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I’m sick of pretending I don’t “get” art: https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppvwby/im-sick-of-pretending...

I get this art, and I STILL don’t like it.

I thjnk there is a sort of societal sickness where we’ve stopped making things that are beautiful and glorify humanity and instead make things which are bland and ugly and depressing.

And sure some post modernist can say “ha that’s what the artist is saying!” Yeah I know. I just think he’s saying it in a boring, ugly way.

The reality of this type of art is that it’s really easy to make. Most of the “skill” required to do stuff like this is the networking required to find somebody who will pay for it.

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> The reality of this type of art is that it’s really easy to make. Most of the “skill” required to do stuff like this is the networking required to find somebody who will pay for it.

I disagree with this. Especially the "really easy to make" part. Is this easy from a technical perspective? Yeah I'd probably say so but I wouldn't think to make this or express an idea in this way. Critics of this art might say that's because I have better taste than the artist here but point is, even if something is "easy," execution is all that matters and I'm not confident most people who say it's easy could execute on it.

I concur. Even amongst buddies, colleagues, acquaintances, yada yada, those who insinuate that something is easy to do are often times insulated from the process/ grind, have little to no experience in the work, and/or are in positions of influence and power where they feel entitled to others doing it for them.

Same individuals, when put to the task to do the thing they claim is easy, either refuse constructive criticism from people with more experience and make something pretty bad in quality with many details overlooked and left unaddressed, or give up and come up with excuses.

Makes me think that even crappy movies that are easy to eviscerate, are still pretty dang difficult to make. This isn't to say crappy movies deserve coddling and undue praise when it fails at what it sets out to do, but focusing on the notion that just because something doesn't resonate with you as a consumer of the work of art, and because it appears simple, that somehow, you as the person who rejected it are just as, if not more capable, to make something slightly better, is 99 times out of 100 rooted in a delusional pride. I've def done this as well, and ate plenty of humble pie along the way (just to level the playing field, so to speak).

For many engineers who don't "get" art, I'll try to give an explanation that parallels something many programmers will be familiar with.

Of course, there is a lot of pretentiousness in the art world, but often when you see a painting or artist who is revered in some way, and you wonder "Wut? This is incredibly simple and boring." it's often because the artist was the first person to really look at the world in that way. Probably my favorite example of that is Agnes Martin, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Martin. I look at her work and think "She's famous for drawing graph paper??" but I think the Wikipedia article does a good job explaining how her work was such a departure from what came before. Similarly, Heizer is famous for the scale and site-specific nature of his works, where sculpture and landscape blend.

This may not be a perfect analogy, but PagerDuty has a market cap of about 2.25 billion dollars (and it was recently twice that). I've used PagerDuty extensively, and I've thought "The is basically a calendar system with alerting policies. How can this be worth so much money?" But the fact is that PagerDuty was one of the first applications of its type that solved an important (if mundane) business problem it a straightforward way. It may not be "genius" in the way Einstein is genius, but it was one of the first to address this problem it a way that users really liked.

I think Wordle is similar - it's not some genius accomplishment, but it does so many things in just the right way (the once-a-day nature, the way sharing works, the jiggling of the letters, the fact that most games just take a couple minutes but every now and then one will leave me stumped for a long time, etc.) is why it became a phenomenon when there have been "word jumble" games for ages.

So my point is that if you see some piece of art that you don't "get", at least first try to understand the context and history of what went into making a piece. Even if you still don't get it after that, it can leave you with some appreciation of why that particular work is more renowned than others.

> often because the artist was the first person to really look at the world in that way.

Rarely was that person "the first". Discovery issues are huge. So huge, I would bet that more artists who are revered had better PR and knocked off a peer than were the originator.

Case in point, you go to Wordle. As you point out, it wasn't the first to think of any of the features it had or the basic gameplay. It was a combination of excellent execution, luck, etc. It's an excellent finished product! But it's not novel.

You went hard between "art is important because its novel" and "execution of the nonnovel Wordle is what matters" without recognizing those are the exact opposite point.

> You went hard between "art is important because its novel" and "execution of the nonnovel Wordle is what matters" without recognizing those are the exact opposite point.

Apologies, you've misunderstood my point. Of course all art builds in n what came before, but when I talk about something being unique and novel, I don't mean nothing ever in it was thought of before, I mean it had just all the elements in all the right combinations, usually with just a dash of novelty.

Again, Dropbox is such a great example of this. Of course there were tons of "file sharing/backup" services before Dropbox, but what was unique about Dropbox was how it packaged it up in a dead-simple "folder on my Desktop" manner.

Heizer didn't invent site-specific sculpture, but he has certainly done it on a scale and timeframe that was unprecedented.

I actually really like brutalist-style angular concrete, so I think this piece is pretty neat. My only complaint with brutalism in actual buildings is that the entrance is generally hidden.

It's OK for different people to have different taste in art.

Is this brutalist though? Concrete elements are brutalist in the context of buildings because they're the exposed functional component of the building. This is just geometric shapes made out of concrete. I like brutalism but I think this is some mediocre postmodern deconstruction. Like when an established artist presents a blank canvas as art and the intelligentsia act like it's brilliant.

Tadao Ando's Church of the Light completely changed my perception of concrete.

https://www.archute.com/church-of-the-light/

It's interesting that you are contrasting "things that are beautiful", and then as the main criticism "it's really easy to make".

In the next few years we are going to have this debate over and over again (AI-art). Does art need to be hard to make to be called art? If I create something really beautiful but it only took me a few seconds to make, is it still art? Would your appreciation of an art piece change if you knew the author didn't spend as much time as you thought on it, why? It's still the same piece.

If a future civilization discovers a lost painting, they can't tell how many hours went into it. Art should stand on its own, the difficulty in creating the final piece is a metadata that is biasing our judgement. "Beautiful" and "hard to create" are orthogonal dimensions.

I think that's a pretty interesting conversation, I see two sub-questions:

1) Is our intuition that art requires effort some remnant of the labor theory of value applied to art?

2) Is it simply that as something requires less effort to make it redefines the baseline for what is considered beautiful, and thus to create something that stands out requires more effort than what's commonly available to everyone?

There is an underlying acceptance in the Art World that all you need to have to become an artist is not really talent. It's a network.

Sure, if "artist" is merely a career and not an aspirational achievement in finding creative ways to reveal truth.

It's where the concept of equity for all leads. When no one is inherently worse or better than anyone else, it becomes mere bigotry to pass any kind of judgment.

That is exactly the thesis of a recent book [0], summarized, more or less, as: "When there is no objective method to rate performance, then the social network becomes the measure of performance."

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Formula-Universal-Laws-Success/dp/031...

Do they teach this in art school?

Well good for you, congrats on being better than this art. Personally, I think its fucking awesome and I'd love to see this in person.

Right? I absolutely love it. And not even on an expert level. I actually just like it at the first order of liking it.

I really enjoy the aesthetics of these sort of desolate landscapes with isolated constructs in them. Just appeals to me.

> I’m sick of pretending I don’t “get” art: https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppvwby/im-sick-of-pretending...

Are the pictures on that article broken for everyone else too or just me? I'm sort of curious about the art the author is ranting about.

The pictures are broken — I also wish I could see them. You can Google the artist to get a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about though.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201108125833/https://www.vice....

The Vice site auto-plays video, and defeats Safari "Reader Mode".

This type of thinking is the first step to change.

When this spreads, ugly art won’t be edgy or cool anymore, and we’ll look back on this 150-year period like we look at 80’s hairstyles today (“what were they thinking!?”)

A future civilization will uncover this and come up with all sorts of grand stories about how it was likely used. Nobody will consider “what if this was some esoteric art installation that serves no purpose?”

> I thjnk there is a sort of societal sickness where we’ve stopped making things that are beautiful

... when artists had to compete with the perfection of camera and escaped in an orthogonal direction.

Lol. Yes the "sickness" is the printing press et al

How can you say you don’t like it if an important component of appreciating this piece is physically walking through and exploring it, which is presumably completely different from viewing a couple low res shots on your cellphone/computer?

> ...making things that are beautiful and glorify humanity...

Oh really? In an ugly and cruel world where humans are terrible to each other, you demand a lie and to glorify the undeserving? Perhaps you think the point of art is to make you feel good? I think what you are looking for is entertainment, there is plenty of that.

You are partially right that what is celebrated as art reflects on (wealthy) society but it is also an expression of perception of reality by the artist which resnoates with those who appreciate it. Perhaps not everyone finds fake portrayals of beauty appealing but many find enjoyment in the beauty of truth as they see it in their reality?

Did you read the part where I said “yes I get it”, because yes, I get it.

I just think it’s really lazy.

For land art, how is it lazy? It takes significant time and resources to construct the artifacts and develop the desert land.

I think this beautiful and glorifies humanity.

I want to visit it, and I expect when I do I'll consider it one of the top aesthetic experiences of my lifetime.

That's a matter of taste, though, and taste obviously varies.

I think it’s beautiful though. Not it some bullshit “explained” way, I just find it pretty, it feels good.

Maybe you are looking in the wrong places?

Figurative painting — pretty much the definition of glorifying humanity - has made a HUGE comeback over the past decade or so, to the point where we art nerds make jokes about it.

There is still a lot of “difficult” art out there, and plenty of IMO anti-humanist work, but the breadth of styles that are taken seriously is greater than it ever was in history.

You don’t have to like everything. There’s plenty out there you probably would like.

> The reality of this type of art is that it’s really easy to make

This is such a shallow statement. Was it difficult to hit the keys which make up your lines of code?

You're too much a reductionist to appreciate this.

I'm with you. I never studied art, but if enjoying it (or "getting" it) requires you to brainwash yourself with 5 years of art college then fuck it.

Ever watched "The Shock Of The New"? Amazing BBC 8 part series from 1980 with art critic Robert Hughes. He gives a great history and interpretation of modern art.

Years later, before he died, he made a follow up piece where he interviewed an art collector, and it cemented my armchair theory that modern art's rejection of beauty and mastery unwittingly allowed charlatans and billionaires to subvert it, in much the same way that popular music has been hijacked by businessmen.

that’s still a skill I don’t have, do you? this stupid thing is going to outlive us, and maybe anything we’ll ever do

> make things which are bland and ugly and depressing

How you feel about art is a reflection of you, not society. If you think this art is "bland and ugly and depressing" then maybe you should examine yourself as to why you feel that way. Plenty of people find concrete art interesting, attractive, and stimulating.

Do those people attend world of concrete every year do you suppose?

Or is it boring when blue collar workers make this stuff, and only high art when an “artist” hires them to do it?

I suppose we could test that. Why don't you give us a couple of examples of where blue collar workers have made this stuff without an artist directing them?

These are just literally giant triangles of concrete, and city curbs holding in gravel. So an example would be: any freeway overpass in the city of Albuquerque, Las Vegas, or Phoenix.

I've only been to the last two and there are certain structures there that begin to evoke the feeling but they don't get there because of their lack of isolation.

I tried to paint you a picture using Dall E of what I mean. The isolation means a lot and the raw structure being present without all of the accompanying stuff really just evokes a feeling.

https://imgur.com/a/xXIcp5V

The desolate isolation of the first picture with the gray concrete of the second, made in simple geometric forms really does it for me. But those pictures don't quite do it because of all the other stuff (the painted curb, the sign, the other materials). I have to imagine the combination because I'm not good enough at prompt engineering yet. And I really wanted a far away shot that really emphasized the isolation.

The prompt I used was something like "daytime photo of an isolated unpainted concrete bus stop in a desert from far away".

I think that many objects that I think you'd describe as built by blue collar workers come close to starting to evoke this feeling. For instance the isolated bus stop thing I was trying to draw there. But this is just like those but with those components of the aesthetics that I appreciate multiplied by a large number.

You can only prove you don't like something by doing better.

Does it give you pause at all that this is, historically, a common way of thinking among authoritarians and fascists?

That’s because this is not art. Contemporary / modern “art” in general is pure crap, and is absolutely NOT art. It’s formed of a circle jerk of people who pretend like their work has a meaning or that they understand each other’s work. Art reflects the life view of the artist, and we can clearly see that this reflects nothing. All people involved know that it’s BS but they’re all afraid to be the odd one out or are directly profiting from people’s stupidity. It always comes down to pretentious elitist assholes who think they’re too intellectual to work for a living.

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