Comment by boppo1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boppo1 | Hacker News Reader

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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...

See also: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691170725/re...

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