Jacksonpollock.org (2003)
jacksonpollock.org
jacksonpollock.org
Curiosity, which we're trying for here, doesn't sneer. It is open, more genuinely satisfying, and makes for a place that's better for everyone. That's in all of our interests.
"Conservatives" - anti-Pollock clan argue that art must have inherit beauty and skill to produce.
"Liberals" - pro-Pollock folks argue that the whole definition of art is up for grabs.
:)
I personally find it wonderful and beautiful - the sf-tech crowds mocking the abstract and psychedelic tend to be a bit unaware where the world they both live and work in came from!
I too could have invented calculus (after learning about it in school).
You think software isn't art?
I've worked pretty hard on producing video support for my live synth music, and have got better at it over time. Doesn't make me a painter, though. In many ways my stuff is pretty pedestrian compared to working video artists: I tend to go for your basic 'light show effects', crowd-pleasing stuff. My imagination as far as coming up with really novel environments… that's what could use some work.
I've made abstract art for decades. I don't share it with HN as that's not really what HN is for, and I'm pretty private about it anyway.
I very much doubt I'm the only artist on HN either. Just because you haven't seen HN users' art doesn't mean they don't make any.
That said, I fully agree that many non-artists underestimate how difficult it is to make some art. Also, there's something to be said for doing it first and stretching the definition of what counts as art, no matter how technically "easy" it was.
The quintessential example of this being Malevich's "Black Square".[1] After Malevich, it could be argued that much of the rest of modern art whose main point was to show that "anything can be considered art" could be seen as just minor variations.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_%28painting%29
Incidentally, this is written as if it's obvious, but it's not at all a given that you can invent something even after you've been taught it. If you can, then it's a serious credit to your teacher.
So does The Human Centipede series.
That's probably been more successful in that regard, in fact.
I do not see your point.
Or not, depending on what you want "art" to encompass.
I don't think this phenomenon is limited to abstract expressionism though. Even being from Iowa, I didn't understand what was special about American Gothic until I saw it in person.
Still don't get it.
Looking for an source that can explain it to me.
I found the paintings terrible, but knowing I usually understand them more once I understand the artist I went to go watch the video. During the video there was a couple rude guys who started snickering at the video. Usually I get kind of upset about this sort of thing, but to be honest, I actually agreed with them. I came away from the experience feeling like I had just been part of a huge prank.
I learned that day that Rothko's painting are trash.
A couple years later I was in a small museum in another country, and across the room saw a painting of a couple of poorly rendered squares in flat shades and thought, "I bet that's a Rothko." Sure enough it was, and now I can recognize his paintings from 20 meters away. So I guess his work is recognizable and unique and I've learned some very begrudging respect for his work that way I guess -- they're at least recognizable trash.
May I ask how you came to the conclusion the painting are trash - and not just that you personally didn't like the paintings?
Why? If you look closely, it is imperfect. If you look around you can find others, very similar. Perhaps any river could have produced it. It isn't saying anything. It isn't telling you anything. It isn't being anything other than a stone. Yet surely, it can be an object of beauty, causing thought, curiosity, contemplation and feelings.
If a stone, why not a canvas deliberately created from inspiration and feelings? Isn't abstract art even more artful than simply copying what your eyes can see?
[1] https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/giorgio-vasari/the-liv...
What's the difference between art and trolling? Is trolling a art to you?
Also: Piss Christ
If art is meant to provoke a response, art which provokes death threats must be the greatest art of all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ
> Gallery officials reported receiving death threats in response to Piss Christ.
Also, knowing what we know about what Pell was getting up to, this must be the greatest work of irony-as-art yet:
> During a retrospective of Serrano's work at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1997, the then Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, sought an injunction from the Supreme Court of Victoria to restrain the National Gallery of Victoria from publicly displaying Piss Christ, which was not granted.
Sadly, that's not difficult to do, especially if the artist has critics, media, museums, and galleries propping them up and giving them publicity.
The history of 20th Century art is full of shock art antics which rile up the public.
One of the most telling examples is Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit"[1], which (true to its name) consists of tin cans containing Manzoni's excrement.
Manzoni sold the cans for their weight in gold ($37 each in 1961), but since then they're selling for as much as €275,000 each.
Poetically, some cans have since burst because of the gases built up inside, making the "art" worthless.
The estimation, outrage, and value of such "art" in the art market, in the eyes of critics, and in the view of the public aptly summarizes a lot of modern art. Perhaps that's why they sell so well.
This reminds me of Barnett Newman's "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III" which has elicited its fair share of visceral reactions as well, with some people going so far as to vandalize it in museums - 99 percent invisible did a great story on it a while back
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-many-deaths-of-a-...
The irony is that Abstract expressionism was used for Cold War propaganda after Harry Truman made his that-ain’t-art criticism of the pictorial works that were the State Department’s Advancing American Art exhibit.
Pollock et al. were politically acceptable demonstrations of American freedom of expression because they are not critically engaged with social conditions. Being critical of America’s social disparities was what spelled the end of Advancing American Art as a Cold War instrument. It was too much free expression for the Truman administration.
Don’t misunderstand me, I appreciate Pollock et al. But it’s why it took an immigrant to produce Frank’s The Americans to follow on the artistic groundwork layed by the Pubic Works Administration in the depression years.
Pollock is safe because it doesn’t raise important questions about meat space. Rants about what is art are as far as it goes. It’s more tampon in a teacup than it is Maplethorpe’s X.
It might be fair to say that Jackson Pollock is too apolitical {for our times,to be taken seriously,for you}, but I personally don't see the conspiracy you're laying out here.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkGTvcz3OuuoOGWctHo5veA
But it may be true, and not a conspiracy theory. I've no idea. I've never looked into the issue.
But if done openly per the OP, then we aren't talking about a conspiracy at all, just politics!
I nearly die from the irony every time I see an F-150 with a "thin blue line" sticker blasting "Killing In The Name Of", which is unfortunately quite a lot where I live.
I never put this together before, thanks!
If that's a defense of Pollock's art, I think it's not a very good one. Obviously a lot of people, myself included, disagree that anything that elicits a strong reaction must be art. I hope there's a better reaction to his art, like maybe it's aesthetically pleasing, provocative or innovative?
For the record, I don't dislike Pollock's art, though it's not really something I admire either.
FWIW, “provocative” means “elicits a strong reaction.”
That's like if a bunch of anti-vaxxers gathered to protest Norman Rockwell's "before the shot." Technically, it does says something about the art's ability to "garner a reaction." But that's a tautology.
If there's a critical mass of ignoramuses who are doing the reacting, that doesn't reveal much of anything about the art.
I think many of us view the thousands of men and women behind the Apollo missions, for example, as the world where we came from. Much more than Jackson Pollock (although I have no strong opinion on Pollock as an artist).
And I see already the sneering that dang was referring to (and I'm sure it's happening in the other direction down-thread).
It takes all kinds :)
And I wasn't comparing us to luminaries like Feynman, but rather to the working men and women of the Apollo program.
In response to your comparison then, I suppose I would say we're as close (or closer) to the hippies of burning man and esalen than we are to the engineers of the Apollo program. It's certainly a mixture of both - I just think the former tends to be marginalized is all.
I might concede this for SV, but not for the American tech industry as a whole. SV has an outside cultural influence on the rest of us, but even it doesn't dominant in places like NYC, RTP, etc.
Maybe they don’t have intrinsic meaning, but a lot of the world doesn’t. Maybe they have meaning from their context, maybe the world does as well. At the end of the day, to me they are provocative and inspirational and help me think and I value thinking so I value Pollock’s paintings. Especially insofar as the paintings aren’t encumbered by the heavy realist Americana that Pollock reacts against from his studies with Thomas Benton (Though I do like Benton’s paintings as well).
At this point is there even anything at all that can't be considered to be art?
The word has become almost meaningless.
- Pope John XXII, docta sanctorum patrum, ca. 1324
To be fair to Pollock, he had the creative insight to make his work in a less permissive period of art, so it's fair to argue he was a great innovator or artist on that merit, but it's a different type of achievement vs 'timeless' pieces of art like (imho) Bernini.
By this logic no writer is a great artist, as anyone could just copy out their books by hand - their work is "easily imitated".
What's up for debate I suppose is to what extent a 'non-artist's splodges in immitation of, are stylistically the same but original, or just clones.
(Some might also argue that the entropy in such paintings make actual clones rather harder they are of than something more real and 'of something'!)
Because the abstract style has actively pushed out other styles. The great majority of people in art museums will see nothing beautiful in the post-WWII sections. When 90% of people find 90% of what is lauded as "high art" worthless, of course there is controversy, or more accurately, anger at what is being pushed on them.
Then I thought that maybe I need to scroll down, as soon as I touched the screen I realized it.
What a nice way to discover functionality accidentally.
As an artist, I find it incredibly sad that critics and other gatekeepers (such as museum curators and gallery owners) have any influence at all.
Fortunately, these days the need for such gatekeepers is diminishing, as artists can get their art (at least in digital form) directly in front of their audience, though at the same time new gatekeepers like search engines and platform owners are arising.
Challenging art almost need to be paired with critics who can provide useful metaphors, historical contexts, or what-have-you to help appreciate the art. Part of my appreciation of challenging works of art comes from reading interesting critical appraisals of them. In those situations I think of the critics and the artists as being somewhat intertwined.
I quite agree on the gatekeeper side of things, e.g. critiques who are mainly concerned with questions of taste and judgement, where art that challenges certain norms is judged poorly.
I can't count the number of times I've gone in to famous museums and galleries and found them stocked to the gills with art that I considered absolute and utter garbage.
Now, of course the curators, critics, and gallery owners who extol such art have a different opinion of this art than I do, or they wouldn't have put it in to their museums and galleries, but really who's to say their opinion is any better than anyone else's?
You sound like Banksy in the forward to "War and Piece".
I'm somewhat convinced that Art to a large extent is marketing. How some art gets noticed and into museums confuses me. (Piling things on the floor, no matter how clever the explanation, isn't great. Hanging wood boards on the wall is nice, I love wood grain but no..). Its frustrating to some extent because there is some fantastic art out there by relatively unknown artists.
I help out with a local open studios event (visit artists in their studio spaces). Very few of the 300+ member artists can make a living solely from their art. Under lockdown its even harder.
Does this sound bonkers and like a conspiracy theory? It does -- but it's also pretty mainstream knowledge by now: the CIA thought abstract expressionism was the polar opposite of Soviet "socialist realism". Any form of art denounced by the Soviet Union was worth supporting by the US.
From https://medium.com/@MichaelMcBride/how-jackson-pollock-and-t...
Former CIA agent Donald Jameson:
> “We recognized that this was the kind of art that did not have anything to do with socialist realism… Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of nonconformity… So one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticized that much and that heavyhandedly was worth support in one way or another.”
and later
> Fundamentally, the CIA made Jackson Pollock rich. They made De Kooning and Rothko household names. And in doing so, they won the cold war. Not with guns, but with abstract expressionism and rock and roll.
This does sound bonkers to me but it's not a fringe theory mentioned by conspiracy websites. See other mainstream references:
- https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
It's important to know the supported artists weren't necessarily aware of how they were being used. In fact, almost surely they weren't. But this was a major source of funding, and it was political in aim.
Truly a joyful memory.
Letters set colors (b=blue, r=red, y=yellow, etc).
Mouse click sets random color.
Spacebar or double-click resets canvas.
And Im referring to Pollock's work. This website is arguably more artistic than his painting.
This interactive site is a beautiful and intense way to experience Pollack. If you get the chance, I hope you also get to experience Pollack's works live and in the flesh.
If you like this kind of work another well known artist in this space is Rafael Rozendaal
https://web.archive.org/web/20110529173830/http://www.supern...
edit: fixed typo
― Anaïs Nin
Also, the character graphics in the comments alone are amazing.
I think Pollack's paintings are aesthetically pleasing. I'm not a professional artist, however I am an art and art history hobbyist. I have been for decades. I like his paintings. I don't, however, think they are special or that he was an artistic genius whose paintings should have broken the record at one point for the most expensive work of art ever sold. That's OK though, we all have different tastes and a guy with $100 million just happened to have different tastes from this guy with no millions.
However, my opinion isn't random or uninformed. I know how a painting is created. How the surfaces are prepared. How preparatory drawings and smaller studies are done. How the final drawing is made. How the underpainting is done. My art is pretty bad compared to professionals. However, studying it for decades means I've watched actual masters do their thing for a countless number of hours. I know how the Italian masters created their works of art in great detail. I know how Pollack created his. The level of technical skill required to become a master of classical realism is absurd. Pollack's strength was executing and publishing an idea no one had done before. In the grand scheme of all of art, I don't think that's a particularly strong strength when compared to masters of classical realism.
My opinion is based on an intimate knowledge of what it takes to be that good. If you disagree with my conclusion that's fine and reasonable but to pretend that everyone doesn't consider him a highly skilled genius is ignorant is in itself pretty ignorant.
If I wanted to create a work like Pollack's, there would likely be a learning curve, but we aren't talking the same amount of practice and preparation that classically trained artists require to even be semi-competent. Like I said before, the biggest strength of the work he is known for was originality, not technical competence. He might have also been technically competent as an artist, but when I look at the works that made him famous I don't see it.
I'd be willing to hang all kinds of abstract / modern / postmodern art on my wall because it adds color, sometimes has great composition, and is aesthetically pleasing. However, most of it just isn't meaningful to me in the same way that other genres of art are like classical realism and impressionism. I don't think anyone should feel like that's a personal attack on their preferences. I'm not missing something, it just has a different effect on me. If you don't like classical realism you aren't missing something either, you just like different things.
However, I am still in favour of an "emperor's new clothes" type interpretation of his work - his initial work was panned by critics; but when the later critics write about his work, they reference his history as a "cryptologist" in the Army, and they say things like "you can see AMOR here and ROMA here in the scrawls" (in the book "Your Kid Could Not Do This" or some similar title) as if there's something _deep_ there. ("others can't see it, but he was a cryptologist once, so there must be something I'm missing")
So my take is similar to one up above here - Pollock became huge when he got a great review from a highly influential critic. Same with Twombly.
I was reading the Smithsonian's transcript of Jim Sanborn's Oral History and I see that theme a few times in there -- like his dad was an artist, and at a young age he went to an art opening where he, his parents and the artist knew the art was terrible but his parents were praising the work as profound, confusing him; and later when he recognized the importance of being in the good books of influential curators and gallery owners in DC; e.g. when Yuri Schwebler became upset with him, he said it set his career back 10 years. So, a "who you know" game. Praise everyone, stay in everyone's good books, and hope you get noticed.
Overall I think he's far worse than Pollack and unless he had some kind of mental illness that deluded him into thinking the work he produced took any amount of effort whatsoever he was obviously a troll or a con man.
https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2018/NYR/2018_NYR_15...
Then again maybe the picture above was indeed just some scribblings that he never intended for anyone to see. I'm not overly familiar with his history.
The issue I have is that within the high art community and art historians and art critics there is no limit to the amount of shit they will swallow from con-men. They eagerly await the next completely ridiculous story. I'm certain there were lots of modern/abstract/etc artists that were legitimate, and as you said, struggled and worked hard their entire lives to produce work.
One of the biggest problems I have with finding meaning in such work is that given the fact that the resulting product of such artists can either be a flag draped on a toilet, a black dot drawn in the center of a piece of paper, random plaint splashes repeated in a semi methodical way in order to create a coherent composition, or even shit in a can, I am not convinced that we have managed to accurately separate charlatans and con men from people that actually put effort into what they did. And if you have an industry where mediocre or even laughably bad end products are similar in apparent quality to celebrated masterpieces and there are millions of dollars at stake you can be certain that the con men have shown up in droves.
You can derive great meaning from Pollack and others that it didn't inherently possess. It can have a real impact on you, your life, and how you see the world. That doesn't mean there's an inherent wealth of knowledge to be found that I'm missing out of ignorance. It just means that the art work speaks to you in some way.
Picasso was actually a highly skilled classically trained artist and that experience was an important part of what he became. I only like a few of his paintings, but in some of them while it looks strange to a person accustomed to traditional art, the competence and technical mastery is clearly apparent to someone that knows what they are looking at. Nude Descending a Staircase is a legitimate masterpiece, for example.
And also, to be clear, I'm not saying that any of the examples I listed are not "real" art. They are all real art, I just find master level works of classical realism, expressionism, and many other genres more interesting, due to the undeniable difference in technical mastery and work ethic required to produce them. And by work ethic I don't just mean the number of hours a person spends doing a thing. If I spend 10 years playing basketball 16 hours a day with my kid in my driveway I wouldn't get to magically claim that what I'm doing makes me just as good at basketball as NBA players and demand that the world ignores the fact that my results aren't even close to what theirs are.
I get it that they weren't interested in being considered "good" artists. That's fine, they can do whatever they want and the world has enough room for everyone. I am just not interested in people that don't care about being good at what they do for a living. I'm not interested in social statements or political statements that aren't accompanied by substance. Other people might be and that's great.
When it comes to all forms of art, media, music, film, etc, the things I find most interesting are when people or groups of people are operating at such a high level of skill that almost nobody in history can compare to the work they produce.
I have a lot more respect for artists like Marcel Duchamp, who was always developing in radically new directions and did not like to repeat himself, in great contrast to one-trick ponies like Pollock.
I say... who cares. If it's easy to imitate something and get 90+% of the way with no skill or practice, then the art isn't worth admiring.
If we reduce art to just pretty things, then consuming art will rarely help us grow as people.
Does this make you an "Art Snob Snob"?
But don’t diminish Pollock’s hard earned technical ability that was necessary for his breakthrough in abstract expressionism. It can be difficult for artists to get past the hurdle of mastering their medium so they can arrive at a place where they can really begin to express their intuitions.
Acknowledging and admiring this does not make it snobbish.
What technical ability was that?
I view Pollock's success as more of a result of stumbling in to a bit of the art world's search space that hadn't been explored before, and his championing by a highly influential art critic that liked his work. After that there was a Life magazine spread that brought him to popular attention.
None of this had anything to do with his technical ability, and I would be very surprised if even Pollock himself claimed that his paintings were technically difficult to accomplish.
As someone who works extensively in an art medium (ceramics), I relate to these as technical challenges. It's very time consuming to reign in control over these factors to the point where they become "right", however subjective, to the artist.
The consistency of Pollock's work, to me, shows that he had a systematic approach to how he technically achieved his work (fractal analysis also seems to prove this [1]). I won't argue if it made his work more successful, but he clearly had a level of intention and skill that I personally admire.
[1] https://blogs.uoregon.edu/richardtaylor/2016/02/08/fractal-a...
I make art in various media myself, but don't look at the elements you list as technical challenges as much as they are expressive choices which provide a sort of a "fingerprint" or signature on an artist's work.
In contrast, technical challenges that require a high amount of skill would be the creation, purely by hand and without mechanical assistance, of something like Albrecht Durer's Meloncolia[1], Michelangelo's Moses[2] or Sistine Chapel, to name but a few.
These works require not just the artist's personal distinctive "fingerprint" but the skill to create great verisimilitude in approximating the appearance of living beings and other things in the "external", "real" world. Any number of mistakes, from proportion to lighting to texture to anatomy, could have been made that would have made their work look "wrong".
The same couldn't be said of Pollock's work. Whether he chose to fling his paint right or left, up or down, would have resulted in more or less the same splatter effect, as long as he kept to pretty much the same paint density and color scheme. That's really not much of a skill compared to the master draftsmen like Michelangelo and Durer.
I also don't believe being systematic is evidence of skill. It's just evidence of organization.
Don't get me wrong, though. I like Pollock myself and consider that at its best his work achieves a high level of energy and harmony that is appealing to me. However, I believe that if just about anyone makes enough random splatter paintings, then those kinds of happy accidents are bound to come along eventually. It really doesn't take much, if any, skill in my eyes. He just happened to do it first.
[1] - http://www.albrechtdurerblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/...
[2] - https://i2.wp.com/befrontmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/...
I’d suggest anyone genuinely interested in experiencing art to just do some exploration. The Artsy app has been great for this. No purchase necessary to simply see what’s out there and some valuations. (Note that the art business is seemingly used for not just selling art but other nefarious things - so laugh at the prices as they’re possibly representative of more than just the art.)
I find much of his work beautiful. It clearly stands out amongst the crowd.
Pollack isn't easy to imitate and get 90+% of the way with no skill or practice. Cheap imitations don't look similar. The jacksonpollack.org website is a silly farce.
My guess: 50%
An equivalent claim is, "Windows 95 can do 90% of what Linux can do already. Operating system programmers aren't worth admiring."
If I've learned anything in my life, it's that when a group of people take something very seriously that seems pointless to me, 99% of the time, it is my own ignorance preventing me from seeing what they see.
Windows 95 can do 90% of what Linux can. Windows 3.1 can do 90% of what Windows 95 can. DOS can do 90% of what Window 3.1 can.
In this (contrived and counter-chronological) example, at each iteration we lost something that was only ever valuable to connoisseurs. In the case of software, we're talking about developers and power users.
But yeah, let's all keep mocking Pollock, and the art history students who cherish the work, until we end up with nothing but the most commercial, easily-digestible, and trite art.
Oh wait...
So another possibility is that there indeed is such a thing as an emperor without clothes, and he might show up in abstract art.
vi, emacs, BBEdit, Notepad++, Sublime, VSCode, TextMate all produce the same plain text. Is it the same?
I can write simple code in Python, Perl, C, PHP, swift, rebol, basic, rexx, JavaScript and do the same thing. Is the end result the only thing?
I have learned a huge amount from studying other programmers simple programs that I could have written. Even inexperienced programmers have taught me.
I have learned a huge amount watching other people paint walls of a house while I am painting the same wall the same color.
There is much more to art than paint on a canvas. Much more.
That's fine, of course you're not obligated to like or admire anything in particular.
Generally, if I don't see value in something a large number of people do, it causes me to reflect a little to try to figure out what I'm missing. And indeed, frequently I find I don't care (pick any pop star of the last few decades, for instance).
But sometimes it opens up a whole world I've been missing.
I do as well.
But a lot of times I come to the conclusion that everyone is just participating in a social meta-game aka "the emperor's new clothes". The art community (in my opinion) is especially vulnerable to these social meta-games (because there is no way to objectively measure art in a way everyone agrees on), where you have to pretend to like and admire stuff to curry favor with peers and critics. Criticize Pollock and you stand to lose a lot of social standing. Praise him and show your learnedness and you climb the social ladder. And as you climb the ladder pretty soon you've fully bought into the status quo yourself.
Anyway, I dunno. I don't think I've ever lost social favor for not liking some dead artist. (Live ones are like everyone else, and tribal bullshit applies. Just like in any other group of humans.)
One thing to be aware of is most folks with an interest in art aren't going to find "I could do that" to be meaningful criticism. Yeah, and? You didn't. Someone other than Armstrong could have been the first man on the Moon, but they weren't, either.
Think about the introduction of photography. Like you said, the ability to imitate something (in this case 100%) with no skill or practice. That's photography. And it changed everything. Impressionism came from this period.
And I think it's interesting when placing Pollock on this timeline, he only did the drip paintings for a couple years of his career. But a lot of people would place these paintings towards the start of AbEx. Which some define as an opposing reaction to encroaching government, McCarthyism, lack of individuality and conformity, communism, etc. It's not just one technique or style. It's a way of expressing individuality and emotion.
Pollock's drip paintings and that type of 'action painting' directly tears apart that narrow view of art you expressed. These pieces purposely make the individual 'building blocks' visible. the brush strokes, paint etc.
What art was before is now being broken down, the parts put on display. One has to view it in the context of the time. Think about the Hollywood blacklist, USSR, control and conformity built from fear.
And Pollock goes and does that.
It was a protest of individuality and expression and is about SO much much more than reproducibility.
Of course, what Rockwell was missing is doing a Pollock-style action painting first. After Pollock, any paintings in his style are just worthless imitations.
It doesn't matter how "easy" it is, getting there first and pushing the boundaries of what is considered art still has a lot of value in the art world.
Norman Rockwell did not push any boundaries of art, and that's why he will always be a minor footnote in the history of art, no matter how much more technically accomplished his paintings in a realistic style are compared to some much more significant but technically "easy" abstract art.
[1] - http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3535/1896/1600/rockwell_s...
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Mozart was creating random compositions with dice as far back as 1792.[1] Pollock was playing with randomness in painting in the 1940's, around the same time that John Cage was innovating with randomness in musical compositions.
The use of randomness in the arts and music has been going on for a long time, so something like your ascii art is probably not going to raise an eyebrow today, though maybe if you did it 100 years ago and managed to get it in to a museum or gallery it might have looked novel then.
That said, I wouldn't put it past some galleries to display it anyway, especially if you do it in a large quantity -- say having random text cover all the gallery walls, or make the font really gigantic. I'm sure some people will love it and consider it some kind of profound statement on the mechanization of modern life or something.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_Würfelspiel
I'm sure you've encountered someone saying something along the lines of "Oh, I like it a lot but it's so common, literally every other person has it.". That's the kind of audience art is targeted towards. It's easy to classify if art is good or bad:
1. Is unique. If something is very similar to other famous and sought-after pieces of art then it's not good. 2. Is popular in the art-community and sought after among the rich.
If something satisfies these two requirements then it's good art. Otherwise it's not.
Remember the $120,000 banana? It satisfies both conditions. So it was "good art". It also got three buyers apparently.
Basically there are good reasons that modern art sometimes does not display a lot of technical skill. It might for example exactly be the point of the artwork, that it can't be sold or reproduced.