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Comment by Fluorescence | Hacker News Reader

IMHO it's more interesting and a greater achievement than lifelike. To me it's an expression of fertile abundance that shows more intention, more imagination, more desire to communicate, more understanding of form and humanity than a straight depiction would.

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The problem is, how do you distinguish between "lacked the skills or tools to make a true life-like statue" and "intentionally made something more abstract"?

When I played guitar I liked doing noisy high-distortion stuff because I could play bad guitar and still make it sound kind of okay (to my ears anyway).

Not saying that everyone who plays this type of music is a bad guitar player, because many aren't, but some are.

It reminds me of Oliver Sacks' excellent book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

It contains descriptions of several real cases of brain damage, including someone who literally made the mistake in the title of the book. He could still see but was increasing struggling to synthesise understanding of objects from the lines and patterns, culminating in that particular confusion (as he was getting up to leave a consultation with Sacks, he tried to grab his wife to put on his head).

This person was an amateur painter, and his paintings were getting increasingly abstract as his condition worsened. The funny thing is, critics would comment that his art was improving in subtly and insight. In reality, he was losing his grasp of object coherence.

As an illustrator who has also done some non-negligible sculpting, this kind of stuff is so much easier than 'lifelike realism' that it's not even close.

i think it looks like what you would make if you werent as skilled, didnt have the right rock, or the tools that were as good as later sculptures. but its still neat.

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