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Comment by guardiangod | Hacker News Reader

While I don't know anything about art to disagree with you, I'd imagine people say the same thing no matter if it's 100, 500, or 2000 years ago.

I suspect the situation is the same with old appliances- only the Good Stuff survives the test of time.

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They definitely said that about Monet and the impressionists in general. Lazy brush strokes and blobs of paint. People find it very pretty though and reproductions hang everywhere.

Still, I could not have painted like Monet or Sisley. I can, however, pick a marker and a canvas and write "I just did that" to reply to the "I could have done that" asshole. Then I'm sure someone will come up and retroactively insert some meaning into that piece of shit "Ah, yes... That is the purpose of that piece. It is to be discussed in a world where meaning itself is to be discussed. You understood it perfectly".

How about someone take a massive literal dump just under that metaphorical crap that says "I could have done that". Technically, someone looking at the two together could say the same thing about both, or mistake the piece of canvas as a label for that actual steaming piece of art.

I think you may have fallen prey to a common misconception about art: Art - not only the modern kind - has and always very much had a "first mover advantage".

It's not about the fact that you couldn't paint coloured squares on canvas Rothko-style. Quite possibly you could. It's that he did it first. There are tons of artists in certain Chinese villages who have perfected the art of pointilism possibly almost as good as Seurat (certainly indistinguishable for an amateur's eye), yet their paintings sell for a couple dollars, not a couple million.

You could also easily extrapolate your argument about scribbling on the canvas to the realm of software development and argue that creating e.g. Facebook or Amazon or Wikipedia is really nothing special. A few lines of code will get you a usable MVP. I'm sure you could have done it (I'm saying this completely unironically). However you didn't. Someone else did it first. There may be dozens or hundreds of copycats but the original idea and/or the successful marketing of said idea is all that counts. The rest is noise (sometimes rightfully, sometimes not).

>I think you may have fallen prey to a common misconception about art: Art - not only the modern kind - has and always very much had a "first mover advantage".

There is no first mover advantage in a piece that says "I could have done this". Michael Scott from The Office probably did it first.

>You could also easily extrapolate your argument about scribbling on the canvas to the realm of software development and argue that creating e.g. Facebook or Amazon or Wikipedia is really nothing special.

That would be quite an extrapolation, though.

>A few lines of code will get you a usable MVP.

There was a documentary about Google on a french tv channel (M6) called Capital. The moment the narrator said "Discover how they built a fortune with a few lines of code", I left.

>I'm sure you could have done it (I'm saying this completely unironically). However you didn't. Someone else did it first.

I'll argue to your side: I'm not sure I could have done, but I understand what you're saying and I often say this to people who say "I thought of that idea" when they see something successful. I always retort: "Yes, I thought of Uber as well. Have I built it? No. We all have ideas we don't materialize".

Here's what I just did. Magritte style piping hot finger:

   __________________________________________
  |                                          |
  |    _________________________________     |
  |   |                                 |    |
  |   |                                 |    |
  |   |    I could have done that.      |    |
  |   |                                 |    |
  |   |_________________________________|    |
  |                                          |
  |                                          |
  |        Ceci n'est pas de l'art.          |
  |                                          |
  |__________________________________________|

Nobody would give two shits about me or my painting if I drew colored squares first.

Actually let me propose an experiment: Take two people: One a famous artist, and one an unknown complete amateur. Someone who hasn't held a brush since primary school. Have them both paint 6 pieces each in a unique but low technical skill style. Then randomize which artist signs which piece.

The success of the artworks will be strongly correlated with who is claimed to have drawn it, and uncorrelated with who actually did.

Yes. There was that anecdote of someone bringing a painting and being told it was clearly a fake after examination because the real one was exposed in a museum. TL;DR: the one exposed in the museum was the fake, the real one was stolen, and that's the one the person brought.

Double-blind wine experiments where people talk about earthy-mushroomy-fruity tones, then have the label revealed are fun.

Wine's are a little bit different imo, because there is a definitely legit basis there just the border with bullshit and marketing is fuzzy.

My take away from those double-blind experiments isn't that it's all made up, but rather that people need to practice more rigor.

Well yeah, appreciating art and owning art are different things. Owning art is an investment, you want the possibility of selling it to someone else with interest later. Can't do that if it's not famous

How do you measure the success of art? I'd go with eyeballs per year, you've picked sales figures, someone else would probably say a third thing

Sorry for the ninja edit there, I kinda went back and forth, settled on a more neutral success.

> It's that he did it first.

By that logic Kim Kardashian is also a great artist. Because she is the first to popularize idea of being famous for being famous. As long as people, who claim Pollock is a great artist, also admit that Kim Kardashian is a great artist, I am good with the argument.

I'm pretty sure that was Paris Hilton?

In fact, from Kim Kardashian's wiki page:

> Kardashian first gained media attention as a friend and stylist of Paris Hilton...

And from Paris' page:

> Credited with influencing the revival of the famous for being famous phenomenon throughout the 2000s,[6] Hilton was, for a number of years, one of the world's most ubiquitous public figures.

The defining character of impressionists, was their ability to paint in the moment. Prior to this period, mixing paints was difficult, and most art was produced in a studio. Industrialization gave readily mixed paints that lasted. This gave people the ability to paint outside, but since they would only have a few hours to capture a scene due to lighting, it encouraged essentially "Speed Paints." From there, its all about being able to capture as much of the subject in the least amount of effort.

Art and technology and extremely linked. We take things like photo realistic paintings for granted, but these are only possible because artists can paint from a color photograph. Vermeers are celebrated because he was able to paint in a photo realistic manner before photos. But he was only able to do that with a complex setup of mirrors to essentially project an image on the canvas (or the eye using a split view setup).

Art has a long history, and aesthetics have changed over time. Techniques like Chiaroscuro and Contrapposto come and go. Highly developed cultures usually have highly developed art and vice versa. Art is usually a balance of ideas and aesthetics. No matter the contemporary techniques, the subject matter has usually been immediately recognizable by a lay viewer, and symbology can be decoded by the specialist. For example: is there a dove flying through a window and Mary is in the picture? That means God is impregnating Mary. But even without knowing that you can still understand the picture is of Mary and is religious in nature.

Post modern art is probably the most extreme example of destruction of aesthetics in the name of pure ideas. Sometimes people say modern art can express feelings that are inexpressible by language. But I argue that either 1) there was no meaning to begin with and its all self-derives and 2) it requires being a specialist to understand the art. Its the ultimate appeal to ego since no interpretation is wrong, since there was nothing really intended.

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