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Comment by the_duck | Hacker News Reader

I'm talking about cases where human involvement is minimal. If all I need to do to make a painting is press the "run" button, there's not much intention there. I haven't expressed anything.

You could certainly make the case for "expressive individuality" in the program making the art, especially if it was written by just one person. But computer programs, IMHO, fail the "valid art" test for other reasons. Of Dutton's twelve criteria they miss at least two: representation (6) and emotional saturation (9).

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" If all I need to do to make a painting is press the "run" button, there's not much intention there."

If all I need to do to kill another person is press the "run" button, there's not much intention there.

Sure, that'd be severe exaggeration in most cases, but we're talking about art, and that art has happened (See the works of yoko ono (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJ3dPwa2tI), wafaa bilal (http://wafaabilal.com/html/shootAnIraqi.html), etc.) Are you both psychic AND time traveling in order to be able to tell what someone was thinking when they hit that button? I realize this puts me in the place of defending art /I/ personally don't like, but that "valid art" term is just the worst.

There are also types of art that are all about hitting the button. For instance, field recording. Wonderful article on it at http://www.factmag.com/2014/11/18/a-beginners-guide-to-field..., but the quote from Yan Jun I reference the most is:

“There is no such thing as documenting a reality,” he tells me, “There is no divide between documenting and creating. The point is I don’t build dreams neither by field recording nor by playing my electronics instruments or computer. To choose equipments, choose position and push record button are acts of composing. Tiny meaningless noises can be a beautiful composition. To summarise I can use this equation – I push the record button = someone making a musique concréte piece = Bach.”

Seriously. I'm happy you read a book about art, and that's not sarcastic. Most people won't ever put that much time into thinking about art, and it's cool you did. Just be careful about how much credit you give anything that ever uses the term "Valid Art".

I think you're making the same category of error of which you accuse the_duck, albeit in the opposite direction, when you say "that art has happened" or claiming that field recording is art, or reverently quoting Yan Jun drawing an equivalence between pushing a record button and Bach. You dropped the word "valid", but you're still making assertions about what is and is not art.

Collectively, humans don't always agree about what is art. One option is to simply always be agnostic about what is and is not art. Then there's no argument.

Another option is to claim that there does exist some dividing line. And if you want to come to an agreement with anyone about that dividing line, it's hilariously delusional to miss the fact that there does not exist a broad consensus about when it is appropriate to use that word, and you need to construct that agreement. And if you want to do that, the idea of "valid art" is essential; blithely saying "that art has happened" is disingenuous at best.

Me, I choose to be agnostic about what is art. I don't understand the value of agreeing about it (except, perhaps, for the purpose of bureaucratic allocation of grants and funding). But even having taken that position, Dutton's ideas about a 12-factor model seem pretty interesting, as a sociological investigation of what other criteria other humans seem to use.

There are paint-by-number programs and then there is Paint-By-Number with real paint. There are software engineers and programmers and there are people who just type in code while following a tutorial (or even just download the sample code and hit build). Everything beyond this from-zero point is extraordinarily complex.

Does a painting composed of a single stroke lack something to be art? What if that painting was done and redone a hundred times? What if the artist's assistant did it at their direction? Does it matter if the artist crafted the brush themselves by carving a fine branch, procuring their own glue and sable, and putting the thing together? Or if instead they bought 10 brushes and 10 sketchbooks in pursuit of an idea? Is the "end product" more or less legitimate because the artist had a clear vision of what they wanted at the start versus having only a vague direction and experimenting until they were satisfied?

the intention doesn't happen when the "run" button is pressed, it happens when the program is written.

unless it's an AI program and then I think it is back to passing "expressive individuality" with extra credit :)

I would just like to say that the fact that the Electric Sheep guy participated in this comment thread makes me unreasonably happy. :)

I think people devalue art in many cases where the outcome is merely something beautiful.

Beauty and art are different things.

There are more beautiful things in the world than artful things.

I think people devalue art in many cases when they say, 'oh this code is so artful, it is full of art'

Could it make you cry?

That being said, although I think that "Art as communication" has some truth in that some kind of communication should happen, obviously there will be instances where that is not the case, but they are definitely something further away from the norm (and I argue the primary value) of art.

I've certainly seen code that made me cry. :)

I don't think computer art is a complicated problem.

Firstly "hand+brain+physical media" has infinitely more degrees of expressive freedom than "pixel robot."

Most pixel robots are really, really dumb.

At worst they draw simple filled shapes. At best they run some minimal - probably recursive, but still trivial - algo thing that makes nice pictures.

But art is not about making pretty pictures. It's about abstracting and intensifying human experience - which is a completely different problem.

Canvas and pigment can be a convenient way to do that, sometimes.

Code is never a convenient way to do it, because it's a very rigid and primitive medium explicitly designed to eliminate the subjectivity and intensity art specialises in.

So even the most interesting computer art is usually just shapes arranged in some semi-random way.

If it has texture at all - often it doesn't - there's absolutely nothing happening under the surface.

You can maybe say the same thing about some more abstract work.

But you certainly can't say it about art as a whole.

> If all I need to do to make a painting is press the "run" button

You do realize, the implementation, algorithm and the input data are equal parts of the artwork. That a layman will have trouble appreciating the more technical parts is irrelevant.

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