Art is Fundamentally Social (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Art is Fundamentally Social (2021)

aaronhertzmann.com

48 pointslnyan30 comments

Not all artists are extroverts in the sense that they want to communicate some feeling or some emotions. Some artists are introverts who create art for themselves, who are more interested in the visual effects of colours, lines and shapes, than what it does to others.

Take for example the Dutch artist Peter Struycken, who started as a classical scholed artist, but who in the late sixties used a computer program developed by Stan Tempelaars to randomly select certain patterns instead of rolling some dices by himself. He was interested in the effects of selecting different distributions of patterns. From these experiments he created eight works consisting of black and white squares. These can be found at: http://pstruycken.nl/EnSKS.html

He since continued using computer programs, some developed by himself, but also by others who were more skilled to write programs. For his last sequence of works, which is all about finding a balanced set of colours, he only used a program to find a random distribtion for the squares to avoid any distraction from shapes and/or patterns. It seems he is primary fasinated by colours and their interaction. He has no intention to express any emotions or display his craftmanship. He does like openings of exhibitions of his works. I also get the idea that most visitors do not understand his ideas behind his art works. I get the impression that he has a rather scientific approach to make these art works.

And one could argue that for that reason he is not an artist, but he has been able to live from his autonomous works and commissions.

I just noted that I wrote: "He does like openings of exhibitions of his works," while I wanted to write that he does not like openings. He only goes there because others expect him to be present.

Exploration, in a nut shell.

Which can be interesting and fun to share (more so when it results in collaboration or derivatives), but can also exist fine without.

I fundamentally disagree with the premise that all art is social

Kurt Vonnegut expressed this better than I ever could in a letter to schoolkids, in it he persuaded them to write a poem then tear it into pieces without showing anyone.. "you'll find that you've already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming"

Full letter here: https://highexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1053653...

Further evidence is the 'outsider artists' who never show their art to anyone and are only discovered on their death

Those kids, and any artist, are if nothing else affected by their environment and the culture they experience, at a fundamental and largely unconscious level.

So even the most reclusive artist is in a dialogue: with all the artists of the past several millenia ;)

> even the most reclusive artist is in a dialogue: with all the artists of the past several millenia

It's not a dialogue if they're dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue

No man is an island, true, but it's quite a leap from that to "art is fundamentally social".

And then there's another deep discussion about what is actually art. I would argue if an artist is motivated by social factors to make art, they are not really making art.

Does that mean all commissioned work (which is a ton of the work that hangs in museums) is not really art?

How is this related to what I wrote?

I assume the parent is implying that commissioned work is 'socially influenced', and thus by your argument, 'not art'...you are creating a piece because someone else is paying you to, not because that particular piece is just something you want to create.

If money is really the fundamental motivation to do something then yeah I would argue that's not art. I'm not saying if you get paid you're not making art. I'm talking about what's driving someone to do something.

Like most chefs are paid to cook but are they doing it, fundamentally, to get paid or there's really another fundamental reason driving their passion?

If someone is painting or making music for social reasons like being accepted by others, becoming famous, finding their identity in what others think of their painting/music, getting rich, etc, that's not really what art is about.

Of course this is only my opinion about a modern conception of art and what an artist is.

> if an artist is motivated by social factors to make art

Theres an entire subset of socializing/communal happenings as art called relational aesthetics tho

Maybe but I would ask what is the fundamental motivation.

Why can’t it be both? Why can’t art that is fundamentally for yourself still be fundamentally social? The entirety of the concepts, techniques, themes, etc. in any art come from exterior influences; the complex web of humanity and our history. That is inherently social to me, even if the end result is never shared.

> Art is Fundamentally Social ... I suspect that this view could be useful for understanding other new phenomena as well.

And old ones.

There's a reason Donald Knuth titled his lifelong works "The Art of Computer Programming".

Having worked in the digital arts and seen the horizons - the staggering enormity of sheer possibility still only in its infancy - what troubles me about the industrialisation of code, not just centralised big-tech and disposable software "engineering" but the lockstep conformity of its cultural product, is what we have lost by forgetting that what we do as hackers is also Art.

AI also contains "art" in it, from artificium - handicraft.

I am personally not a big believer in the idea that art is just a means to an end (even if that end is something we consider very valuable). This article uses the words "purpose" and "goal" a lot, and it is that aspect that I disagree with, although I would agree that art is phenomenon that can only be considered properly inside of its social context.

That is, saying that a painting is just a tool for the painter to evoke certain emotions or experiences in the viewer (or social goals for the painter, like wealth and status), just as a hammer is a tool for driving nails into wood, is to reduce the painting to a mere instrument.

Art is meaningful to people, and I think that cannot be reduced to art being just a goal-directed tool we use to manipulate/control the world or people around us.

I think of it as art itself being the goal.

While artists may hope their art will also fulfill other goals, I wouldn't want to live in a world without art, where those goals are instead fulfilled by expending equivalent effort to turn the crank of some machine. I suspect neither would the author of this article.

I agree. I often see the top 1% who are really successful in art, using art as the means rather than the end. note how mediocre their art is versus other great skills they have like networking (i.e.: current pop music) with very rare exceptions.

I have a lot of sympathy with this article's main point of view, that art has has its roots in the biological evolution of the human species. The author references a book by Denis Dutton - The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution[1] - where Dutton argues that art is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. That book was published in 2010; I wrote a (short) article in 2007 along very similar lines in an attempt to explain why poetry exists in every human language[2] - it's good to find out that I'm not alone in having such an outrageous belief!

The second half of the article, on how computer-generated art fits into the art-is-fundamentally-social equation ... I currently have no definitive opinion on that question. My thoughts on the issue vary on a day-to-day basis between "art without a human creator is irrelevant" and "art happens in the mind of the person who sees/hears/feels it, not in the medium used to present and preserve it". My guts favour the latter opinion, but it would be nice if I could work out a decent argument to support the assertion.

[1] - the link in the article to the book is broken. The book is available from Amazon here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Instinct-Beauty-Pleasure-Evolut...

[2] - The Monkeys Who Learned To Sing - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/monkeys-learn-to-sin...

Just reading the title I wanted to mention Henry Darger, who produced art, a huge manuscript in fact, along with a few more things with no seeming intention of ever sharing it with the world. He is certainly not alone. There are many people who use art not for social purposes or social commentary or anything like that, they just to it because they like it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger

But after reading the article, especially this part:

“ But no art form exists apart from our social relationships.”

I think this is true. Even in the case of outsider artists or people doing it to relax or whatever, it has a social component to it. Whatever is produced is a result of social interactions, knowingly or otherwise.

Art is fundamentally social perhaps in the way metaphysics and philosophy is too. Perhaps it's very true, but it's a distasteful framing in my opinion.

Self taught painter here who produces hundreds of works yearly without showing out to the world. I am enjoying the process of making art and the idea of showing selling has been pushed out because socializing takes too much energy leaving me with less for actual art making. There is an idea of maybe one day doing it full time, idea which will require some marketing and selling some work unless I get lucky in another way and can retire from full time programming.

However, there is a social aspect. Few people saw my work and were moved by some works which I immediately gifted to them. It felt like a full circle connecting: I enjoyend the process which generated the artwork but once done I no longer needed them and accumulating works is hard if you’re poor. When given out to someone it feels like a healthy purge.

If anything this article talks more about the author than art.

Most artists I know would be happy doing their thing on their own. It only becomes social because there's a need to market and sell it.

Nope. Some art is being made for the sake of making art. For me the process is pain relieving, even if no artefacts remain.

Art can be and often is social. But it is not fundamentally so.

> In thinking about the nature of art, I have come to believe that the art is a fundamentally social phenomenon; art exists primarily for social purposes.

It's funny because I think this idea is new or even shocking to some, but would be the most obvious thing in the world in other times and places.

In the Renaissance, for instance, I'm sure the artists achieved some amount of personal expression but the art was created to inspire religious feelings in a church or glorify a prince or accomplish some other social goal.

lets not forget not too long ago art was a available only to the rich. the social elements were confined to the whim and contingency of the lords, aristocratics and nobles who deemed art to be so. as we may glean from walter benjamin, the reproducibility of art in a capitalist industry brought art to the 'people'. we now live in an age where 'art' and 'artists' are ubiquitous and available for 'everyone'. these social parameters are beguiling and precarious. machine learning as a factor of human creativity is almost somewhat a meta statement on art as 'art'. a second order logic to this 'social' element. an 'algorithmic' tendencay to achive some 'objective' (german idealist) sensitivity to what art is, within the confines of a subjugate classism. think insta, the labor of some is proliferate to the consumption of many. even the doom scroll is an installation by which we socially engage to pronounce the illusion of an agreement to an objective beauty.

While I agree that "high quality art" or "art made from expensive materials" may, for much of human history, have been available only to the rich, I would argue that such art is a minuscule percentage of all the art produced down the ages. Take jewellery, for instance: while the rulers and nobles may have owned brooches and necklaces made from gold or carved from jade, everybody needed to pin their clothes together, or felt safer when they hung a ward/fetish/amulet around their necks to help them get through the day. Such things can be made from the commonest materials (clay, bones, wood, etc) but that doesn't stop the people who made such things putting some effort into making them attractive, beautiful even - in other words, art.

Art has existed long before the rich became wealthy. The most ancient of cave-people collected shiny stones, painted walls, sang and danced, and crafted non-tool items like idols.

> the reproducibility of art in a capitalist industry brought art to the 'people'.

The Japanese were woodblock printing art for the masses since the 17th century. Woodblock printing itself is much older.

yesyes, both good responses. i suppose i was focusing on a type of art prevalent in classism. many types of art have existed for all peoples through out history. we call cave paintings 'art' but did those peoples who painted them have that conception? most likely not. although a deep generalization has threaded every human culture's expressions of art, there is always variation. indeed art has been for the people in many cultures and for a very very long time. i suppose i was more focused on the whole 20th century, 21st century, computer part of the article, which in fact i didnt really dive into at all.

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