"The World Premiere of the Amiga (1985, Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry): Possibly wanting to one-up the Apple Macintosh launch in 1984, the Amiga 1000 debuted at a black-tie event held at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City on July 23rd, 1985. (...)"
Andy Warhol, Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, and others were were given an intro to the Macintosh by Steve Jobs himself, at Sean Lennon's 9th birthday party in 1984.
Keep in mind that the footage of the computer starting at 13:03 has now been revealed from this article to be from an earlier rehearsal. Now I understand why there's this cheesy fly in effect!
Last year I was really into non-ebay auctions. Basically traditional auctions that were also online.
I got super excited when I saw a Commodore 64 was coming up soon, until I noticed the starting price was around $100,000. It was actually for a collection of unreleased digital art from Andy Warhol, and they were throwing in the computer for free. Apparently there is a lot of it that they still haven’t sorted through.
I don’t know anything about art, I was just bummed it wasn’t a cheap retro computer.
Yeah I have a couple of commodores in my storage left there for 25 years, probably even more, I can’t even be bothered to make time to go there to throw them away
Although C64 and Amiga are not rare by any means (although the Amiga, if you're in the US, wasn't that much of a success in the US compared to the UK/EU), they're highly thought after items. There's no reason to throw them away: just message a forum/board and say "free Commodore in XXX, must come pick them" and some shall gladly give them a second life.
Well, they fetch some money. Still not more than the sticker price when they were new, generally, definitively not more than the inflation-adjusted price!
I'm sure if you had one you wouldn't even connect it to the power, it has a command line, some GUI and prince of persia, which you can play now even on modern PCs with emulators, it has really no use, rather than, I don't know
It was pretty fun that we could actually run games from ~40 year old tape. It impressed my son. It also impressed me actually, because I remember how often those things broke...
If they're Commodore 64's you definitely don't want the use the stock power supplies. Their voltages can drift and can destroy otherwise working hardware.
Every serious retro collector has become an expert on power supplies and capacitors. It is very cool to see and I'm glad it is the power supply and not the more delicate components, at least so far.
Please don't throw them away. Someone will be more than happy to take them off your hands. They are like gold to some people. If you're in the Los Angeles area I'd pay you to "go there" to let me take them off your hands.
> and a signed floppy disk containing eight images that Andy Warhol created that day. He said he’s had them on display in his home for about 39 years.
Shout out to the longevity of floppy disks as a storage medium. I was quite disappointed when I discovered many of my writable CD's started failing at the 15 to 20 year mark.
> Shout out to the longevity of floppy disks as a storage medium.
Last I checked (Covid) about 2/3rd of my 5"1/4 Commodore 64 floppy disks were still working (they had to be about 35 y/o when I tried in 2020). But the ones working won't last much longer.
Yeah, GP got lucky. At least CDs you can store in an airtight enclosure with moisture removed to help them last longer. For floppies it's enough to come close to a strong magnetic field to mess them up.
I stumbled across a DVD-RW last weekend and popped it in a drive to see if the files were still readable. I had read that for a -RW drive you shouldn't expect more than a few years, maybe a decade before it decays so I was not hopeful. However, the disc was fully readable and the checksums all came back clean even though it was burned in 2003.
It wasn't any kind of important data. It was a copy of some stuff I had made to bring to a meeting 20 years ago that's still readily available. If the data was important I wouldn't have left it on degrading optical media that I didn't trust.
Also, the whole point of DVD-RWs was to replace stuff like floppies or Zip disks when you are sneakernetting things around. The same way you use uSD or thumb drives these days. They were never meant for long term archiving, if you were doing that you would use DVD-R or DVD+Rs instead.
I was writing a book a few years ago that I have long since shelved, all about the longevity of information. The base premise was a mental experiment, what if we don't succeed in over coming some key fundamental issues of society and we end up in a long term energy decline position. How long would it take to go back into a dark age and just how much would we have preserved.
Basically about the life time of SSD's (20 years) , CD's (10-40 years) , Floppy disc/magnetic tapes (5-50 years), vinyl records (30-120 years), books (high/low acid paper)(50-500 years), clay tablets (centuries/millennia) and eventually spoken word (tens/hundreds of millennia). Seeing as how much of the internet has gone dark both through lack of economic incentive or accidental erasure - it was not the most cheery conclusion. About how the more efficient we get with information storage, the more brittle it becomes. But also the longer information can last, the more it is liable to be changed with time. Think like the game of telephone.
The big lesson take away I made from it all was that, it isn't so much the medium but the information. If it is useful or cherished, it will live far beyond its original medium. Knowledge of hygiene will live a lot longer than season 3 of Survivor on DVD. Video games are cherished and many are living way beyond their original medium. We will loose 99.99% of all data produced over the last few decades but that it mostly stuff that nobody had any need or desire to keep - and that is totally fine. It is basically a natural filter for quality, and while we may be concerned about what we may loose, ultimately a quality statement will be made. Information about the taxation system of 1956 will not last as long as the I Ching which has already gone millennia.
Allegedly the quad layer BDXLs should have the same longevity as they are made using the exact same technology. Shame Sony just announced they are going to shut down the only remaining factory in the world making those, I've ordered some from Japan but I imagine they will shoot up in price once the official stocks deplete.
It is fascinating seeing in the retro games space just how quickly some are dying. The Gamecube/Ps2/Xbox era is starting to fall to it and I have even seen a handful of Xbox 360/Ps3 games with this issue. Many collectors now request photo's of the discs being back lit to check the integrity before purchasing.
And yet there are also a lot of audio CD's from the 80's that are holding on. A big part of it would be the manufacturing quality and how in the name of efficiency and lower prices, some corner may have been cut.
For anything digital, having reduntant backups and error correcting codes makes much more sense than worrying too much about the medium. The theoretical longevity of your vinyl won't matter if your house burns down or if you accidentally throw out the dusty box they are packed in.
That said, if you just like the sound of vinyl and feeling of handling them then good for you and I'm not trying to rain on your parade.
I already said that I don't particularly like the sound, and hard drives, CDs, and records alike can all be lost in a house fire. Of those three media, one fails less arbitrarily and catastrophically.
The lifetime of a medium is of no use for the general user if the lifetime of a drive is smaller and the industry stop making new compatible ones or historians in the future never have the budget and/or tools to custom build new drives.
Mine work now for almost 40 years. And don't forget: floppy disks have mechanical attrition.
The floppy disk lifetime was, as always, an estimate. My 5 1/4 disks for C64 seem to be the way more robust product compared with the 3 1/2 for Amiga and later PC. Maybe information density plays a role here.
CDs have the reflection layer problem, not the information loss per se. That's the main difference between disks and CDs.
I've had really great experiences with recovering 3,5" floppies from 40 years ago. Not so much with 5 1/4". Despite the ultra low density of 360kB on that huge surface.
For the 3,5" drives I simply used a USB version which are available aplenty.
For the 5 1/4" I needed to use a Greaseweazle ( https://sordan.ie/product/1527/newest-greaseweazle-v41-usb-f... ) as there are no USB versions available. The drive I have is a good quality HD drive though (1,2MB) so it should be able to read 360kB disks with no issue.
Off the shelf optical substrate just degrades and lazerdiscs suffer from this greatly . There is the m disc series that has a more advanced substrate but I believe magnetic tape is the only backup method that can last very long (other than printing it out in paper).
Is 35 years "very long"? Because we just retrieved data from about 50 old Commodore 64 5 1/4" floppy disks after 35 years. They all read perfectly on an old Commodore 1541 floppy drive.
From what I can tell, the upper time limit for magnetic media is generally expected to be 30 years[1]. My money is on survivorship bias for longer time frames. I've had 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppies die on me within months of purchase - I don't recall that ever happening for a CD/DVD, but I'm sure someone has had that experience. Anecdotes aren't hard data, but I have 2 CD binders full of CDs and DVDs that have outlasted 3 hard drives that I didn't keep backed up as a young adult, and as long as they were kept away from scratches and heat, all of them were easily read and playable.
Lucky you: as I posted a few hours ago... Only about 2/3rd of mine still worked but then they've been stored, for some, in bad conditions. For example some were in an underground garage with lots of cars passage and, after decades, gunk builds up everywhere in the garage.
It depends a lot on situations. I've heard that there's a fungus in the Southern US that slowly eats some floppy disks (or grows on them, I donno). Also there's a luck component with nearby magnetic sources.
I live in the hope that I'll always be tech-literate, even into my retirement, but I'm beginning to suspect that no matter how generalist I try to be with my skillset, the mind will specialize as it gets older in few particular ways and no matter how skilled I am in field A B or C, it just will not translate to field X Y or Z.
The LLMs have been this moment for me - the toolkit, usage patterns, and strengths and weaknesses are so different from what I’m used to that I have a really hard time trusting my instincts or judgements on when to use them and where. They’re the first piece of technology that’s so far outside my experience set that I need to onboard a fully different paradigm to understand them as a tool.
To be fair, currently it looks like most people's "instinct" about LLMs is "let's just blindly trust what this thing says because it sounds authoritative". I'm waiting for someone to coin the term "AI natives", a generation which, it'll eventually turn out, will be just as "native" as Gen Z are "digital natives".
> I have a really hard time trusting my instincts or judgements on when to use them and where
Its easy, do you want to find something but you forgot the name and have a hard time with Google? Ask an LLM, they will likely find the name you need to find it on Google. This goes for both things you have forgotten and new concepts that you never knew the name for but you think there exists something.
The other main use case is translations between languages, LLMs are by far the best translators today.
For other things LLM doesn't really help, except help turn out crap you have to spend so much time checking that it doesn't really make you more productive unless your job is to create crap.
Or that isn't fair, if you need to write a letter with some emotions that you have a hard time with due to your fleshy nature not wanting to fake emotions, you can ask the computer to fake those emotions for you. Computers are great at faking emotions now. Think corporate emails etc where you have to use a tone that doesn't at all match your state etc.
This is exactly what people who are falling behind would say. They're often the last ones who are aware of the situation. (Just food for thought - not saying you are actually falling behind.)
We had to develop something internally regarding genlock and a ring buffer that Python wasn't going to work, so an engineer at our company picked up C++. Mind you, he's never written a line of C++ in his life and has close to no experience with C-style languages at all.
Within 2 days he had completed the prototype to synchronize multiple latency sensitive gear with leading/falling edge methods in C++. (On top of his other work.)
3 days prior to it he'd written no C++.
When asked how he did it, he said: "Claude is the best translator out there."
As for subtle mistakes, you still need to know how to code. Compilers make plenty of subtle inaccuracies and we still use them for most applications, don't we?
That's interesting! I wouldn't feel comfortable using a non memory safe programming language without any experience in it though. Claude could introduce memory handling bugs and I might not be able to spot them.
My personal experience has been that the “smarter autocomplete” in the IDE is the bulk of the value add for me. It handles a lot of the really rote stuff - “create a struct that matches this data structure”, “add an accessor for this property”, “make another unit test with a slight variation on this” and saves me an enormous amount of time typing.
I’ve had basically no luck getting code from the chat-style interfaces, though. The bugs often aren’t even subtle, and it’ll either argue with me that there’s not a bug or apologize and produce exactly the same code again.
But typing is like less than 1% of the time spent programming, it doesn't take many seconds to type the things you mentioned and it takes significantly longer to figure out you want to make them.
In the moment, having to type anything more than half a line is still a distraction, as you can still make typos, or start watching as the starts to highlight issues as you type (which may or may not be real issues). Reducing distractions in the moment still can help keep flow going for some people.
God, this makes me so happy. I well remember that self-portrait on the cover of Amiga Magazine back in ~1986. I was so excited about the platform, the technology, and the possibilities.
I enjoy Warhol's silkscreen prints. You can pick one up on Ebay for about $100 or so and it is pretty rare for a piece by such a prominent artists to be affordable but that's what Warhol's market was.
With that process you can also get spot colors that are not in the CYMK space, for instance last week I struggled with printing an image of Rudbeckia flowers until I understood that the RGB version of that yellow (at the edge of saturation so probably not as saturated as the real thing) doesn't exist in CYMK which means if you don't modify the color to be in gamut the printer will do it for you -- probably not the way you want.
With spot color (say Pantone) I could get some ink mixed up that would color match the flower even better -- it was before Pantone but Warhol's spot colors were often like that. And of course his work with the Amiga is much in the style he's famous for.
I used to collect coins before the days of the internet and decided to pull out my collection and thought about getting back into it. It's just scam / fakes everywhere on Ebay.
Certain artists have methods to authenticate their work. In general, I wouldn't trust ebay. Fakes abound, coins, art, any high value collectables. Consider this interesting story from earlier this year: https://nypost.com/2024/02/21/us-news/brian-walshe-sentenced...
If you want original art, especially from an artist as popular as Warhol, it's best to go through galleries or art auctions. You don't have to be in NY or LA, Paris or London, etc. You probably have some places in driving distance. Most ship, too. These places have actual reputations on the line and can't hide behind ebay or just open up shop with a different name.
I've made some CMYK (e.g. inkjet) prints that were inspired by Warhol and anime fan art. I took a class in silkscreen printing and I'm probably going to be taking one in block printing soon. If I was going to get better at silkscreening an obvious idea is to do something more or less Warhol-inspired.
My understanding is that there is an interesting universe of fakes, for instance Warhol would make some screens and send them off to get printed, he would authorize, say, 100 prints and sign and number those, but the printers would hold on to the screens and make more that weren't signed.
Typically these prices are for unlimited print runs as opposed to a run of a 100 or less (which command more money obviously, due to supply). I have a Haring print in my home that was about the same price (I think around $250 in total for print and frame) that's signed by the artist.
It's most likely a fake. Signed prints by Haring and Warhol for for a lot more — you can get an idea for how much by looking at Sotheby's/Christie's past results.
I'd be surprised to learn about an unlimited run of a print that is signed by an artist like Warhol or Haring. The lithographs in your sibling comment are in the price range you're talking about, but have a printed signature.
The lost Amiga art is never shown, in this article or any of the linked sources. The 9 images on that "lost" disk aren't actually displayed. The disk itself is the valuable object, kind of like Picasso signing a napkin. But, even the disk isn't shown. None of these articles say whether anybody tried reading the disk.
Previous discovered files from old floppies by AW, and also ones by Keith Haring was sold as "NFT". That had the positive side effect for me to be able to extract exact copies (although not original files).
Real vintage computing aficionados prefer a KryoFlux disk image, it's magnetic flux transitions produce a warmer image and hits the high photoreceptor notes in your retina.
An original file would be the same file byte for byte in the original obsolete image format for example ILBM/IFF.
An exact copy would be a lossless PNG (for example) of the image, that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference by looking at it when it's displayed on a screen from the original.
I wonder if they could be shared? Who owns the copyright? It would be the Warhol estate, no?
This person can sell the disks but I don’t think they are selling rights to the work on the disk. I think it might be similar to me selling you my DVD of Star Wars.
Yes, that's how it worked before 1989. In that year the law was changed so that creators now obtain copyright automatically without any requirements for notice or registration.
If the linked article is accurate and Warhol gave a disk containing the images to an engineer without a copyright notice on the disk or in the disk's contents, and without any explicit restrictions on redistribution, those images are in the public domain as well.
It would be interesting to know, actually. Prior to 1989 copyright notices were required on works in the US, but historically no fine art that I'm aware of has had copyright notices. (I'm on my phone and have limited enthusiasm for searching in this UI...)
It's well-established that, before 1989, anything copyrightable required a copyright notice when first presented to the public or it immediately and irrevocably went into the public domain.
A classic case is a Picasso sculpture purchased by the city of Chicago in 1967. Prior to installation of the sculpture, city officials presented a model to the public. A copyright notice was put on a placard nearby, but not on the model. A lawsuit established that since there was no notice on the model, the design was in the public domain, and people could make postcards and posters of the sculpture freely, much to the city's dismay.
So yes, much of the fine art produced in the USA before 1989 is in the public domain.
I'm seeing that between 1978 and 1989 works could receive copyright protection, regardless of the display of a notice, if they were registered within 5 years.[0] Otherwise everything I'm reading jibes w/ what you're saying.
So it is possible Warhol registered these works, in which case they would be protected by copyright until 2057.
Edit: A quick search w/ LOC's "Official Public Catalog" through "Visual Material" registered to "Warhol Andy" after 1984 doesn't return any titles that look like they'd be these images. He definitely registered a ton of stuff (as would have been required for the time).
You're partly right. In that time period you not only had to register, you also had to make a good faith effort to add copyright notices to the works you wanted protected.
The copyright registration database is online [0]. He only registered a few of his art works, and these digital images are not among them.
edit: his estate registered a bunch of stuff after he died, but registration doesn't bring things back out of the public domain for pre-1977 works, or things beyond the 5-year threshold for works 1977-1989
A caption from that article: "Warhol also made a digital Botticelli for the Commodore". So many articles over the last few years have implied he made that Venus picture in its entirety. It was created by Avril Harrison, among many other images she created for EA's marketing, for the program that became Deluxe Paint. The image they always show is Avril's image after somebody (perhaps Warhol, perhaps it was somebody demoing it to him) used the brush tool to simply copy one eye and paste it in the middle.
Neat to see a post here from Dave Farquhar's blog. His Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia, published by O'Reilly at the turn of the century, was an early inspiration: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1565926773
Andy got mental about art. That is, thinking was an important step for him, in his process. He went far down that road.
Some artists don't do the mental thing so much. More of a conversation between just the hand and the beauty sense. Maybe a little mental, maybe no mental at all.
The non-mental approach is more fulfilling, imo. A better high and a better product. What beauty I can create in 5 minutes scribbling takes a year to almost-do the same in code.
(ok, the mental approach is pretty much just a big tease. It never really delivers. Lots of "neat" and "interesting" but it never really actually delivers the big punch. Sorry if that's harsh.)
All respect to Andy tho. And it's nice to know that he shared that particular path with us. I wonder if he ever dabbled in code.
This is interesting and very cool news but the writer ruins it with some weird self-aggrandizing and a baffling comparison of himself to Warhol.
"The digital images Andy Warhol created are rudimentary by today’s standards, and in some ways, perhaps less ambitious then some of the thumbnails I create for my blog posts. But this was 39 years ago, and I have much better tools than he did."
The lost artwork was discovered almost exactly ten years ago, in 2014. Are there any new developments on this front? If the article contained anything new, I missed it.
It means that we previously had crude photographs of screens taken during the event. Those are the pictures you see in the article. You can even see the pixel arrangement of the CRT display in the pictures.
What has been found are the original Amiga files saved on a disk. They haven't been released to the public, or might never be depending on who buys them from the guy. He should just release them.
For arguments sake, could it mean the arrangement of specific atoms on the first storage medium for the digital file? Therefore a duplicated copy or screenshot would not count?
Thanks. It seems you're right. I started with the first Deluxe Paint myself back then and always incorrectly thought he used it based on the videos I saw.
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I think this is an example of what I’d call the “Blade Runner” effect: if you show Blade Runner to someone who’s never seen it before, they’re going to think it looks vaguely derivative, because they live in a post-Blade Runner world, in which everything looks like Blade Runner.
Warhol’s really the ur-version of this. We’re all in Warhol’s world, now.
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.
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).
This is such an infuriatingly dismissive and abrasive answer, even with not being part of that community. All metal is just trivial guitar play and angry shouts right? Paintings are just the correct application of colors and other materials.
- edit - And yes, I have talked to artists about absolutely trivial paintings. During that I learned how.. nontrivial putting poop on canvas may be - /edit -
Sometimes it's better to accept you're not part of a conversation and to either shut up, or ask a very confused "But why?"
Good, I'm glad you find it infuriating. It likewise annoys me when I see people praise low-effort garbage, so I see it as only fair.
>And yes, I have talked to artists about absolutely trivial paintings. During that I learned how.. nontrivial putting poop on canvas may be
And I've talked to artists who have told me they agreed with me, and that they think pseudo-artistic shitposts devalue the work they put into their own pieces.
I too confused art with craft for quite a long time. it's another framing of the difference between being interested in why versus being interested in how.
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.
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.
You don't understand what you're looking at, you don't understand what the artist was doing, you don't understand why they were doing it, you don't understand the constraints they were or were not operating under and why they may or may not have picked those constraints. It's like looking at a Picasso and saying "well that's the shittiest bull I've ever seen." What you're doing is like watching a boxing match and saying "it's very lazy that these people aren't using their legs" or "I don't understand why that person won, they didn't even knock the other person out!". There's a thing that's happening here that you've not bothered to learn enough about to understand whether or not the participant is accomplishing their goals, because you haven't bothered to learn what their goals are or what accomplishing them would look like.
Again, it's totally fine to say "I don't like this," or "I don't understand this" (although I'm getting the sense I'm unlikely to hear _that_ from you), but to say "this lacks artistic merit" - you absolutely do not have the knowledge, background, or apparent interest in the topic to have any idea whether or not that statement is true.
You're trying to convince me to be less confident in my assertions by confidently telling me what I do or don't understand, and what I need to understand in order to reach conclusions.
>What you're doing is like watching a boxing match and saying "it's very lazy that these people aren't using their legs" or "I don't understand why that person won, they didn't even knock the other person out!". There's a thing that's happening here that you've not bothered to learn enough about to understand whether or not the participant is accomplishing their goals
But, you see, art is not a game. There are no rules. If you paint me a portrait of myself with your feet and you make me look like my mother, I'm not going to be impressed that you managed to paint my mother with your feet. I'm to ask you why you didn't use your hands, you dolt! If you handicap yourself to the point you make something bad, then it's only fair the results are judged on their own merits, isn't it? If you wanted to use your feet to entertain yourself then any criticism you receive for it shouldn't matter, because the activity fulfilled its purpose to you, the same way boxers don't care about the criticism they receive from people who think they should also use their legs.
I don't care about their goals. Their goals are for themselves. I don't need to know them to judge the quality of the result.
>"I don't understand this" (although I'm getting the sense I'm unlikely to hear _that_ from you)
I'm honest enough to say I don't get the point of the soup can. That doesn't stop me from saying it's low-effort. I see better art on Twitter every day, even though most of it probably has less of a message.
You're constantly missing the point. Artistic merit has nothing to do with your feelings about a particular work or how it was made. That is your personal preference or opinion, whatever. People decide on artistic merit organically as a collective.
They seem to not get that they are judging other people, not the work itself, when the say something has no artistic merit.
At the same time they say that:
- They would look down on an art history PhD who tries to tell them there's more to it
- They think that people who think that work isn't "shit" are idiots
- They are glad others are frustrated with their attitude, because other people seeing something in what they think is "shit" frustrates hem
This is way beyond missing the point. They are taking offense at others having opinions on an artwork, and take a difference of opinion as a personal attack that they are glad to retaliate to with a bona-fide, actual personal attack.
They also feel entitled to an explanation, which they demand, and when people point them in the direction of what they could learn, they say that "oh, you want to get something out of me" (as if learning gives to anyone else).
Their basis is: "If I see it a certain way, then everyone else should see it that way, unless they are incredibly stupid or are talking in bad faith". So when other people don't provide a justification for seeing things differently, they are dismissed as stupid, or perceived as hostile.
Let's say, this pattern of behavior is well-studied, and has a name.
>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
Not at all. You go far beyond "judging on your own grounds" by saying that something has little artistic merit.
In fact, your "judgement" only has the word "you" and none of "I" or "my"; your own grounds are completely missing from it.
You are entitled to your grounds, but you are instead climbing on a pedestal to confidently proclaim that everyone else doesn't have ground to stand on.
Here's what you have enough basis to say:
"I see a painted can of soup on a white background. I felt that you didn't try. To me, lack of trying means that your work has little 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.
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.
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".
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
>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?
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).
That's a lot of definitive statements for something as poorly defined as "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?
Why? Why is that the question to ask? Why must be considered in this specific way, rather than any other?
>You can't understand art without understanding the audience, because art is made for the audience
So something that's made to be made rather than to be seen is not art, even in the case that if someone did see it they would think it's art?
>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.
No. No, no, no. There's no justification for this besides that you say so. Why can't I look at the thing in isolation and decide for myself what it's good for? What do I care what the person who made the wood saw thought he was making? If for my purposes it's a good screwdriver and I use it like that, is it wrong because I'm not properly interpreting the message the manufacturer embedded into the tool?
>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.
Again, why? Exactly what prevents me from doing that? What, I'm barging into a club? Well, sorry, but I didn't see any signs on the door. I just saw a bunch of people gushing over trash and thought I'd speak my mind. If you don't like that I don't like what you like because I don't care about the things you care about then that's too bad.
>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.
Interesting line of reasoning. Mathematics is art, therefore mathematical merit is artistic merit. Artistic merit by my definition is about originality, therefore mathematical merit (being artistic) is about originality. I hope I don't need to say I don't agree with either the soundness of the reasoning nor with the conclusion.
I don't agree that mathematics is art with no qualifiers whatsoever. Mathematics is, very reductively, primarily concerned with the search for true statements, not with the search for beautiful statements, nor with self-expression or cultural transmission.
>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.
Calculus is useful, regardless of its history. The reason people don't appreciate mathematics is because a) they think mathematics is manually calculating things (because that's what they're taught to do), which sours them to the idea, and b) they're forced to learn things they think has nothing to do with their daily lives, not because they don't learn about the history. And if we're honest, they're right. Very few people will ever need to know calculus at any point in their lives (outside of school), and fewer still will need to calculate things by hand.
>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.
That's one way to appreciate it, I'm not denying that. But you're arguing that it's the way to appreciate art, and that if I don't do that I'm missing the point.
Your approach to art is a beautiful combination of a toddler and a grumpy old man. It's immature, ignorant and stubborn in its refusal to actually listen to what others are saying. You have made so many straw-men that it's difficult to consider your posts as being neither well-intentioned nor inviting a meaningful discussion.
One thing is to say 'I don't get it, this is not for me'. Another is to lie down on the museum's floor and start kicking and screaming in a tantrum about the lack of artistic merit of something like the Black Square without a glimmer of open mind and the tiniest will to at least attempt to understand it before dismissing it.
And all you're doing is complaining that someone doesn't like what you like, and trying to invalidate their opinion through ad hominem. Sorry, but I don't need to engage with the thing the same way you do to form and voice an opinion on it. That's just the way it is.
This is one of the straw-men. No one is complaining about you not liking what other people like. No one. Not a single person. Even the authors of these pieces wouldn't complain. That is not the point whatsoever and yet you are bringing it up in many posts.
People are frustrated that you insist on your 'opinion' being valid when the position you hold is void of a thought. It's actually a lack of an opinion. It's a tantrum. You have eyes, you have the time and perhaps even the interest to look, and yet you put your head in a sand and claim that the darkness you see gives you enough data to claim whether something has artistic merit or not.
The frustration comes from witnessing the blatant and confident ignorance, not from whether you 'like' or 'dislike' something.
"I think this piece of art is overrated as it has comparatively little content for the amount of interest it generates" is very much not a non-opinion.
You're not offering any reason why I should form my opinion in any way other than the way I do, you're just trying to invalidate my opinion because you think how I formed it is wrong, again without offering any reason why that is so. Yes, perhaps if both your and my opinions were informed by the same facts we would agree. But so what? That doesn't invalidate my opinion, and I'm not going to shut up. I'm just going to keep calling out low-effort garbage when I see it. I don't care if it frustrates you. If that lowers your opinion of me I'm fine with that; I also don't have a high opinion of the people who think this sort of trash is deep.
You seem to really have very little education, perspective, and experience regarding art. When you have very little education, perspective, and experience, your opinions are irrelevant and it frustrates people to see someone so content (and self-righteous) in their ignorance
Someone on this thread likened it to watching a boxing match and then complaining that they aren't using their legs. This is a good comparison. I would also compare it to having only eaten chicken nuggets your whole life and then complaining that a serving of foie gras isn't filling enough.
Yes, the foie gras isn't really filling, the boxers aren't using their legs, and the art doesn't look like real life. But your judgement is based on ignorance. You lack the vocabulary to describe what you're seeing-- but more than that, you lack the eye to even see it in the first place. And instead of conceding that you just don't really know what you're talking about, you double down and insist that you're actually privy to some profound truth about art. It can't be that the countless Art History PhDs, renowned critics, museum collections, and artists who see the relevance of Warhol based on years of study and consideration are correct. No, your perspective is greater because you... were dragged to a museum one time and didn't really pay attention? Because you have delusions about "effort" and the difficulty of trompe l'oeil? For fuck's sake, read a book.
If all you can do is tell me that I can't be right because I'm less educated on art than someone who doesn't agree with me, that just tells me I'm probably right. I'll stand in front of an art PhD and tell them their degree is worthless and a waste of time because it didn't teach to see something an uneducated idiot like me can see.
Sorry, you can't get me to shut up through ad hominem and appeals to authority. You have to actually convince me I'm wrong. Argue your point or don't bother; you're just wasting your time otherwise.
Would you stand in front an astrophysicist PhD and tell them their degree is worthless because you can’t see dark matter and supersymmetry? Would you stand in front of an archaeology PhD and tell them their degree is worthless because you can obviously see that aliens created the pyramids? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Your idea of art as a purely subjective study isn’t held by anyone with even casual knowledge of the field. It’s like claiming mathematics is subjective because we all have different favorite numbers.
Multiple commenters have used pathos and ethos to argue with you because your understanding is so rudimentary and your ignorance so great that to argue the nature of art with you would be like trying to teach algebra to an ape. You cannot comprehend an actual argument from your starting point.
I for one don’t really like Warhol. I’m a spurned formalist along the likes of Greenberg and Fried, and I think the true inheritor of post-modernist conceptualism lies with Minimalists like Serra, Morris, Smithson, etc. I’m not convinced by Baudrillard, and I think the strongest Warhol is his early and late periods where he was much more concerned with illustration and surface treatment, respectively. I am still not such an uneducated simpleton so as to make the claim that Warhol isn’t art or worthy of art historical study. -This- is what an argument against Warhol looks like. Demonstrated knowledge of art history, methodology, and reasoning. You are claiming people aren’t engaging with you but you lack the fundamental skills to be engaged with. Again, this is like arguing mathematical proofs with someone who can’t multiply two numbers. Read a book!
>Would you stand in front an astrophysicist PhD and tell them their degree is worthless because you can’t see dark matter and supersymmetry? Would you stand in front of an archaeology PhD and tell them their degree is worthless because you can obviously see that aliens created the pyramids?
No. Obviously I don't have the same respect for all fields.
>-This- is what an argument against Warhol looks like. Demonstrated knowledge of art history, methodology, and reasoning.
See, you're misunderstanding. You expressed an idea in the form of an argument that might convince someone educated the same way you are, of its truth. I simply made an appreciation and then explained how I got to it. It was never meant to be convincing, it was just meant to be out there. And all I got were a bunch of people who said I shouldn't say that, or I shouldn't look at it that way, yet could offer no reason why I shouldn't say that, or why I shouldn't do that. You're doing it, too; you're just telling me to read a book. I'm not going to read a book on art history. I don't have the inclination or time, and my appreciation of art doesn't work like that the way it does for you. I have nothing to gain from reading a book on art, and much to lose. You're the one who thinks I shouldn't be saying the things I'm saying, convince me I shouldn't.
WHY am I wrong in approaching the subject in this manner? Because so far the only problem I see is that it ruffles the feathers of people with art degrees. If that really is the only reason then I simply do not care.
>I simply made an appreciation and then explained how I got to it. It was never meant to be convincing, it was just meant to be out there… WHY am I wrong in approaching the subject in this manner?
You’re asking me to justify to you why one shouldn’t flap their mouth about things they don’t know anything about and then stand by their willful ignorance when confronted by domain experts? You want me to convince you that it’s not ok to just spout bullshit and insist that it’s a valid position to hold irrespective of knowledge, methods, accuracy, reasoning, logic, research, justification, experience, etc etc? Lmfao. You’re delusional.
>Why? Why is that the question to ask? Why must be considered in this specific way, rather than any other?
Have you asked the same question about your definitions? You might as well ask why words have certain meanings rather than any other.
A short answer: art is commonly understood as an expression of thoughts, feelings, emotions, ideas, etc. in some form. Creating art is converting human thoughts and emotions into objects of art. Consumption of art is the reverse process: thoughts and emotions emerging when the object of art is consumed (seen, heard, etc).
Taking an art history course will leave you with a better answer. Maybe a google search on "what is art", too, if you actually put some effort into it.
>So something that's made to be made rather than to be seen is not art, even in the case that if someone did see it they would think it's art?
See, now you're getting closer. You're defining art by saying that it's art because someone who sees it thinks it's art, i.e. you're analyzing the emotional impact.
When an art object is made, the audience is the set of people that consumes it at has thoughts and emotions as a result. It may or may not include the artist themselves. In your example, the person that thinks it's art is the audience.
Without an audience, there is no art.
Something that's "made to be made" has the artist as its audience at the very least.
>No. No, no, no. There's no justification for this besides that you say so
I'd hope, common sense would be one. Sadly, it's an increasingly uncommon asset these days. In any case, it's me and everyone else in this thread, which could give a hint that you're missing something.
>Why can't I look at the thing in isolation and decide for myself what it's good for?
Can a caveman look at a microscope and decide for himself what it's good for? Absolutely. He can decide it's good for beating other people with. And then talk how there are many better sticks out there, and how anyone who thinks a microscope is valuable is an idiot.
And insofar as the caveman is concerned, he's right! He has no other use for a microscope because he is too limited in his understanding. He would be better off with a large stick.
You, too, certainly can do the same, but your understanding will only apply to yourself.
Insofar as other people are concerned (and your judgements of them), your opinion will be less than worthless, because it's only based on what's in your head, and there isn't enough there to judge others.
> If for my purposes it's a good screwdriver and I use it like that, is it wrong because I'm not properly interpreting the message the manufacturer embedded into the tool?
You're welcome to use a saw as a screwdriver.
But if you leave a one-star review for a saw because it's a shitty screwdriver, and start judging other people who like them for reasons beyond your understanding, you'll be laughed out of every room.
>Again, why? Exactly what prevents me from doing that?
Your ignorance. Which is what you'll actually be opining on instead of art and its merits.
There's a logical fallacy at the very basis of your thought:
- you decide what something is good for, without looking at a larger context
- you observe that it's not good in that way
These two statements are in contradiction to each other. The second statement shows that what you decided on isn't the right thing.
Instead, you conclude that the object is not good at all, and everyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot.
>Interesting line of reasoning. Mathematics is art, therefore mathematical merit is artistic merit. Artistic merit by my definition is about originality, therefore mathematical merit (being artistic) is about originality.
I have no idea where you are going with this. This wasn't what I wrote, and it doesn't make any sense to me either.
>I don't agree that mathematics is art with no qualifiers whatsoever. Mathematics is, very reductively, primarily concerned with the search for true statements, not with the search for beautiful statements
Says who? Not the mathematicians. And I am one[1] - so I am qualified to say this. Are you? If so, please show me your work, and I can use it as a basis of explaining things further.
Otherwise, you'd be better of listening to someone who has created works of mathematics and art (also see [1]).
As mathematicians, we see beauty in truth. But finding un-truths is even more fascinating. Posing a conjecture and finding counter-examples is fundamentally a part of mathematics.
So is "bad" math. "Lapses in mathematical reasoning"[2] is a great mathematics book.
Finding ways in which something we thought was true isn't is the crown achievement - like the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry.
Mathematics itself has been proven to be either inconsistent or incomplete[3]. And a lot of mathematics is concerned with things like Riemann's hypothesis (which may or may not be true), or the continuity hypothesis (which may or may not be answerable).
> Mathematics is, very reductively, primarily concerned with the search for true statements, not with the search for beautiful statements
Let me emphasize again that it is, in fact, the opposite.
Generating true statements is easy. Generating beautiful statements that are true is mathematics.
> nor with self-expression or cultural transmission.
Let me assure you that you are wrong on both accounts here as well.
There is a very strong cultural element in mathematics; different mathematical schools have different mathematical traditions.
Mathematics in inherently a cultural, group activity. It's all about self-expression. That's why theorems have names attached to them.
That's why we talk of "Lwow School of Mathematics"[4], for example.
Further discussion of this subject is out of scope. I ask you to not have strong opinions of this kind on mathematics if you are not a mathematician.
>I don't agree that mathematics is art with no qualifiers whatsoever
No art is without qualifiers. Mathematics is a kind of art. So is painting.
Not every calculation or result is art, and not every application of paint.
The qualifiers are what we are discussing.
>Calculus is useful, regardless of its history.
Useful to whom? Certainly not to the college student taking it only because it's a required course during the last semester.
>The reason people don't appreciate mathematics is ... not because they don't learn about the history
You have neither authority, experience, nor qualifications to say that.
>And if we're honest, they're right. Very few people will ever need to know calculus at any point in their lives (outside of school), and fewer still will need to calculate things by hand.
So, you have proven me right, and yourself wrong with this statement.
You very clearly demonstrate that there's no reason for most people to learn Calculus for the purpose of using it.
The conclusion should be : this is not WHY Calculus should be taught.
Not we should not teach Calculus.
You get the WHY wrong, everything else follows.
> But you're arguing that it's the way to appreciate art, and that if I don't do that I'm missing the point.
You are missing the point, indeed.
If you see something, and you like it, I am in no position to tell you that you are doing it wrong.
But if you are not enjoying something because you have no idea what it's for, I could point out a way that will change your experience.
I'm telling you that:
a)you're missing something, and
b)point you in the direction to learn more to find out what you're missing.
I can't implant that knowledge into your head, you have to go and actively learn.
This is not specific to art, mind you - which is why others are so irritated with your argument.
You can look at the first transistor ever made, and say that it's stupid because it's larger than a radio lamp, which does the same thing. You can't appreciate that invention without knowing the history of how it affected electronics engineering, the connections, the impact.
You don't need any of that to enjoy electronics. But you need to do that if you want to criticize it, which is what you are doing.
In fact, forget about art.
There's something in the world that a lot of people talk about. You look at it, and say it's stupid. We tell you that it may seem stupid to you, but regardless of your perception, it had an impact on the world, that there is more to that something than what you're getting, and what you need to do to see it.
You sound like a person that says that a book is stupid because they only read the cover, and doesn't know that one can open a book and there will be much more inside.
We are telling you to do that before you judge the book.
It may not be the way to enjoy books, as you put it, but if you don't do it (and decide, in isolation, that the cover is the only important thing), you are depriving yourself of something.
And trying to criticize and correct others based on that level of interacting with books is surely not wise.
On that note:
>Why can't I look at the thing in isolation
This is precisely one of the biggest themes and questions of modern art, most prominently - in late 19th / early-to-mid 20th century.
This question has been explored in depth before you were born.
Taking an art history course will expose you to that exploration, and allow you to answer it for yourself.
We really cannot do this for you, and we surely cannot do it in HN comment section.
This is a good question, but a good answer to it involves referring to a good deal of prior art and philosophy. To boot, the entire notion of symbolism requires a larger context to have things that a symbol can stand for, and symbolism is one of the most ancient forms of art.
The 20th century thinkers and artists have very conclusively shown that there is no such thing as a "thing in itself" when it comes to art in particular. There was never a time when art was a thing in itself.
Art pieces like Cage's 4'33" were made precisely as counter-examples to the claim that you even can make art as a thing in itself.
Of the Black Square, painted by Kazimir Malevich, a Ukrainian, in 1916, I can tell you that it was an important enough piece of work to be officially and specifically banned in the USSR for fifty years (1930 - 1980).
So I hope that, if anything, you'd have enough curiosity to find out why the Soviet regime considered it dangerous.
Which, perhaps, it was. The USSR collapsed in 1991.
Whether there was a connection or not isn't something you'll learn by looking at the painting in itself.
Same goes for Andy Warhol (born to Ukrainian parents in the US, incidentally).
Sincerely hoping that reading this will be a starting point of exploration and learning for you, and not an opportunity to double down on what you have already said.
>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).
>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.
>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.
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.
Andy Warhol arguably invented the cultural landscape we inhabit today, but fifty years before the iPhone: reality as entertainment, consumers as content creators, influencer marketing, and DIY viral fame. He's a fascinating pioneer and his impact on today's tech industry is hard to understate. It's well worth learning about his work, which goes far beyond the pop art prints.
Warhol's true skill was arguably self-promotion, there aren't a lot of people who think he was particularly skilled as a classical artist — but he developed a look, talked to all the right people, and made a brand of himself in a time where it was a lot more rare to do so.
This stuff is also fairly pedestrian to our eyes now because of Warhol's influence, he was doing this in the 60s, decades before anyone could say "looks like a photoshop filter"
That actually is one of the points of pop art. Why should a soup can be a piece of art? Why does our culture hold advertisements and products to such a high degree?
One of the keys to opening the world of modern art to me was that modern art isn’t about what you see so such as what it makes you feel or think about or discuss. It’s a starting point, not an ending.
Have you seen the artists who are celebrated today?
I stayed for the credits of a movie the other day and they listed all the musicians at the end. ~80% song attributions were formatted like:
`Song written by "unknown person". Performed by "Famous musical act"`. Maybe Warhol was like a proto version of being famous despite special talent, but it is almost all we get nowadays. I wonder if huge companies like Disney know that by distributing power (some people write, others perform, others do marketing, etc.) they can ensure they have final power and any artist can be replaced easily.
Totally different. When someone performs a piece by Beethoven everyone knows they are performing his work. Very few Beyonce/Taylor Swift/Nsync/whatever fans could name the people who actually write the songs. Classical composers were total rock stars of their period, they were well known and the face of their music.
Modern pop musicians have almost all of their work written by people who are intentionally kept in the shadows.
Being a composer is not a public facing profession anymore.
People mostly don't care about the composers/producers of modern pop music. But if you want to find out it is really easy on all music platforms (Spotify, Youtube music etc).
Being a performer and a composer is a very different skill set and a very different business model.
Also, it is very difficult to compare the amount of fame of someone in 1800 vs someone in 2020. I am not so sure being a composer was ever a "public facing profession".
Isn't this sort of thing people would follow with the joke "someone just discovered filters in photoshop"? I'm reminded of AVGN's review of Plumbers don't Wear Ties.
I'm aware, but it's at the same level of quality. I don't see what's so special about the results of some guy fooling around with his computer's paint program.
I didn't do it because it's a shitty idea. You see, I have this thing called "shame". I would feel ashamed to attach my name to something that I know is bad.
He didn't scam people only in the same sense that someone is selling Bitcoin at its current price. It's the same speculative nonsense as always. God, people annoy me.
In science many people have simultaneously discovered similar aspects of a problem - or someone discovered something and were ignored until someone else rediscovered it independently later. e.g. who invented the computer? or who discovered that cleanliness was essential in hospitals? Surely art is similar?
Yeah it is interesting how art is not a contextless buffer of pixels. I think that's actually the main thing that's interesting about art throughout history.
Warhol paints Debbie on stage:
https://youtu.be/_QST1ZAJ29o?t=719