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>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

>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?
      - romwell 2y ago
        I would say that your definition of artistic merit disagrees with what people in the art world use (both artists and people who appreciate art), and is way more aligned with the criteria the patent office and the copyright law use. That's to say, your definition of artistic is very close to "patentable or copyrightable" (originality and novelty are required, emotional response isn't). So you're not talking about art at all. What's important to you is not what makes art art. The question to ask with art is a simple one: when people saw it, did it make them feel or think differently are the moment? And did it make them feel differently from the way other art pieces did? You can't understand art without understanding the audience, because art is made for the audience — even if the audience is the artist themselves. You can't examine art in itself, just like you can't examine a mechanical tool in itself, without asking why it was made, what it was made for, and whether it was good in doing that. You can't look at a saw and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms objects it's applied to (and what materials the saw was meant for). You need to tell a wood saw apart from a hack saw, and you need to know whether it actually could cut wood well to talk about the saw's merits. A wood saw isn't bad if it doesn't cut metal. And if it cut a million trees down, it is a good saw beyond doubt. You can't look at art and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms people it's shown to (and what audience the art was meant for). You need to tell early 20th century suprematist art apart from art made today, and you need to know whether it actually could make people in early 20th century feel and think differently in response to it to talk about the art's merits. An early 20th century suprematist artwork (like the Black Square) isn't bad if it doesn't cut it in today's artistic landscape. And if it changed the way a million artists thought and felt about art itself (which it did), it is good art beyond doubt. The recommendation others had of taking an art history class is a solid one. It really widened my perspective when I took it, and I think it'll do the same for you. PS: the same criteria apply to mathematics, which is art with a particular audience in mind. Anyone can prove the Pythagorean theorem, and many have rediscovered it. It would be asinine to say it has no mathematical merit, or that Pythagoras wasn't a great mathematician. Same goes for many other results. Calculus is common knowledge — and even in its time in was independently developed by both Leibniz and Newton. The fact that any freshman knows to compute an antiderivative to find the area under the curve doesn't take away from magnificence of Leibniz and Newton doing the same. But you'd have no idea what's so important about Calculus if that was all you knew about it - which, sadly, is how it's taught, and which is why people have no appreciation of neither mathematics, nor art. Only learning about Calculus in a wider historical and mathematical context would enable you to do that. You'd need to know how mathematics was before calculus, what compelled people to develop it, how it affected mathematicians, what kind of mathematics came into existence because of it, and ultimately, how it changed the world. You need to know about which problems the scientific society was facing at the time, what question was Calculus an answer to, what the objections were at the time (and there were many - it was seen as heresy! Infinitesimals were whacky!), and why it was accepted in spite of them. And once you do, you will see the simple integral sign differently than just a fancy way to write the letter S (which, by the way, it is: S for "sum", d for "difference", and the integral is, literally, a sum of differences multiplied by varying weights). Same goes for art.
codingdave 2y ago
You seem to be conflating craftmanship and artistic merit. They are not the same thing. While it is perfectly valid to care only about craftsmanship, and many people do feel that way, that isn't a universal opinion. It is also an opinion that makes it difficult to have a meaningful conversation about many modern artists for whom craftsmanship simply wasn't the point of their work.
- fluoridation 2y ago
  I don't agree that I'm conflating the two. Actually, some of the things I've seen that had the most artistic merit were awful things made by truly incompetent people who didn't care they were incompetent. They still had artistic merit because unless you're actually bad, it takes special effort to make something really terrible. I guess you could say that artistic merit increases when you move away from the sludge of mediocrity, while craftsmanship exists only in one direction. >It is also an opinion that makes it difficult to have a meaningful conversation about many modern artists for whom craftsmanship simply wasn't the point of their work. Do you mean that it makes it difficult, or do you mean that those artists don't come out looking good? Because I'm fine with the latter.
criddell 2y ago
You would really enjoy an art history course. A lot of them start with prehistoric work (like cave drawings) and progress through all the major periods and movements. I think you might change your definition to at least include some context of period and artist.
romwell 2y ago
>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 So, there's no art since photography was invented. Or, the perfect art is the white noise on the TV (exactly recreating noise is outright impossible). >the medium imposes so many restrictions that it's inevitable that someone else will recreate it by accident And yet, there has not been a Black Square before Kandinsky. Nor a painting featuring Campbell soup cans before Warhol (and if you see one, you'll immediately think Warhol). Weird, isn't it?
- fluoridation 2y ago
  >So, there's no art since photography was invented. I don't know what you mean. I don't think photography lacks artistic merit intrinsically, if that's what you're getting at, although it's often more difficult to make art out of photography when you don't control the subject. >Or, the perfect art is the white noise on the TV (exactly recreating noise is outright impossible). White noise contains information, but no meaning, and was not made by a human, therefore it's not art and has no artistic merit. >And yet, there has not been a Black Square before Kandinsky. Nor a painting featuring Campbell soup cans before Warhol (and if you see one, you'll immediately think Warhol). Weird, isn't it? I've re-read this paragraph like twenty times and I'm still not sure what to make of it. You do understand that you're looking back at history, right? From our vantage point, it's not up to chance who made those paintings. Kandinsky and Warhol did. There's no universe where someone else painted them instead and we're still having this conversation, because then that someone else did, and not Kandinsky and Warhol, and so you'd still argue that that someone painted them. I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make. It's obvious that whoever painted a painting, painted it; tautologies are indeed tautologies.
  - romwell 2y ago
    >I've re-read this paragraph like twenty times and I'm still not sure what to make of it. Re-read what it was written in response to. You argued a lot that something like Black Square has little "artistic merit" because it is very easy to re-create, and someone could do it by accident. Let me pose a question: if so, why hasn't there been a painting like that in the 19th century? 18th? Or at any time over the millenia that the humanity has produced paintings in rectangular frames? Black, after all, is the simplest, most easily available color. Another line of thought for you to consider. You might have heard of Vaporwave[1], which is a musical[2] as well as visual art aesthetic/movement. I would urge you to read [1], as it will help you understand the answers to your questions, then come back here. [1] https://medium.com/@joriam/vaporwave-art-born-of-the-internet-59cac21e1bb4 https://medium.com/@joriam/vaporwave-art-born-of-the-interne... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s

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?
    - romwell 2y ago
      I would say that your definition of artistic merit disagrees with what people in the art world use (both artists and people who appreciate art), and is way more aligned with the criteria the patent office and the copyright law use. That's to say, your definition of artistic is very close to "patentable or copyrightable" (originality and novelty are required, emotional response isn't). So you're not talking about art at all. What's important to you is not what makes art art. The question to ask with art is a simple one: when people saw it, did it make them feel or think differently are the moment? And did it make them feel differently from the way other art pieces did? You can't understand art without understanding the audience, because art is made for the audience — even if the audience is the artist themselves. You can't examine art in itself, just like you can't examine a mechanical tool in itself, without asking why it was made, what it was made for, and whether it was good in doing that. You can't look at a saw and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms objects it's applied to (and what materials the saw was meant for). You need to tell a wood saw apart from a hack saw, and you need to know whether it actually could cut wood well to talk about the saw's merits. A wood saw isn't bad if it doesn't cut metal. And if it cut a million trees down, it is a good saw beyond doubt. You can't look at art and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms people it's shown to (and what audience the art was meant for). You need to tell early 20th century suprematist art apart from art made today, and you need to know whether it actually could make people in early 20th century feel and think differently in response to it to talk about the art's merits. An early 20th century suprematist artwork (like the Black Square) isn't bad if it doesn't cut it in today's artistic landscape. And if it changed the way a million artists thought and felt about art itself (which it did), it is good art beyond doubt. The recommendation others had of taking an art history class is a solid one. It really widened my perspective when I took it, and I think it'll do the same for you. PS: the same criteria apply to mathematics, which is art with a particular audience in mind. Anyone can prove the Pythagorean theorem, and many have rediscovered it. It would be asinine to say it has no mathematical merit, or that Pythagoras wasn't a great mathematician. Same goes for many other results. Calculus is common knowledge — and even in its time in was independently developed by both Leibniz and Newton. The fact that any freshman knows to compute an antiderivative to find the area under the curve doesn't take away from magnificence of Leibniz and Newton doing the same. But you'd have no idea what's so important about Calculus if that was all you knew about it - which, sadly, is how it's taught, and which is why people have no appreciation of neither mathematics, nor art. Only learning about Calculus in a wider historical and mathematical context would enable you to do that. You'd need to know how mathematics was before calculus, what compelled people to develop it, how it affected mathematicians, what kind of mathematics came into existence because of it, and ultimately, how it changed the world. You need to know about which problems the scientific society was facing at the time, what question was Calculus an answer to, what the objections were at the time (and there were many - it was seen as heresy! Infinitesimals were whacky!), and why it was accepted in spite of them. And once you do, you will see the simple integral sign differently than just a fancy way to write the letter S (which, by the way, it is: S for "sum", d for "difference", and the integral is, literally, a sum of differences multiplied by varying weights). Same goes for art.

codingdave 2y ago

You seem to be conflating craftmanship and artistic merit. They are not the same thing. While it is perfectly valid to care only about craftsmanship, and many people do feel that way, that isn't a universal opinion. It is also an opinion that makes it difficult to have a meaningful conversation about many modern artists for whom craftsmanship simply wasn't the point of their work.

fluoridation 2y ago
I don't agree that I'm conflating the two. Actually, some of the things I've seen that had the most artistic merit were awful things made by truly incompetent people who didn't care they were incompetent. They still had artistic merit because unless you're actually bad, it takes special effort to make something really terrible. I guess you could say that artistic merit increases when you move away from the sludge of mediocrity, while craftsmanship exists only in one direction. >It is also an opinion that makes it difficult to have a meaningful conversation about many modern artists for whom craftsmanship simply wasn't the point of their work. Do you mean that it makes it difficult, or do you mean that those artists don't come out looking good? Because I'm fine with the latter.

criddell 2y ago

You would really enjoy an art history course. A lot of them start with prehistoric work (like cave drawings) and progress through all the major periods and movements. I think you might change your definition to at least include some context of period and artist.

romwell 2y ago

>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 So, there's no art since photography was invented. Or, the perfect art is the white noise on the TV (exactly recreating noise is outright impossible). >the medium imposes so many restrictions that it's inevitable that someone else will recreate it by accident And yet, there has not been a Black Square before Kandinsky. Nor a painting featuring Campbell soup cans before Warhol (and if you see one, you'll immediately think Warhol). Weird, isn't it?

fluoridation 2y ago
>So, there's no art since photography was invented. I don't know what you mean. I don't think photography lacks artistic merit intrinsically, if that's what you're getting at, although it's often more difficult to make art out of photography when you don't control the subject. >Or, the perfect art is the white noise on the TV (exactly recreating noise is outright impossible). White noise contains information, but no meaning, and was not made by a human, therefore it's not art and has no artistic merit. >And yet, there has not been a Black Square before Kandinsky. Nor a painting featuring Campbell soup cans before Warhol (and if you see one, you'll immediately think Warhol). Weird, isn't it? I've re-read this paragraph like twenty times and I'm still not sure what to make of it. You do understand that you're looking back at history, right? From our vantage point, it's not up to chance who made those paintings. Kandinsky and Warhol did. There's no universe where someone else painted them instead and we're still having this conversation, because then that someone else did, and not Kandinsky and Warhol, and so you'd still argue that that someone painted them. I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make. It's obvious that whoever painted a painting, painted it; tautologies are indeed tautologies.
- romwell 2y ago
  >I've re-read this paragraph like twenty times and I'm still not sure what to make of it. Re-read what it was written in response to. You argued a lot that something like Black Square has little "artistic merit" because it is very easy to re-create, and someone could do it by accident. Let me pose a question: if so, why hasn't there been a painting like that in the 19th century? 18th? Or at any time over the millenia that the humanity has produced paintings in rectangular frames? Black, after all, is the simplest, most easily available color. Another line of thought for you to consider. You might have heard of Vaporwave[1], which is a musical[2] as well as visual art aesthetic/movement. I would urge you to read [1], as it will help you understand the answers to your questions, then come back here. [1] https://medium.com/@joriam/vaporwave-art-born-of-the-internet-59cac21e1bb4 https://medium.com/@joriam/vaporwave-art-born-of-the-interne... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s