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Comment by kubb | Hacker News Reader

Yes, people are also running faster than they used to, they play chess better than they used to, we've been pushing the limits (not me personally lol) of what is possible and it stands to reason that portraitists are also getting better.

The only objection to this I can imagine is rooted in the misconception that it's somehow irreverent to see today's students as better than the old masters. The brilliance of the past heroes consisted in pushing the needle of what was possible, and today's heroes are pushing it even further.

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That’s a great point, it surprises nobody to see today’s students posting better performances than yesterday’s masters when it comes to sport, or have today’s grad students know more than trailblazers of 19th century science, but that seems a lot more alien when it comes to the arts (at least in the general public).

But as in sports, or sciences, or architecture, or engineering, what the old masters had to discover or invent then became part of the standard curriculum, and could be refined, built upon further, and better tooling could be designed and taught.

For me, a large part of what makes the art of the past so captivating is its historicity. It reflects and intervenes in a context - politically, intellectually, economically, artistically - radically different to our own. Looking at great art from the past is an insight into different ways of thinking and being, and different moments in history. Reducing art to technique misses this.

> they play chess better than they used to

I tend to believe that, given how intensive we train players these days, but are we actually certain that it is the case? I guess we could ask a chess engine to rate all available games but that would not be terribly convincing because they were playing a different style, against the players of their time (unlike a running competition, you really need two players to play a game of chess). Also, for some past players we don't have that many games to begin with.

(Context: I'm a very bad chess player, but have been getting into it lately.)

I think we're fairly certain that chess players today would beat chess players of the past, in a regular 1 on 1 game. Assuming the old chess players didn't have time to prepare.

Chess programs can rate the accuracy of moves, so we can see how accurate past players were. In addition, a lot has been discovered about more correct opening theory - a grandmaster of the past would make many mistakes in the opening that a modern grandmaster would be able to take advantage of, simply because they didn't know those lines.

Except, progress isn't guaranteed by the march of time.

Take something more objective than fine art, like Roman Concrete [1]. To this day the Pantheon is the largest freestanding dome in the world because of the concrete's disproportionately good durability and longevity. It puts modern mass produced concrete to shame.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete

Counterpoint: People write worse poetry than they used to, the books are worse now, and all the architecture is terrible.

Grant that they don't have anything interesting to write about and it's too expensive to build decent buildings, but the poetry is indisputable.

There was no shortage of bad poems, books, and architecture in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

This is an intriguing proposition, but for the architecture we can trivially prove it false. Just go outside and look at the new developments going up, then go to the library and look at pictures of literal tenements from a hundred years ago.

Even their industrial buildings looked good!

I'd say architecture fits in a bit differently here, due to the extremely high barriers to entry (you have to secure property AND fund the design AND fund the construction) compared to almost any other form of artistic expression. American society (and much of the rest of the world) has become more profit-focused over time, and buildings are a huge cost. Therefore, they've been increasingly designed to be purpose-built. Aesthetics cost money, and rarely serve the purpose of whoever is paying for the building.

If you funded the most talented architects alive to create works of beauty, I bet you'd get it.

You're not wrong, but I think that's more a function of how one becomes a respected architect than the potentials of the students. I suspect it's an out growth of what Taleb called the 'expert problem' in that the best architects are anointed as such by other architects, rather than the public.

What makes you think there are less interesting things to write about then in the past?

Not a whole lot going on. Back in the day, you always would have some kind of good war going on, for one. And then you had all of those other big cultural issues, you could always pump out a book about communism or three. Today, all we can do is to express our opinion on whether or not a man named Joe Rogan has a good podcast.

There are multiple wars going on right now? There was attempt to overthrow election results last year? You can write about terrorism, islamic, far right wing, incels, blm protests, drugs.

Many famous classics are about interpersonal issues and down to earth minor issues which is something that still goes on. You can write about good old alcoholism, abuse, love.

The crime still exists, so something like Crime and Punishment is super doable.

Do you subscribe to any poetry publication? Poetry, New Yorker, three penny review and plenty other big and small publications have great contemporary poems. I would rather argue we are much worse in reading poetry now.

Great contemporary poems, perhaps, but not contemporary great poems.

If we look at the current issue[0] of The Threepenny Review, the pathology is quite obvious. The three "poems" in the list all share certain features:

- A variable amount of syllables per line (e.g. no metre)

- No rhymes

- No other discernible differences from prose

At that point, why even bother calling it a poem? You might as well save yourself the time by opening up the day's newspaper in a text editor, clicking randomly, and pressing enter. When you feel there's enough line breaks, you're ready to publish.

[0]: https://www.threepennyreview.com/current.html

A poem, by the Washington Post and Emacs auto-fill-mode:

  Russian warships sailed toward
  the Black Sea on Tuesday,
  stoking alarm among U.S. and
  European security officials
  who warned that the final
  capabilities for a large-scale
  assault on Ukraine appeared to
  be falling into place.

  On a day of frantic shuttle
  diplomacy by French President
  Emmanuel Macron, who hopped
  among capitals trying to avert
  a conflict, Russian officials
  gave little sign that the
  French leader’s initiatives
  had changed their
  calculations.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/08/ukraine-russ...

"Do you subscribe to any poetry publication? Poetry, New Yorker, three penny review and plenty other big and small publications have great contemporary poems. I would rather argue we are much worse in reading poetry now."

This is all so subjective.

Very few poems resonate with me... maybe something like 1 out of 100, and almost always they're old poems, like those by Kabir, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost.

It's exceedingly rare for any contemporary poetry that I've read to come anywhere close to being as moving, interesting, or deep as some of these classics.

That said, 99% of old poetry doesn't move me either.

I'd read a lot more poetry if the signal to noise ratio was higher, but sadly for my taste it's not.

So that’s not about relative quality of poetry over time. It is about signal vs noise. Fundamentally this is a strategy of waiting for history to filter out the noise. With 1% you are taking a pretty low pass filter, though. In my experience, I enjoy about 20% of poems I read, the remaining 80% I will quickly skim so signal to noise in terms of my time is more like 90/10.

"People write worse poetry than they used to, the books are worse now, and all the architecture is terrible."

What percentage of newly created poetry, books, and architecture do you read or look at?

There's an absolute glut of information right now, and no human is capable of consuming more than a tiny fraction of it.

I'm absolutely sure that "great" creative work is being made right now, but it's going to take time for humanity to sift through everything out there to find the gold.

That's not to mention that one man's trash is another man's treasure, and plenty of people who we consider "great" now were completely ignored or even denigrated in their lifetimes.

Not a big poetry reader, but books are definitely not worse now. Some of the best books I've ever read have been published in the last 10-20 years, across various genres.

Not to mention the huge leap in quality of TV writing.

We've been pushing the limits of things which we care a lot about and invest a lot of time and money into. Is portrait painting one of those things? My impression is that it took a bit of a dip when the camera was invented, and the number of people doing it seriously today is fairly low. There are plenty of digital artists making images of human beings, but how many of them are traditional portraits? Probably not too many. So, it would not surprise me if the field had not increased as much as, say, chess or semi-conductor production.

>many of them are traditional portraits

There is so much talent out there due to increased accessibility that people who don't specialize in portraits are still extremely capable, many (arguably) more so than old masters. I think even more than sports, where physiology limits how much one can train / improve. Digital tools have allowed artists to accumulate much more practice. Literally not having to wait for paint to dry is a huge advantage.

Progress in sports is fairly linear. Progress in the arts is not very linear.

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