Comment by low_tech_love | Hacker News Reader

Comment by low_tech_love | Hacker News Reader

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I would like to take a tangent here and discuss your question on whether the opinion would be the same if it was on a museum. I hear that argument very often and it is based on a deep misunderstanding of what an art exhibition is. The main point missed is this: An art exhibition is a ”curated” event; it is almost as much about the person who arranged the event as it is about the artists themselves. There is a meaning to what you are seeing that was intended by the curator. The point you tried to make (as so many others have also tried) is based on an assumption that you could take any random work of art and put it in a museum and it would be judged solely by its ”artistic” (i.e. ”plastic”) merits. It can’t be and won’t be like that. When you go into a museum you trust the curator that what you are seeing has a meaning that goes beyond that. Every piece of meaningful art is surrounded by a context. You can’t put a few colored squares up on a museum and expect it to be treated like a Mondrian. I’m not saying you should just swallow everything that the curator shows you, discussions can and should happen. But the point remains that art cannot be judged out of context. As much as I hate NFTs and stuff like bored apes, I have to admit that the apes themselves are much more than random machine-created childish drawings; society has made them more than that, and I can appreciate that. Whether it’s art or not, it remains to be seen, but I have a hunch that this same thing was discussed when Andy Warhol put a banana in a white canvas.

This is probably one of the silliest/pretentious comments I've read on HN in a while.

> But the point remains that art cannot be judged out of context.

What?? Of course it can.

> When you go into a museum you trust the curator that what you are seeing has a meaning that goes beyond that

My partner a curator for a medium sized exhibit. Not everything is some pretentious, contextful piece of art. Some are just chosen because they'll look nice and attract the general public.

> it is almost as much about the person who arranged the event as it is about the artists themselves.

My wife rolled her eyes at this point when I read it out. Does the layout and collection matter? Sure. Does anyone care about who was the curator? Not 99 percent of people. Please stop pretending art museums are something mystical and let people here pretend about judging AI art in a fictional museum.

Thanks for the laughs, though

Art museums are mystical if they're any good, and not every curator has something to say.

Nevertheless, if you hang a banana in a collection of fruit it has a context-engineered interpretation. If you hang it amongst photographs of fields littered with starved corpses next to the portrait of a fat general it will have another. Add mood lighting and a dress code, and exit through the banana-t-shirt gift shop... or free banana bread and kids running around?

I like developed arts of all kinds, and these require learning on the part of the beholder, not just bones tossed at puppies. - Alan Kay, via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

That a single museum hasn’t taken up this or something similar as an exhibit is telling.

There is no story worth telling. The context of seeing artifacts from another era of humanity is very elucidating. As is hearing the story of an artistic work that is more recent.

These stories and contexts interest people. The absence from museums is already telling. People and curators don’t think it has a story or context that is interesting.

Implicitly the story here is tech bros made silly images that look too much like NFTs. This story is not engaging or revealing to the wider public. Perhaps they don’t understand it.

Thus no one is putting it in a museum, even as a story of computers creating “art” and the designers and engineers behind the programs. Even the “creative” process of human engineers isn’t seen as that interesting.

The OP is saying all this is implied in an exhibit. That is how it gets to be an exhibit. Human interest. This doesn’t have it clearly. Perhaps one day humans will be drawn to AI images, but honestly I kind of doubt it.

Nice to know the reaction from a curator, thanks. Maybe my comment sounded too serious, I guess I overdid it. However, the fact that nobody cares about the curator does not mean the curator is not important. Out of an immense population of possible art pieces, she chose a handful, for subjective reasons. We’ll never know the reason objectively, but they are ingrained in the exhibit itself. So yeah, it’s partly her exhibit, even if she insists she had little to do with it. It would be naive to assume that she used entirely objective scores to rank every possible art piece out there and picked the top 20 of the list.

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