4 ms·

I agree, musical instruments also have the benefit of a much higher skill ceiling. That can also be a downside though, since it can make it frustrating to learn

petesergeant 1y ago
I came back to guitar after being self-taught and not very good, and was pleasantly surprised that the Trinity Guitar Initial Grade (eg the first book you'd start a kid on) had some awesome music that you could make the melodies of very quickly. Like, 2-3 hours of practice and you can slowly pick out the melody from Runaway Train, Orange Crush, and Where did you sleep last night. I guess my point is you can get some good sounds out of the guitar very quickly, which can be very intrinsically motivating.
- bowsamic 1y ago
  I agree but I find with these things there is a plateau that then requires real work to push through
munificent 1y ago
> a much higher skill ceiling. As someone who both knits and plays a couple of instruments, I suspect you are underestimating the skill ceiling of knitting. Take a look at something like this: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-shawl https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-sha... You're talking years of work to complete it. You may be thinking, "well, sure, but it's just doing the same relatively easy thing over and over for a really long time." But that's not quite it. You're making a single physical object where it's easy to make mistakes and also easy to not realize you've made a mistake. Knitting builds on the previously knitted stitches. If you miscount something early on or forget a stitch, you can end up diverging irrevocably from the pattern. A moment's inattention early on can mean you have to undo literally months of work. A large complex project like that shawl is like a giant oil painting. It's not just the scale and time, it's the ability to consistently avoid making mistakes which requires incredible patience and discipline. And that's just knitting the work. Now consider the mastery required to design a project like this.
- bowsamic 1y ago
  My mum knits and while yes the skill ceiling is still high no I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels Knitting has a lower skill ceiling doesn’t mean knitting or design is easy. I know that well, my mum ran a knitting shop and still works on patterns part time. She still knits a lot of stuff for us and it takes a lot of skill and work But it’s not Glenn Gould on piano, is it? It’s not playing Bach fugues
  - munificent 1y ago
    > I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels There is a very old, very relevant observation that when men do something we call it "art" and when women do it we call it "craft". I don't think it makes a lot of sense to compare a performative art like playing an instrument to a constructive art like knitting because the skillsets are so different. It's like trying to decide if ice cream is better than stand up comedy. But I do think you can reasonably compare constructive arts like painting and knitting. For those, there are two aspects: coming up with the design for what you want to make, and implementing that design. Historically, the latter was given more weight than the former. The most famous painters of the Renaissance mostly just painted pictures of normal people, but it was the execution of those paintings that made them famous. Today, thanks to the invention of reproductive technology like cameras, we mostly prize originally of thought over execution. Andy Warhol is not a particularly skilled painter. (One way to think of the modern conception of "high art" versus "low art"—think Damien Hirst versus Thomas Kinkade—is exactly the distinction between concept and execution.) Given all that, I would the best knitting designers on the same level as the best furniture designers or portrait painters. Most knitting is deliberately not conceptual, so it's hard to compare it to explicitly conceptual art. But if you think anything can reasonably be called art when it is mostly focused on quality and difficulty of execution, then knitting is an art with a ceiling as high as any other. And, to be clear, there are fine artists whose medium is textiles as well. For example: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-textile-artists-who-are-pushing-the-medium-forward https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-textile-art... How you feel about those probably reflects mostly how you feel about much of modern art. But I don't see any reason it should be considered a lower rung of art than other sculpture media just because it uses fibers and not metal or glass.

petesergeant 1y ago

I came back to guitar after being self-taught and not very good, and was pleasantly surprised that the Trinity Guitar Initial Grade (eg the first book you'd start a kid on) had some awesome music that you could make the melodies of very quickly. Like, 2-3 hours of practice and you can slowly pick out the melody from Runaway Train, Orange Crush, and Where did you sleep last night. I guess my point is you can get some good sounds out of the guitar very quickly, which can be very intrinsically motivating.

bowsamic 1y ago
I agree but I find with these things there is a plateau that then requires real work to push through

munificent 1y ago

> a much higher skill ceiling. As someone who both knits and plays a couple of instruments, I suspect you are underestimating the skill ceiling of knitting. Take a look at something like this: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-shawl https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-sha... You're talking years of work to complete it. You may be thinking, "well, sure, but it's just doing the same relatively easy thing over and over for a really long time." But that's not quite it. You're making a single physical object where it's easy to make mistakes and also easy to not realize you've made a mistake. Knitting builds on the previously knitted stitches. If you miscount something early on or forget a stitch, you can end up diverging irrevocably from the pattern. A moment's inattention early on can mean you have to undo literally months of work. A large complex project like that shawl is like a giant oil painting. It's not just the scale and time, it's the ability to consistently avoid making mistakes which requires incredible patience and discipline. And that's just knitting the work. Now consider the mastery required to design a project like this.

bowsamic 1y ago
My mum knits and while yes the skill ceiling is still high no I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels Knitting has a lower skill ceiling doesn’t mean knitting or design is easy. I know that well, my mum ran a knitting shop and still works on patterns part time. She still knits a lot of stuff for us and it takes a lot of skill and work But it’s not Glenn Gould on piano, is it? It’s not playing Bach fugues
- munificent 1y ago
  > I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels There is a very old, very relevant observation that when men do something we call it "art" and when women do it we call it "craft". I don't think it makes a lot of sense to compare a performative art like playing an instrument to a constructive art like knitting because the skillsets are so different. It's like trying to decide if ice cream is better than stand up comedy. But I do think you can reasonably compare constructive arts like painting and knitting. For those, there are two aspects: coming up with the design for what you want to make, and implementing that design. Historically, the latter was given more weight than the former. The most famous painters of the Renaissance mostly just painted pictures of normal people, but it was the execution of those paintings that made them famous. Today, thanks to the invention of reproductive technology like cameras, we mostly prize originally of thought over execution. Andy Warhol is not a particularly skilled painter. (One way to think of the modern conception of "high art" versus "low art"—think Damien Hirst versus Thomas Kinkade—is exactly the distinction between concept and execution.) Given all that, I would the best knitting designers on the same level as the best furniture designers or portrait painters. Most knitting is deliberately not conceptual, so it's hard to compare it to explicitly conceptual art. But if you think anything can reasonably be called art when it is mostly focused on quality and difficulty of execution, then knitting is an art with a ceiling as high as any other. And, to be clear, there are fine artists whose medium is textiles as well. For example: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-textile-artists-who-are-pushing-the-medium-forward https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-textile-art... How you feel about those probably reflects mostly how you feel about much of modern art. But I don't see any reason it should be considered a lower rung of art than other sculpture media just because it uses fibers and not metal or glass.