense of abstract art here, I am not a painter and if I were it would probably not be purely abstract. Now historically painters went into the abstraction when photography came around, which could create the photorealistic image very easily. Nowadays photorealistic painters often just take a photograph and (like your neice), copy it to the pixel. That is of course a lot of work, and maybe there is even a bit of art or rebellion in that amount of work itself, but I find it more interesting when people pull out things from seemingly nowhere in their very own and unique ways. But I am a musician and I work a lot with harsh noises many people hate to hear. I don't think there is any need for me to even attempt to defend what I like to do and so shouldn't painters.

sideshowb 3y ago

Isn't the craft part harder than the art part though? Far too much craftless art out there imo.

atoav 3y ago
A comparison for the tech crowd would be the difference between being able to learn and write complex syntax and writing a clear, concise, bug-free software. To non-software people the syntax is what seems impossibly hard and in their view writing a software that works, reliably is what should be easy. The truth is just the opposite. So to non-software people, someone writing Hello World in brainfuck would seem crazier than someone writing a good piece of software that solves a hard problem. So judging the craft can be hard if you are not doing the craft yourself. A painter like Picasso could draw completely realistic at age 19 and spent the following decades doing more abstract things. Not because the realistic stuff was hard and he was lazy, but quite the other way around. Writing a complicated program with obscure syntax and many million lines is possible, but it takes a true master to do the same thing in a very readable, maintainable way, while making it shorter. Art can, at times, be very similar.
- sideshowb 3y ago
  I don't think the coding analogy holds at all. To me, writing good working maintainable software of non trivial complexity is craft, and to call it that is high praise indeed. I'm not entirely sure what art is, but I think it tends to happen when someone wants to create for the sake of creating, rather than maximising commercial gain, status, or whatever. It's orthogonal to craft. I enjoyed the Picasso museum in Barcelona and it was indeed eye opening to see his conventional but excellent architectural drawings ;-)
  - atoav 3y ago
    Picasso for example was a master because he understood that beyond the technical is where the real callenge lies. Now the question would be whether that beyond is part of the craft or not. Ultimately this isn't that important, my point was rather about technicality. Technicality alone doesn't make a great master, just like syntax knowledge alone doesn't make you a great software engineer. But in coding the goal is typically to write good software and the criteria for good software are pretty clear — compared to what makes good art at least. Now as an artist you can totally suck at many things but be good at one specific thing that you did in a very specific and novel way and this alone can make the difference. One could say with our subway painter that the special thing about him are not the paintings but how he medializes their creation. But just painting realistically is something many people can do, and many also can do better.

Tade0 3y ago

I think his art is actually not the paintings, but the performance around creating this world where such spontaneous interactions repeatedly happen. It's all fake, but people are captivated by the story and suspend their disbelief. Plenty of creators like him and I think his career will be a short one, but for now he gets to be the world's most famous bullshit storyteller. It's accidentally a profound statement on how visual arts are seen by the general public.

atoav 3y ago
I think you are 100% on point.
dahdum 3y ago
Yes, his celebrity and fame stem from the performance, not the art. He could still have a long and successful celebrity career, periodically making waves with more commercialized and staged performances. Like Banksy, but with a good face and real backstory.

tgv 3y ago

> Yves Kleins blue I do question calling those art. Monochromes were absolutely not new when Klein does a blue one. That's already quite mediocre. But then he makes more of the same painting. How is that art?

lores 3y ago
My considered opinion is "if it's not purely functional, it's art". Every other definition ends up self-contradictory. Screwdriver handles are art - 1,000 models of screwdrivers, all doing their job just fine, yet all with different handles. That's the designer putting forward his ideas of what evokes comfort, power, notability, progress, and whatever else, and in turn two different screwdrivers will generate different feelings in their owners. That's art; it may not be art that appeals to millions, or endures centuries, but very little does.
- tgv 3y ago
  I know the definition (natural nor functional), but the post I'm replying to makes quite a distinction. It calls the work (there's another term for you) from the article not art. But Klein's Blue is one of the things that stands out to me as falling in the category "mediocre idea, mediocre execution." The idea was a cliche, the artist failed in conveying it in the execution, and the execution of the work itself was as good as the wall I painted last year. Why isn't my wall art?
  - gizajob 3y ago
    Because it's a wall, and you're not an artist.
    - tgv 3y ago
      There are walls that are considered art, which only leaves the circular explanation: only artists can make art.
      - atoav 3y ago

lores 3y ago

But uninteresting to an art specialist like you does not make it uninteresting to his many, many fans. Of course what he does is art, what meaningful line can you put between art and craft? I'd even argue that he has far more impact on the world by bringing a little aesthetic happiness to millions than even a Turner-prize winning artist like Tai Shani, who's meaningful only to a few.

atoav 3y ago
I am not an art specialist. I studied art, but my field was film, not painting. My mother is a painter so maybe that counts who knows. I did not say anything about his role in society and whether it is okay to like him or not. It is. It was also great for Bob Ross for example to do what he did in communicating art: His paintings are not stellar examples of landscape painting, but he managed to inspire many people to go for the journey and that is worth a lot. Subjectively, to me as someone who has a closer background to arts than most I find it lacks something — and that something might make all the difference between lasting love or forgetting him in a few years time. Other people might have differing opinions. Think of any field you know something of. E.g. if you are in tech there might be some celebrity non-tech people see as a tech genius. But you know they are mediocre at best. That doesn't takw away from their ability to reach people, but it is not the same as being stellar in their field.

underwater 3y ago

That was the point the author was making. His popularity has come completely from outside the establishment.

underwater 3y ago

Establishment art is just technical proficiency mixed with good marketing. In fact, you can do what artists like Jeff Koons do and just skip the skip the technical proficiency step. I don't see how, at its core, it is any different from what this TikToker is doing.