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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

> OBJECTIVELY pixel art looks incomparably better on CRT monitors

"Objectively" doesn't just mean a thing is a strongly held opinion or even widely held. This seems like a perfect example of a thing that is subjective, not objective. There is no objective metric for measuring the looks of pixel art. Or really any art in general.

Probably most people who care prefer this, but that doesn't mean it's objective.

This probably doesn't contribute to the discussion. But I have a personal peeve about people using the word "objectively" (and "demonstrably") when they really mean "significantly".

Carry on.

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I think the objectivity here is that it is what the artist intended.

Not true anymore for modern pixel art, which is often an art style intended for modern displays, and it is sometimes combined with high resolution images and transforms.

That's an often repeated claim people make about pixel art and CRT monitors esp on social media, but I think it's just a trite bite that sounds good rather than something that's meaningful.

Example: https://x.com/kitten_beloved/status/1849159022479577277

Plenty of people debunking it including the person she took the screenshots from.

>including the person she took the screenshots from.

who is that in the thread please? I can't find them

See https://x.com/Ian_Fisch/status/1820897215432233186

That doesn't debunk it at all - but some good points were made. Note that the artists of the day were also using CRT displays just higher resolutions. They certainly did test their work on the target. Some people obviously did more tweaking based on what they saw on the target machine and some less. This continues to this day.

That's a screenshot of a video made by tiktok user "mylifeisanrpg". I don't know where the image of the sprites came from but Fisch doesn't say he made it.

If we had an artist's statement of intent for a particular piece, that might be a reasonable argument.

We don’t need a statement of intent because we have historical records of their work process simultaneously using both TV and computer displays.

Yeah, it's just not your grandmother's pixel art anymore

"Objectively the artists intended the art to be viewed on a CRT" is a very different statement than "Objectively the art looks better on a CRT"

Intersubjective is also a word that nicely fills in the ground between subjective and objective.

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

Thank you for pointing that out. I agree that using the word „objectively” in this case was a bit silly, and I apologize for that.

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