Jackson Pollock's painting technique
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
One thing I did learn though was that it would take a lot of effort to get anything close to actual Pollock. His stuff really is more than "random paint splashes".
Try it if you don't believe me.
If I kept up with it for some time and gained more knowledge of the paint materials and how they worked together, I'm sure I could create something similar. Art doesn't have to be painstakingly "difficult" or require superhuman skill in order to be considered "good". Sure, some forms of art do require more skill than others, but that by no means translates 1-to-1 with cultural impact.
You mention elsewhere that Pollock's main contribution is art as "process" which I would agree with, its something that he shared with a few of his contemporaries. I'm also very interested in generative art, and he is an early example of this idea. I'm aware he didn't invent abstract art or anything like that.
1992: Author John Briggs published a book featuring the first observation that Jackson Pollock’s poured paintings have the appearance of fractal patterns (Fractals, Touchstone Publishers, 1992)
1997-8: Physicist Richard Taylor built a chaotic pendulum called the “Pollockizer” to generate fractal paintings using the pouring technique (Physics World, 76, November 1997, New Scientist, vol. 2144, 30, 1998 and The Art of Science documentary, ABC, May 1998)
1998: Mathematician Richard Voss conducted the first fractal analysis of an artwork. He used the analysis to distinguish between illustrative paintings by different Chinese artists (Fractal Image Encoding and Analysis, Springer, 1998)
1999: Taylor’s group published the first fractal analysis of Pollock’s paintings (Nature, vol. 399, 422, 1999. See also Scientific American, vol. 287, 116-121, 2002 and Leonardo, vol. 35, 203-207, 2002)
1999: Taylor introduced the term “Fractal Expressionism” to describe fractal art generated by humans rather than computers (Physics World, 25, October 1999)
1999: Art conservator Jim Coddington proposed that fractal analysis should be explored as a technique to help authenticate Pollock paintings
2003: Psychologist Branka Spehar collaborated with Taylor to demonstrate that Pollock’s fractals induce the same physiological responses in observers as nature’s fractals and computer-generated fractals (Chaos and Graphics, vol. 27, 813, 2003)
2004-5: Physicist Jonas Mureika’s group quantified Pollock’s fractals using a multi-fractal analysis technique (Physical Review E, vol. 72, 046101-1-15, 2005 and Chaos, vol. 15, 043702-1-6, 2005).
2005: Taylor’s group used a dimensional interplay fractal analysis to distinguish 14 authentic Pollock paintings from 51 non-Pollock paintings with 100% accuracy (Pattern Recognition Letters, vol. 28, 695-702, 2005)
2005: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation asked Taylor to perform a fractal analysis on the “Matter paintings” found in a New York storage locker (Nature, 439, 648, 2006). The analysis identified “significant deviations from Pollock’s characteristics.” Taylor cautioned that the results should be “coupled with other important information such as provenance, connoisseurship and materials analysis.” Two years later, materials scientists showed that pigments on the paintings dated from after Pollock’s death
2006: Physicist Kate Jones-Smith and colleagues published a study of non-fractal star drawings and claimed that fractal analysis is flawed because their analysis falsely identified the stars as fractal (Nature, vol. 444, E9-10, 2006). In their rebuttal, Taylor’s group performed their own fractal analysis on the star patterns and showed that the stars were, in fact, not fractal (Nature, vol. 444, E10-11, 2006). Taylor reported further flaws in Jones-Smith’s analysis. Fractals expert Lansaros Gallos summed up: “What Jones-Smith has done is just a simple trick – this is bad science about fractals.” (ScienceNews, vol. 171, 122, 2007) Jones-Smith raised one valid issue: whether Pollock’s patterns occur over enough magnifications to be called fractal. However, she admitted she was at odds with the research community. She would have to dismiss half of all the investigations of fractals ever published based on this concern. Benoit Mandelbrot, inventor of the term fractal, summarized: “I do believe Pollocks are fractal.” (ScienceNews, vol. 171, 122, 2007).
2006-7: Computer Scientist Bruce Gooch’s group used computers to generate Pollock-like images by varying their fractal characteristics (Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering, 97-104, 2006 and Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, vol.1, 73-83, 2007)
2007: Art theorist Claude Cernuschi’s and colleagues presented an “arc-fractal” model of Pollock’s paintings (Pollock Matters, McMullen Museum of Art, 2007)
2007: Jones-Smith and colleagues announced to the press that they had submitted a study of poured paintings to the journal Physical Review Letters. The study showed that their fractal analysis could not distinguish between Pollock and non-Pollock paintings. Physical Review Letters rejected the submission. Computer scientist Hany Farid commented: “I think they [Jones-Smith et al] took a fairly simplistic way of separating those colors [of paint] which could have skewed their results.” The study served as a useful warning: the success rate of fractal analysis in detecting fakes is sensitive to factors such as image quality of the paintings and the image processing techniques used. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-fractal....
2007-8: Three groups (led by psychologist Christoph Redies, psychologist David Field and computer scientist Jose Alvarez-Ramirez) independently quantified Pollock’s fractals using a Fourier transform technique (Spatial Vision, vol. 21, 97-117, 2007, Spatial Vision, vol. 21, 137-148, 2007, Journal of Spatial Vision, vol. 21, 149-164, 2007, Perception, vol. 37, 1341-1352, 2008, Physica A, vol. 387, 281-295, 2008).
2008: Alvarez-Ramirez quantified Pollock’s fractals using Hurst analysis (Physica A, vol. 387, 6452-646, 2008)
2008: Coddington and computer scientist Dan Rockmore quantified Pollock’s fractals using entropy dimension. They summarized as follows: “Fractal geometry has begun to play an important role in the authentication of the work of Jackson Pollock. We believe such analyses are necessary for pushing the field forward” (Proceedings SPIE, vol. 6810, 68100F 1-12, 2008)
2009: Jones-Smith and colleagues’ 2007 fractal analysis of poured paintings was eventually accepted for publication (Physical Review E, vol. 79, 046111, 2009). In his own publications on Pollock’s fractals, computer scientist David Stork described Jones-Smith’s publication as: “a failure to follow well-established principles and methodologies from statistical pattern recognition” (SPIE Electronic Imaging: Machine Vision Applications II, vol. 7251, 72510Q1–11 2009 and SPIE Proceedings on Computer Vision and Image Analysis of Art II, vol. 7869, 78690H, 2009). He also recommended combining fractal analysis with other pattern analysis techniques to increase its detection capabilities.
2010: Mureika and Taylor used fractal analysis to successfully distinguish between poured paintings by adults and children (SPIE Proceedings of Electronic Imaging, vol. 7531, 7531001-6, 2010)
2011: Taylor and neuroscience collaborators developed a “fractal fluency” model for how observers view Pollock’s fractals. The results demonstrated that Pollock’s patterns span sufficient magnifications to strongly display the visual character of fractals (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 5, 1- 13, 2011 and Fractal Geometry of the Brain, Springer, 2016).
2011: Cernuschi’s group employed non-linear physics to examine Pollock’s pouring technique (Physics Today, June edition, 31-36, 2011).
2012: In a public lecture on Pollock, chief Pollock scholar Francis O’Connor declared “These fractal occurrences in the facture of Pollock’s pourings can be read as a very personal signature that can be found in all of his works” and described fractal analysis as a “tool with which the connoisseur can perceive falsity in a fake Pollock” https://blogs.uoregon.edu/richardtaylor/files/2015/12/Franci...
2013: Mureika and Taylor quantified Pollock’s fractals using multi-fractal depth (Signal Processing, vol. 93, 573-578, 2013)
2014: Computer scientist Kang Zheng’s group used computers to generate Pollock-like images based on fractal patterns (Vis Comput DOI 10.1007/s00371-014-0985-7)
2015: Computer scientist Lior Shamir showed that, when combined with other pattern parameters, fractal analysis can be used to distinguish between real and imitation Pollocks with 93% accuracy. He found that the fractal parameters were the most powerful contributors to the detection accuracy (International Journal of Arts and Technology, vol. 8, 1, 2015)
2016: Shamir used fractal analysis to distinguish between abstract expressionist paintings by adults and children (ACM Transactions of Applied Perception, vol. 13, 1, 2016)
2016: Physicist Elsa De la Calleja and colleagues examined the evolution of Pollock’s paintings in terms of an “Order-Fractal” transition. (Annals of Physics, Vol. 371, 313 (2016)
2017: Psychologist Alex Forseythe’s group showed that the fractal characteristics of a painting can be linked to the artist’s neurological condition (Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 31, 1, 2017)
2017: Taylor’s group use fractal analysis to explain why Pollock’s paintings induce perceived images (PLOS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171289 Nature | News, 14th February 2017: http://www.nature.com/news/fractal-secrets-of-rorschach-s-fa...)
2017: De la Calleja’s group compared the evolution of the fractal characteristics in Pollock’s paintings to parameters quantifying the painting’ topology (Betti numbers) (Knowledge Based Systems, 2017)
2019: Aleverez-Ramirez employs fractal analysis to compare Pollock’s paintings to those of the Riopelle Abstract Expressionists (to be published in Physica A)
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People in our industry are notorious for dressing down to where the art of dressing up is lost to the silicon sands of time
Most anyone you ask from an entry level to a manager, director, vice president all the way to Jack Dorsey himself will tell you dress is meaningless and unimportant to "getting things done and building great things" and I know it comes from a place of ignorance because I used to be the same way until I stumbled into a Brooks Brothers one day a few years back
Dress is a lot like art in that one must master the classics but that too is becoming the exception in fail fast culture where the means exceedingly outweigh the ends
So I ask myself what would Alan Turing do? And I know he'd dress formally and carry on because back then computer science really did save lives as opposed to now when the user is only worth the data that can be squeezed out of them -- I'm sure this is exactly the future the hippies in the Homebrew Computer Club envisioned when they convened in their dark garages by the light of their fluorescent vacuum tubes to worship their newfound digital deities dressed in jeans and printed T's /rant
It was great. They loved wearing the suits (often their first suit) and opened a lot of doors for us with our customers. They were tired of tech people showing up in rags, and then we'd show up in suits. For a small business like ours, it was a game changer.
Formal wear unlocked some muscles your organization never even knew it had, and also some difficult conversations and investment dynamics which arose but were settled magnanimously enough and seem to have led to modest gains in morale despite initial skepticism and coercion / push & pushback
The point is you got to somewhere you didn't know you'd go and now you have a taste for how the world actually works that's ever so slightly outside of the organizational event horizon i.e. the collective comfort zone that keeps you all locked in to a shared inertia
I'd venture, not to harp on your example that the organization never quite reached the critical mass that would possibly have occurred had you followed down this road a ways, and perhaps the whole thing fizzled out after some new people got onboarded and the old guard began to drift away?
> now you have a taste for how the world actually works
I've known that since college, I just was lackadaisical about applying it.
Dressing better is a big part of being more successful. My advice to anyone who feels their talents are underappreciated and overlooked is to consider upgrading their wardrobe. Billionaires can dress like slobs, but the rest of us can't really afford to. Dressing better won't close the deal, but it can open up opportunities one wasn't aware of.
Working on one's speech patterns is effective, too.
There's what we say, what we mean, and what to intend
The conversation has gotten so mixed up its hard for anyone to know anything especially with people with whom one is unfamiliar and in large groups
Dress is very much part of that conversation and is a great heuristic of where the conversation is going; as a very stark generalization I'd venture that people with advanced dress sense also have advanced conversation skills
Don't get me wrong I'm sure that people exist who don't fit this but that's why it's just a heuristic
And before you mention judging a book by its cover I'm not being judgemental I'm simply stating that humans still need all the help they can get -- we can't all be Kurt Cobains because there are simply some conversations that can't be had in certain milieus
Unfortunately day after day for a year say, it becomes quite apparent that some people dress without intention, intentionally and that hurts morale
Sometimes dressing down is purposeful projection of success. It's like playing hard to get. Or "I'm so good at what I do that I don't even need to dress well to earn business."
Hence the stereotypical billionaire dressing like a slob. But that don't work so well for the rest of us.
For a fictional example, see the TV series "Billions". Axe, the head of the hedge fund, dresses like a slob while his minions all dress to the nines.
That's my point. I don't think that is always true. I think it might actually work in some cases
You'd wonder what would happen if the military went casual?
It's ironic our corporations use the military C&C structure but not the military's attention to dress details
Those approaches are only connected insofar as they remove traditions and experiment in new ways. That’s why I always think that a wholesale rejection of modern art is so ridiculous. You have to at least be more specific.
And you're right - modern art shares the rejection of what came before, and experimentation in new ways. But rejection for its own sake, change for the sake of change, lost its novelty about a century ago. That leaves us with ugly art, that is doing its best to steal the oxygen from anything aesthetically pleasing.
Even someone like Pollock uses paint, uses a canvas. His works are presented in museums the same way paintings from, say, the 17th century are. His paintings are recognizably painting-shaped. So there are some traditions he does not reject.
So modern art is not some sort of wholesale rejection of everything that came before. People just allowed themselves to reject different things. That’s the big picture.
However, like modernism as a whole, there certainly was a rejection of traditions and among the many approaches there were very dogmatic ones (but a single approach being dogmatic and rejecting things stringently still leads to diversity if other approaches accept those things and reject different things). Postmodernism has certainly been breaking that up, though.
So to address your points: * Artists had reasons for picking their approaches. You might not agree with those reasons, but those reasons existed. I think you would be hard pressed to find artists that rejected traditions just because. * A rejection of things that are “aesthetically pleasing” is not a common theme among modern art, though declaring the goal of creating something “aesthetically pleasing” as not a goal or as just one possible goal is certainly an oft rejected tradition.
The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. A distinguished British painter who taught at the Slade asked me, 'How did you learn how to do animation?' I answered that I was lucky enough to have done a lot of life drawing at art school, so without realizing it I got the feeling for weight which is so vital to animation.
Then I said, 'What am I telling you for? You're teaching at the Slade and it's famous for its life drawing and excellent draftsmen.'
'If the students want to do that,' he said, 'then they've got to club together and hire themselves a model and do it in their own home.' At first I thought he was joking - but no! Life drawing as a subject went out years ago. It wasn't even on the curriculum!
-- Animator's Survival Kit, page 32. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-OTUJDZcAzLcDhFbVN3TjdwUnc/...
Life drawing was never more accessible then today. For that matter, learning any drawing was never more accessible then today.
But then again, those aren’t his most famous works are they? Something more famous like Mural looks like something your one-year-old would spit up.
I think the outsized monetary and historical value lies in the controversy, and the story behind the art, not the art itself.
I can completely understand why it’s both loved and hated. The end result looks random and doesn’t convey any particular meaning, basically a defiant statement against interpretation, but it’s also just planned enough to send you searching for patterns and meaning. I can see why it could be pleasing and impactful to the right person.
To detractors it’s like modern art gone too far: it’s just nonsense that’s fucking with you, like the artistic version of an Internet troll.
Personally, I just can’t come around to it.
The interpretation game is just the 'retail front' for art.
I'm not really sure what, but that suggested to me that there is something there.
Perfect what, exactly? What's the end goal of the perfection? There's no way to measure it.
Signing my name is technically very difficult - I've been perfecting it for 20+ years on various random documents and I can 100% tell if someone other than me signed my name (you can too if you study my signature for a few years at a college).
Does that automatically make my signature praiseworthy and worth millions? What if I put my signature in the center of a football field sized canvas and name it "Football Sig 100.1ZZZ"?
In all seriousness, a signature of that scale would be art. It’s the ultimate expression of ego and people may well want to see it, because you had a point for all that labor involved (even if the point was proving how stupid art can be).
There are people (including a Prager propaganda video featuring a jealous painting peofessor) who claim that art like Pollack's isn't art or isn't good because it looks like paint thoughtlessly splattered on a floor or a smock. The point is, it doesn't, and the way it doesn't (chaotic yet balanced multiscale patterns of colors) is interesting.
The most important part of a painting to the audience is how it looks and how it makes them feel. And to a lot of people Pollock works look lazy, and it makes people feel kind of ripped off, like they paid $25 to get into this museum and they are looking at what looks like pure randomness (even if it’s truly not, even if it truly took massive amounts of talent to create).
And inevitably defenders come out and insist that it’s actually groundbreaking and the first of its kind. And inevitably they look like snobs.
Pollock paintings are like that rare movie on Rotten Tomatoes that has a 100% critic score and a 10% viewer score. It’s really hard not to side with the viewers.
Or maybe Pollock paintings are like a Mitsubishi Mirage. Sure, it took hundreds of engineers great skill and hours to make one, certainly I could never make one, but that doesn’t change the fact that most people consider it a hella shitty car. And I’m sure someone’s out there praising its low price and great fuel economy.
In the case of art, I think art has value that is at least somewhat objective. Liking art, on the other hand, is almost purely subjective. But since recognizing the objective value of art requires some study and effort, people generally aren't in a position to judge.
So instead, we get this weird leap where "Pollock paintings are simple and stupid"... but that collides with virtually everyone with some education in art saying "No, he was a genius". So do people think "Huh, maybe there's something here I don't understand"? No. Instead, we get "Pollock is bad art, and anyone who thinks it's good is either pretending to be cool or trying to scam us".
This is why "dismiss whatever they don't find pleasing" is a bad policy.
I'm not sure if there's a connection between that and this new paper; perhaps it's taken a while to get it published?
As for the other bit: In the end, you're part of it as much as anyone else is. So if you see nothing there, then there is nothing there for you. So be it. Onward to the next one. Till you feel emotion evoked. For me, Diebenkorn's Window makes me feel this longing for this particular life I had briefly. And that's it for me. I've walked through halls of paintings that are some repulsive, lots boring, and some just incredibly magnetic. And some of the 'ugly' ones are famous and some of the ones I like aren't and that's it.
The reason why "modern art" is about "abstracts," "concepts" or whatever dealers and fooled enthusiasts use is because this leaves room for marketing to BS people into believing it is actually "hard" Just notice the sales copies are as abstract as some of these BS paintings.
And if that fails you can always use shame "you just don't understand modern art you pleb" ... and sure just because your scribbles and splashes you tried at home don't look like Pollock's that doesn't make Pollock's technique any more "harder" ... I equally doubt Pollock would emulate your scribbles and splashes ... I doubt any great artist Velasquez or Rembrandt or non-artist would be able to emulate it either.
It's easy, once you perform a highly repetitive task very high number of times, you will start to follow a certain pattern as to save brain output.
Thus anyone splashing paints for such a long time would fall into his own "signature" routine. You don't need to use intellect, deep thought or inspiration.
And once it's legitimised by "specific foot distance" and nonsense like that that he (likely entirely randomly) and equations nobody will ever verify you can safely continue making money not worrying about other BS "artists" overcrowding the space.
https://www.collidingworlds.org/how-fractals-science-and-tec...
I can't copy-paste, but there are a few gems in these pages.
Hilarious!
Jackson Pollock had a quaint
Way of saying to his sibyl,
'Shall I dribble?
Should I paint?'
And with never an instant's quibble,
Sibyl always answered,
'Dribble.'
To me all I see is squiggly lines and random colors.
I do enjoy art, but mostly old school art, say Van Gogh. Paintings that depict expressions, humans, situations, etc.
Consider, those blank white canvases take very little skill and creativity to produce. What they are a snapshot of a moment in art where very rich, well connected artists got to the idea of a blank white canvas as a message "first." Thus, they staked their flag in the ground and claimed that signpost in the long road of art history, and their rich, well-connected art selling friends probably convinced some gullible curators and collectors that those completely contentless abstractions are somehow valuable.
I'll give Pollock and others their due, that is some very interesting technique. However, as an oil painter myself, I believe the solid color canvasses hanging in museums are a slap in the face to the craftsmanship and sheer genius of the great painters, Pollock included.
While I'm not a fan of solid color canvasses myself, I don't object to them on the grounds of lack of craftsmanship, as I've seen plenty of paintings with masterful craftsmanship which I find don't move me in the least and which I find utterly boring and without value (such as Chuck Close paintings or other hyper/photorealist work). Conversely, I'm a great fan of children's artwork -- art that almost by definition completely lacks any skill or craftsmanship at all. I find it a lot more refreshing and original than much art by highly educated and skilled adult artists.
The same goes for some "naive" or "outsider" art, art of the mentally ill, and "primitive" art. All of these vary in skill level, of course, but even those created without much if any skill are often very powerful and show me a new and different way of looking at the world than what I get in traditional academic or popular art.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-many-deaths-of-a-...
To be fair a lot of simple looking art like this is produced by artists with a sound understanding of composition and color theory. For some of them everything they do is done with intention and thought. However, having a sound understanding of color theory and composition are just two basic skills any good artist will possess in addition to a multitude of other skills.
Note that I'm not saying that artists have to adhere to standard color theory and composition. I'm saying that when people deviate from them usually the good ones do it in an intentional way with a full understanding, and the specific way they break the rules is well thought out and so it works.
I think this is what gets under my skin. I don't really have a problem with the artists, anybody who is able to fleece a few million from the super rich is doing a public service as far as I'm concerned.
It's the people in the galleries, auction houses and general art world that get up my nose. The ones that tell you you are a philistine because you can't appreciate a somewhat random splattering of paint or an unmade bed. We already have empirical evidence[1] that wine snobs don't know what they are talking about, perhaps we should try and find the same for art snobs.
[1] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...
I went to the University of Iowa, which has Jackson Pollock's Mural, his most important painting. It's worth about $250M. I'd just stare at it for long periods of time. It's extraordinary, breathtaking, a symphony of squiggly lines - but in no way random. The figures and sense of right-to-left motion are quite clear, but it's impossible to point to any little detail and see the whole. It's like trying to understand a symphony from one bar of what the second violins are doing, or trying to understand Thanksgiving dinner from a little smear of butter.
And it's an entirely different painting at different perspectives. Looking at it from 50 feet is a very different experience from looking at it from five feet. The tiny detail work is as extraordinary as the whole.
Many fields are not baffling to people without specialized education.
Your description of Pollock’s mural reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/915/
But this really boils down to a distrust of intellectualism, and the idea that Joe Sixpack's off-the-shelf opinion is more valid than the opinion of someone who actually studies the subject seriously - that the real student is merely an elitist snob who uses their study to lord over the cretins. Sigh.
The trouble is if you assume an entire field is garbage then you're assuming the authorities of that field are either dishonest or deluded and you dismiss anything they say as self-sustaining nonsense. When that's the case, how do you change somebody's mind?
For the record, I like Pollock and find art history/criticism much more valuable than astrology. But, how would you explain that to someone who just sees it as paint smears?
And many fields are. I feel like at this point you're nitpicking their phrasing ("any" instead of "many") instead of addressing their point.
> Your description of Pollock’s mural reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/915/
Note that comic doesn't claim that those differences aren't real, just that they're not visible or interesting to most people, which is pretty close to what the parent comment said.
I'm sure the irony isn't lost on you that not too long ago Van Gogh was decidedly "new school" and considered random colors and squiggly lines that most people didn't see the value in.
Of course, the fact that this guy [2] is not also in the Smithsonian is strong evidence that it is in fact completely arbitrary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_field [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owSZs7H24UY
But like, while somewhat over represented in Vienna modern circles, they were no majority at any point nor only the ones liking it. Probably not even more likely to like it.
Let me use an analogy you can better understand. I am sure you can appreciate music. Most people who listen to the Marriage of Figaro by Mozart, can understand it's a master piece. Yet, it isn't the most difficult balad Mozart composer and many other musicians have created far more complex balads. Also a gifted 5 year old could probably learn to play it and reproduce it quite accurately. Does that diminish its value because a 5 year old can play it? It's even possible for an average 5 year old to invent a similar balad after listening to it. But could an average 5 year old create something like the Marriage of Figaro from scratch without ever hearing it? It takes a pretty special 5 year old, like Mozart to produce something like that. And its the whole composition that matters, not just a few notes - anyone can play a few notes.
The same happens with Pollock. He was the first drip painter. And while an average 5 year old could drip some paint in a canvas (play a few notes), they won't be able to create a powerful composition of colors that mirrors a full Pollock composition. Sure, there are amazing reproductions of Pollock made by very trained art forgers - yet that doesn't diminish the value of Pollock just because someone else after analyzing his technique is able to reproduce it.
The value is another story. It's worth $200M because of its size and scarcity. Pollock wasn't a big art producers and thus there aren't many paintings around. Yet there are many people who love his work and want to buy it. Supply and demand dictates the price. Sure you can buy something similar from an art forger, but its not the same, the same way that listening to a album on a set of speakers is not the same as having the artist play live for you.
But it is true. Of course it is not the whole story, but complexity and difficulty influence how humans interpret and value things.
Which is why more abstract drawings raised into prominence. And they are not so easy either - as much as five years old scribble, they don't create same effect not pleasing composition of colors or structures.
That's not a double-blind standard - you are comparing pipes to chairs. Although I can understand that one may care for the homeopathy or placebo effect of having the "real" item.
But I believe that there are artists that could make a better Pollock than Pollock himself.
Modern art is a sham. I only appreciate art that I recognize takes skill above my own to create. Anyone can come up with random novel "art". For example, I could buy a SpaceX rocket and launch a piece of feces into low earth orbit. "Poop in Orbit" would be extremely novel and random piece of modern "art".
Michaelangelo blows my mind. Pollock makes me roll my eyes.
I mean, I could probably spot an amateurish Pollock forgery, and I'm no expert. And while forging his general style would be difficult, forging specific works would be nearly impossible - the layers are very specific. It would be even harder to forge drip technique paintings, where his direct control of the "brush" was limited.
I'm saying it's easy to make Pollock-esque paintings. I bet you could study Pollock for a few hours and then make a Pollock-esque painting that would fool 99.9% of the population. You can't do that with Michelangelo.
> forging specific works would be nearly impossible - the layers are very specific.
Obviously. That's like me throwing a fistful of sand on the floor and taking a picture of it and saying it would be very hard for someone to forge the picture because the sand grain positioning is very specific - which is technically true.
I could claim that whatever it is you do (including your HN comment) is no more complex or interesting than monkeys banging on typewriters.
Saying that careless sprinkling sand is as good as a Pollack is very nearly the same as saying picking numbers off the top of your head is as good as a secure RNG for crypto. It's not, in ways only an ingorant person fails to understand.
Even if you had the skill to create a passable forgery of a Pollock, which you probably do not, you're attributing no value to the importance of concept and initial creation. A kid performing a Beethoven piece at a recital is not Beethoven.
I let you study Michelangelo's sculptures for 24 hours using any resources you want. I then hand you a block of marble and a chisel and ask you to create a Michaelangelo-style scupture.
We then present your sculpture alongside an authentic Michelangelo sculpture and ask 50 random people on the street to identify which one was made by you and which was made by Michelangelo. I would wager 100% would reject your sculpture as inauthentic (based on an obvious lack of skill).
Now we repeat the same experiment but with Pollock. I would wager 50% would reject your painting as inauthentic and 50% would reject the Pollock painting as inauthentic (people would randomly choose).
Pollock paintings require no skill, just a large canvas and a few contrasting colors to splatter and drip. There is no dexterity or experience required to make a painting in the style of Pollock, unlike Michelangelo sculptures.
2) Please try to replicate a Pollock. I think you’ll be surprised.
No, I understand. The Japanese flag is a red circle on a white rectangle. Takes no skill to design or draw. But I still think it's has value as a symbol. But I wouldn't pay $200M for it and I certainly wouldn't prop up the person who made it as some sort of highly skilled artistic juggernaut. I would think "neat concept, but I could've done that" and that would be it.
> Please try to replicate a Pollock. I think you’ll be surprised.
Please try and replicate my signature. I think you'll be surprised at how difficult it is (I've been perfecting it for 20+ years signing documents) and that should cause you to respect me much more, right? If not, please explain why not and in doing so you'll understand why I don't care for Pollock or his work.
Anyone can just make up a new form of art and "perfect" it by just doing it over and over (like your signature). I could invent a new form of music by randomly mashing keys on a piano in a way unique to me. So what? There is no negative feedback loop so therefore the "perfection" process is completely nebulous and arbitrary and takes no real effort because there is no defined destination.
Can we at least acknowledge the massive skill gap between learning to play a Chopin piano piece and pioneering a Pollock-esque field of art where there are no rules or negative feedback loops to correct you?
Also, art can be looked at as a science experiment where the artist performs an experiment and shares their results with the world. Expressionism is one such "field of research" with Jackson Pollock being a prominent researcher. His body of work is like a groundbreaking experiment and each painting is an artifact of that experiment. In other words buying a Jackson Pollock is sort of like buying one of Einsteins papers.
Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is probably the most valuable painting in the world, a canonical work recognized instantly by probably half the world's population. Van Gogh died penniless. He gave away his paintings for food and wine.
Does that mean "Starry Night" was worthless when Van Gogh painted it, just because no one would pay him for it? Or is the intrinsic value of the painting distinct from its economic value?
When you are in a philosophical vacuum, generalizing value is useful. However, markets concertize value. The question of "why has this been so valuable" is firmly answered by "this is how much someone payed for it".
"What is value?" is an excellent philosophical question. "Why is (some item) so valuable?" is easily answered by a simple analysis of history and statistics.
I think it's very important to consider value independently of money, and Van Gogh's paintings are an excellent example of that.
Intrinsic value is about what you value. Which may be million different things and changes over time.
Part of abstract art not understood is just that, a foreign language. Part of it is a navel gazing community congratulating itself. Part of it is a popularity contest with random winners.
It’s the problem with a specialty which is tending towards a singularity: quality becomes ever harder to judge and by ever fewer people who must dedicate ever more time to even understand. There are lots of hangers on who have only vague ideas about the quality and as a result the field gets overrun with nonsense. That doesn’t mean there is nothing there.
To a consumer, viewer, or critic of art, the value of a work of art may be in the final product, but the artist may not view it that way at all, and it could be valuable to them because of, say, the way the process made them feel at the time, or how it helped them work through some personal issues they were going through.
So, yeah, you might feel like some abstract work of art is "garbage", or think that "my 2 year old could do that" or something, but your reaction is really irrelevant to some artists. Some artists want to be seen, recognized, acknowledged, and appreciated by the public, while others work just for themselves and really couldn't care less what you or anyone else thinks of their work.
As an abstract, visual artist myself, I find my work to be very meditative for me, and akin sometimes to digging through layers of earth and excavating something buried within, which can be fun, intriguing, or therapeutic for me. I do strive to make the final result pleasing to myself, but to me the process of creating the work itself has value, and what some random person off the street thinks of it is really of no consequence to me.
As for what a painting is worth on the art market, you have to realize that for many art buyers, these paintings are seen as investments, and their price is determined by what people are willing to pay for them (which is often determined by what they think these paintings will be worth to other investors in the future), not necessarily by them having any "objective value".
Also, what's often valued in art market and to academic critics is someone doing something first, or stretching the boundaries of what is considered art. The first "blue canvas" or whatever, is worth a lot of money even though it took absolutely no skill to create, while anyone else creating a "blue canvas" today would be ignored because they're neither being original nor pushing the boundaries of what's considered art.
As Salvador Dali once said, "The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."
On the other hand, the value of art in the art market is a testament to Any Warhol's definition of art: "Art is anything you can get away with."
I then realized art isn't just about whether you could have done something, but would you have done it. Whenever I look at art now I ask myself both questions: Could I have painted like Rembrandt? No. Would I ever have thought to drip paint onto a massive canvas and call it art? No. Both are equally as a valid. This applies to music and books and movies, etc. Would I ever have thought of the plot to Reservoir Dogs? Never.
Art, in my opinion, still has to evoke emotion, and be the result of a creative effort. So a music piece generated by a computer doesn't really count, but the code written to program it definitely does.
Of course art is art and everyone has their opinion about it, this is just my way of looking at it.
I don't know if you mean this painting specifically, or paintings in general, but obviously, art is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Now, there are many reasons a person might pay a lot for a piece, or how a piece might end up selling for more than an expert would expect. Here are just a handful:
1. Someone buys expensive art and donates it to a museum for a nice tax deduction. The more the painting is, the more the deduction. The person who bought Number 17A immediately donated it to a museum.
2. Two collectors are both really rich and both really interested in a piece and get into a bidding war. It only takes two, but sometimes there are many people who want a particular piece or a piece from a particular artist.
3. A collector (or dealer) might try to spur interest in an artist by overpaying for a piece to try and reset the price for said artist.
4. You can launder money by buying or selling art at auction.
Art criticism has almost nothing to do with how much a piece is worth at auction. The price of a painting essentially comes down to the "fine art" world being a popularity contest.
That's not a fair question to ask an art critic.
I mean, if you asked me why it's worth forty of your minutes to listen to Gyo:rgy Ligeti's Violin Concerto, I'd take a shot at it.
But if Ligeti's music happened to be tied to an international black market such that his scores were being bought and sold for a quarter of a billion dollars what could I possibly say?
You don't have to like it, but there is no way you can in good faith study a Pollock and come away believing a 3 year old could have done that.
It is certainly not art critics that decided that a Pollock should cost 200M. But is considered worth 200M because some billionaire will pay that much for it.
>To me all I see is squiggly lines and random colors.
I favor the Bitcoin hypothesis - a consensus derived worth for a portable, mostly anonymous, value store of no intrinsic utility - just slightly ahead of gold and diamonds really ...
(Only usefully available to the really rich, though)
and possibly communism http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20161004-was-modern-art-a-w...
https://medium.com/@MichaelMcBride/how-jackson-pollock-and-t...
https://www.christopherhallart.com/blog/2015/2/10/jackson-po...
Even if either of the sources you cited suggested that the CIA specifically looked for low-quality art (spoiler: they don't), I'm not sure the CIA qualifies as the foremost authority on artistic achievement.