Picasso's self portrait evolution from age 15 to age 90
rarehistoricalphotos.com
rarehistoricalphotos.com
* https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/...
* https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/...
* https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/...
* https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/...
He was near the end of his life when he painted those self-portraits.
There'll never gonna be "too much" good art.
No one is saying "draw a copy of something that already exists with near-pixel-perfect accuracy". When the parent comment said "emulate", they meant "create something of your own in a similar art style/genre".
I can bet you that if you try to "scribble a random mish mash of curves", it won't look and feel anywhere as great as that Picasso painting, and it will be extremely difficult to get anywhere even close to his level. And even if you show both yours and Picasso's paintings side-by-side to a person who has never seen a Picasso's painting before (and who doesn't even know who Picasso is), they will always pick the Picasso's painting as more artistically impressive.
this is also why art generally follows fashion rather than being truly avant-garde--artists need to pander to the wealthy/powerful (the church for many centuries, for example) to make a living, so trying to "emulate" popular art would first require a pandering/fashionable perspective, which is hard for an outsider to truly achieve without first becoming an (art) insider.
Modern Art is a cultural placebo for the vast majority of admirers. If it has the right signature or is hanging in a museum people will dig for rationalizations of their faux appreciation.
You can see every motion, every measure, the size of the flame, there are no cuts.
But if you actually go ahead and try to make this it turns out to be INCREDIBLY difficult to get it right.
Not every random mish mash or scribble is as random as a layperson will at first think.
The other analogy is look at the original post. Picasso COULD have painted like he did at 15 or 18 or 20 - which I assume you would agree you couldn't scribble yourself. But he CHOSE to paint in the style you are criticizing. You should default to assuming that there is more skill to it than you can see.
not in the case of Picasso.
> a master chef never makes meals that objectively taste bad, even if they are experimenting with completely new flavors and techniques?
not when they are preparing it for clients.
The point is that very skilled people are consistent
Their output is always gonna be beyond average.
> some of his experimental creations fell flat and objectively turned out bad
perhaps.
but there's no proof of it.
in fact there's proof that he's always been at Picasso's level.
How would we know the difference?
I ask because I've seen a lot of art when traveling with friends and nothing other than sculptures has ever come even remotely close to impressing me as far as traditional art goes. So I'm curious if it's mostly celebrity status or something else I'm just missing.
David in Florence
There have been some others I really liked, having been to about 5 really top museums, but I remember those ones as being like “whoa”
I’ve never really understood why Picasso is considered as good as he is
Picasso (with Georges Braque) literally invented, pioneered, and perfected a new artistic style, cubism. It's like saying "I've never really understood why Isaac Newton is considered as good as he is."
Give me a picasso painting and a year and I guarantee you I could reproduce something indistinguishable to 99% of people. If I gave anybody a year to learn and make mathematical discoveries even 1/100th as impactful as Newton, it's likely no one would come close.
Invent an entirely new and impactful style of painting, that hasn't been seen before, from dust. Just like Newton invented a whole new "style" of mathematics.
I still think Picasso is less important but you haven't even begun to draw the correct analogy here.
Pretty sure that's GP's point. Nowadays, any graduate physics student can solve calculus problems. The amazing part is the creation of new ways to see and describe the world.
While working in AI research, we have known that many of the similar works gets generated when you accidently wire networks differently or if network has short of schizophrenia and works on a region and then sort of randomly but still somehow similar way does something else on other region. There is no rhym or reason except that our brains gets surprised by patterns that it hadn't expected.
I feel people who appreciate this art and put down others for not seeing things are in same category as wine testers. As one of the commentor said, if you didn't knew if this was from Picaso, your level of appreciation would be much less.
You think that Picasso’s style was nothing more than mental illness?
You think Picasso used no “reasoning”, and there is no “mystery” involved, because it was not intentional/skillful?
And you think everyone who likes it is just a snob?
I think there's something to be appreciated in Picasso, but that's a bad example. Physics has Newton, Einstein, maybe Galileo, and then no one who can match those 3. Art easily has dozens of people who can match Picasso. Just because he invented something new doesn't mean the work he did extends throughout the entire discipline, like Newton does. Picasso is not that important.
It would be better to compare to, say, Wilt Chamberlain in basketball or something. Or if you want to reach to physics, say Neils Bohr or James Clerk Maxwell. But then I think Bohr might even be reaching too far. Schrodinger?
I know: Hugh Everett is the Picasso of physics. He gave us an interesting and different way to see the world (many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics). He was no doubt brilliant, and many modern physicists continue to lean on his ideas regularly. But, of course, tons of physics would exist without him.
Anyone with basic knowledge of history of Physics or Maths can tell why Newton is considered good, I don't see same happening with Picasso.
Even more obvious with modern art. There was literally a blank canvas on display at the SF MOMA. Some others a child could do better. There was cool stuff too, but a lot of bullshit imo.
Probably not as big, but I think it would have some kind of impact. I've certainly seen "street" art that impressed me greatly, as compared with simple scrawling of initials or similar.
I don't think you can really divorce art from its creator and your knowledge of the history behind it, unless you have no previous knowledge of the artist at all.
In this case, yes, the context around it, his age etc. definitely colored my experience of it.
Well, I sometimes wonder... if everyone in the whole world forgot about artists like Picasso, could the masses still be convinced his art is good in modern times? I for one would be pretty unimpressed with most of his work ("is this some random grade schooler's work you are showing me?").
Meanwhile if the whole world forgot about Michelangelo, my mind would still be blown if I saw any number of his works for the first time. The first time I saw The David up close I was astonished at the level of detail carved into the marble. Like... you could see individual veins in the hands and forearms.
So in a hypothetical future where memory of Picasso's 'typical art' mastery has been lost, that which makes Picasso special will also be lost?
> This is such a techbro opinion
Scoffing at Picasso and (particularly) Pollock seems very mainstream in the working classes (and has been for as long as that art has existed.) It's not a "tech" thing.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-duchamps-urina... is a fun read :)
I was recently taught that some art is not meant to stand on its own, out of context in which it was created.
But why should I care about that when the "art piece" I'm seeing at the moment doesn't impress me?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Jos%C3%A9+Ruiz+y+Blasco&clie...
That's an interesting way to phrase this. There are hype beasts out there that camp out and spend tons money on a sneaker because it says SUPREME on it. I think people in this theoretical world can be convinced that Guernica is a masterpiece. I would go a step further and say most people wouldn't even need convincing.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/David_-_...
we use photography for the same thing
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Raising_...
This increases the value of the artistic side of painting relative to the technical side.
That said, Jackson Pollock sucks and I'll die on that hill
This opinion is common and untrue. If you've ever seen Tim's Vermeer, David Hockney, a well-known and very successful 20th painter, claims that Vermeer absolutely could not have achieved a particular gradation without some sort of optical aid. Then, check out https://www.instagram.com/grandcentralatelier/. Buncha 19 year olds with proper instruction developing near-absolute control over the kind of gradation Hockney claims is impossible. Hockney just can't paint, like most 20th century painters.
Is your actual question directed towards the quality of the art, or towards the ability of the masses to recognize it? Maybe it’s because I used to paint a bit, but man, Picasso was amazing. If you actually know a random grade schooler who “comes up” with this, hook me up!
ART is not about about aesthetical appeal or about realism. Art is about art, and what makes an artist just that is the ability to translate his perception into something. Look at the way the style of the self-portraits changed… you can look into his soul.
No one, and I mean no one, is driven towards art because they want the masses to be pleased about their artwork (if anything, the opposite is the case, but it’s not about that). Expression needs no public appeal.
Will what Picasso expressed still be accessible to humans removed from our contemporary culture? Yes. For the masses? Not in the chaotic absence of culture that dominates our time.
Wikipedia seems to be claiming they called her "petite Picasso," but I remember her being called "pocket Picasso." It was a while ago and possible my memory is bad. She went to middle school across the street from my high school and was friends with a freshman in my class when I was a senior, so I got to meet her and work with her a bit.
I guess it's an open question whether she would have been as popular and successful if not for the original Picasso already existing. There is always an element of luck in who gets discovered. It's not like she was the only uniquely talented person I ever met in all the years I dabbled in art. But people seem to consistently underestimate what this takes. It's not like you just wake up every day with no training or practice, inspiration strikes, and 20 minutes later you have a cubist masterpiece, and you can repeat that every day. This girl was legitimately special.
It also reminds me of Marcel Duchamp, who (speaking of his tremendously famous and influential Nude Descending A Staircase[1]) said "This idea of changing, not repeating myself. I could have done ten nudes probably at that time if I wanted to. I decided not to go that."[2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase%2C...
[2] - 7'32" in to this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuf_GHmjxLM
That is a very modernist way of looking at it. I think art ceases to become art when it is self-referential. Art is truth, and great art can stand alone, divorced from context.
> is driven towards art because they want the masses to be pleased about their artwork
Agreed, artists are self-driven.
> Will what Picasso expressed still be accessible to humans removed from our contemporary culture? Yes. For the masses? Not in the chaotic absence of culture that dominates our time.
Artists like Picasso could only become so influential because the art buying elites were hellbent on rejecting the existing bourgeois order. This included a distaste for conformity, which turned into an obsession with originality. I genuinely doubt that humans removed from our contemporary culture will look in awe at art produced in such an incestuous context, rather, more they will pity the conditions in which such art thrived. Or just ignore it.
Artists need to eat too
I mean... probably? "The masses" aren't the only judges of art, although broad appeal does count for some of it. Go see the documentary "The Art of the Steal" about the Barnes Foundation and its founder, who purchased a trove of post-Impressionist work in the early 20th century. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Foundation#Notable_hold...) The Philadelphia high society art snobs of the time thought all that stuff was grotesque. Yet Barnes, a chemist of working-class background and sparse art education, assembled a collection that the "critics" would eventually recognize as masterpieces.
Art we would call "realist" (a term which begs the question) always impresses people. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's good that that is not the totality of human expression.
See, you were "astonished" by Michelangelo's work, you felt something about it, the realism and the details of the carving aroused something in you, emotions.
People can also feel powerful emotions from other types of visual arts - there are more nuanced things, like colors, shapes, lines and things that you can't describe but only experience, partly subconsciously.
Go see a Rothko painting, for example. You can even naively tell me that it's just some colors and anybody could paint it, but no, stand there and try to experience what that raw visual data makes you feel, without trying to find some logic.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/541f6defe4b091...
As in any other form of art, I think there is a continuum in painting between art that is great because of its surface aesthetic qualities [1] and its display of technical skill, on the one hand, and works that are less accessible, and made great by their relation to other works and their broader historical situation. I certainly think that Picasso is much farther towards the second pole than Michelangelo. And there's nothing wrong with preferring Michelangelo on that basis.
The problem with this as a criticism of Picasso is that it pretends to but ultimately fails to identify any objective reason for preferring Michelangelo. I personally prefer Picasso because I think his work is interesting in the way it relates to other works of art and the ideas it communicates if you go looking for them. It's true that I would get much less of that if a Picasso work were torn from its historical context. But that's just a thought experiment. How does that relate to the value of a Picasso at it exists in the real world? (I hasten to add: to say that I prefer Picasso is not any sort of criticism of Michelangelo! I'd happily travel half way around the world to look at his work all day long as well.)
[1] This is, of course, just a first order approximation. I'm willfully ignoring the likely interplay here between so-called "aesthetic properties" (what colors look nice near each other, etc.)--and the broader cultural context.
Yes, if you just dumped a random pile of his paintings out now, I don't think they would be great (or at least, I wouldn't be able to understand why they were great myself).
- the arc of a career - the historical period - influence on other artists
> could the masses still be convinced his art is good in modern times?
Probably not because those contextual factors would be different. The experience would be different.
But I also think you sometimes need to learn how to look at art.
For example Piet Mondriaan is a like Picasso. They both slowly transformed into the abstract. In the end Mondriaan only created lines and colors. So it is easy to think that anyone could create such a painting. But a trained eye can see that there is balance in Mondriaan's work.
But in the end it's all about taste. Personally I don't like Van Gogh's work very much.
This is a key point. Many people assume they can judge art because they have eyes. But it requires experience, knowledge, immersion and time to develop appreciation for it.
An analogy that just occurred to me: I have some really good organic dark chocolate right now, that is 90% cacao. I love it. The taste is intense but also balanced, with a silky mouth feel, and the berry notes really come through. My kids detest it and would much rather eat cheap milk chocolate from the corner store.
What is better? Well, let’s not be so contrarian that we insist that better is simply a matter of perspective. The fine chocolate is better. My kids just don’t have good taste (yet).
Why is this contrarian? "Taste is subjective" seems to me to be the most straightforward and obvious take.
Screw beauty.
Another example of this is Andy Warhol's "Marilyn Monroe" that was just sold for $195M. Currently, you can write a neural network that will create better looking portraits, but it wouldn't convey any of the context in which Warhol first created his pop-art.
Edit: typo in MM's name.
That said, skill in creating realistic representation is not the only measure of art's value. Consider Starry Night by Van Gogh. What is it that makes this such a striking and stirring vision of the night sky? It is certainly not a photo-realistic rendering of the stars and moon. Instead, I think it represents a radically different perspective and I find beauty in art that allows me to have a different vision of the world. A more extreme example of the same idea is Islamic art, which strictly forbids representations of life, but still strives to express a vision of god/allah. Consider the mosque ceilings in this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/BaytAlFann/status/1517074277312389121. There is absolutely no representation of any recognizable form, no people, no animals. Only geometry. Yet, they are undeniably beautiful. Why is that?
For Picasso, I would make a similar argument. No, his art doesn't immediately strike one through its technical skill. This is not the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. However, what it provides is a completely different perspective. Faces are inverted and laid flat, arms are arranged in strange configurations. Try to look at a scene around you, right now, and imagine how Picasso would see it. Then, I think you'll see how extremely peculiar and valuable his art is.
https://mediaproxy.salon.com/width/1200/https://media.salon....
Even when older, he could still draw with rare economy. This is just a few extended strokes - pure controlled line.
https://doitbeforeme.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/picasso-...
But he moved on, because there's only so much you can do with representational figurative drawing. He was more interested in psychological and perceptual abstraction.
So his imagery is often grotesque, deliberately primitive, and visually distorted.
But powerful psychologically, often in uncomfortable ways.
And hard to do - never mind invent out of almost nothing.
I think my point was more that the skill is not as immediately evident as compared to the Renaissance masters. It’s much more subtle.
I have wondered this myself. People think they recognize great art because of its inherent qualities, ignoring the hard to dispute fact that culture, fashion, and economics influences a lot of what we consider great in art. Tastes change over time, and the pantheon is always in flux, even though the art itself is still the same. So, of course people can look at something and "fail" to recognize its genius!
That's not to say that some things aren't better than other things, or that everything is relative. Only that the relationship between aesthetics and culture is complicated and woven together in a way we struggle to untangle in ourselves, let alone more broadly.
In the particular case of Picasso, I think I can look at paintings like Guernica and Man with a Guitar and say "well, shit, there's something going on here that deserves my attention". But there are other widely-hailed artists I don't respond to in this way. I think they're garbage, and people are crazy for paying millions of dollars for their work. Maybe I'm deluding myself.
The only thing I'd challenge you on is your confidence that you'd always recognize certain Michelangelo works as genius (with the implication that they are universally and timelessly good, not just that you would happen to personally like them). All I can say is that I'm not sure I am confident that I would pass that test.
I guess there's no accounting for taste.
There are well-intentioned people here explaining to you why your natural instincts are wrong because they have learned how to carefully tamp theirs down. Picasso and other modernists were an important step forward, but the ideas were taken too far. Twombly is a hack, full-stop.
The story of Picasso's paintings extend beyond an individual painting. If a painting on its own, without any context, doesn't impress, then so what? You need to read a whole book to appreciate its story, not just a page.
this has happened in my 3d art and in my 2d art where once I got to a point I was happy with my technical skill, the emotive desire really starts opening up.
of course that doesnt mean I'm some sort of maestro of technical skill, it just means that I have accomplished enough of what I feel like doing technically that I feel perfectly comfortable leaving THAT path and exploring others.
It's moot whether Picasso's paintings would stand up solidly in isolation as you suggest but on balance I reckon a significant percentage of them would.
How would I rate Picasso in the great order of things? In my opinion he ranks pretty high but I'd never rate him amongst the pinnacles of Western European Art such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer - and even Michelangelo. I think by any measure these artists would stand high in any era.
Whilst the masses mill around da Vinci's Mona Lisa you'd find me in another wing of the Louvre staring transfixed at wonderful paintings such as Caravaggio's The Fortune Teller. For me, works by these artists represent the epitome of art - but then that's just my opinion (but I know that I'm far from being alone in thinking this way).
I recall decades ago on my first visit to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and not knowing what to expect, I walked into an alcove in which only one painting had pride of place and that was a Rembrandt self portrait.
I was completely transfixed as this old man stared directly into my eyes from across four centuries past. There was a strange realism about the experience, it was as if he were actually standing there beside me. I was alone in the alcove and only several feet away from the painting (just being that close alone, I consider a remarkable privilege). This experience is one of the most memorable of my life. (Picasso's paintings have never impacted me to that degree.)
Around several corners and not far away were some Vermeers including The Milkmaid. Even now, my brain is overloaded just thinking about the experience.
https://www.boredpanda.com/alzheimers-disease-self-portrait-...
Someone on Reddit mentioned that his pottery was lesser known and could be obtained for a reasonable amount (10-15K at the time I think).
I just thought it would be cool to say that I owned a "Picasso". :)
It ended having to read everything I could find online about detecting fake vs authentic artwork.
Anything on eBay is (probably) a fake. Anything from the big auction houses will have authenticity priced in (makes sense).
I never bought anything.
That said, your comment is probably the true one in reality.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_psychedelic_madness_...
It's the age, not the name. Picasso feels like a late 1800s, early 1900s master, but he lived so long he saw the moon landing, and was painting the entire time.
“The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting… “
it can be crushing to feel the need to constantly improve and move towards an ideal (whose ideal?), abandoning that concept seems so freeing
> Why would a genius deny themselves the license to be original?
Because originality as a virtue is a fairly recent concept (post-WW1, after disintegration of the bourgeois order). Some artists reject that premise.
Can't wait for a future with more Rembrandts, it's something I'd totally buy.
The problem is that there are thousands (or more) young people with all the technical ability of Michelangelo, and so they absolutely need something else to distinguish them. Thus many artists go through their "Michelangelo phase" to get to their "weird scribbly splotchy phase" which is the real lottery ticket.
Perhaps more importantly, the critics needs something to say about art, or they won't say anything. See "The Painted Word" by Tom Wolfe
He was certainly Michelangelo talented… & eventually ended up… hmm… as schizophrenic robotripping-esque?
Not sure that’s the most respectful way to describe his art, but it’s definition accurate.
There aren't. There are some out there who are real, real good, but this isn't true.
Without outside restrictions, any creative pursuit almost requires deviating from the norm though, even coding. Think of it like this, are you still using only the techniques you learned in college and nothing more? Do you not talk shop with your coworkers and try to think of new ways to do things?
"Why would they draw that?" gets you a lot further in the art world than, "That is a very high quality work of art." IMO for good reason (you are free to disagree obviously).
Really wish there was an easy way to short sell art. Artists themselves are pretty good at judging this stuff, but the market can stay irrational a long time.
Abstract, but not as crazy as the ones he did after he turned 50
If you say Picasso was a genius, then you're automatically accepted into a "smart" or "high class" or whatever group of people. If you criticize, then you're ostracized.
It's exhausting to criticize, because the arguments for are so lacking in any substance. You get arguments like "art is about art", "its subjective", and "there are lots of people who paint pretty pictures, but only one Picasso". All actual arguments from this thread, all completely lacking in substance. Another good one: "if you're talking about it then it must be good". Barf.
I truly do not believe even 50% of people who claim to like Picasso actually like Picasso's paintings. I'm very confident the majority are people who say they do to fit into a group.
Art is my best analogy to crypto.
Are some crypto technologies cool and useful? Sure. Are some artworks nice to look at and/or thought provoking? Absolutely.
But some are just hyped by people who are all-in on it, without any actual merit. And convincing someone otherwise is like convincing a devout religious person that there's no god. No amount of convincing is going to change their mind because they're all-in.
Not only that, but there's evidence[1][2] that the CIA secretly manipulated the public's perception of modern art in the cultural war against the Soviet Union.
[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
[2] - https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...
Once that happens though it opens the door to appreciating other pieces.
I have experienced that same phenomenon with bands, where people say "X" is great and I hear a song and don't "get it" until I find some other song by them years later and it all sort of "clicks" in a way it originally didn't.
With that said, there are definitely people that try to say "I like X" to fit in. I just don't know about the 50% bit in the OP, but then again, 90% of statistics are made up.
BTW -- The Old Guitarist is on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago. It is wonderful in person if you haven't been yet.
Why bother making it about identity and individual attributes? I find that exhausting. I'm blown away by Picassos work, because I find true beauty in his way of abstracting. He very clearly saw the world from a special point of view, which he translated in a way that language is not meant to convey. I can't claim to truly see what he saw just by looking at his work, but I'm seeing something, and I couldn't care less wether you find this to be an unsubstantial claim, because I don't have to make everything in life about groups and identity, peer confirmation, etc etc.
Some well meant food for thought: not all data has to fit your model of the world. Usually when this happens, it's not a data-problem. Now you can say "well people who claim they see value in abstract art are noise to me", and that's ok, it's your model - but I found it to be a far better strategy in life to keep my mind open instead of being reactionary when confronted with something that doesn't please me. Cheers!
Of course, and I'm not offended that Picasso decided to create his art the way he wanted to. What I'm talking about specifically is art popularity.
I'm also not say that there's no one that legitimately would be able to pick Picasso's work out of a lineup and genuinely find beauty in his work. You very well might be in that category.
My main point is that it seems that some artists such as Picasso (and I'll throw in Rothko as well since I saw them mentioned here) are artificially popularized by people trying to seem high class/intelligent.
Rest assured: while such dynamics (artificial boosting of specific artists) do exist, they are a property of the art market, not of the artists or their audience. This isn’t to say that 100% of people who claim to find beauty in $artist actually do so, but there is a reason that an artist either shapes the culture and his peers - or he does not. Picasso and Rothko got big through organic content aggregation - they checked the boxes of their peers, you will have a hard time finding someone versed in the craft who doesn’t appreciate them. Saying that some of the people who identify as fans of their work actually just look to belong is in no way directly related to the art, it’s an emergent dynamic in any group, so it’s pointless to bring up when the actual art is being discussed - it’s just dismissive of the work and the conversation ends with exhausting fingerpointing and games of groups and identity.
The various motivations behind art, specifically Picasso and Rothko, are free from this exact burden :-)
If we just ignore the aesthetic of Picasso's art, you can categorize Picasso as a genius purely on his influence of other artists that follow him. It's possible to dismiss his influence by saying those other artists are fools or deranged. However, Picasso's influence is undisputed and absolute. Purely on that metric, he is classified as a genius. My hope is that anyone who is reading this will ask "Why is Picasso influential?" instead of "Why would anyone like this?"
It is possible to dislike Picasso and appreciate his influence on art.
That's a dangerous game. You can surely think of plenty of counter examples here in history and modern times.
Brenton Harrison Tarrant commands a following and influenced a lot of copycats (his most recent disciple being the perpetrator of a certain shooting in Buffalo). So... can we categorize Tarrant as a genius purely on his influence of [others] that follow him?
What happened to "assume good faith"? People assume everything others do now is for clout, or virtue signaling, or somehow disingenuous. It's fine not to like popular things without assuming everyone else is lying about liking it.
On the other hand, there is a social context to style and taste - we grow up in a certain aesthetic environment, and may feel true attachment to that, although a large part of it because we grew up with it! So the two factors of authentic enjoyment and social influence don't necessarily need to be in conflict.
Finally, a lot of things are popular for the straightforward reason that large groups of people actually like them. It doesn't even mean they're good. I can't stand most of the best-seller novels personally, but enough people buy and read them. A "Live Laugh Love" piece is probably more popular household item than a given print from Picasso..
Edit: You might also be interested in checking out Rene Girard, with his theory of desire and mimicry. Why people might imitate high-brow tastes etc.
Maybe you could put forward some specific reasons that you don't like Picasso's work, instead of just accusing others of being sheeple for disagreeing with you?
To put my money where my mouth is, a bit, here are some things that I think make Picasso great, other than their relationship to other works and art history more broadly:
1. Picasso's best cubist portraits move away from representing people just as they look and make an attempt to communicate what it might feel like to be a person in all of its inner deformity and (for some) turmoil.
2. He synthesized traditional iconography (especially the Bull) onto modern art in a way that illustrates (and creates) the continuity between modern culture and more ancient ones.
3. Particularly in works like Guernica, Picasso's composition makes me feel--if only dimply--an appropriate sense of sense of (in the case of Guernica) chaos and terror.
Imagine every once in a while there's the same man screaming on a busy street you frequent. Most people around you watch and comment on the beauty of the man and his actions.
After a while of ignoring it and moving on with your day, you eventually have to stop and say "what the fuck are you all talking about?"
Everyone looks at you like you're crazy.
"You know, that man was a child prodigy. He mastered classic singing styles and is now showing off his abstract work"
"You don't have to get it. I find it powerful."
"Art is art. It's playful. He's expressing his emotions. Not everything has to fit in the lines."
The man continues to scream. You comment, "My 5 year old does this every day. Why is this special?" You're desperately looking for answers. Maybe there's something you're missing.
"I doubt your 5 year old could scream like this."
"There are millions of 5 year olds. Only one of Him."
The man continues to scream.
If you get aggressive and say "what the fuck are you all talking about" and act like you're superior and noticing the emperor has no clothes, then you're being an asshole and no one will want to give you any respect.
Okay — but outside your narrative, people can tell the difference. Even when the labels are reversed.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761140091...
And preliminary work suggests machines can as well.
https://cs230.stanford.edu/projects_fall_2019/reports/262372...
So, in your analogy, it’s because everyone but you is paying attention to the words and style of the man screaming — which is quite unlike your child’s tantrum. And you’re blinded to that by your own biases.
I've seen a bazillion highly realistic paintings that are so emotionally flat. The technique in them can be impressive, but otherwise they tend to be both unimaginative and emotionally hollow.
Even more extreme than Picasso in the "it takes no skill to make this" (apprently) but conveying real feeling is Jackson Pollock.
Lots of people will look at Picasso and Pollock and say "my 5 year old kid could do this" -- and there's something to that, as children's art tends to be more fresh and expressive than art made by trained adults -- but kids don't do either (unless they've seen and try to emulate Picasso or Pollock). Neither do adults.
It took Picasso and Pollock to come up with art like that. Same with Malevich's Black Square and Duchamp's Fountain, which are also about as simple as art gets, but things like that weren't considered art before, and it took these artists to make us look at the world in a different way and stretch the boundary of what art could be.
John Cage's work with randomness in music is yet another good example. His compositions could sound awful or boring, and I personally don't like them -- but why must music be something that we like? Can't we appreciate and value music that isn't pleasing?
The paintings of Francis Bacon and Goya are similar -- pretty "ugly" stuff.. but to me they speak the truth about the ugly/horrible side of life that is valuable to look at.
At their best, such artists open our eyes and ears to the world around us and let us see it in a fresh way that we might not have appreciated before.
This is an oxymoronic sentence.
Malevich's Black Square is not pleasing to me, but I value and appreciate it for expanding the boundaries of art. Same with John Cage's music. What's so oxymoronic about that?
It's not about it being bad or something. It's just that it's not for me. And that's fine
Some for sure.
> If you say Picasso was a genius, then you're automatically accepted into a "smart" or "high class" or whatever group of people. If you criticize, then you're ostracized.
By who? I have a ton of family and friends who think Picasso and "all those other guys" suck, none of them are "ostracized". You're more likely to be ostracized if you say "I love Picasso, he was a genius.", and your reply to "what is your favourite work" is "ummm, the melting clock thing?". Mostly because that was Dali.
> It's exhausting to criticize, because the arguments for are so lacking in any substance.
I'm not sure how to respond to "I can't criticize Picasso because your defence will lack substance."
Why, how, would I even "defend" Picasso?
> I truly do not believe even 50% of people who claim to like Picasso actually like Picasso's paintings. I'm very confident the majority are people who say they do to fit into a group.
A majority of people will say they don't like Picasso if they could even identify his work. I didn't really like Picasso until I started seeing his work in person. Even then, he's hit or miss for me.
I'll bet nobody jumps on this comment to ostracize me.
Here is a lecture that discusses this shift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G8UfISpb0I
There is no way to tell this, I am the biggest Picasso fan boy.Some of his paintings are total shit but some are beyond genius.
He had a very long career that spans so many tastes and even within that taste, so many low points. He is the height of being human to me.
This is not to be "cool". My Picasso love is so within my own head.
There is a reason he is a super heavyweight of art. He is not Warhol.
Picasso is renown the world over because he pushed art forward, and he kept experimenting and pushing art ever forward in to his old age.
His later work may not be pretty, but there are a billion painters of pretty pictures, but only one Picasso.
edit: not contesting the garbage definition. it might as well be it, at least if you feel it is, you have every right to feel that way. Doesn't mean that he wasn't one of the best painters ever. Art should provoke emotions ( even repulsion is an emotion) not just "look how pretty that is". That's the easy part.
Anyway, he was following a path, he was getting better, not deteriorating.
https://www.keylight.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Toro_pica...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/-inside-apples...
When I first saw "simplifying the bull" I felt I could draw a bull by replicating what Picasso did.
I am still terrible, but in a way he gave me the tools to draw something (or an idea of it if you will) without being able to actually draw it.
His process is assimilable to research at its best.
My girlfriend she's a painter and studied fine arts in a London art school.
First thing she told me is that everything is asymmetrical, if you're measuring distances, you're doing it completely wrong.
Second thin she told me is that details are completely useless - if not confusing - if you don't get the basic shapes right.
As you correctly point out it's like a compression algorithm, and like compression algorithms (as a computer scientist) I think implementing what's already working is easier than come up with your own new algorithm.
But, despite all the help I got, I'm - unfortunately for me - still a terrible draftsman.
If your goal is to draw like picasso you need to be where he is at 15 before you understand what you're simplifying. Even after you take apple's class you'll have concepts but you won't have thousands of hours of practice that actually using any of those lessons requires.
That's fine. My take is that it's perfectly OK to have art for popular appeal, and perhaps separately, art that takes some investigation to fully appreciate. I face this as a musician, specifically playing modern jazz. A lot of my friends find polite ways of telling me they don't like that kind of music, and I reassure them that I'm not in the least bit offended.
Of those Picasso portraits, if I could afford just one, I'd take 1971. Turns out I can afford just zero.
For me it would be the 1906 one.
But, like you, I can afford zero of them.
It often is.
"Modern" usually implies dissonance, syncopation, and sometimes downright atonality and free time.
These concepts are fun from a musicians standpoint, as they break away from formalities and rules, but do so within a complex musical context in ways that are very difficult as the instruments are balancing between having the cake and eating it against each other, simultaneously.
This is hard to pick up on, which in effect often leads to the sub-genre confining itself to musicians-listening-to-other-musicians demographics, eg. "are they high?"-jazz.
Similar comparisons can be made for Picasso and art in general I suppose(?).
In high school, being interested in anything but top 40 made you a freak. Oddly enough the kids who were accepting of a shy nerd who liked jazz and classical, were the punk rockers. That's whom I hung out with.
For some musicians, "hotter" can also mean older, such as baroque or early music specialists.
I understand why you might not like the later paintings (or at least prefer not to hang them on your wall).
The later paintings are best understood in the context of history. Picasso and his peers were experimenting during the industrial revolution when trains and fast motion were new and video cameras didn’t exist to film them. Cubism was a response to some of those social changes at the time.
Art like this is also, partly, about community—having a good time with other artists in a “hey, check out a thing I tried” sense. Picasso may have intended these as a “Ask:HN” or “Show:HN” rather than a post of a gallery ready piece of work.
A lot of these are also probably paintings he did for practice, never planned to show publicly, and just never threw away. Then, after he died, people found them and sell them as Picasso originals.
also for Show HN, i have published just the last week 6 cubism art, picasso style computer generated of course, Dalle, and i have created already 10 other different variations of cubism, in the style of picasso, some of them are really good. And hundreds of them to come in the future. Dalle and Picasso are a benign combination. If anyone is curious insta/pramatias and the albums will be uploaded elsewhere as well. The albums are annotated with the Dalle prompts as well.
I have long thought that programs, operating systems etc could be annotated to ease the understanding of the program. Especially big programs like operating systems, browsers etc. We could annotate for example every function with an image. Black n white could mean that the function has side effects, and colorful images could be used for the pure functions. That way in one glance of a file, just a millisecond we can tell which function is probably to have caused a strange panic.