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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Whenever people discuss about contemporary art I get reminded of these incredibly poignant Soviet war paintings [1] which manage to partially describe what the atrocities on the Eastern Front meant for the people involved, but which are nevertheless a lot less well-known compared to contemporary art "darlings" like Jackson Pollock whose works don't tell me absolutely anything and who had his career propped up by the CIA at some point. [2]

Later edit: I mean, compare this Soviet painting called "The Last Letter" [3] to Pollock's "One, Number 31, 1950" (taken from the artist's wikipedia page). The first painting instantly made me feel the blood flowing through my veins, even though I had last seen it 7 or 8 years ago (when I also left a related comment here on HN), while Pollock's painting doesn't make me feel anything.

[1] http://www.allworldwars.com/Soviet%20War%20Paintings.html

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...

[3] http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures065.jpg

[4] http://www.moma.org/media/W1siZiIsIjIyMzgwNSJdLFsicCIsImNvbn...

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So, I personally get an emotional response to Pollock, especially that particular one, I actually have a MoMA catalog on my bookshelf with that entry bookmarked with my admission ticket from 2010 when I went to see it ( https://imgur.com/a/hFBR7Nu ). The size is a factor as well, there is no way to look at it on a computer screen that is close to how you look at it in person ( https://www.moma.org/wp/inside_out/wp-content/uploads/2012/0... ). But we definitely have different tastes.

Regarding those soviet paintings, Goya depicted war and suffering, and is very well known and highly regarded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_of_May_1808 . But your point is the core of what the article is trying to get at. The people who evaluate art are looking for something that isn't being satisfied by the same criteria as i.e. journalism, cuisine, even music to a certain extent.

I tried to understand contemporary art, up to a point, there was a time when I used to buy each issue of the FT - Weekend Edition so that I could read Georgina Adam’s articles on what was the hippest thing being transacted and the like, but in the end pretty much all of it meant nothing to me.

Reguarding the representation of war, I’m afraid 200-year old paintings don’t do it for me anymore, modern warfare is so much more different and more atrocious and industrialized compared to how things happened two or three centuries ago that we do need the power of art to make us, humans, help us understand at least some part of it all. I pretty much admire the new-Hollywood directors who had the guts to put on screen what the Vietnam war meant for all those involved, from the local Vietnamese population to the US soldiers to the relatives of the US soldiers at home. For comparison the Iraqi and the Afghan wars were pretty much invisible for today’s artists, with notable and very few exceptions (like Brian de Palma).

I like the Goya painting in particular because a firing squad still looks the same: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Du39t4jWsAIe6_b.jpg .

If any notable art came out of the Iraqi wars it is probably hanging in Baghdad, we might find out about it eventually.

ISIS has put out a great deal of notable art, in the form of propaganda videos.

In the same way that Mao era paintings are valuable in understanding the history of early communist China, I believe the ISIS videos will be valuable to future historians in understanding how the radicalization and subsequent wars in the Middle East happened.

FT?

Financial Times, their weekend supplement can be quite interesting at times.

Goya's black paintings do a pretty good job of depicting the horrors of war, and being timeless as well. At least to me.

I got to see these in the Prado last year. It was a piety emotionally stunning experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Paintings#/media/File:Fr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Paintings#/media/File:La...

Contemporary anti Vietnam-War art was set up as Korean war or older. It's un-PC to directly criticize a current war, so artists apply a thin veil of barely plausible deniability to get past censorship.

I also get an emotional response to Pollack, similar to the emotional response I get to the painting of a colored square done on the TV show "House Refabbers" where they take a canvas, paint a background in one color and then a square on the background in another color.

It's not a deep emotion, of course, it's a fleeting sensation, really, like smelling a flower or listening to a "boop boop" sound effect on the tram. It's a trite emotion, which is the best way to describe the reaction I get to Pollock - trite.

I think that particular Pollock piece would make for a great panel or wallpaper in a basement. There's a certain movement and a not-unpleasant interplay with the colors - again, similar to the "boop, boop" on various public transportation system sound effects.

You can call it "art" sure, I think "craft" would be better, or perhaps "decorative arts" is probably the best way to describe Pollock. I recall a youtube video of the painting of a countertop in a kind of "hip, modern" kitchen that had a similar aesthetic.

Of course those Soviet paintings of WWI are far more meaningful than Pollack's visually not-unpleasant background color mix.

The soviets are just craftsmen, people skilled at doing the mechanical work of a camera. They are precursors to the modern soap opera or shock website or GoFundMe scam. It's easy to elicit a strong emotional response by playing on the well understood heartstrings.

This game is silly. Denigrating a work of art for being different from another work of art is not critique, it is bitterness. Life is short. Speak up for the beautiful things you understand, not against the things you don't understand.

I went to the Pollock's Wikipedia page and at first thought that the photo of his studio floor was one of his paintings.

Apparently, this is considered a very good result for abstract paintings: "Throughout the experiments, the students typically picked the professional pieces between 60% and 70% of the time."

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

Thanks for the links! I have some commentary on some of the pieces that I found most interesting:

http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures063.jpg

Dreamlike imagery, sleeping position, very vertical, contrasting colors, a strange bit of peace in war and imminent death, jagged fields that the man is hurdling towards.

http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures041.jpg

The men seem to melt into the trenches and become part of the mud. The warm colors evoke a feeling of sunlight, yet feel horrific. The muted faces are reminiscent of Edvard Munch's Scream. little explosions, or are they grasses, pop off everywhere. Chaos

http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures055.jpg

Good historical view of the hardships that women underwent in the absence of men. The little boy's face is almost plastic and is the only one seen in the painting. A lot of subtle commentary on the soviet system in here, as it ended up just like the old ways of the Czars

http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures069.jpg

Just like a Degas, at least to me. Not seeing the face of the player leaves you guessing as to how this solider got to be where he is. Was he a pianist before the draft? How did he learn to play? The gun is on his back and prominently central to the painting. The scattered papers tell a story of a battle and fleeing in panic. The highlighter colors give a waviness to it all, a sense of uncertainty and serenity pervades the piece

http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures057.jpg

Great use of sky, water and man. A private returns home, but to what? The war is over for him, but the peace is just as uncertain. Will the clouds of this spring day pour on him, or will it stay sunny?

http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures019.jpg

The structure of the colors here is stark, obvious, yet wonderful. Black enemy, white allies, red sky of soviet victory. The use of triangular imagery. Very Picasso-y

http://www.allworldwars.com/image/008/SovietPictures065.jpg

The news arrives and it is bad. Just like the immigrant-farmer mother picture of the US depression. The woman shines in the dark room, her child tries to support her, her back is straight all the same despite the news. She faces off-stage and is nearly pushed off the bench by her child, who is in the center. The little window, her former existence, is full of things and life, she faces her new darker life with what appears to be a shroud and a rifle leaned up against the wall. The letter still hangs brightly in her right hand.

Not even a Pollock fan but the idea that a scan of a Pollock painting is at all similar to standing in front of one seems like a huge stretch. They absolutely huge and the paint is layered on very thick in a way that almost forces you to deconstruct the process of its production as you look at it.

This other painting on the other hand, I'd be very surprised if there's more to be gotten from seeing it in person that what's already on my screen. Going beyond that, a photo that captures the same emotions would be exponentially stronger for me personally too.

I don't travel much or look at much art, but I have happened to seen that Pollock. It is true. You can't ignore it, it's very palpable. I'm not sure I liked it, but I definitely felt something strongly.

I was wary of Pollock's works, but yes: they really are fantastic experiences in person.

> a photo that captures the same emotions...

Your comment hits on something many people miss. We have photos today. We didn’t in the very recent past. I showed my grandma (96) photos on an iPad and her response was “there’s no reason to paint anymore”. She’s painted her entire life. Artists used to struggle to invent techniques for representing reality, now photos have made that less compelling and artists are looking for other challenges.

I think the problem is that you're comparing art pieces that have different purposes, and even more, different value systems. Those Soviet pieces are meant to be poignant, they're meant to be instantly emotionally evocative, and they're immensely successful in creating great content. The artist there is valuing impact, and truthful representation of a thing, be it the horror of war or the heartbroken silence of world shattered by a letter. However, these works are derivative. They are not novel in how they show their content; they use the same techniques that were popularized and perfected years ago. This is fine, because these paintings are complete in and of themselves.

Pollock on the other hand wasn't focused so much on the content of what he was creating, but on the process. Pollock wasn't trying to make you feel a thing, Pollock was trying to make a statement about what it means to be art. Pollock and other modern artists aren't looking to provide a story in isolation - they're iterating and expanding on a corpus of techniques, and means of representation, and questions about what it means to be art. Do I need to draw a person to show human suffering? Do I need to represent reality to make something meaningful? Can I create something that is recognizable as art while working under these arbitrary limitations?

I think this is true of any art/skill/techne - once the art reaches a certain level of maturity and sophistication. For practitioners, the new frontiers are not in the content you create (because it's established that you can create anything) but the process by which you make it. Look at modern poetry, and literature. A lot of the time these are very tangled, frustrating pieces to read because they break with the forms we are used to and iterate on them. Many of these aren't written to tell a story, or to make you feel, but to explore how one tells a story, or how one paints a thought in words. You see this to an extent in programming - there's very little value to writing conway's tree of life in brainfuck or competing to see who can write the smallest program that can reproduce the mona lisa in ASCII, but we do it because these limitations are challenging and cool to us.

(I'd argue that a Rothko painting can show just as much poignancy as any of those Soviet paintings you showed above.)

These are really pretty great, and do what - in my opinion - art should do (in as much as art should do anything at all). And that is to tell a story.

The best paintings provide a connection with a subject - person, place or time - and maybe stir up some emotion about the scene. Some of my favorite are 16th and 17th century Dutch paintings of naval battles. The artists were the war correspondents of their time and their work is as moving as any photograph from a modern battlefront.

Pollock's paintings tell a story in their own way too. I worked in theater in high-school and college and also painting boats and for an industrial coatings company. In short, I spent a lot of time around paint. A Pollock painting reminds me of these workshops: of years, sometimes decades of overspray, splatter, drips, spills and all of the other marks of "work being done here".

The scarred and stained surface of the workbench from my grandfather's garage could hang in a museum. Sixty years of paint and oil; holes from when tools were bolted to it or when parts were drilled; cuts from countless handsaws; scorch marks from blowtorches and soldering irons.

The painting is like the artistic expression of the evidence of work accomplished.

These paintings are interesting as a sort of juxtaposition of the soviet "Socialist Realism" style with the harsh reality of war. They are also clearly technically adept.

Jackson Pollock's paintings are interesting because he was the first to apply his technique in a studied way. They don't translate well to the digital era, but there is a certain arresting physicality to them when you see one in real life. Many of them are huge, and are not displayed within a frame. You can get very close and see the layers of paint rising up and the aging exposed canvas beneath.

Pollock is more famous than these painters because his work is distinctive. These soviet painters are good at painting, and you obviously connect to their subject matter, but comparing their work from [1], its hard to distinguish any of them as individual artists as their styles are only subtly different, much like Pollock's early work was fairly derivative of the original abstract expressionists and much like someone today deliberately aping a Pollock would not be celebrated in the same way (if not derided as a hack).

That said, I don't think figurative art is objectively better or worse than abstract art. Its purpose is different.

Pollock is an odd target here in a way, because the man was actually skilled, he produced things which proved hard to copy. Unlike a lot of later very-abstract artists, who really were all about their timing / positioning / contacts etc.

I would have to google a lot but there was a nice mathematical investigation of this, in which the summary was something like that he produced a very consistent scaling of details from very small to quite large, in a way which matches natural scenes. Whereas fake Pollocks don't show this, and perhaps that is why they aren't as pleasing.

Also seems like if you're going to rate a painting purely on how much of a rush it gives you to see it, having a subject matter like war that kicks right at the base of your humanity and then comparing it to an abstraction is a bit of a rigged game... I mean even I could probably write a country song dealing with really simple subject matter that would make my mom cry, it's how people are built to react to stuff like that. But it doesn't mean I'm a great artist.

Whenever people discuss about contemporary art I am amazed that they see themselves somehow divorced from the larger entertainment industry. Once we acknowledge that artists are selling an experience, a pleasure, to art buyers then the 2m urinal makes perfect sense.

People are buying a pleasurable experience and each has a different taste. Some people want a light show and so go to a big rock concert. Some people want a pretty painting to look at while eating breakfast. So they buy a painting. Some people like the feeling of being better than other people. So they buy objects that, for them and their peers, are a badge. They demonstrate how much better their owners are than persons without such objects. Many people like this feeling and are willing to pay.

Some of these people buy flashy cars to show themselves off as they drive to work. Others buy paintings by the great masters and squirrel them away in a vault only to bring them out for dinner parties. In that context, a 2m$ urinal isn't all that different. It is an object that bestows barging rights on its owner. Compared to a great many cars and paintings, both of which come with substantial maintenance costs, 2m$ for a bit of porcelain is cheep.

I worked in a place with a big collection of modern art. Initially my impression was “what a bunch of nonsense”. But when you look at it in context, it isn’t without meaning, and is often beautiful in its own way. It is thought provoking.

While I sometimes question the talent required to create some of these pieces relative to other works, it’s difficult to really judge without context. Many of the things that I value in my profession no doubt seem silly or trivial to laymen as well.

The Soviet War paintings you link to are well executed but seem completely unoriginal to me. I can't see any reason why these paintings would be famous.

Obviously very subjective, but modern art seems like a case of emperor's new clothes to me, a humble engineer.

When I was in college I would see art around campus take the form of random metal shapes welded together, concrete blobs, or Pollock-esque splatters and shake my head.

How can you judge a category of art for which there are no rules?

I can look at Michelangelo's "The David" and be awed to the core at how he was able to replicate lifelike looking veins in marble. It's difficult for me to even fathom his skill level but I recognize that it is much, much higher than mine.

But a sideways urinal with some marker on it? Anyone with no skill can do random things with random items and call it art.

"Any sufficiently advanced art is indistinguishable from garbage"

Anybody could do it, but they didn't and you didn't either. It's really easy to bag on any art with that line of reasoning, but the fact of the matter is that art lives in time and space, and at the time that piece was made nobody else did it, and readymade had a colossal influence on every other aspect of modern art (and even design) that came after that. It's easy to dismiss it as a urinal with marker when you ignore the context in which it was created and presented and the influence it had on other art, much of which is universally regarded as beautiful.

With invention of photography artists realized that there is no reason to depict reality anymore. But they also realized that there is much more happening than watching image. It is whole experience of contexts, mood of place and the way how the art is shown and all kinds of subtle things.

It is not about what anyone can physically do nor if it's easy or hard. It is about the ideas and navigating culture and finding interesting connections. It is opposite of random.

It's like saying "But this textfile with some wierd file extension? Anyone with no skill can write random characters on keyboard and call it programming"

Don't get me wrong i hate contemporary art but there are many interesting and important ideas coming out of it.

It's just not made for general public anymore. And people in that bubble don't care. That type of art was replaced by tattoos, illustrators, photographers and even popular movies/games etc.

If you pursue art academically, you are expected to push the form. Much like a CS PhD is expected to do novel research, an MFA is trying to make something nobody has ever seen before. In both cases, there are many practitioners that fail at this. But in both situations, their work is inaccessible to laymen by its very nature, produced after ingesting massive quantities of the prior art in their respective fields.

Not criticising any art or artists; but don't believe in the camera argument. Paintings do not look like photographs at all; they are often images of things that do not and never have existed. Many of them could only be created using human imagination; and reflect some complex human culture and society at a point in time.

I too find myself in constant awe when in the presence of renaissance masters. I can't stop returning because italy is dripping with it every where you turn, constantly full of awe-inspiring surprises. In terms of workmanship, there is nothing since which compares to even the 10th-best basilica in rome.

But I don't appreciate those nearly as much as I do no-named postmodern pieces, even procedurally-generated ones. There are so many curious layers of questions that arise when staring into the abstract and being left to your own perception to pull out appreciable components. So much to wonder about the artist, his intentions, and his chaotic vision or process. It is far deeper than masterful material work.

Considering how absolutely we are able to control materials these days, particularly now that atomic-level artificial composition is within our power, I find the questions of what? why? why not? or even lol wtf? far more appetizing to modern curiosity.

Modernism in the arts has a bit of a path-dependency problem that tends to intentionally obscure the "artistic value" of the bleeding edge from the uninitiated, but which can make the art more meaningful to those who are familiar with the context.

I'll use jazz as an example, since I'm most familiar with that history. You can start with something as approachable, if disorganized as "Jelly Roll Blues"[0], and polish the genre into "Take the A Train" [1] as it became more generally popular. After that, though, the bleeding edge of the genre self-protects itself away from the common ear by growing increasingly obscure, with bop [2], modal jazz [3], free jazz [4??] becoming progressively less approachable to the uninitiated ear, to the point that the the unfamiliar ear can hear the latter and find itself unable to recognize even as "music", while someone familiar with the genre can see the path and appreciate the work in context.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt203us6TME

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb2w2m1JmCY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2tvlp7RnlM

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwmRQ0PBtXU

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU

Oh man, some of the stuff my friends are listening to these days is amazing music, they've got the algorithms to prove it! Something about listening to the notes that aren't played or some such. Music that should be heard, but not listened to.

Check out some of the stuff Mike Gao is putting out with the use of his Polyplayground app.

One thing to consider is that being a case of the emperor's new clothes is intentional. Consider The Fountain again:

The artist had the audacity to put a urinal in a gallery. It's not so much that this was a particularly lovely piece of ceramic (though some may think so). The point is the meta-awareness that urinals don't belong here.

The rule-breaking is the art. The fact the emperor has no clothes is the exact reason people were talking about it. It's not that no one has ever seen a naked person before! But the emperor?! That's not supposed to happen!

Art is the production of veblen goods. Duchamp, in his genius, realized that though the ability to buy something painfully handcrafted does signal wealth, buying literal garbage is a much better display of wealth. Someone who can afford to buy a meticulously painted portrait, well, one may be will willing to make sacrifices for beauty. Someone able to spend millions on literal garbage - now that is a rich man.

Another aspect is photography allowed normal people access to create cheap reproductions of beautiful art. High-class people used to be able to distinguish themselves from the mob with beautiful things the mob couldn't afford.

But this does not work with cheap reproductions allowing one to signal the same taste.

In this way, there became an incentive for high-class people to acquire and inculcate a taste for art that is actively repulsive to distinguish themselves from those normal people who desire beautiful things.

Mostly this doesn't matter. They are only hurting themselves. But the effect of these incentives on public architecture has been pretty horrifying.

> Duchamp, in his genius, realized that though the ability to buy something painfully handcrafted does signal wealth, buying literal garbage is a much better display of wealth. Someone who can afford to buy a meticulously painted portrait, well, one may be will willing to make sacrifices for beauty. Someone able to spend millions on literal garbage - now that is a rich man.

> Mostly this doesn't matter. They are only hurting themselves. But the effect of these incentives on public architecture has been pretty horrifying.

This is a very good analysis summary.

But at what point does daring rule-breaking degenerate into mere gimmickry. I guess I can understand why piece generated so much interest in it's time, but since then we've been subjected to a relentless parade of urinals, cow corpses, faeces, signed brillo boxes etc. At this point we've seen the emperor naked ad nauseum

The _second_ time it's done! The way I see it, the first person to hang an all white canvas in an art gallery is a genius. The second, third, and fourth, not so much.

Eventually it becomes interesting again, though. The guy who does nothing but white canvases gets a degree of notoriety after a while. And the three thousand, two hundredth guy who does nothing but white canvases blows up because now it's funny that people are still doing that.

'First!', 'Frist!!!', 'FIRST!!!1111lol!' and other web comment poop is born of the same impulse.

At that point it becomes a meme. Are memes art?

Memes are absolutely art. Why not?

That's actually the thesis behind my startup, Memes On Canvas: https://www.memesoncanvas.com

Amazing, good luck with your lawsuits. /s

Sure, if it's played out, you have to do something different. It's the logic of publicity: whatever gets people's attention works, until it doesn't.

I think this is an interesting way to approach art, actually: you can walk through a museum admiring artists for how they were able to get away with something different.

Although, in this age of memes, maybe it's more interesting to see what holds lasting attention?

I think it's easier to appreciate the skill involved in making a piece of art than it is to appreciate the art piece itself. Some people (myself included), may even prefer appreciating the skill in and of itself, independent of the art.

Further, I think it's easier to comprehend how difficult it must be to produce a realistic sculpture or painting or what have you, compared to an abstract piece. As the piece becomes more abstract, appreciating it requires, I think, a lot more contextual information that the viewer may simply not have.

Of course, some art may just be crap. Who's to say?

Nowadays, rule-breaking is no longer provocative. It's derivative. We all got the memo: there's no set definition of art, it doesn't need to be skillfully made, it doesn't need to be beautiful, it can be offensive, blah blah blah. It's not clever any more.

I respect Duchamp. He made his point so eloquently that none of the imitators are adding anything to the conversation.

See Banksy's "Love is in the Bin". People are still excited when artists break convention, even if it gets harder and harder to do something unexpected.

"it gets harder and harder to do something unexpected."

I just found something!

https://designyoutrust.com/2016/07/guy-paints-over-shit-graf...

I'm generally pretty fond of taking a devil's advocate position when it comes to modern art. But regarding your specific example of "The David", let me ask you: which aspect of the sculpture is the art?

I would argue that replicating lifelike veins in marble is not the artistic part of David. That the craft - and surely many of Michaelangelo's contemporaries (and indeed many sculptors today) were also capable craftsmen when it came to sculpting. The art is the body language, expression, and overall "feel" of the piece.

This comes into sharp relief when you examine the work of someone like Robert Mapplethorpe[1] - who wanted to be a sculptor, but realized he could often achieve the same artistic goals with models and photography. He wanted to capture beauty and emotion through the human form - and the medium was just a means to an end.

All of this is to say that contemporary art is capable of communicating the same feelings as more classical artistic styles - and those feelings are really the point. The comparison between David and some college piece is also unfair. It has always been true 99% of everything is crap. What is the best contemporary art will only be apparent in retrospect. Stuff you see around a college campus is likely not even the best of contemporary art at the time it's created (that's why it's on a campus). Comparing that to art that has had 300+ years of societal filtering doesn't really make sense.

One of my favourite pieces of contemporary art is "Fuck Death" by Leon Golub[2]. I like its straightforward starkness and the way it seems hastily done - as if the painter was in a hurry because death is, indeed, coming. The technical aspects of this piece are, honestly, not very impressive. It's a very simple watercolour. But it speaks to me in a way that classical depictions of death, with all their craft and realism, really don't. That ability to communicate feeling is the art. The choice of medium or style is just aesthetic preference.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mapplethorpe

[2] http://interrum.tumblr.com/post/59580566966/bidartanalysis-f...

Edit: I am also a humble engineer, so I'm probably just re-inventing art theory 101 here. But I don't think contemporary art is as worthless as many seem to think.

>How can you judge a category of art for which there are no rules?

Why are you assuming that modern art is arbitrary, random and has no rules?

For that matter, why do you seem to assume the purpose of art is to be "judged" according to some objective set of rules?

Have you tried to study any modern artistic movements, or artists, and what those movements or artists were actually trying to express? It seems like you're mistaking complexity and technical skill for meaning, or assuming that only realistic depictions of nature have any artistic credibility.

>But a sideways urinal with some marker on it? Anyone with no skill can do random things with random items and call it art.

Don't assume that because something appears simple or obvious, that there is no meaning behind it. Maybe sometimes there isn't. Maybe the art at your campus was literally just there to look cool. Maybe some modern artists are taking the piss, like Duchamp, who was trolling the art society he was a part of with that[0].

Yes, you could assume Jackson Pollock was just throwing paint against a canvas and that can't be art because anyone could throw paint against a canvas, but like Marcel Duchamp and a lot of other modern artists, he was trying to say something[1], and that's what makes it art, not its reproducibility or realism.

Artists like Picasso and Mondrian were capable of creating traditional artwork in the classical style, but they became famous for their abstract work. I think it would be a stretch to say these people lacked talent or understanding of what art was, rather, they were trying to express their ideas in as minimalist a style as possible.

>"Any sufficiently advanced art is indistinguishable from garbage"

And any sufficiently advanced criticism is indistinguishable from ignorance.

[0]https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573

[1]https://www.quora.com/What-do-Jackson-Pollocks-paintings-rea...

> Why are you assuming that modern art is arbitrary, random and has no rules?

More like inference than assumption, based on occurrences like Pierre Brassau's art.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Brassau

That seems more like a criticism of art critics and the subjectivity of art valuation than modern art as a category, given that most modern art isn't done by chimpanzees.

Although, ironically, the hoax itself makes it a valid form of performance art anyway.

>Although, ironically, the hoax itself makes it a valid form of performance art anyway.

This is the bullshit that makes people weary of modern art. If you disagree, you fail to realize that this post, and indeed hacker news itself, is postmodern performance/interactivity art. Your opinion is wrong and invalid if you disagree.

>If you disagree, you fail to realize that this post, and indeed hacker news itself, is postmodern performance/interactivity art. Your opinion is wrong and invalid if you disagree.

No one is actually saying that, though. The only people trying to invalidate anyone's arguments and opinions are the ones who disagree that modern art has any value. And no one mentioned anything about hacker news itself.

What I am trying to imply is that there is more than one valid interpretation of this particular event. That, even if paintings by chimpanzees weren't art,and the hoax wasn't intended as art, the effect of the hoax still serves the purpose of art.

Please stop being defensive and please appreciate that context is sometimes relevant to a discussion.

>No one is actually saying that, though. The only people trying to invalidate anyone's arguments and opinions are the ones who disagree that modern art has any value. And no one mentioned anything about hacker news itself.

I was intentionally being standoffish in a manner so as to imitate modern art fanatics. See, you just don't understand the _performance art_ that is contained within a HN discussion (this is facetious).

I would agree that "ones who disagree that modern art has any value." are misinformed. And on the flip side, I would argue that those who believe _all_ modern art _has value_ and is _worthwhile_ are incorrect. There is a lot of shitty modern art out there that can and should be dismissed (I realize beauty is in the eye of the beholder) and by not doing so, you only hurt the worthwhile modern art.

I once saw a coca-cola bottle filled to the brim with cigarettes, placed into a red circle, in the SF MOMA. That isn't art; that's every weekend outside my apartment in college.

This is the bullshit that makes modern art more interesting than painters trying to represent reality on canvas.

Yeah when the neighborhood kids teepee your house that's modern art too.

Nobody does that anymore.

That's literally untrue, but ok.

Art is a form of communication. The skill with which works are crafted is often part of how they are able to communicate so well, but it isn't strictly necessary. If you find yourself looking at highly regarded art and not understanding why, it is possible its just that you don't have the right context to understand what it is saying.

Of course it is also possible it s all just so much wankery and garbage, but you can't just assume that.

> Anyone with no skill can do random things with random items and call it art.

Others have mentioned this, but I think the key here is that the "skill" you are referring to is what art theorists would call "craft." There is a degree of technical skill that goes into a work of art (e.g. sculpting realistic bodies in marble or being able to draw consistent shapes or human anatomy, etc), but theorists would say that the truth of the art is about what emotions and ideas it expresses in the viewer. In this way, since contemporary art often eschews craft, it can (in one sense of the term), be considered the most pure kind of art.

> How can you judge a category of art for which there are no rules?

Keeping the above in mind, art isn't about rules or judgement, but about the personal message it sends to the viewer. Because, after all, what are the "rules" you are ascribing to The David? Realism? If so, then what would you say about impressionist works by, say, Claude Monet?

I say this also as a humble engineer (even if I come off as standoffish, which I hope I'm not), who happened to take a few art theory courses at school, which by no means makes me an expert: so this is just my own experience and perspective.

The most powerful experience I've had with a work of art was with one of Mark Rothko's paintings. Sure, you can look at it as a plain wall of one or two colors in a plain square shape, but when I really got a good look at it for a prolonged period of time, I began to get lost in the colors and appreciated the nuances of the brushstrokes (it also helped that I had read John Logan's play "Red," which is a psychological profile about Rothko's method, which I recommend highly)

All of this to say that, yes, anyone with no skill can do random things with random items and call it art. Because the skill, the things, and the items are not the true characteristics of what art is. I don't think that "Fountain" should necessarily be marked as a masterpiece or objectively hailed as brilliant or anything, but I think to label it as "not art" misses the point (the point that it's trying to make a statement about art as a whole). Art is not about skill/craft, but about communication between the artist and viewer.

That's my perspective on it at least!

After getting into painting a few years ago, I dug into aesthetics a bit and quickly ran into the same fundamental problem: most abstract works are, prima fascie, giant heaps of crap. I mean, I sat down and tried to read different intros to art theory, etc, but it all was so much flim flam trying to paper over the obvious: it was fecal matter, sold for high prices (don't get me started on pomo performance stuff).

One text I ran into was by an Objectivist: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P9RV9PE/ - which goes into the motives and rationales for why the modern art went the way it did - and compares with other societies. Fascinating book.

Fundamentally, the Objectivist text comes down to roughly this

> – Proletarian: relevant to the workers and understandable to them.

Which is a description of soviet realism (something Objectivists might find startling).

http://www.russianartdealer.com/socialist-realism/

I also want to stress that the notion that art is subjective, or that it should make you feel, is wholly a product of the Romantic era and its challenge of a previous understanding of art as being an _objective_ thing with a ladder of values.

So I strongly concur with you here.

What about an emotion-priming title, then a picture of clouds?

Pollack almost literally uses inkblots, like the Rorschach test.

Thank you so much for your post. I knew about the former but have never seen these paintings before thank you.

This is a lot of words to basically say the tired ‘my kid could paint that’ thing.

These where made by people- for people. There was not market, thus there was no need for the meta-scam that art is today. All it was, was a way to eternalize the life and missery of people, capture those moments before we all vannish. It was art, while we have nun, but the one in a thousand photos we make.

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