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Comment by deugtniet | Hacker News Reader

I tend to disagree with the assessment that the an artists technique has anything to do with how good an artist is.

Case in point: in Picasso's formative years, he was a great realistic painter. He became a great artist because he pushed the boundary of abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work. To me, Picasso was so good because he built a story (myth) around his work that resonated with so many people.

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting because of the myth around it. It's a beautiful portait, but is it really the best portrait ever? I think in the same wing of the Louvre there are better paintings of Da Vinci on show, even though there is no crowd around it.

Recently, the myth builders have been (maybe they still are) Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, I think that's what makes them great artists.

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Picasso was a hack who contributed to the downfall of a thousand year old tradition of craftsmanship. The modernists destroyed university casts and ruined academic drawing programs so completely that they have not recovered to this day.

We are very fortunate that image sharing on the internet has revealed that the art establishment has no clothes and people enjoy representational works. Artists like Will St. John, Colleen Barry, Ramon Alex Hurtado, Jeremy Lipking and others are reviving academic figurative traditions.

If I sound upset, it's because I am. In highschool I took AP art and all the other art classes I could. I visited all the nearby art associations and establishments that people revered. I wanted to paint people, wanted to make great paintings like the ones I saw in museums. I attended one of the best-ranked public highschools in my state and my teachers with art degrees didn't even know there was an academic path out there because their colleges just taught them about the greatness of conceptual garbage. I wound up giving up on that dream and floundering through the last decade with constructive methods like loomis and bridgman in my spare time. Now I have a degree I'm not passionate about and enough debt that pursuing academic training is out of the question.

Warhol's soup cans are neat and abstract movements were a refreshing breath of fresh air in art history, sure. You might admire works of lesser craftsmanship for their "philosophical" achievements, but consider the destruction that philosophy wreaked upon education and the cultural-nuclear-crater left behind.

Google Sargent, Repin, Bouguereau, and Homer. Then look again at Koons, Hirst, Twombly, etc. and try to convince yourself a grave error and loss has not occurred.

There’s a lot to unpack here. But Picasso wasn’t a hack. Overrated, sure. But he approached his subject matter and technique with as much focus and detail as any artist that came before him. You aren’t required to appreciate his contribution to the artistic conversation; but calling him a hack is dismissive and purposely neglectful of his substantial impact.

Picasso did what he did, and created what he created because of photography. In a world where capturing likeness, and form was basically free - what do you do with painting? Certainly not attempt to capture likeness and form - perhaps you make an Ernest attempt to capture or project the emotional response of form and subject. Picasso’s facial structure was modeled after African war masks, which were at the time ignored by the art world. And his composition and color and repetition were inspired by the Japanese print makers. A lot of the art from that era was inspired by what was coming out of Japan at that time. The product of Picasso was a mashup of influences, like all impactful art.

The backlash against likeness and form was certain way before Picasso. But the fact that he rode that style to such fame is what made the art world dramatically over correct so drastically.

At the time of the shift away from traditional fine art, there was a big shift in how art was marketed and style itself probably did not have as much influence as people think.

Academy art was very expensive because it took a long time to make (so artists only made a hand full of work), and there were fewer artists at that level because it took so much training to get to the level of a Bouguereau or Sargent. Up until this point the people buying this kind of art were wealthy or powerful enough to afford it.

At the turn of the century, there was an increased demand of art from the new burgeoning middle class, however there simply was not enough supply, and it was all expensive academy art. Because of this, art dealers were incentivized to promote impressionists because they were already academy rejects so they were outsiders with chips on their shoulders, and the work they did was by design easier and quicker to make, so they were able to produce way more art that dealers could sell to the middle class who were less discerning than the traditional art world.

The new mass market ended up being far more profitable for dealers, the demographic so much larger, that it really just drove what kind of art was created and marketed afterwards. Bouguereau died at 80 and made less than a thousand works over his lifetime, Picasso made tens of thousands. Picasso's true genius is in his ability to produce and market his works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G8UfISpb0I

Google WW2, the Berlin Wall, Crystal Pepsi, Walmart, Donald Trump and then you may understand why Warhol reflects the contemporary zeitgeist and academic neoclassical art does not. (By the way, Twombly is totally unlike those other two artists. There is in fact a subtle classicism to his work.)

> There is in fact a subtle classicism to his work.

Please enlighten me. The man made literal scribbles:

https://youtu.be/X-nJNcE4uKs

Anyone with functioning eyes ought to watch that and be able to immediately see that the "expert" is not wearing any clothing. They've got classical violin music playing to add a sense of prestige, it's grotesque. It would be more appropriate to accompany the video with "zen music"[0], the musical analog to twombly's work: https://youtu.be/uOOtJcWAk-A

[0]: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13248549

His work is often read as an archaic, pre-verbal poetics of the classical world: https://www.bastian-gallery.com/ausstellungen/cy-twombly-a-m... The scribblings draw from the walls of Pompeii, soft whites and blood reds evoke a certain Greco-Roman pallette etc. Scribbles but more than scribbles.

He was actually criticized for not adhering to postmodernist scripture: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/10...

Totally agree. There's a raft of modern realist painters who's work is so similar to photographs that they're utterly devoid of the main criteria of good art... feeling

A lot of this is compounded by the practice of working from high def photographs. Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos. As an illustration of this, try and take a photograph of a beautiful sunset and compare it to what you see

I always found that practice weird. When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas.

Yes there are many photos that you can call art, but if you're not the one that took the original photo it feels like most of the creative effort was not yours and you're just showing off your brush/pen technique.

As a disclaimer, I have 0 talent when it comes to drawing/painting so I'm pretty much clueless about the creative process of modern painting.

When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas.

There are lots of ways of using a photo as a source. A lot of the 'art' comes from choosing which techniques and paints and colors to use to capture the feeling you are after. You can also choose to make choices like adding/removing elements, changing the field of view or moving the point of view, playing with perspective etc. to make the composition more interesting.

You can give the same photo to 100 different artists and you will get back 100 different paintings with 100 different artistic choices, some of which will appeal to you on an artistic level a lot more than others.

Thank you for the details, and I agree that what you describe includes plenty of creative effort.

I guess my scenario was much more narrow, as I was thinking about doing an exact copy of a photo that you didn't take yourself. Doing an exact copy limits greatly the number of artistic choices you could make as most of the choices were made by the photographer.

Just found out this is actually a thing called photorealism where the artist is expected to also take the original photo. Feels good to read about something else than software and politics for a change :).

Is it weirder then trying to become good in literally any other craft or skill?

People spend hours trying to become good at coding competitions, games, sport, musical instrument, embroidery, hoby electronics ... you name it. Why would "trying to become as good as possible at creating realistic drawing" would be weirder then anything else? The technical skill involved in making it look hyper realistic is huge.

By "weird" I meant that having great technique doesn't automatically translate to great art. It could translate to greater craftsmanship, faster and more precise work, but by art I understand the process of applying your own creative filter and emotions to whatever you want to represent/imitate in whatever medium.

I feel like I'm going to deep into this "art" thing so time to get back to a domain where I have more experience, software development.

Being great at touch typing is an awesome skill that many people train but typing fast doesn't make you automatically a great developer/architect/manager.

I see the effort of exactly copying someone else's photo similar to how developers do "coding katas" to hone their fundamentals. It's basically practice, not really creative problem solving.

Nothing wrong with honing one skills, but in my book skills are tools to be used as part of a creative process. They don't replace the creative process, but they can elevate the end result.

Artists themselves do call it art tho. They value the technical skill on itself too, apparently. And talk about it a lot. And then it becomes separate field where you can try to excel or competition on itself. (Also, in subgenres like manga when they talk about quality of art, they typically mean technical skill more then ability to convey emotions.)

It makes it something you don't value or like, which is 100% valid. But it seems to be fairly within what artists themselves call art.

I understand that people can call art whatever they like.

One can argue that doing an exact copy of a photograph with the end result being indistinguishable from the original photo is some kind of "meta" art and the lack of creativity actually puts focus on the technical skill and the effort of the artist, as a kind of "anti-creativity statement" type of art, "there is no artist just paint and effort".

But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality.

Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort?

On that note, I think I'll stop. I feel I'm getting high just from all the meta-ideas I'm writing, lol.

> One can argue that doing an exact copy of a photograph with the end result being indistinguishable from the original photo is some kind of "meta" art and the lack of creativity actually puts focus on the technical skill and the effort of the artist, as a kind of "anti-creativity statement" type of art, "there is no artist just paint and effort".

I mean you can, but generally, artists would call this bullshit explanation. I am pretty sure you are aware of that too :). None of what I talked about was any meta. It was down to eath, pragmatically, "yeah art is also technical ability to make hyper realistic picture".

> But my non-artistic brain would still rate this lower compared to the original in terms of creativity, insight, originality.

Again, yes, judged by insight and originality. But, it is not the only valid criterium for art work. Among other things, realistic portraits are pretty low in general if judged by creativity. The old master did not went for creativity there - the realism was actual ambition for many of them.

> Yes you can raise a skill to the level of an art, but then wouldn't the actual performance of the skill be the artwork? And the resulting picture just an artifact that has no artistic value without the original side by side + a description/video describing/showing the actual effort?

I dont understand why the result would had no value. You don't have to like it or find it interesting, that is 100%. This sort of stuff is subjective. What I found out was that many artists often do value technical skill and do see value in the resulting picture, actually.

You seems to insist on one definition of art, which is super strict and exclusive. And kinda excludes majority of drawings people produce. At least I think. Most of drawings are people trying to figure out how to draw the thing, again and again.

Art, as used currently or in history, does not have to include only super deep I have philosophical opinions or deep feelings or whatever. Plenty of times it is "look guys, I finally managed to draw a nose".

> I don't understand why the result would had no value.

I exaggerated that one, it has value, but to a lesser degree, imo. The value of the painting is in the skill of producing the copy, not really in having the creativity or insight that the original photographer had when taking the photo. The subject is already in 2d, perspective already frozen, and if you're replicating it perfectly you're not adding anything substantial, you're just changing the medium.

Can a copy be considered art? Sure it can, like I said previously anything can be art if framed in an artistic context. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic.

> You seems to insist on one definition of art, which is super strict and exclusive.

I don't think I've tried to define or limit what can/cannot be art in any of my comments. I'm just talking about my personal criteria for differentiating between different levels of artistic quality.

My top comment in this thread merely stated that using someone else's photographs to photocopy into a painting without applying your own insight is a less-creative form of art than if you are framing and taking a picture yourself and you use that as an intermediary medium before copying it to the canvas.

Me building a wooden chair by looking at a picture on ikea's site is a form of craftsmanship. Can it be called art? Sure it can, I might even take a picture and post it on reddit. Is it great art? By my criteria, no. I would say that a chair built by Gaudi has more artistic value than my chair, and please note I'm not saying that my chair isn't a piece of art, just a lesser one.

If someone finds my preserved wooden chair in 1000 years it's historical value would be great but I wouldn't be so sure about it's artistic value, unless it's the only remaining representation of a chair left from the 21st century in any kind of medium.

What's wrong with brush/pen technique?

Nothing, it's a great skill to have, and one that I never invested in.

The painter themselves can take the photo. Photos can help if the subject or the scene is hard to be around long enough to paint. Say, an artist painting impressionistic city streets in the rain. It’s hard to stay in the rain and paint, but they can take a photo and paint at home, while recalling the feeling of being at the scene - the cold, the wetness, the sound of the splashing water, cars driving by, etc.

yep, I already addressed this in another comment, that's photorealism, and the artist always takes the picture so painting it is just the last step in the overall creative process.

my point was that it feels weird for me to call it art if you didn't take the photo and your just doing the last, arguably less creative, step.

Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser".

> Not that it doesn't take a great deal of effort and skill to achieve it, it just feels somehow "lesser".

Yeah, it does in a certain way. Say, I take a picture then send it so someone to make a "painting" of it. I does feel a bit "lesser".

Of course, depending on the trend in art, it may be that's the whole point of the piece -- to highlight that everything is just a copy of a copy and so on. Basically, it could be a deliberate part of the process like say https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbel...

> Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos

What if you use a camera obscura, as many of the “old masters” are believed to have done?

Funnily enough quite a lot of artists use early digital cameras, where the quality is described as 'grainy'

Its of just bad enough quality (and hasn't been altered by algorithms) that you can get a 'sense' of the scene without too much detail, being over/under-exposed, etc.

Edit: also see the use of a 'black mirror' https://londonfineartstudios.com/the-mirror-the-black-mirror...

I think this is a perfect post to bring up the theory of Vermeer's work presented in this film, "Tim's Vermeer." The focus of the movie, Tim Jenison of NewTek, hypothesized the use of a mirror to allow an almost paint-by-numbers recreation of the sitting subject.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/

I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. In some part due to the difference in skill development required by using a photo for reference versus using live references or your imagination/memory/whatever, but mostly because of how much the technological conceits and limitations of that photography come to infect other media which don't suffer from them.

It's most obvious in paintings and videogames. Depth of field, bokeh, motion blur, perspective, lens distortion—even focal length and composition. Once you realize it, it becomes impossible to ignore, and it really compromises the work for me. So many of the most technically adept artists today are using all their skill to effectively simulate one form of art with another. It's an interesting exercise, sure, and I'll never dissuade someone from developing and refining a skill, but in the best-case scenario, I'm just left thinking I'd rather see the photo or the movie, or not see the image at all. And I'm someone who will gladly spend 20min+ standing in front of a Rembrandt.

I don't have any issue with realism in art and think it can be quite effective when used well. But so much of what makes something like The Night Watch incredible is how it feels both convincingly real and compellingly uncanny at the same time due to its rendering from some fuzzy approximation of what the artist observed from his models, conceived in his mind's eye, and meticulously sketched and reworked.

To me, it's the ability to capture and create something within/from that gray area that makes an artist great.

Yes, people confuse an accurate photograph of being as real as you can get. But in actuality the brain does a lot of work in order to compose a scene, as any optical illusion will reveal. So the accuracy of a photo becomes its downfall in feeling real.

The Impressionists understood this and used effects such as 'optical mixing' (from the scientific findings of Maxwell) to create works that felt more real

> I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference.

There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph. For instance, Ben Aronson (https://benaronson.net/), a contemporary impressionist painter I very much like, heavily uses photographic references to paint cityscapes that he just literally couldn't paint live (because, say, its in the middle of a busy downtown street, or way up in the air between buildings). But his paintings are far from "photorealistic", not only utilizing an impressionist style, but also often moving or adding buildings or landscape that don't actually exist in the photo.

> There's a big difference between photographic reference and copying a photograph

But of course. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. As I mentioned, my primary issue is with how heavy reliance on photo reference can result in a photo-like final painting.

As I mentioned in another comment, I have a secondary issue with how photo reference affects the process, but that's another discussion.

Depth of field, bokeh and perspective are things that aren't photographic, it's just physics and our eyes do it too. You can easily notice it in real life.

Focal length being variable has nothing to do with photography either. It has to do with screens that vary in size and distance. To be able to match the angle of view of our eyes, the camera in a video game needs to vary it's focal length. And of course, our eyes have a focal length too.

Our eyes feel motion blur too. It's just cut out when you saccade your eyes by the brain. Track a car with your eyes and notice the motion blur over the whole street. Now, for video games, it doesn't make much sense until you realize that we use 30/60fps screens. Motion blur is a crutch to minimize the obviousness of low frame rates. In a perfect world of course, you would want your screen to have 144+Hz of refresh rate and let your own eyes do the motion blur, but that's too expensive for now.

So you see, these things aren't actually there because of photography. They are things that our eyes do just as much as any camera. In fact, the only real difference between our eyes and cameras is that eyes operate continuously while cameras operate semi-discretely, though at 200fps+ this converges almost completely.

> Depth of field, bokeh and perspective are things that aren't photographic

They are, though (unless you think I'm saying that relative physical distances literally do not exist outside of photography?). You can say our eyes operate as more sophisticated lenses and are likewise constrained by physics and light, to be sure, but the experience of seeing something is very, very different from viewing that thing in a photograph or film.

With your eyes, you cannot study or capture or examine the blurred areas on the periphery of your vision; photography enables that. Similarly, photography enables the capture and examination and artistic presentation of motion blur. Photography creates that apprehension of the world. Painting from or to mimic that apprehension is, I feel, limiting. Even when your subject is not abstract.

What I'm taking issue with isn't the basic principles of light; it's painting a scene the way a camera captures it, rather than the way a painting can. If you truly don't see any representative differences between the paintings of the 'old masters' and the current paintings-of-or-like-photos to which I'm referring, then I think we're just not on the same page here, or I'm simply doing a poor job of explaining what I mean.

The problem is not really one of the technology, though. At some level, all we are doing in making representational visuals is copying proportions, either spatially by indicating shape and form, or by samples of light. Where the source material doesn't have those proportions we need, the artist is filling in gaps. You can still iterate into The Night Watch from photos by using intermediate sketches; it's just a process.

A big part of why abstraction took off at nearly the same time as photography is that the differentiation of an artist from a camera had to come from somewhere. Artists that make art that looks like cameras are simply drawing on their strongest reference and not doing much additional decision making.

Agreed. I don't mean to vilify the technology itself, but rather the ways in which many artists employ it. What bothers me is when that gap-filling you describe is either not being done or is being done in such a way that retains the character and forms of the reference medium. I similarly dislike it when photographers try to make their photos look like paintings.

I do have misgivings about how reference photography affects the process of certain forms of art-making, but that's another issue entirely. In this case, I'm just talking about effects on the product, not the process.

I met a local portraiture teacher, and all he did was take a nice photo of someone and copy it on canvas. His craft seemed great. But I didn't get the point of copying a photo exactly. Why not just print out the photo? But I guess he enjoyed the painting process.

Yes it'll never turn out as good because you're no longer painting a face; you're painting a poorer 2D representation of a face

What if a 3D scan were taken of the subject, and the artist then made the painting while viewing the 3D representation in some kind of augmented reality setup?

That would be 3D but still effectively painting from a "photo".

But then you're adding in several more processing layers away from reality: 1) the digital scan won't pick up the details sufficiently 2) the AR rendering will again strip a lot of detail

It'd also be incredibly difficult and straining for your eyes of focussing on a canvas and then on an AR image

his painting looked exactly like the photo. So it's like a painted version of the photo. It was very realistic. And like I mentioned, the craft of painting was great. But he took the time to take a nice portrait with a camera so he can paint it.

Since I'm a photographer, I guess I didn't get why he would need to copy a photo exactly.

"Why not just print out the photo?"

An interesting argument... which could be extended to "why paint from life?" because you're just copying what you see.

In fact, some artists who paint completely from their imagination or who create nonrepresentational art have this exact objection to just painting what you see (even without photographic reference), which they don't find interesting because it's not creative enough for them.

Vermeer is highly regarded, yet there is evidence that he worked using technology that was something like a camera (though of course it was primitive by today's standards).

Photography is just another tool, and what matters is how you use it.

A Camera Obscura is worlds apart from copying a high-def image. The primitiveness allowed them to get dimensions correct for a sketch but then they'd have to use all of their artistic skill to pick the correct values, tones etc.

The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself.

Picasso was a great self promotor and back before the internet the opportunities for proving him wrong we’re very limited indeed so the myth could persist. Nowadays, however, the stuff he did back when he was drilled by his father into being an artist can easily be found online and, guess what: it turns out to be fairly mediocre.

> The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself.

There are many examples of his early work online. His skill in classical realistic art is hardly deniable even if one might disagree that it reached the levels of Raphael to whom he once compared his pieces of that period. He also was partly educated at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando which wasn't some no-name school either.

Picasso twice completed copying the entire series of Bargue drawings, a set of 70 lithographs sold all over Europe in the 19th century as a course in academic drawing. His copies are excellent; he'd certainly mastered the academic realist techniques.

He failed to produce great realist work because he found those techniques boring, repetitive, and mechanical, and thus didn't try to work in that mode. He moved on to keep pace with the many radical departures from the French Academy that surrounded him. He had the skills, he just didn't use them.

Accurately copying Bargue perhaps qualifies Picasso as a serviceable mediocre realist. It doesn't mean he was "great," which was the assertion here. His early realist works were bland and uninspired, if technically proficient.

In other words, doing well in the technical aspects of a student drawing course is not even close to demonstrating that one is "great" on the same level as, say, Caravaggio or Rembrandt.

"doing well in the technical aspects of a student drawing course is not even close to demonstrating that one is "great" on the same level as, say, Caravaggio or Rembrandt"

I'm not sure the original poster meant "great" in the sense of Caravaggio or Rembrandt.

To a lot of people being technically proficient is all it takes to be a "great" artist, so by that standard Picasso would qualify.

> Accurately copying Bargue perhaps qualifies Picasso as a serviceable mediocre realist.

The things you read on this website sometimes... Accurately copying Bargue requires far more that mediocre skills. Caravaggio is a great painter in the sense that Mozart is a great composer. If that’s where you put the bar, I probably have enough fingers to count the great painters in the whole human history. Amusingly for this discussion Picasso might still be amongst them.

I think Bargue did the world a great service in collecting his set of plates, and I think the sight-size method has a lot of merit. I really wish I could escape for a few years into one of the ateliers that employ it to train artists. It would be a pleasant break from doing IT work in the defense industry. :)

That said, Bargue's process was intended for communicating good taste to 'lesser' commercial and decorative artists as much as it was used for training fine artists. It's a method that essentially boils down to copying pictures of sculptures which are twice removed from nature.

Before and since Bargue, we've had great artists who gained their chops by being students of nature. Many of them never saw a Bargue plate. Many of them didn't use the sight-size method. And there were a lot of skilled Bargue disciples who never had any real impact on art history.

All that to say, I don't think the parent comment is at all out of line. Copying Bargue plates is a fine warm-up or substitute for life drawing, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient to becoming a great realist (we had those long before Bargue). Plus, the world has churned out countless nobodies skilled in the art of copying Bargue plates (which I say as someone who would like to be one of those countless nobodies). It's just not as important as people think.

Arguably, Bargue accelerated the decline of the French Academy. Once his drawing course started reliably producing skilled draughtsmen, skilled draughting became less interesting and important as in fine art. It's a common observation in the field of art history that the 19th century, in "perfecting" academic realism, set the stage for the 20th century's rejection of it, since there was nothing left to say with it.

Regardless, I've done several Bargue drawings, and they're wonderfully meditative once you get into them. You don't need an atelier, though it would help. You can find copies of the plates online, and many videos of artists doing one, to show you the method. If you want further guidance, email me (look in my profile) and I'll set you up. I've actually run lunchtime classes at work making Bargue drawings.

You can't judge whether someone was "great" in a particular field if they didn't actually practice in that field. Bargue drawings are very technically demanding, but they're exercises. They don't even count as works of art in themselves.

Just as we can't really say he was a great realist, we can't say he was a mediocre one. He didn't make realist art. We can say that he mastered the skills, so if he'd worked as a realist, he'd probably have been pretty great, if only because once he found a preferable mode of expression, he was actually great.

For those that wish to judge for themselves: https://mymodernmet.com/picasso-early-work/ https://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/period-first.php

As to whether his early or late works were great or mediocre, that's not something that can be pronounced from on high, but I do think it's fair to say he was proficient in the techniques of his era before branching out.

> The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself.

What? The source of Picasso being a good realistic painter is the paintings Picasso made when he was a teenager of which most have survived. You can see multiple of them at the Picasso museum in Paris or by simply googling it as you point yourself. Science and Charity which he painted at fifteen is in every way a descent classical paintings and Child with dove is a perfectly fine work in the post-impressionist style. It’s not revolutionary like the work he did later but the idea that Picasso is a mediocre painter is so demonstrably false it gets funny.

> abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work.

Strong disagree. Expertise often looks easy. He had to understand the rules on a fundamental level before he could break them as he did, to express not just pictures but the underlying form and composition.

In my opinion it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso did than it is to paint realistically.

>it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso

I agree with this. It's harder because you have to have all the technique before you start picking and choosing what to leave out. An abstract painting becomes at least in part a story of what the painter decided to try, some unique combination of choices, at several levels of zoom. This is dangerous stuff because its easy to alienate a viewer this way. But done well you find a (substantially) new path to beauty and wonder.

You're, perhaps intentionally, mixing hard and hard. Could a child paint an abstract Picasso if it had him hanging behind a shoulder, saying what to do? Could it paint a realistic Picasso?

> Could a child paint an abstract Picasso [...]?

No. Could a child paint something that to their own parent seems similar? Maybe.

I personally find the art of children a lot more interesting than 99% of highly skilled adult artists who work in a "realistic" style.

Children's art usually has a freshness, originality, and vibrancy that's missing from highly skilled adult art.

I had to get over my worship of realism before I could appreciate it, though, and I find it very sad that most non-artists are still stuck at valuing art only by how realistic it looks.

> The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting because of the myth around it. It's a beautiful portait, but is it really the best portrait ever? I think in the same wing of the Louvre there are better paintings of Da Vinci on show, even though there is no crowd around it.

That's not a good example to affirm your point : it's a painting that was historically know for its technical qualities, representing the pinnacle of Leonardo's sfumato. But it's also been extremely damaged to the point these qualities are heavily lacking now.

"[Picasso] became a great artist because he pushed the boundary of abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work."

This reminds me of the old joke about the customer who got upset at having to pay $100 to a mechanic who fixed his car by hitting the engine with a hammer. The mechanic replies that he only charges $1 for the hammer hit, but $99 for knowing where to hit.

So it is with Picasso. His mature style is easier on a technical level than some more photorealistic work, but I challenge you or anyone else who thinks it's "easy" to paint something with even half the emotional impact of Guernica, or to come up with a novel style that's as innovative as Picasso's was when he created it.

Picasso wasn't copying anyone else's style. He was innovating and pushing art forward... that's why he gets pride of place in the art history books and artists who just copy his style don't.

As in science, you get a lot of credit in the art world for being first.

The art world also appreciates being shown the world in a different light, which you don't necessarily need great technical skill to accomplish (as Picasso and many artists before and after him showed).

This whole debate about the need for technical skill in "art" actually predates Picasso, and was hashed out before him about the Impressionists, who were already accused of sloppy technique by Academy artists.

Impressionism is no longer controversial, and most people can appreciate it, even though on a technical level it's arguably no better than cubism (the style that Picasso is most well known for).

Picasso's abstract work was only accepted because he proved he could master and reject the realistic style. It's similar to Norm MacDonald telling horrible old jokes. A huge part of the humor was the metajoke that he could be telling better jokes if he felt like it.

arguably easier to paint than his earlier work.

This is hard to judge from the outside. My wife is an art school graduate and serious amateur painter. There are some artists that she follow, where she is in absolute awe of what they do, and I just see some quite 'simple' paintings that are nowhere near as detailed or 'interesting' as some of what she paints. Yet she assures me that what those artists are doing is Really Hard, and far beyond what she is capable of.

I'm not surprised.

That is something I became aware when practicing competitive programming as a teen: anyone would have an opinion on how nice/pretty the outcome was, but only the few thousands people actually involved in the competition would have an actual clue about what mattered, what was important and what was actually hard to achieve. It's hard not to notice the same pattern in any activity one is deeply involved with, be it sports or arts.

It is to be expected, after all, that specialization implies some form of impediment to communication.

I think some of Picasso's paintings were exceptional.

The bullfight paintings define to me how a master can do so much with so little:

https://www.pablopicasso.org/images/paintings/bullfight-3.jp...

This is true of many things in life. The branding and marketing is more important than actual quality. :)

This is a weirdly bleak assessment.

You are of course correct that art is more than raw technique. And you are of course correct that art appreciation is no stranger to fads and hype.

But, you seem to suggest there is nothing else to it at all.

Is that what you mean to say?

>Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is a salesman who makes shit art. Jeff Koons makes things that are at least amusing. I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future.

"I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future."

You're an optimist.

It's more likely we'll slide towards an Idiocracy future, where it's garbage that'll be praised to the heavens.

The contemporary art world has been sliding that direction for a long time, and outside the art world kitsch dominates, and it's probably only going to get worse over time.

The greatness of Picasso's formal skills can be seen in one genre: his prints for the Vollard Suite. His lines are quick and delicate and invoke a whole body and its suppleness. The economy of line is astonishing.

I'd add that Banksy is another modern artist who's done a pretty good job developing his own mythology.

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