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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Are there any documented studies where art experts were challenged to differentiate between:

- abstract paintings by someone universally regarded as "good", and something done by a very young child?

- a piece of new, legitimate, modern art vs maybe a pile of random things from a junkyard

I'm aware it might just be me that's confused, but I have a suspicion much of the abstract and/or modern art world is void of value...that is, without lots of context about the artist and their intentions.

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Your comment reminds me of a scene in "The Great Beauty" where the little girl expresses her tantrum with buckets of paint hurled on a very large canvas. The grown-ups stood back, fascinated, it was kinda obscene.

Here's an interesting article that addresses your question (well, partially):

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/03/1...

That's exactly what I was looking for...thank you!

Why should context not matter for art (or anything else really)? Suppose you come across a what appears to be a picture of Mozart in the sand on a beach. Doesn't it matter to your understanding of what you see if it was drawn by an artist, the happenstance by the motion of the waves, or a crawling turtle?

The times I've seen these things, sufficient context was not provided.

A picture of Mozart (even if appearing by chance in the sand) isn't in my definition of these abstract or modern art pieces that are confusing to me. I'm asking about the things that I have trouble recognizing as something worth looking at. Blobs and splatters of paint, or as shown elsewhere in the comments, a bag of garbage.

That is one of the things museums do, the curators put things in the museum because they think people should look at it (the act of which of course becomes part of it). Suppose you picked up a book on real analysis without understanding basic arithmetic. Would it be the fault of the author that you didn't understand what you were looking at? Would they have done something wrong?

One way to think about art is that each piece is made at a point in time but is participating in a long din of conversation(s). If you don't understand the general arc of the conversation (or at least the conversation going on right around you), you will miss some of the aesthetic value of any piece. This is as true of Michelangelo as it is of Barnet Newman even if you have more context-free aesthetic/technical appreciation for Michelangelo's work.

Most museums also have docents which are usually more than happy to talk about various pieces.

Someone must have surely done one of those clickbait articles featuring the picture question 'Modern Abstract Art or Random Picture of Painter's Scaffold'?

The context is important, but that an artwork does not have to have any special value in of itself, certainly is a change that some people do not get used to.

To be clear, I didn't mean just monetary value. I can appreciate an interesting geometric pattern made of scrap steel. Or a translucent weave that reveals a leaf, made from dental floss.

What's hard to a appreciate is a semi-arranged pile of trash that's supposed to be a commentary on "disposable society". But which required little time or skill to create.

I also didn't mean monetary value. I meant the value you can assign to an object or performance by itself, with no context.

For example, you can look at an Impressionist painting, and most people would agree that by itself, it has some aesthetic value. Knowing the context of that painting might make it even more valuable, in other ways.

However, the pile of trash you mention does not hold any intrinsic value by most standards (you can find lots of those in any alley), but knowing the context, the commentary and the intention, makes it valuable.

Think of it like an inside joke.

> "maybe a pile of random things from a junkyard"

I definitely thought one exhibit at a modern art museum was junk from a remodel or something, because it was a pile of drywall, plastic sheeting, and other types of normal construction junk.

Pierre Brassau, Monkey Artist

http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/pierre_brassau_monkey_ar...

My boss has some art in his apartment; whenever he's dialed in over video from home, I try to figure out if it's drawn by his nieces and nephews, or is worth $15,000 per.

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