Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found
dfarq.homeip.net
dfarq.homeip.net
Warhol paints Debbie on stage:
Story: https://www.davidsheff.com/the-night-steve-jobs-met-andy-war...
Photos: https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/tde885/steve_...
I got super excited when I saw a Commodore 64 was coming up soon, until I noticed the starting price was around $100,000. It was actually for a collection of unreleased digital art from Andy Warhol, and they were throwing in the computer for free. Apparently there is a lot of it that they still haven’t sorted through.
I don’t know anything about art, I was just bummed it wasn’t a cheap retro computer.
Today every such PSU is aged, and every such PSU is simply a C64 destroyer.
Even in non-working or untested condition, they fetch quite a bit of money.
This made me physically cringe with sadness. I’d love to even find one and people are just tossing them.
Man, I'd love to, once, run a program from a cassette again just for the nostalgic hell of it!
https://www.youtube.com/@The8BitGuy
Shout out to the longevity of floppy disks as a storage medium. I was quite disappointed when I discovered many of my writable CD's started failing at the 15 to 20 year mark.
For the 3,5" drives I simply used a USB version which are available aplenty.
For the 5 1/4" I needed to use a Greaseweazle ( https://sordan.ie/product/1527/newest-greaseweazle-v41-usb-f... ) as there are no USB versions available. The drive I have is a good quality HD drive though (1,2MB) so it should be able to read 360kB disks with no issue.
The floppy disk lifetime was, as always, an estimate. My 5 1/4 disks for C64 seem to be the way more robust product compared with the 3 1/2 for Amiga and later PC. Maybe information density plays a role here.
CDs have the reflection layer problem, not the information loss per se. That's the main difference between disks and CDs.
And notably HD were terrible at being used as DD, as is generally the case with Amiga floppies.
With the advent of Amiga hard disk I didn’t need that much disks anymore. I bought mine - 50mb! - at the World of Commodore 1991 I think.
Right?
Also, the whole point of DVD-RWs was to replace stuff like floppies or Zip disks when you are sneakernetting things around. The same way you use uSD or thumb drives these days. They were never meant for long term archiving, if you were doing that you would use DVD-R or DVD+Rs instead.
Last I checked (Covid) about 2/3rd of my 5"1/4 Commodore 64 floppy disks were still working (they had to be about 35 y/o when I tried in 2020). But the ones working won't last much longer.
And yet there are also a lot of audio CD's from the 80's that are holding on. A big part of it would be the manufacturing quality and how in the name of efficiency and lower prices, some corner may have been cut.
That said, if you just like the sound of vinyl and feeling of handling them then good for you and I'm not trying to rain on your parade.
The images in the posted article are from other sources.
[1] https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/4life_expectancy
Basically about the life time of SSD's (20 years) , CD's (10-40 years) , Floppy disc/magnetic tapes (5-50 years), vinyl records (30-120 years), books (high/low acid paper)(50-500 years), clay tablets (centuries/millennia) and eventually spoken word (tens/hundreds of millennia). Seeing as how much of the internet has gone dark both through lack of economic incentive or accidental erasure - it was not the most cheery conclusion. About how the more efficient we get with information storage, the more brittle it becomes. But also the longer information can last, the more it is liable to be changed with time. Think like the game of telephone.
The big lesson take away I made from it all was that, it isn't so much the medium but the information. If it is useful or cherished, it will live far beyond its original medium. Knowledge of hygiene will live a lot longer than season 3 of Survivor on DVD. Video games are cherished and many are living way beyond their original medium. We will loose 99.99% of all data produced over the last few decades but that it mostly stuff that nobody had any need or desire to keep - and that is totally fine. It is basically a natural filter for quality, and while we may be concerned about what we may loose, ultimately a quality statement will be made. Information about the taxation system of 1956 will not last as long as the I Ching which has already gone millennia.
I’ve had basically no luck getting code from the chat-style interfaces, though. The bugs often aren’t even subtle, and it’ll either argue with me that there’s not a bug or apologize and produce exactly the same code again.
But typing is like less than 1% of the time spent programming, it doesn't take many seconds to type the things you mentioned and it takes significantly longer to figure out you want to make them.
We had to develop something internally regarding genlock and a ring buffer that Python wasn't going to work, so an engineer at our company picked up C++. Mind you, he's never written a line of C++ in his life and has close to no experience with C-style languages at all.
Within 2 days he had completed the prototype to synchronize multiple latency sensitive gear with leading/falling edge methods in C++. (On top of his other work.)
3 days prior to it he'd written no C++.
When asked how he did it, he said: "Claude is the best translator out there."
As for subtle mistakes, you still need to know how to code. Compilers make plenty of subtle inaccuracies and we still use them for most applications, don't we?
Its easy, do you want to find something but you forgot the name and have a hard time with Google? Ask an LLM, they will likely find the name you need to find it on Google. This goes for both things you have forgotten and new concepts that you never knew the name for but you think there exists something.
The other main use case is translations between languages, LLMs are by far the best translators today.
For other things LLM doesn't really help, except help turn out crap you have to spend so much time checking that it doesn't really make you more productive unless your job is to create crap.
Or that isn't fair, if you need to write a letter with some emotions that you have a hard time with due to your fleshy nature not wanting to fake emotions, you can ask the computer to fake those emotions for you. Computers are great at faking emotions now. Think corporate emails etc where you have to use a tone that doesn't at all match your state etc.
With that process you can also get spot colors that are not in the CYMK space, for instance last week I struggled with printing an image of Rudbeckia flowers until I understood that the RGB version of that yellow (at the edge of saturation so probably not as saturated as the real thing) doesn't exist in CYMK which means if you don't modify the color to be in gamut the printer will do it for you -- probably not the way you want.
With spot color (say Pantone) I could get some ink mixed up that would color match the flower even better -- it was before Pantone but Warhol's spot colors were often like that. And of course his work with the Amiga is much in the style he's famous for.
Are they, legit?
I used to collect coins before the days of the internet and decided to pull out my collection and thought about getting back into it. It's just scam / fakes everywhere on Ebay.
What do you think it means in this context?
https://www.grafiart.shop/1/index.php?id_category=4923&contr...
If you want original art, especially from an artist as popular as Warhol, it's best to go through galleries or art auctions. You don't have to be in NY or LA, Paris or London, etc. You probably have some places in driving distance. Most ship, too. These places have actual reputations on the line and can't hide behind ebay or just open up shop with a different name.
My understanding is that there is an interesting universe of fakes, for instance Warhol would make some screens and send them off to get printed, he would authorize, say, 100 prints and sign and number those, but the printers would hold on to the screens and make more that weren't signed.
Previous discovered files from old floppies by AW, and also ones by Keith Haring was sold as "NFT". That had the positive side effect for me to be able to extract exact copies (although not original files).
What's the difference between an original file and an exact copy?
An exact copy would be a lossless PNG (for example) of the image, that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference by looking at it when it's displayed on a screen from the original.
This person can sell the disks but I don’t think they are selling rights to the work on the disk. I think it might be similar to me selling you my DVD of Star Wars.
A classic case is a Picasso sculpture purchased by the city of Chicago in 1967. Prior to installation of the sculpture, city officials presented a model to the public. A copyright notice was put on a placard nearby, but not on the model. A lawsuit established that since there was no notice on the model, the design was in the public domain, and people could make postcards and posters of the sculpture freely, much to the city's dismay.
So yes, much of the fine art produced in the USA before 1989 is in the public domain.
I'm seeing that between 1978 and 1989 works could receive copyright protection, regardless of the display of a notice, if they were registered within 5 years.[0] Otherwise everything I'm reading jibes w/ what you're saying.
So it is possible Warhol registered these works, in which case they would be protected by copyright until 2057.
Edit: A quick search w/ LOC's "Official Public Catalog" through "Visual Material" registered to "Warhol Andy" after 1984 doesn't return any titles that look like they'd be these images. He definitely registered a ton of stuff (as would have been required for the time).
[0] https://copyright.universityofcalifornia.edu/use/public-doma....)
The copyright registration database is online [0]. He only registered a few of his art works, and these digital images are not among them.
edit: his estate registered a bunch of stuff after he died, but registration doesn't bring things back out of the public domain for pre-1977 works, or things beyond the 5-year threshold for works 1977-1989
Sound recordings were not eligible for copyright protection at all until 1972.
If the linked article is accurate and Warhol gave a disk containing the images to an engineer without a copyright notice on the disk or in the disk's contents, and without any explicit restrictions on redistribution, those images are in the public domain as well.
The thing that Debbie Harry said she had one of two of was a /print/ of the images.
There's some more context here: https://pagesix.com/2024/07/29/lifestyle/long-lost-andy-warh...
Some artists don't do the mental thing so much. More of a conversation between just the hand and the beauty sense. Maybe a little mental, maybe no mental at all.
The non-mental approach is more fulfilling, imo. A better high and a better product. What beauty I can create in 5 minutes scribbling takes a year to almost-do the same in code.
(ok, the mental approach is pretty much just a big tease. It never really delivers. Lots of "neat" and "interesting" but it never really actually delivers the big punch. Sorry if that's harsh.)
All respect to Andy tho. And it's nice to know that he shared that particular path with us. I wonder if he ever dabbled in code.
"The digital images Andy Warhol created are rudimentary by today’s standards, and in some ways, perhaps less ambitious then some of the thumbnails I create for my blog posts. But this was 39 years ago, and I have much better tools than he did."
Is this trolling? lol
Would a duplicated file count still? Would a screenshot (for argument’s sake) not count?
What has been found are the original Amiga files saved on a disk. They haven't been released to the public, or might never be depending on who buys them from the guy. He should just release them.
Never completed it. But now it looks like there is a better photo reference all of a sudden, need to look into it again!
Does anyone know how exactly it was recovered? Or if raw dumps of the disks are available?
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For example, see Warhol's soup can: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79809
At this point nothing surprises me anymore.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
It could happen in modern times too, promote harmless social ideas that leaders of China and Russia overreact to while the West passively tolerates.
Because surely you can't beat a literal black square[1] in the "come on, you call this art?!" category.
One of the keys to opening the world of modern art to me was that modern art isn’t about what you see so such as what it makes you feel or think about or discuss. It’s a starting point, not an ending.
Indeed. His famous quote comes to mind:
"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."
I stayed for the credits of a movie the other day and they listed all the musicians at the end. ~80% song attributions were formatted like: `Song written by "unknown person". Performed by "Famous musical act"`. Maybe Warhol was like a proto version of being famous despite special talent, but it is almost all we get nowadays. I wonder if huge companies like Disney know that by distributing power (some people write, others perform, others do marketing, etc.) they can ensure they have final power and any artist can be replaced easily.
And actors don't write or direct or shoot movies either.
Modern pop musicians have almost all of their work written by people who are intentionally kept in the shadows.
Being a composer is not a public facing profession anymore.
Being a performer and a composer is a very different skill set and a very different business model.
Also, it is very difficult to compare the amount of fame of someone in 1800 vs someone in 2020. I am not so sure being a composer was ever a "public facing profession".
This stuff is also fairly pedestrian to our eyes now because of Warhol's influence, he was doing this in the 60s, decades before anyone could say "looks like a photoshop filter"
> [...] subvert the idea of painting as a medium of invention and originality.
This was a new thought.
Warhol’s really the ur-version of this. We’re all in Warhol’s world, now.
You look at something, and it makes you feel a certain way, think a certain way, say to yourself - wow, I've never seen anything like this before - isn't this a big part of artistic merit?
That's the part that vanishes once the art influences the world enough that it becomes commonplace.
You can say the same about the work of Russian Constructivists[1] and Suprematists. What's artistic about fonts that look like Helvetica? What's artistic a literal Black Square?[2]
Or, you can ask, what's artistic about this building[3] - it looks just about like any other modern building, the standard box-with-glass look with a cylindrical wall thrown in to break up the shape.
I'll leave the answers to the reader to ponder on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuev_Workers%27_Club#/media/Fi...
No. That's how much you like something. A mountain can provoke emotions in you, and it has zero artistic merit.
>What is artistic merit?
Simply put (or at least this is how I use the term), it's the measure of how difficult it is to recreate an artistic work, or something very similar to it, especially without having seen it before. For example, a pattern of 3x3 tiles made by choosing one of two possible colors for each one has very little artistic merit, because the medium imposes so many restrictions that it's inevitable that someone else will recreate it by accident. Likewise if you take a digitized image and you postprocess it with wacky colors again and again (or as in TFA you play with a bucket fill) until what it shows is barely recognizable, it will almost invariably tend towards a certain aesthetic simply by the nature of how the filters work. That's not you putting your personal touch into your work, that's the program doing what it does. If someone else started from the same digitized images and used the same software, would they be able to make something similar to what you made just by accident? Then what you made has little artistic merit.
There's a million examples like this.
By this definition, this comment of mine is peak artistic merit. Nobody could've created it without seeing it here — except me, just now!
No, I'm not. Re-read what I wrote:
>how difficult it is to recreate an artistic work, or something very similar to it, especially without having seen it before
You don't need to be telepathic to recreate something someone else has made if the creative space for a given medium contains a small number of "interesting" solutions. One time when I was a teenager playing around in QuickBASIC I independently rediscovered H trees. Did I read the mind of the person who first discovered them, or is it that the space of symmetric binary trees where each branch is a constant ratio of its ancestor small enough that I was bound to find them?
If you think nobody is trying to pass off something so abstract (I would say, with so few bits) as art, consider this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_(artist)
>By this definition, this comment of mine is peak artistic merit. Nobody could've created it without seeing it here — except me, just now!
Well, I would say so. I don't know how to argue that it's not. Do you?
That's to say, your definition of artistic is very close to "patentable or copyrightable" (originality and novelty are required, emotional response isn't).
So you're not talking about art at all. What's important to you is not what makes art art.
The question to ask with art is a simple one: when people saw it, did it make them feel or think differently are the moment? And did it make them feel differently from the way other art pieces did?
You can't understand art without understanding the audience, because art is made for the audience — even if the audience is the artist themselves. You can't examine art in itself, just like you can't examine a mechanical tool in itself, without asking why it was made, what it was made for, and whether it was good in doing that.
You can't look at a saw and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms objects it's applied to (and what materials the saw was meant for). You need to tell a wood saw apart from a hack saw, and you need to know whether it actually could cut wood well to talk about the saw's merits.
A wood saw isn't bad if it doesn't cut metal. And if it cut a million trees down, it is a good saw beyond doubt.
You can't look at art and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms people it's shown to (and what audience the art was meant for). You need to tell early 20th century suprematist art apart from art made today, and you need to know whether it actually could make people in early 20th century feel and think differently in response to it to talk about the art's merits.
An early 20th century suprematist artwork (like the Black Square) isn't bad if it doesn't cut it in today's artistic landscape. And if it changed the way a million artists thought and felt about art itself (which it did), it is good art beyond doubt.
The recommendation others had of taking an art history class is a solid one. It really widened my perspective when I took it, and I think it'll do the same for you.
PS: the same criteria apply to mathematics, which is art with a particular audience in mind.
Anyone can prove the Pythagorean theorem, and many have rediscovered it. It would be asinine to say it has no mathematical merit, or that Pythagoras wasn't a great mathematician.
Same goes for many other results. Calculus is common knowledge — and even in its time in was independently developed by both Leibniz and Newton.
The fact that any freshman knows to compute an antiderivative to find the area under the curve doesn't take away from magnificence of Leibniz and Newton doing the same.
But you'd have no idea what's so important about Calculus if that was all you knew about it - which, sadly, is how it's taught, and which is why people have no appreciation of neither mathematics, nor art.
Only learning about Calculus in a wider historical and mathematical context would enable you to do that.
You'd need to know how mathematics was before calculus, what compelled people to develop it, how it affected mathematicians, what kind of mathematics came into existence because of it, and ultimately, how it changed the world.
You need to know about which problems the scientific society was facing at the time, what question was Calculus an answer to, what the objections were at the time (and there were many - it was seen as heresy! Infinitesimals were whacky!), and why it was accepted in spite of them.
And once you do, you will see the simple integral sign differently than just a fancy way to write the letter S (which, by the way, it is: S for "sum", d for "difference", and the integral is, literally, a sum of differences multiplied by varying weights).
Same goes for art.
>The question to ask with art is a simple one: when people saw it, did it make them feel or think differently are the moment? And did it make them feel differently from the way other art pieces did?
Why? Why is that the question to ask? Why must be considered in this specific way, rather than any other?
>You can't understand art without understanding the audience, because art is made for the audience
So something that's made to be made rather than to be seen is not art, even in the case that if someone did see it they would think it's art?
>You can't examine art in itself, just like you can't examine a mechanical tool in itself, without asking why it was made, what it was made for, and whether it was good in doing that.
No. No, no, no. There's no justification for this besides that you say so. Why can't I look at the thing in isolation and decide for myself what it's good for? What do I care what the person who made the wood saw thought he was making? If for my purposes it's a good screwdriver and I use it like that, is it wrong because I'm not properly interpreting the message the manufacturer embedded into the tool?
>You can't look at art and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms people it's shown to (and what audience the art was meant for). You need to tell early 20th century suprematist art apart from art made today, and you need to know whether it actually could make people in early 20th century feel and think differently in response to it to talk about the art's merits.
Again, why? Exactly what prevents me from doing that? What, I'm barging into a club? Well, sorry, but I didn't see any signs on the door. I just saw a bunch of people gushing over trash and thought I'd speak my mind. If you don't like that I don't like what you like because I don't care about the things you care about then that's too bad.
>the same criteria apply to mathematics, which is art with a particular audience in mind. Anyone can prove the Pythagorean theorem, and many have rediscovered it. It would be asinine to say it has no mathematical merit, or that Pythagoras wasn't a great mathematician.
Interesting line of reasoning. Mathematics is art, therefore mathematical merit is artistic merit. Artistic merit by my definition is about originality, therefore mathematical merit (being artistic) is about originality. I hope I don't need to say I don't agree with either the soundness of the reasoning nor with the conclusion.
I don't agree that mathematics is art with no qualifiers whatsoever. Mathematics is, very reductively, primarily concerned with the search for true statements, not with the search for beautiful statements, nor with self-expression or cultural transmission.
>But you'd have no idea what's so important about Calculus if that was all you knew about it - which, sadly, is how it's taught, and which is why people have no appreciation of neither mathematics, nor art.
Calculus is useful, regardless of its history. The reason people don't appreciate mathematics is because a) they think mathematics is manually calculating things (because that's what they're taught to do), which sours them to the idea, and b) they're forced to learn things they think has nothing to do with their daily lives, not because they don't learn about the history. And if we're honest, they're right. Very few people will ever need to know calculus at any point in their lives (outside of school), and fewer still will need to calculate things by hand.
>You'd need to know how mathematics was before calculus, what compelled people to develop it, how it affected mathematicians, what kind of mathematics came into existence because of it, and ultimately, how it changed the world.
That's one way to appreciate it, I'm not denying that. But you're arguing that it's the way to appreciate art, and that if I don't do that I'm missing the point.
One thing is to say 'I don't get it, this is not for me'. Another is to lie down on the museum's floor and start kicking and screaming in a tantrum about the lack of artistic merit of something like the Black Square without a glimmer of open mind and the tiniest will to at least attempt to understand it before dismissing it.
People are frustrated that you insist on your 'opinion' being valid when the position you hold is void of a thought. It's actually a lack of an opinion. It's a tantrum. You have eyes, you have the time and perhaps even the interest to look, and yet you put your head in a sand and claim that the darkness you see gives you enough data to claim whether something has artistic merit or not.
The frustration comes from witnessing the blatant and confident ignorance, not from whether you 'like' or 'dislike' something.
You're not offering any reason why I should form my opinion in any way other than the way I do, you're just trying to invalidate my opinion because you think how I formed it is wrong, again without offering any reason why that is so. Yes, perhaps if both your and my opinions were informed by the same facts we would agree. But so what? That doesn't invalidate my opinion, and I'm not going to shut up. I'm just going to keep calling out low-effort garbage when I see it. I don't care if it frustrates you. If that lowers your opinion of me I'm fine with that; I also don't have a high opinion of the people who think this sort of trash is deep.
Everything else aside, this is an absolutely brilliant (and succinct) way of describing that attitude, and I'm absolutely going to steal it.
Have you asked the same question about your definitions? You might as well ask why words have certain meanings rather than any other.
A short answer: art is commonly understood as an expression of thoughts, feelings, emotions, ideas, etc. in some form. Creating art is converting human thoughts and emotions into objects of art. Consumption of art is the reverse process: thoughts and emotions emerging when the object of art is consumed (seen, heard, etc).
Taking an art history course will leave you with a better answer. Maybe a google search on "what is art", too, if you actually put some effort into it.
>So something that's made to be made rather than to be seen is not art, even in the case that if someone did see it they would think it's art?
See, now you're getting closer. You're defining art by saying that it's art because someone who sees it thinks it's art, i.e. you're analyzing the emotional impact.
When an art object is made, the audience is the set of people that consumes it at has thoughts and emotions as a result. It may or may not include the artist themselves. In your example, the person that thinks it's art is the audience.
Without an audience, there is no art.
Something that's "made to be made" has the artist as its audience at the very least.
>No. No, no, no. There's no justification for this besides that you say so
I'd hope, common sense would be one. Sadly, it's an increasingly uncommon asset these days. In any case, it's me and everyone else in this thread, which could give a hint that you're missing something.
>Why can't I look at the thing in isolation and decide for myself what it's good for?
Can a caveman look at a microscope and decide for himself what it's good for? Absolutely. He can decide it's good for beating other people with. And then talk how there are many better sticks out there, and how anyone who thinks a microscope is valuable is an idiot.
And insofar as the caveman is concerned, he's right! He has no other use for a microscope because he is too limited in his understanding. He would be better off with a large stick.
You, too, certainly can do the same, but your understanding will only apply to yourself.
Insofar as other people are concerned (and your judgements of them), your opinion will be less than worthless, because it's only based on what's in your head, and there isn't enough there to judge others.
> If for my purposes it's a good screwdriver and I use it like that, is it wrong because I'm not properly interpreting the message the manufacturer embedded into the tool?
You're welcome to use a saw as a screwdriver.
But if you leave a one-star review for a saw because it's a shitty screwdriver, and start judging other people who like them for reasons beyond your understanding, you'll be laughed out of every room.
>Again, why? Exactly what prevents me from doing that?
Your ignorance. Which is what you'll actually be opining on instead of art and its merits.
There's a logical fallacy at the very basis of your thought:
- you decide what something is good for, without looking at a larger context - you observe that it's not good in that way
These two statements are in contradiction to each other. The second statement shows that what you decided on isn't the right thing.
Instead, you conclude that the object is not good at all, and everyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot.
>Interesting line of reasoning. Mathematics is art, therefore mathematical merit is artistic merit. Artistic merit by my definition is about originality, therefore mathematical merit (being artistic) is about originality.
I have no idea where you are going with this. This wasn't what I wrote, and it doesn't make any sense to me either.
>I don't agree that mathematics is art with no qualifiers whatsoever. Mathematics is, very reductively, primarily concerned with the search for true statements, not with the search for beautiful statements
Says who? Not the mathematicians. And I am one[1] - so I am qualified to say this. Are you? If so, please show me your work, and I can use it as a basis of explaining things further.
Otherwise, you'd be better of listening to someone who has created works of mathematics and art (also see [1]).
As mathematicians, we see beauty in truth. But finding un-truths is even more fascinating. Posing a conjecture and finding counter-examples is fundamentally a part of mathematics.
So is "bad" math. "Lapses in mathematical reasoning"[2] is a great mathematics book.
Finding ways in which something we thought was true isn't is the crown achievement - like the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry.
Mathematics itself has been proven to be either inconsistent or incomplete[3]. And a lot of mathematics is concerned with things like Riemann's hypothesis (which may or may not be true), or the continuity hypothesis (which may or may not be answerable).
> Mathematics is, very reductively, primarily concerned with the search for true statements, not with the search for beautiful statements
Let me emphasize again that it is, in fact, the opposite.
Generating true statements is easy. Generating beautiful statements that are true is mathematics.
> nor with self-expression or cultural transmission.
Let me assure you that you are wrong on both accounts here as well.
There is a very strong cultural element in mathematics; different mathematical schools have different mathematical traditions.
Mathematics in inherently a cultural, group activity. It's all about self-expression. That's why theorems have names attached to them.
That's why we talk of "Lwow School of Mathematics"[4], for example.
Further discussion of this subject is out of scope. I ask you to not have strong opinions of this kind on mathematics if you are not a mathematician.
[1] https://romankogan.net/math
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Lapses-Mathematical-Reasoning-Dover-M...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lw%C3%B3w_School_of_Mathematic...
No art is without qualifiers. Mathematics is a kind of art. So is painting.
Not every calculation or result is art, and not every application of paint.
The qualifiers are what we are discussing.
>Calculus is useful, regardless of its history.
Useful to whom? Certainly not to the college student taking it only because it's a required course during the last semester.
>The reason people don't appreciate mathematics is ... not because they don't learn about the history
You have neither authority, experience, nor qualifications to say that.
>And if we're honest, they're right. Very few people will ever need to know calculus at any point in their lives (outside of school), and fewer still will need to calculate things by hand.
So, you have proven me right, and yourself wrong with this statement.
You very clearly demonstrate that there's no reason for most people to learn Calculus for the purpose of using it.
The conclusion should be : this is not WHY Calculus should be taught.
Not we should not teach Calculus.
You get the WHY wrong, everything else follows.
> But you're arguing that it's the way to appreciate art, and that if I don't do that I'm missing the point.
You are missing the point, indeed.
If you see something, and you like it, I am in no position to tell you that you are doing it wrong.
But if you are not enjoying something because you have no idea what it's for, I could point out a way that will change your experience.
I'm telling you that:
a)you're missing something, and
b)point you in the direction to learn more to find out what you're missing.
I can't implant that knowledge into your head, you have to go and actively learn.
This is not specific to art, mind you - which is why others are so irritated with your argument.
You can look at the first transistor ever made, and say that it's stupid because it's larger than a radio lamp, which does the same thing. You can't appreciate that invention without knowing the history of how it affected electronics engineering, the connections, the impact.
You don't need any of that to enjoy electronics. But you need to do that if you want to criticize it, which is what you are doing.
In fact, forget about art.
There's something in the world that a lot of people talk about. You look at it, and say it's stupid. We tell you that it may seem stupid to you, but regardless of your perception, it had an impact on the world, that there is more to that something than what you're getting, and what you need to do to see it.
You sound like a person that says that a book is stupid because they only read the cover, and doesn't know that one can open a book and there will be much more inside.
We are telling you to do that before you judge the book.
It may not be the way to enjoy books, as you put it, but if you don't do it (and decide, in isolation, that the cover is the only important thing), you are depriving yourself of something.
And trying to criticize and correct others based on that level of interacting with books is surely not wise.
On that note:
>Why can't I look at the thing in isolation
This is precisely one of the biggest themes and questions of modern art, most prominently - in late 19th / early-to-mid 20th century.
This question has been explored in depth before you were born.
Taking an art history course will expose you to that exploration, and allow you to answer it for yourself.
We really cannot do this for you, and we surely cannot do it in HN comment section.
This is a good question, but a good answer to it involves referring to a good deal of prior art and philosophy. To boot, the entire notion of symbolism requires a larger context to have things that a symbol can stand for, and symbolism is one of the most ancient forms of art.
The 20th century thinkers and artists have very conclusively shown that there is no such thing as a "thing in itself" when it comes to art in particular. There was never a time when art was a thing in itself.
Art pieces like Cage's 4'33" were made precisely as counter-examples to the claim that you even can make art as a thing in itself.
Of the Black Square, painted by Kazimir Malevich, a Ukrainian, in 1916, I can tell you that it was an important enough piece of work to be officially and specifically banned in the USSR for fifty years (1930 - 1980).
So I hope that, if anything, you'd have enough curiosity to find out why the Soviet regime considered it dangerous.
Which, perhaps, it was. The USSR collapsed in 1991.
Whether there was a connection or not isn't something you'll learn by looking at the painting in itself.
Same goes for Andy Warhol (born to Ukrainian parents in the US, incidentally).
Sincerely hoping that reading this will be a starting point of exploration and learning for you, and not an opportunity to double down on what you have already said.
>It is also an opinion that makes it difficult to have a meaningful conversation about many modern artists for whom craftsmanship simply wasn't the point of their work.
Do you mean that it makes it difficult, or do you mean that those artists don't come out looking good? Because I'm fine with the latter.
I think you might change your definition to at least include some context of period and artist.
So, there's no art since photography was invented.
Or, the perfect art is the white noise on the TV (exactly recreating noise is outright impossible).
>the medium imposes so many restrictions that it's inevitable that someone else will recreate it by accident
And yet, there has not been a Black Square before Kandinsky.
Nor a painting featuring Campbell soup cans before Warhol (and if you see one, you'll immediately think Warhol).
Weird, isn't it?
I don't know what you mean. I don't think photography lacks artistic merit intrinsically, if that's what you're getting at, although it's often more difficult to make art out of photography when you don't control the subject.
>Or, the perfect art is the white noise on the TV (exactly recreating noise is outright impossible).
White noise contains information, but no meaning, and was not made by a human, therefore it's not art and has no artistic merit.
>And yet, there has not been a Black Square before Kandinsky. Nor a painting featuring Campbell soup cans before Warhol (and if you see one, you'll immediately think Warhol). Weird, isn't it?
I've re-read this paragraph like twenty times and I'm still not sure what to make of it. You do understand that you're looking back at history, right? From our vantage point, it's not up to chance who made those paintings. Kandinsky and Warhol did. There's no universe where someone else painted them instead and we're still having this conversation, because then that someone else did, and not Kandinsky and Warhol, and so you'd still argue that that someone painted them. I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make. It's obvious that whoever painted a painting, painted it; tautologies are indeed tautologies.
Re-read what it was written in response to.
You argued a lot that something like Black Square has little "artistic merit" because it is very easy to re-create, and someone could do it by accident.
Let me pose a question: if so, why hasn't there been a painting like that in the 19th century? 18th? Or at any time over the millenia that the humanity has produced paintings in rectangular frames?
Black, after all, is the simplest, most easily available color.
Another line of thought for you to consider. You might have heard of Vaporwave[1], which is a musical[2] as well as visual art aesthetic/movement.
I would urge you to read [1], as it will help you understand the answers to your questions, then come back here.
[1] https://medium.com/@joriam/vaporwave-art-born-of-the-interne...
That sounds more like innovation than art. There's no art in the black square or in the soup can. No matter what your artistic tastes, you will never stop to admire a black square, and that's how you know it is not art. The same for the soup can. If you won't stop to admire it then it is not art. The black square and the soup can became "art" only because of hype and marketing. Art dealers hype up and promote non-art as art in order to make money.
That's a new hot take... For 1915.
My friend, do yourself a favor and take an art history class.
You'll both get to more art and understand it better in the process of doing so.
To me your black square is a 1-minute C note, and your soup can is "Mary had a little lamb".
No, the argument is that it has comparable artistic merit to the Black Square.
Art dealers can influence the perception of what is considered valuable or important in the art world. Through marketing, exhibitions, and networking, they can elevate the status of certain artworks, thereby increasing their market value.
I won't deny that in some cases works can be interested because of their context, but generally speaking, to me, a piece has to stand on its own regardless of who made it or when or how. Mozart's scat letters don't become good by virtue of having been written by him (although they do become funnier).
The confidence is the problem.
You don't understand what you're looking at, you don't understand what the artist was doing, you don't understand why they were doing it, you don't understand the constraints they were or were not operating under and why they may or may not have picked those constraints. It's like looking at a Picasso and saying "well that's the shittiest bull I've ever seen." What you're doing is like watching a boxing match and saying "it's very lazy that these people aren't using their legs" or "I don't understand why that person won, they didn't even knock the other person out!". There's a thing that's happening here that you've not bothered to learn enough about to understand whether or not the participant is accomplishing their goals, because you haven't bothered to learn what their goals are or what accomplishing them would look like.
Again, it's totally fine to say "I don't like this," or "I don't understand this" (although I'm getting the sense I'm unlikely to hear _that_ from you), but to say "this lacks artistic merit" - you absolutely do not have the knowledge, background, or apparent interest in the topic to have any idea whether or not that statement is true.
>What you're doing is like watching a boxing match and saying "it's very lazy that these people aren't using their legs" or "I don't understand why that person won, they didn't even knock the other person out!". There's a thing that's happening here that you've not bothered to learn enough about to understand whether or not the participant is accomplishing their goals
But, you see, art is not a game. There are no rules. If you paint me a portrait of myself with your feet and you make me look like my mother, I'm not going to be impressed that you managed to paint my mother with your feet. I'm to ask you why you didn't use your hands, you dolt! If you handicap yourself to the point you make something bad, then it's only fair the results are judged on their own merits, isn't it? If you wanted to use your feet to entertain yourself then any criticism you receive for it shouldn't matter, because the activity fulfilled its purpose to you, the same way boxers don't care about the criticism they receive from people who think they should also use their legs.
I don't care about their goals. Their goals are for themselves. I don't need to know them to judge the quality of the result.
>"I don't understand this" (although I'm getting the sense I'm unlikely to hear _that_ from you)
I'm honest enough to say I don't get the point of the soup can. That doesn't stop me from saying it's low-effort. I see better art on Twitter every day, even though most of it probably has less of a message.
At the same time they say that:
- They would look down on an art history PhD who tries to tell them there's more to it
- They think that people who think that work isn't "shit" are idiots
- They are glad others are frustrated with their attitude, because other people seeing something in what they think is "shit" frustrates hem
This is way beyond missing the point. They are taking offense at others having opinions on an artwork, and take a difference of opinion as a personal attack that they are glad to retaliate to with a bona-fide, actual personal attack.
They also feel entitled to an explanation, which they demand, and when people point them in the direction of what they could learn, they say that "oh, you want to get something out of me" (as if learning gives to anyone else).
Their basis is: "If I see it a certain way, then everyone else should see it that way, unless they are incredibly stupid or are talking in bad faith". So when other people don't provide a justification for seeing things differently, they are dismissed as stupid, or perceived as hostile.
Let's say, this pattern of behavior is well-studied, and has a name.
(I grew up with a parent who behaves in this way)
It is low-effort. That is the point.
Not that you could be a good judge of effort in general. Andy Warhol's art, however, was specifically made that way.
In any case, I hope that you do understand that effort and artistic merit are different, orthogonal concepts.
There are masterpieces that were created with little effort.
There are works made with great effort that are worthless.
The examples are abundant.
Not at all. You go far beyond "judging on your own grounds" by saying that something has little artistic merit.
In fact, your "judgement" only has the word "you" and none of "I" or "my"; your own grounds are completely missing from it.
You are entitled to your grounds, but you are instead climbing on a pedestal to confidently proclaim that everyone else doesn't have ground to stand on.
Here's what you have enough basis to say:
"I see a painted can of soup on a white background. I felt that you didn't try. To me, lack of trying means that your work has little artistic merit."
- edit - And yes, I have talked to artists about absolutely trivial paintings. During that I learned how.. nontrivial putting poop on canvas may be - /edit -
Sometimes it's better to accept you're not part of a conversation and to either shut up, or ask a very confused "But why?"
>And yes, I have talked to artists about absolutely trivial paintings. During that I learned how.. nontrivial putting poop on canvas may be
And I've talked to artists who have told me they agreed with me, and that they think pseudo-artistic shitposts devalue the work they put into their own pieces.
If you came here to infuriate other people (or think it's good that it happens), you have come to the wrong place.
Please reconsider.
Same goes for those all-white or all-red paintings. You could do it, but you didn’t and you don’t.
https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/dada/marcel-duchamp-an...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Lichtenstein
for people like Warhol who expanded the range of "art" vs "not art".
The really relevant information is who did it.
More so when the law is concerned.
Actions are only crimes if the "wrong" people perpetrate them.
For the right people, "crimes" are nothing but expressions of their right to power. For the wrong people, "crimes" are conclusive proof of sociopathy.
Art is no different.
It isn't interesting it is almost step 1 in marketing. Tie your product to some celebrity or influencer to get exposure and credibility.