Comment by theoh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theoh | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What Close actually wrote:

"Even if your motives are not bad, I still do not want my work trivialized. I must fight you because if I know of your project, and do nothing to exercise my legal rights, that will put me in a position where I can’t fight the next, even more egregious usage of my copyrighted image and use of my name. It may be an amusing project and many people might like it, but it is MY art that is trivialized, MY career you are jeopardizing, MY legacy, which I have to think about for my children, and MY livelihood. I must fight to protect it. I hope you will realize the harm you are doing me and my work that you claim you admire and voluntarily shut down the site so as to avoid a law-suit."

It was amicably resolved.

http://hyperallergic.com/54104/my-chuck-close-problem/

Scott Blake's Close-like images were a travesty of Close's paintings, and they potentially give the impression (to an uninformed bystander) that there's no creativity or individuality in Close's work. The fact is that the similarity with Close's work is recognizable, and Close's work can be devalued by imitation ("bad money drives out good", etc.)

Dean L.'s work is more convincing as an image, but it doesn't avoid the problem of dilution by not mentioning Close's name. It's still obviously a Chuck Close filter that acts in a way that completely erases/ignores the materiality, labour, and individual creativity that Close put into his paintings.

I'm no fan of Close, but he was absolutely right to act to try to stop this from happening.

Scott's TEDx presentation says otherwise[1] - he was pretty much against Chuck's allegations to the point where he did a tongue-in-cheek presentation.

> It's still obviously a Chuck Close filter that acts in a way that completely erases/ignores the materiality, labour, and individual creativity that Close put into his paintings.

I disagree. In no way does that ignore Chuck's materiality, labour and individual creativity. In fact, it sheds more light on the process (which is very procedural and art critics would argue it is very "mechanical"). There is a tremendous amount of creativity in figuring out, as the OP has done, the underlying algorithmic beauty of replicating Chuck's works. Your definition of creative endeavor (materiality, labour) is profoundly limiting and very "physical".

I feel the opposite - OP's algorithm is way more interesting than Chuck's "materiality" and "labour". I will resort to Feynman's clip on 'Beauty of Flowers'[2], which does a better job of explaining my point.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKndFPr4vWk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo

Sure there's creativity in writing a Chuck Close filter, or a Monet filter, or a van Gogh filter: they're all conceivable and likely to become popular.

The problem is that it's not polite and indeed somewhat aggressive to put forward a bit of code as an equivalent to the human brain. Remember it's the artist's brain that's the object of interest here, as much as any well-understood but beautiful flower or pebble. Since the brain is the most complex object we know of, it's fair for anyone to feel insulted when something they create intuitively, using their whole personality, is imitated using a few lines of code. It's really a dilution of their personal "trademark" output, to frame it in commercial terms.

In a court of law, you can't do various frivolous/cheeky things without risking being found in contempt of court.

Society as a whole isn't so different, and Feynman is not a good guide to civilized, socially conscious behaviour. Remember the time he got someone seriously injured because he wanted to unmask a perpetual motion hoax? http://hoaxes.org/comments/papparticle2.html

It might have been an innocent act on Feynman's part, but bear in mind that he was just trying to expose the guy for his own slightly arrogant satisfaction. Not a good look when that ends in serious injuries.

Also, "What do you care what other people think?", the title of one of the entertaining Feynman books... Well, going back to the issue of trademark dilution, actually, in civilized society, you know as well as I do that considering other people's feelings and livelihoods is crucially important. It's not merely a conventional matter of piety, deference or respect, although sometimes those things are appropriate. It is a question of humility.

(That might not be a very HN sentiment because having a conscience gets in the way of disruption.)

> Society as a whole isn't so different, and Feynman is not a good guide to civilized, socially conscious behaviour. Remember the time he got someone seriously injured because he wanted to unmask a perpetual motion hoax? http://hoaxes.org/comments/papparticle2.html It might have been an innocent act on Feynman's part, but bear in mind that he was just trying to expose the guy for his own slightly arrogant satisfaction. Not a good look when that ends in serious injuries.

Interesting article, thanks for sharing. It seems like an accident accord the article? I wouldn't be so quick to draw conclusions about Feynman's character from some accident. He has done notorious things with the CIA!

I was just trying to make a point. It could have been anyone, not necessarily Feynman, that sought beauty in various dimensions...not just the tangible paint and materiality. This point of view says nothing about civilized society or not appreciating what Chuck Close did. What the OP did just adds to the beauty of it all, doesn't take anything away from whatever it is that you romanticized about, i.e. "in the labour, materiality and individual creativity." This kind of view point is regressive in my opinion.

Feynman did nothing wrong. The guy built a bomb to cover up his fraud. He probably intended to set it off regardless of what Feynman did, according to your link. Regardless, Feynman had no way of knowing there was a bomb there.

It's completely appalling that he got away with it, despite killing a person and seriously injuring 2 more. He even successfully sued Feynman.

According to your link, the person died (and two more were injured) but the cause was a fraudster rigging their perpetual motion machine to explode to avoid it being discovered to be a scam.

Feynman's actions had no impact on what happened, at least according to the version you linked to, which is Feynman hinself's take on things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com