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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Intrinsic value is about what you value. Which may be million different things and changes over time.
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.
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...