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Comment by sandspar | Hacker News Reader

AI video may be to Hollywood as photography was to painting. Photography wasn't "painting, but better" - it was a different thing. AI-native video may not resemble typical Hollywood 3-act structure. But if it takes enough eyeballs away from Hollywood then Hollywood will die all the same.

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I think you're contradicting your own argument. Painting didn't die from photography.

Photography increased the abstract and more creative aspects of painting and created a new style because photography removed much of the need to capture realism. Though, I am still entranced by realist painting style myself, it is serving different purpose than capturing a moment.

I'm not an expert so I may be wrong about all this. But my impression is that Pictorialist photography aped painting for 50 years. Photography only came into its own as a "photography native" art form with Stieglitz and people like that around ~1905. By that time, non-representational painting styles like Cubism had already sucked the remaining juice out of painting, with Duchamp's 1917 urinal perhaps deserving credit for the coup de grace. Today painting is a shadow of what it once was - and public interest and auction prices reflect that. Museums occasionally have abstract painting exhibits but they're poorly attended because the public dislikes them. Ask a person on the street what their favorite painting movements are and likely every name will be more than 100 years old, possibly hundreds of years old. Compare auction prices between pre-1917 paintings and post-1917 paintings. Besides a few middlebrow pop artists like Dali or Warhol, meme painters like Pollock, or trendy political painters like Basquiat or Johns, the older paintings will be orders of magnitude more in demand. Painting used to move the conversation forward, now nobody cares.

> Ask a person on the street who their favorite painting movements are and likely every name will be more than 100 years old

I think you overestimate the publics art appreciation. The average answer will be a blank stare.

Well if you want to really be pedantic, they said every name, not average answer, so if most people reply with a blank state, that is still not in the set of every name, because they're not names. So the ones who actually do reply with a name are, as I agree with them, likely to be older than 100 years.

Have my upvote for pedantic overkill.

Sounds right, except calling Dali or Warhol "middlebrow." That's just weird.

>Painting didn't die from photography.

Commercial portrait painters died out pretty fast.

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