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.
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.
If we reduce art to just pretty things, then consuming art will rarely help us grow as people.
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.
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/...
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...
sdaf;lkajdfahvpo8xcuvx0cvu43nkQ#$%0digf09dsvsdfgsdfgdfg
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003.1415hhh
sdaf;lkajdfahvpo8xcuvx0cvu43nkQ#$%0digf09dsvsdfgsdfgdfg
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003.1415hhhs
daf;lkajdfahvpo8xcuvx0cvu43nkQ#$%0digf09dsvsdfgsdfgdfg
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003.1415hhh
sdaf;lkajdfahvpo8xcuvx0cvu43nkQ#$%0digf09dsvsdfgsdfgdfg
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003.1415hhl
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.
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.
Does this make you an "Art Snob Snob"?
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%
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.
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.