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It's not surprising that people who love AI and NFTs are willfully ignorant about what makes art meaningful. It's a sadly transactional view of the world.

mingus88 2y ago
It’s obvious that many people in this industry believe themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course. They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.
- dontlikeyoueith 2y ago
  Most of them don't value hard science either.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    barbrook wrote an essay about this 30 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology Still on the nose.
    - hbsbsbsndk 2y ago
      Incredibly prescient. This quote from 2011 really sums it up: > The original promise of the Californian Ideology, was that the computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes, in control of our own destiny. Instead, today, we feel the opposite—that we are helpless components in a global system—a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.
- nottorp 2y ago
  Ok but why would you need a "humanities course" to appreciate art?
  - mingus88 2y ago
    You don’t. It’s a great way to get an introduction to a field outside of your typical realm of expertise though. It’s one of those things that really lets you know how much you don’t know. Then when you comment about such things on the internet you might be open to learning more, as opposed to what many folk in this thread are doing.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      I don't know, I don't want to become an expert. I just enjoy my books and paintings and sculptures and architecture... The problems appear when you start assigning a monetary value to everything you do.
- dmoy 2y ago
  I can appreciate art, and play music at a pretty damn good level myself, but still think that John Cage is totally wack. I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is... no longer music. Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music. I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line. Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.
- trbleclef 2y ago
  Your comment will rattle a few cages here but I honestly think about this all the time, as one of the minority of music educators around HN. The blind spots (or perhaps a STEM vs STEAM upbringing) are unfortunate. We are possibly the only — or one of an incredibly small number of — species that even makes sounds solely for enjoyment and aesthetics. The humanities are what make us us.
  - ddingus 2y ago
    Indeed! I am a strong tech person. Always have been. That said, early in my life I took a chance on music and really enjoyed the performing arts. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, I ended up doing Music education for my peers. A beloved teacher had a health issue that left them unable to teach and the substitute did not have the same manner and appreciation for the music and after a few conflicts, they called me out and I (foolishly) accepted! Now I just had to back it up with actions. Short story, "my" class was a success. Students reached their goals, we placed well in competition and that teacher and I developed a great friendship. You are dead on with your comment. And having had the chance to take music education, then turn right around and deliver it seriously was at once crazy and ultra enlightening! I had the realization my chest thumping got me placed into a position where I had an obligation to educate my peers and rid them of that blind spot you wrote of the same as was done for me. And that was the H in "hard." Running the class, prepping pieces for performance, debugging the choir all were what I thought was hard. Nope. Getting them to internalize the humanity of it, language of emotion and all that, is hard. Respect for the art, whatever it may be, is hard. Cultivating the culture of learning, shared vulnerability (in the case of group performing arts) and the intensely personal nature of it all is hard. I grew half a decade doing that as a high schooler, who had no clue at all what they said yes to... In the end, a walk through the humanities is both empowering and enlightening on a level many technical people fail to appreciate. No fault of theirs. They just did not get what I and many others did or gave as the case may be. I can put a notch sharper point on all this for passersby (assuming you and I talking is preaching to the choir): The ones who do not take the trip through the humanities are often told what to do by the ones who did. Thanks for doing the hard work you do. It is often underappreciated.
  - Vegenoid 2y ago
plastic-enjoyer 2y ago
We call this people "Fachidioten" in Germany, people who are really good at their craft but absolute morons in every other field. Unfortunately, these are the people that dominate tech and you can see this in how technology develops.
- egypturnash 2y ago
  Google Translate renders this in English as "Specialist idiots" and I like that.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  But that word equally describes artists
  - whstl 2y ago
    Celebrities !== Artists
  - eszed 2y ago
    It can. Qualitatively - having spent the first half of my working life in the arts, and now the second nearly-half in tech - all I can say is that serious artists are every bit as smart and driven and interesting as are the serious people in tech. They just don't make as much money, so they don't get much respect.
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
[flagged]
- HelloMcFly 2y ago
  I get the frustration with art discourse that it can feel exclusionary or pretentious. There are definitely versions of that discussion that are more about gatekeeping than appreciation. I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation. Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.
  - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
    You should mind that old saying about not being so open-minded that your brain falls out. While the questions "what is art" and "what is beauty" are indeed interesting, this doesn't help in any way. There's no substance, it wouldn't get a thousandth of this attention if it was made by a nobody and isn't even fit to be called a meme: it's something between outrage bait and an insipid conversation piece, a transparent (thus vulgar) case of "muddying the water to make it seem deep". But the whole intellectual "class" being so devoid of people upright enough to call out the naked emperor is much less benign than that: a clear symptom of decadence.
    - HelloMcFly 2y ago
      I think it’s possible to critique art, institutions, or trends without assuming everyone who finds meaning in something is deluded or complicit in cultural decline. Dismissing curiosity or optimism as decadence seems like its own kind of absolutism. Reasonable people can still find value in things even when you don’t, which is kind of my main point. Your comment makes me a little sad, but not for me.
AlexandrB 2y ago
I don't see how that follows. Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. The meaning of the piece is completely externalized to the identity of its author and the history of its composition and cannot be derived from observing the piece itself. That describes NFTs to a tee! The only thing missing the layer of cryptography on top.
- whstl 2y ago
  > Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. That's painting things with a broad brush and a wrong one at that. Ironically, there's plenty of avant-garde art that is 100% about the aesthetics, to the point people complain they were "made without technique".
airstrike 2y ago
Why are you making such sweeping assumptions about us? I studied architecture and art history for over a year, I'm the son of a painter, I have an uncle who's a Grammy-winning musician and an aunt who's a musical scholar who literally has a doctorate degree on John f* Cage of all people... which is to say I grew up surrounded by art. I've visited every museum you can name this side of the Berlin Wall's remains, many more than once. I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit. I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.
lolinder 2y ago
This is an incredibly reductive dismissal of a very diverse group of people who don't find Cage's art in particular to be meaningful.

mingus88 2y ago

It’s obvious that many people in this industry believe themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course. They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.

dontlikeyoueith 2y ago
Most of them don't value hard science either.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  barbrook wrote an essay about this 30 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology Still on the nose.
  - hbsbsbsndk 2y ago
    Incredibly prescient. This quote from 2011 really sums it up: > The original promise of the Californian Ideology, was that the computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes, in control of our own destiny. Instead, today, we feel the opposite—that we are helpless components in a global system—a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.
nottorp 2y ago
Ok but why would you need a "humanities course" to appreciate art?
- mingus88 2y ago
  You don’t. It’s a great way to get an introduction to a field outside of your typical realm of expertise though. It’s one of those things that really lets you know how much you don’t know. Then when you comment about such things on the internet you might be open to learning more, as opposed to what many folk in this thread are doing.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    I don't know, I don't want to become an expert. I just enjoy my books and paintings and sculptures and architecture... The problems appear when you start assigning a monetary value to everything you do.
dmoy 2y ago
I can appreciate art, and play music at a pretty damn good level myself, but still think that John Cage is totally wack. I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is... no longer music. Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music. I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line. Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.
trbleclef 2y ago
Your comment will rattle a few cages here but I honestly think about this all the time, as one of the minority of music educators around HN. The blind spots (or perhaps a STEM vs STEAM upbringing) are unfortunate. We are possibly the only — or one of an incredibly small number of — species that even makes sounds solely for enjoyment and aesthetics. The humanities are what make us us.
- ddingus 2y ago
  Indeed! I am a strong tech person. Always have been. That said, early in my life I took a chance on music and really enjoyed the performing arts. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, I ended up doing Music education for my peers. A beloved teacher had a health issue that left them unable to teach and the substitute did not have the same manner and appreciation for the music and after a few conflicts, they called me out and I (foolishly) accepted! Now I just had to back it up with actions. Short story, "my" class was a success. Students reached their goals, we placed well in competition and that teacher and I developed a great friendship. You are dead on with your comment. And having had the chance to take music education, then turn right around and deliver it seriously was at once crazy and ultra enlightening! I had the realization my chest thumping got me placed into a position where I had an obligation to educate my peers and rid them of that blind spot you wrote of the same as was done for me. And that was the H in "hard." Running the class, prepping pieces for performance, debugging the choir all were what I thought was hard. Nope. Getting them to internalize the humanity of it, language of emotion and all that, is hard. Respect for the art, whatever it may be, is hard. Cultivating the culture of learning, shared vulnerability (in the case of group performing arts) and the intensely personal nature of it all is hard. I grew half a decade doing that as a high schooler, who had no clue at all what they said yes to... In the end, a walk through the humanities is both empowering and enlightening on a level many technical people fail to appreciate. No fault of theirs. They just did not get what I and many others did or gave as the case may be. I can put a notch sharper point on all this for passersby (assuming you and I talking is preaching to the choir): The ones who do not take the trip through the humanities are often told what to do by the ones who did. Thanks for doing the hard work you do. It is often underappreciated.
- Vegenoid 2y ago

plastic-enjoyer 2y ago

We call this people "Fachidioten" in Germany, people who are really good at their craft but absolute morons in every other field. Unfortunately, these are the people that dominate tech and you can see this in how technology develops.

egypturnash 2y ago
Google Translate renders this in English as "Specialist idiots" and I like that.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
But that word equally describes artists
- whstl 2y ago
  Celebrities !== Artists
- eszed 2y ago
  It can. Qualitatively - having spent the first half of my working life in the arts, and now the second nearly-half in tech - all I can say is that serious artists are every bit as smart and driven and interesting as are the serious people in tech. They just don't make as much money, so they don't get much respect.

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago

[flagged]

HelloMcFly 2y ago
I get the frustration with art discourse that it can feel exclusionary or pretentious. There are definitely versions of that discussion that are more about gatekeeping than appreciation. I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation. Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  You should mind that old saying about not being so open-minded that your brain falls out. While the questions "what is art" and "what is beauty" are indeed interesting, this doesn't help in any way. There's no substance, it wouldn't get a thousandth of this attention if it was made by a nobody and isn't even fit to be called a meme: it's something between outrage bait and an insipid conversation piece, a transparent (thus vulgar) case of "muddying the water to make it seem deep". But the whole intellectual "class" being so devoid of people upright enough to call out the naked emperor is much less benign than that: a clear symptom of decadence.
  - HelloMcFly 2y ago
    I think it’s possible to critique art, institutions, or trends without assuming everyone who finds meaning in something is deluded or complicit in cultural decline. Dismissing curiosity or optimism as decadence seems like its own kind of absolutism. Reasonable people can still find value in things even when you don’t, which is kind of my main point. Your comment makes me a little sad, but not for me.

AlexandrB 2y ago

I don't see how that follows. Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. The meaning of the piece is completely externalized to the identity of its author and the history of its composition and cannot be derived from observing the piece itself. That describes NFTs to a tee! The only thing missing the layer of cryptography on top.

whstl 2y ago
> Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. That's painting things with a broad brush and a wrong one at that. Ironically, there's plenty of avant-garde art that is 100% about the aesthetics, to the point people complain they were "made without technique".

airstrike 2y ago

Why are you making such sweeping assumptions about us? I studied architecture and art history for over a year, I'm the son of a painter, I have an uncle who's a Grammy-winning musician and an aunt who's a musical scholar who literally has a doctorate degree on John f* Cage of all people... which is to say I grew up surrounded by art. I've visited every museum you can name this side of the Berlin Wall's remains, many more than once. I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit. I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.

lolinder 2y ago

This is an incredibly reductive dismissal of a very diverse group of people who don't find Cage's art in particular to be meaningful.