6 ms·

Except his art doesn't look unoriginal. It looks, well, lacking in artistic merit.

romwell 2y ago
What is artistic merit? You look at something, and it makes you feel a certain way, think a certain way, say to yourself - wow, I've never seen anything like this before - isn't this a big part of artistic merit? That's the part that vanishes once the art influences the world enough that it becomes commonplace. You can say the same about the work of Russian Constructivists[1] and Suprematists. What's artistic about fonts that look like Helvetica? What's artistic a literal Black Square?[2] Or, you can ask, what's artistic about this building[3] - it looks just about like any other modern building, the standard box-with-glass look with a cylindrical wall thrown in to break up the shape. I'll leave the answers to the reader to ponder on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuev_Workers%27_Club#/media/File:Zuev_Workers'_Club_in_MSK.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuev_Workers%27_Club#/media/Fi...
- fluoridation 2y ago
  >You look at something, and it makes you feel a certain way, think a certain way, say to yourself - wow, I've never seen anything like this before - isn't this a big part of artistic merit? No. That's how much you like something. A mountain can provoke emotions in you, and it has zero artistic merit. >What is artistic merit? Simply put (or at least this is how I use the term), it's the measure of how difficult it is to recreate an artistic work, or something very similar to it, especially without having seen it before. For example, a pattern of 3x3 tiles made by choosing one of two possible colors for each one has very little artistic merit, because the medium imposes so many restrictions that it's inevitable that someone else will recreate it by accident. Likewise if you take a digitized image and you postprocess it with wacky colors again and again (or as in TFA you play with a bucket fill) until what it shows is barely recognizable, it will almost invariably tend towards a certain aesthetic simply by the nature of how the filters work. That's not you putting your personal touch into your work, that's the program doing what it does. If someone else started from the same digitized images and used the same software, would they be able to make something similar to what you made just by accident? Then what you made has little artistic merit.
  - riddley 2y ago
    Difficult for whom? Jazz musicians can easily play most Rock songs. Does that mean that they (the songs) lack artistic merit? There's a million examples like this.
    - fluoridation 2y ago
      You're talking about execution, while I'm talking about creation (composition). It is easier to, say, copy Guernica than to paint it having never seen it before. Easier in the sense that way, way more people can do the former than the latter.
      - romwell 2y ago
        You're moving the goalposts from difficulty to recreate (your choice of words), i.e. copy, to difficulty of creating something without having seen it before (i.e., telepathy). By this definition, this comment of mine is peak artistic merit. Nobody could've created it without seeing it here — except me, just now!
        fluoridation 2y ago
        >You're moving the goalposts No, I'm not. Re-read what I wrote: >how difficult it is to recreate an artistic work, or something very similar to it, especially without having seen it before You don't need to be telepathic to recreate something someone else has made if the creative space for a given medium contains a small number of "interesting" solutions. One time when I was a teenager playing around in QuickBASIC I independently rediscovered H trees. Did I read the mind of the person who first discovered them, or is it that the space of symmetric binary trees where each branch is a constant ratio of its ancestor small enough that I was bound to find them? If you think nobody is trying to pass off something so abstract (I would say, with so few bits) as art, consider this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_(artist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_(artist) >By this definition, this comment of mine is peak artistic merit. Nobody could've created it without seeing it here — except me, just now! Well, I would say so. I don't know how to argue that it's not. Do you?
- breadwinner 2y ago
  > I've never seen anything like this before That sounds more like innovation than art. There's no art in the black square or in the soup can. No matter what your artistic tastes, you will never stop to admire a black square, and that's how you know it is not art. The same for the soup can. If you won't stop to admire it then it is not art. The black square and the soup can became "art" only because of hype and marketing. Art dealers hype up and promote non-art as art in order to make money.
  - romwell 2y ago
    >There's no art in the black square or in the soup can That's a new hot take... For 1915. My friend, do yourself a favor and take an art history class. You'll both get to more art and understand it better in the process of doing so.
    - breadwinner 2y ago
      Let's translate the black square to the world of music: Press the C key on your piano and hold it down for a full minute then release. This is the "music" released by someone who later became renowned for this music. The music experts call it an amazing work of art. You disagree, and you're told to take a music history class if you want to understand why that one-note music is an amazing work of art. Ridiculous, isn't it? To me your black square is a 1-minute C note, and your soup can is "Mary had a little lamb".
      - roughly 2y ago
        I’m guessing you’ve got opinions about 4’33”, too.
        fluoridation 2y ago
        I sure hope you're not going to argue that it has the same artistic merit as literally any song of the same duration with at least one note.
breadwinner 2y ago
Agree... I think it is art dealers that turn things that most people wouldn't consider to be art into high-priced art. Art dealers can influence the perception of what is considered valuable or important in the art world. Through marketing, exhibitions, and networking, they can elevate the status of certain artworks, thereby increasing their market value.
roughly 2y ago
An awful lot of art, and especially modern art, has its meaning and merit in the context of when and why it was created - there's a reason people talk about art as a conversation, because very often what you're seeing in a piece or a movement is a response to other pieces or other movements, or are expressed specifically with constraints ("what can we show with just one color? what can we show without form? how can we use these new materials expressively?"). A great many people seem to confuse artistic merit with technical difficulty and specifically with realism or complexity, at which point we peaked at Vermeer and it's all been downhill from there.
- fluoridation 2y ago
  Personally, I'm not interested in that conversation, any more than I'm interested in suddenly lurking in a random subreddit. It's a community I'm not a part of and which doesn't interest me. If you took a dump on a canvas and hung it on a gallery to make fun of a guy who said no one would ever do that, well I'm glad you had fun and all, but it's still shit on a wall. I won't deny that in some cases works can be interested because of their context, but generally speaking, to me, a piece has to stand on its own regardless of who made it or when or how. Mozart's scat letters don't become good by virtue of having been written by him (although they do become funnier).
  - roughly 2y ago
    I'm not asking you to care, I'm asking you to recognize you don't understand what you're looking at. You can say "I don't find the work compelling", but to say it lacks artistic merit is just silly.
    - fluoridation 2y ago
      But it's not silly, though. You're asking me to either judge the work on the same grounds as you do, or to abstain from opining if I can't, but I have no reason to do that. I can confidently say "You painted a can of soup on a white background. You didn't try. Your work has little artistic merit." I don't see any reason why I shouldn't say that.

What is artistic merit? You look at something, and it makes you feel a certain way, think a certain way, say to yourself - wow, I've never seen anything like this before - isn't this a big part of artistic merit? That's the part that vanishes once the art influences the world enough that it becomes commonplace. You can say the same about the work of Russian Constructivists[1] and Suprematists. What's artistic about fonts that look like Helvetica? What's artistic a literal Black Square?[2] Or, you can ask, what's artistic about this building[3] - it looks just about like any other modern building, the standard box-with-glass look with a cylindrical wall thrown in to break up the shape. I'll leave the answers to the reader to ponder on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuev_Workers%27_Club#/media/File:Zuev_Workers'_Club_in_MSK.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuev_Workers%27_Club#/media/Fi...

fluoridation 2y ago
>You look at something, and it makes you feel a certain way, think a certain way, say to yourself - wow, I've never seen anything like this before - isn't this a big part of artistic merit? No. That's how much you like something. A mountain can provoke emotions in you, and it has zero artistic merit. >What is artistic merit? Simply put (or at least this is how I use the term), it's the measure of how difficult it is to recreate an artistic work, or something very similar to it, especially without having seen it before. For example, a pattern of 3x3 tiles made by choosing one of two possible colors for each one has very little artistic merit, because the medium imposes so many restrictions that it's inevitable that someone else will recreate it by accident. Likewise if you take a digitized image and you postprocess it with wacky colors again and again (or as in TFA you play with a bucket fill) until what it shows is barely recognizable, it will almost invariably tend towards a certain aesthetic simply by the nature of how the filters work. That's not you putting your personal touch into your work, that's the program doing what it does. If someone else started from the same digitized images and used the same software, would they be able to make something similar to what you made just by accident? Then what you made has little artistic merit.
- riddley 2y ago
  Difficult for whom? Jazz musicians can easily play most Rock songs. Does that mean that they (the songs) lack artistic merit? There's a million examples like this.
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    You're talking about execution, while I'm talking about creation (composition). It is easier to, say, copy Guernica than to paint it having never seen it before. Easier in the sense that way, way more people can do the former than the latter.
    - romwell 2y ago
      You're moving the goalposts from difficulty to recreate (your choice of words), i.e. copy, to difficulty of creating something without having seen it before (i.e., telepathy). By this definition, this comment of mine is peak artistic merit. Nobody could've created it without seeing it here — except me, just now!
      - fluoridation 2y ago
        >You're moving the goalposts No, I'm not. Re-read what I wrote: >how difficult it is to recreate an artistic work, or something very similar to it, especially without having seen it before You don't need to be telepathic to recreate something someone else has made if the creative space for a given medium contains a small number of "interesting" solutions. One time when I was a teenager playing around in QuickBASIC I independently rediscovered H trees. Did I read the mind of the person who first discovered them, or is it that the space of symmetric binary trees where each branch is a constant ratio of its ancestor small enough that I was bound to find them? If you think nobody is trying to pass off something so abstract (I would say, with so few bits) as art, consider this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_(artist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_(artist) >By this definition, this comment of mine is peak artistic merit. Nobody could've created it without seeing it here — except me, just now! Well, I would say so. I don't know how to argue that it's not. Do you?
breadwinner 2y ago
> I've never seen anything like this before That sounds more like innovation than art. There's no art in the black square or in the soup can. No matter what your artistic tastes, you will never stop to admire a black square, and that's how you know it is not art. The same for the soup can. If you won't stop to admire it then it is not art. The black square and the soup can became "art" only because of hype and marketing. Art dealers hype up and promote non-art as art in order to make money.
- romwell 2y ago
  >There's no art in the black square or in the soup can That's a new hot take... For 1915. My friend, do yourself a favor and take an art history class. You'll both get to more art and understand it better in the process of doing so.
  - breadwinner 2y ago
    Let's translate the black square to the world of music: Press the C key on your piano and hold it down for a full minute then release. This is the "music" released by someone who later became renowned for this music. The music experts call it an amazing work of art. You disagree, and you're told to take a music history class if you want to understand why that one-note music is an amazing work of art. Ridiculous, isn't it? To me your black square is a 1-minute C note, and your soup can is "Mary had a little lamb".
    - roughly 2y ago
      I’m guessing you’ve got opinions about 4’33”, too.
      - fluoridation 2y ago
        I sure hope you're not going to argue that it has the same artistic merit as literally any song of the same duration with at least one note.

breadwinner 2y ago

Agree... I think it is art dealers that turn things that most people wouldn't consider to be art into high-priced art. Art dealers can influence the perception of what is considered valuable or important in the art world. Through marketing, exhibitions, and networking, they can elevate the status of certain artworks, thereby increasing their market value.

roughly 2y ago

An awful lot of art, and especially modern art, has its meaning and merit in the context of when and why it was created - there's a reason people talk about art as a conversation, because very often what you're seeing in a piece or a movement is a response to other pieces or other movements, or are expressed specifically with constraints ("what can we show with just one color? what can we show without form? how can we use these new materials expressively?"). A great many people seem to confuse artistic merit with technical difficulty and specifically with realism or complexity, at which point we peaked at Vermeer and it's all been downhill from there.

fluoridation 2y ago
Personally, I'm not interested in that conversation, any more than I'm interested in suddenly lurking in a random subreddit. It's a community I'm not a part of and which doesn't interest me. If you took a dump on a canvas and hung it on a gallery to make fun of a guy who said no one would ever do that, well I'm glad you had fun and all, but it's still shit on a wall. I won't deny that in some cases works can be interested because of their context, but generally speaking, to me, a piece has to stand on its own regardless of who made it or when or how. Mozart's scat letters don't become good by virtue of having been written by him (although they do become funnier).
- roughly 2y ago
  I'm not asking you to care, I'm asking you to recognize you don't understand what you're looking at. You can say "I don't find the work compelling", but to say it lacks artistic merit is just silly.
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    But it's not silly, though. You're asking me to either judge the work on the same grounds as you do, or to abstain from opining if I can't, but I have no reason to do that. I can confidently say "You painted a can of soup on a white background. You didn't try. Your work has little artistic merit." I don't see any reason why I shouldn't say that.