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Comment by skookumchuck | Hacker News Reader

I visited an art museum recently. There were rooms with nice oil paintings, and a couple of rooms with modern art in it.

I was convinced the guards in the modern art section were there to keep the janitors from tossing the modern art into the trash bins.

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For your "entertainment" here 3 links to art that got destroyed by cleaners (apologies for the German):

http://www.spiegel.de/karriere/putzfrau-zerstoert-kunstwerk-...

http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/galerie-sala-murat-in-bari-re...

http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/weggeschrubbte-k...

So your assumption might not be so crazy after all.

Last time I was at a modern art museum I was leaning against something that was pushed up against the wall. Turns out it was one of the exhibits. The security guard saw me, smiled, shook his head and walked over. It happened daily, he said.

Another place had literal garbage as part of the exhibits in a room. Refuse scattered around small partial scenes of rooms, with no physical divider between you and it, and really no set path through some of it.

> I was convinced the guards in the modern art section were there to keep the janitors from tossing the modern art

I saw a work of "modern art" on the television once, it was a rectangular canvas with small torn-off squares glued to it in rows and columns. Each rectangle was painted a slightly different shade of green, and each one had a (different) number on it. I thought it was crap. Then the artist explained what it meant to him:

He had been in Vietnam, and was still coping with the fact that he made it out alive when so many others, just like him and equally deserving, hadn't made it. The khaki-coloured rectangles represented the soldiers who had been killed, and the numbers highlighted the randomness of their living or being killed.

I didn't think it was crap after hearing that.

So sad these people are down voting you.

IMNSHO if most 5 year old can do it, it's not art.

If you insist it is art, fine, it is very shitty art. Very good confidence trick though!

If the intention of art is to make you feel something, there are plenty of artists that have the intention of making you feel literally that.

I mean, just look at Fountain by Duchamp. The "Skill" isn't in the production of the object involved, it's in the wit or thought of the artist.

Incidentally, it probably wasn't Marcel Duchamp who came up with that artwork, but Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven¹.

1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/06/14/famous-urinal-fountain-...

Oh we're not going to get into a deep dive into Dada, intention, and idea genesis. That's WAY too much to try and cover when we can't even get people to understand that they're just Stuckists who don't know what Stuckists are.

I sympathize with your view (although with s/5 year old/me/). However, over the years I have come to realize that many of the things I used to think I could have done, I actually could not have...to say nothing of your 5 year old. It might look like a few apparently random splotches of paint could have been put there by you, but in many cases looks are deceiving.

You might watch a grandmaster chess game and think that you could make those moves. Or perhaps you see a solution to a traveling salesman decision problem and think "it's easy to see there exists a path that short". But in both cases you're mistaken. The moves you would have played wouldn't be as good as the grandmaster's. The path you would find wouldn't be as short. And the paint splotches you would throw on the canvas wouldn't look as compelling.

Yes, there does exist shitty "art"--things that you or your 5 year old could have done. But I suspect it's less common than you think.

I thought they'd actually done blinded studies that showed an inability to distinguish between "real" art and amateur attempts?

This is what some people who don't understand any art history say about art.

You can often hear this with statements like, "Picasso just drew cubes! Anyone can do that!"

I saw one in a museum where the canvas was simply painted a solid color.

Yes, anyone can do that.

There was a guard near it, too, watching me, making sure I didn't approach closer than a line taped on the floor.

I could almost hear the artist laughing at the gullibility of the modern art patrons.

My definition of art is something that myself, a no-talent hack, could not do in a weekend. Art really ought to take some non-ordinary non-trivial skills to produce. Otherwise, there is simply nothing special about it.

It's just like nice furniture. I could saw up some lumber and nail it together, but nobody would ever look at it and throw money at me. Nice furniture takes years of learning to figure out how to make it.

yes, modern art is a love/hate kind of thing. However, I don't recall seeing any news about modern art being stolen recently (even though some can be worth silly money). Using your example we can conclude that art thieves could be janitors but never security guards.

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