I agree with your premise that art comes from your medium and limitations, but wanted to elaborate a bit on a part that you and him are not explicit about (alth

I agree with your premise that art comes from your medium and limitations, but wanted to elaborate a bit on a part that you and him are not explicit about (although I suspect you may feel similarly based on "Don't pretend it's the old medium"). The value of art is inextricably linked with the process used to create it. People will have a very different emotional reaction to a painting which is created by hand than a painting which is programmed into a computer and painted by a painting machine (this generalizes all sorts of ways, this is just an example). His examples were specifically of people who were deceptive about the process they used, first in the camera obscura, second in Frank Frazetta. Of course, the term "art" is so imprecise that you can essentially import anything you want into it, including, if you so choose, the notion that part of the art is the practice of deceiving patrons about the way it's created in order to enrich yourself. I will allow that you can be an artist and lie about your methods to make your art more emotionally impactful, but I will not allow that doing so is the right thing to do or makes you a good person deserving of praise. If I'm creating art by painting by hand on tiny grains of sand and the world becomes enamored with it, but it turns out I'm actually using a computer-driven process to paint them (in order to become rich and not to later reveal my actions as some sort of castigation of modern art or some other such thing; basically, take a charitable view of my example here), I think one of the following is the case no matter what your definition of art: 1. It's still art, but it's not art in the way I'm trying to suggest that it is, or 2. It's a performance art where the deception is part of the art, but I'm still a bad person for doing it. Now, I'm not certain that the author would disagree with me (or that you would agree with me), because he doesn't directly address it in these terms. But he does say "I don't care how it's created: I only care about the results." and he also says that Frank Frazetta lying about how he created his art "does not diminish Frank Frazetta's art in the slightest." Perhaps he's saying that the art is still good taking into account the methods which he knows of and keeping mum on Frank Frazetta's deception. Maybe he doesn't think very thoroughly about ethics and so he's inconsistent, or maybe he has a system of ethics where deceiving people in this instance is okay. Of course, presumably many artists are not specific about their methodology, or they could say that they want it judged by the results, not the methods, in which case I agree with the author that it should be judged as it is as an artifact. But I reserve the right to change my emotional reaction to the piece if I later learn that their method is to hire 10,000 third world artists to paint as well as they can and they select the best to portray as the result of their artistic process.