All: a lot of comments in this thread are sneering at something: some person, some group, someone's work, someone's comments, or the rest of the community. Please don't do that on HN, even in response to sneers by others. It feels justified and maybe brings relief, but it fills the thread with nasty fumes and makes for a place no one can really enjoy. It's not in any of our interests.
Curiosity, which we're trying for here, doesn't sneer. It is open, more genuinely satisfying, and makes for a place that's better for everyone. That's in all of our interests.
I don't think its that bad @dang :) There is no nationalism and politics, just people debating about art with passion. I kind of found it interesting and fun to see both sides debating.
"Conservatives" - anti-Pollock clan argue that art must have inherit beauty and skill to produce.
"Liberals" - pro-Pollock folks argue that the whole definition of art is up for grabs.
Pollock is wonderful, particularly in person. But more than I enjoy the art (Silver Over Black, White, Yellow, and Red in person is enough to bring me to tears), I really enjoy listening to people's anger ranting why its not really art, or why anyone could do that, etc. If art is intended to garner a reaction - Pollock accomplishes that in spades.
I personally find it wonderful and beautiful - the sf-tech crowds mocking the abstract and psychedelic tend to be a bit unaware where the world they both live and work in came from!
I really enjoy listening to people's anger ranting why its not really art, or why anyone could do that, etc.
The irony is that Abstract expressionism was used for Cold War propaganda after Harry Truman made his that-ain’t-art criticism of the pictorial works that were the State Department’s Advancing American Art exhibit.
Pollock et al. were politically acceptable demonstrations of American freedom of expression because they are not critically engaged with social conditions. Being critical of America’s social disparities was what spelled the end of Advancing American Art as a Cold War instrument. It was too much free expression for the Truman administration.
Don’t misunderstand me, I appreciate Pollock et al. But it’s why it took an immigrant to produce Frank’s The Americans to follow on the artistic groundwork layed by the Pubic Works Administration in the depression years.
Pollock is safe because it doesn’t raise important questions about meat space. Rants about what is art are as far as it goes. It’s more tampon in a teacup than it is Maplethorpe’s X.
> But it’s why it took an immigrant to produce Frank’s The Americans to follow on the artistic groundwork layed by the Pubic Works Administration in the depression years.
So what do you make of jazz, hip hop or punk rock? Those are full of social criticism, and also seem to reinforce the idea of free expression under capitalism. And there are lots of visual artists and dancers and writers too. I'm looking at the VOA music stream [0] and it seems to be full of free speech of all kinds.
It might be fair to say that Jackson Pollock is too apolitical {for our times,to be taken seriously,for you}, but I personally don't see the conspiracy you're laying out here.
Ironically, the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities investigated Advancing American Art exhibit looking for a leftist conspiracy. Or to put it another way there is no rationale for proposing a government conspiracy. It was ordinary government operations described in newspapers and magazines of the day and documented in the Congressional Record and the National Archives.
"Establishment funding sources dry up when the artists they're supporting develop an anti-establishment message" is hardly a conspiracy theory. It might be true or false, but it's not a conspiracy theory, that's the wrong concept to associate with it.
It definitely could be a conspiracy theory, if the allegation is that funders are conspiring together to exclude artists who are too political (and if the allegation is false).
But it may be true, and not a conspiracy theory. I've no idea. I've never looked into the issue.
No, if the allegation is true, it still would be a conspiracy. The key factor is the secrecy, not the reality of the situation. If it is provably true, that moves it out of the realm of a theory to history, but it would be a conspiracy regardless.
But if done openly per the OP, then we aren't talking about a conspiracy at all, just politics!
My opinion of Pollock changed drastically when I saw something in person. For me, it was Greyed Rainbow, which is completely uninteresting in a book and quite enthralling in person.
I don't think this phenomenon is limited to abstract expressionism though. Even being from Iowa, I didn't understand what was special about American Gothic until I saw it in person.
I had a similar reaction to Mark Rothko's work. On a page it seems silly and stupid but standing in front of a giant canvas that is seemingly perfectly imperfectly painted is just something else. It engulfs your entire vision and is really something that needs to be experienced in person.
I remember going to the National Gallery in D.C. and while asking for a map the person at the desk told me "you should go to the tower, we have something very special there". It was an exhibit of some Rothkos and a video about his life and significance to help the viewer interpret his works.
I found the paintings terrible, but knowing I usually understand them more once I understand the artist I went to go watch the video. During the video there was a couple rude guys who started snickering at the video. Usually I get kind of upset about this sort of thing, but to be honest, I actually agreed with them. I came away from the experience feeling like I had just been part of a huge prank.
I learned that day that Rothko's painting are trash.
A couple years later I was in a small museum in another country, and across the room saw a painting of a couple of poorly rendered squares in flat shades and thought, "I bet that's a Rothko." Sure enough it was, and now I can recognize his paintings from 20 meters away. So I guess his work is recognizable and unique and I've learned some very begrudging respect for his work that way I guess -- they're at least recognizable trash.
Why? If you look closely, it is imperfect. If you look around you can find others, very similar. Perhaps any river could have produced it. It isn't saying anything. It isn't telling you anything. It isn't being anything other than a stone. Yet surely, it can be an object of beauty, causing thought, curiosity, contemplation and feelings.
If a stone, why not a canvas deliberately created from inspiration and feelings? Isn't abstract art even more artful than simply copying what your eyes can see?
Maybe you just don't like Rothko? People like different things and that is fine. I don't think there is a anything to "explain" about Rothko and that genre - the point of the paintings are the physical form and colors itself, there is nothing "behind" which need explanation.
I had a similar reaction. When I would see Pollocks in books, I would dismiss them as being overrated, but when I finally saw one in person, I was really overwhelmed. There's something about the presence of it that really pulls you in. Maybe it's the size of the pieces that does it.
Giotto is the same. His paintings seem lifeless in a book with 10" pictures. But there's a room in the Uffizi which features Madonnas by Giotto, Cimabue, and Duccio. They are mind-blowing. First of all they are not 10 inches but 10 feet tall. Second, Giotto's Madonna and Child almost feels as if they are alive. Seeing his work side-by-side with contemporaries it's instantly obvious why Vasari considered Giotto as the reviver of the art painting. [1] (The others were no slouches either.)
> I really enjoy listening to people's anger ranting why its not really art, or why anyone could do that, etc. If art is intended to garner a reaction - Pollock accomplishes that in spades.
What's the difference between art and trolling? Is trolling a art to you?
Also: Piss Christ
If art is meant to provoke a response, art which provokes death threats must be the greatest art of all.
> Gallery officials reported receiving death threats in response to Piss Christ.
Also, knowing what we know about what Pell was getting up to, this must be the greatest work of irony-as-art yet:
> During a retrospective of Serrano's work at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1997, the then Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, sought an injunction from the Supreme Court of Victoria to restrain the National Gallery of Victoria from publicly displaying Piss Christ, which was not granted.
That poor guy is being crucified. After being betrayed, hauling the device of his own execution up a hill, being whipped, crowned with thorns and mocked. Being submerged in piss is the least of his worries and indignities... yet it still manages to be a pretty picture.
Hah that's so well said. I had typed a response about why that piece of art didn't really do much for me, but it was like 3 paragraphs long - this is a perfect way to put it!
> I really enjoy listening to people's anger ranting why its not really art (...)
This reminds me of Barnett Newman's "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III" which has elicited its fair share of visceral reactions as well, with some people going so far as to vandalize it in museums - 99 percent invisible did a great story on it a while back
"If art is intended to garner a reaction - Pollock accomplishes that in spades."
Sadly, that's not difficult to do, especially if the artist has critics, media, museums, and galleries propping them up and giving them publicity.
The history of 20th Century art is full of shock art antics which rile up the public.
One of the most telling examples is Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit"[1], which (true to its name) consists of tin cans containing Manzoni's excrement.
Manzoni sold the cans for their weight in gold ($37 each in 1961), but since then they're selling for as much as €275,000 each.
Poetically, some cans have since burst because of the gases built up inside, making the "art" worthless.
The estimation, outrage, and value of such "art" in the art market, in the eyes of critics, and in the view of the public aptly summarizes a lot of modern art. Perhaps that's why they sell so well.
Edgy art like this is mostly used as a money laundering racket by the ultra rich, a way to piss away money by the rich, and a way to feel cool by aimless middle class hipsters. I love it all, but some people refuse to acknowledge this.
I actually rather like Pollock. And the paintings really are something that needs to be seen in person, not unlike a large Monet water lily canvas. But I still find it hard to believe that Pollock was once a student of the American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton. No two could be more different...
> I really enjoy listening to people's anger ranting why its not really art, or why anyone could do that, etc. If art is intended to garner a reaction - Pollock accomplishes that in spades.
If that's a defense of Pollock's art, I think it's not a very good one. Obviously a lot of people, myself included, disagree that anything that elicits a strong reaction must be art. I hope there's a better reaction to his art, like maybe it's aesthetically pleasing, provocative or innovative?
For the record, I don't dislike Pollock's art, though it's not really something I admire either.
But you know what I meant: just provoking a strong reaction is not enough. Stepping on dog shit also provokes a strong reaction of disgust, but dogs aren't really artists. (Well, I'm sure some dogs are...)
> the sf-tech crowds mocking the abstract and psychedelic tend to be a bit unaware where the world they both live and work in came from!
I think many of us view the thousands of men and women behind the Apollo missions, for example, as the world where we came from. Much more than Jackson Pollock (although I have no strong opinion on Pollock as an artist).
And I see already the sneering that dang was referring to (and I'm sure it's happening in the other direction down-thread).
The men and women of the Apollo program were much more distant from SF than Unix and Berkeley and LSD. I fully understanding desiring to be a closer decedent of Richard Feynman than Timothy Leary, but that's just a desire, not a truth. I myself am an engineer who previously lived in SF, so no sneering - however I came from poverty, southern california, east LA, etc - which is a very different world than my University of Chicago comp-sci friends.
Ehh, if you're going to stress the SV connection to the modern tech industry, I'd say that William Shockley, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore had far more influence - even culturally - than Timothy Leary.
And I wasn't comparing us to luminaries like Feynman, but rather to the working men and women of the Apollo program.
Fair enough - I was generalizing heavily. I'd not heard of Robert Noyce before, but I'm glad to have some weekend reading!
In response to your comparison then, I suppose I would say we're as close (or closer) to the hippies of burning man and esalen than we are to the engineers of the Apollo program. It's certainly a mixture of both - I just think the former tends to be marginalized is all.
> we're as close (or closer) to the hippies of burning man and esalen
I might concede this for SV, but not for the American tech industry as a whole. SV has an outside cultural influence on the rest of us, but even it doesn't dominant in places like NYC, RTP, etc.
> I really enjoy listening to people's anger ranting why its not really art, or why anyone could do that, etc. If art is intended to garner a reaction - Pollock accomplishes that in spades.
That's like if a bunch of anti-vaxxers gathered to protest Norman Rockwell's "before the shot." Technically, it does says something about the art's ability to "garner a reaction." But that's a tautology.
If there's a critical mass of ignoramuses who are doing the reacting, that doesn't reveal much of anything about the art.
"Despite multiple assurances that they could have done it as well, I'm still not aware of any modern art coming out of HN."
I've made abstract art for decades. I don't share it with HN as that's not really what HN is for, and I'm pretty private about it anyway.
I very much doubt I'm the only artist on HN either. Just because you haven't seen HN users' art doesn't mean they don't make any.
That said, I fully agree that many non-artists underestimate how difficult it is to make some art. Also, there's something to be said for doing it first and stretching the definition of what counts as art, no matter how technically "easy" it was.
The quintessential example of this being Malevich's "Black Square".[1] After Malevich, it could be argued that much of the rest of modern art whose main point was to show that "anything can be considered art" could be seen as just minor variations.
> I too could have invented calculus (after learning about it in school).
Incidentally, this is written as if it's obvious, but it's not at all a given that you can invent something even after you've been taught it. If you can, then it's a serious credit to your teacher.
Missing the point. Nobody is asking whether Jackson Pollock could code. The suggestion is that HN commenters are talking a big game about cutting-edge visual media, but they're not creating high quality visual art in such a way as to authenticate their specific opinions on other people's visual art.
I've worked pretty hard on producing video support for my live synth music, and have got better at it over time. Doesn't make me a painter, though. In many ways my stuff is pretty pedestrian compared to working video artists: I tend to go for your basic 'light show effects', crowd-pleasing stuff. My imagination as far as coming up with really novel environments… that's what could use some work.
No one accuses me of being insane for going to a park bench and watching cranes and ducks skim across the river and just think. Why is it controversial for someone to like Pollock’s paintings which give the same type of space?
Maybe they don’t have intrinsic meaning, but a lot of the world doesn’t. Maybe they have meaning from their context, maybe the world does as well. At the end of the day, to me they are provocative and inspirational and help me think and I value thinking so I value Pollock’s paintings. Especially insofar as the paintings aren’t encumbered by the heavy realist Americana that Pollock reacts against from his studies with Thomas Benton (Though I do like Benton’s paintings as well).
A lot of the post-war abstractionists are treated that way by people. From de Kooning to Reinhardt to Yayoi Kusama, they all get dismissed for one thing or another but I think all of them have some unique stylistic choices that breathe life into their art, Kusama in particular. They aren't traditional or easy to love, in fact, they are much easier to just scoff at. But the artists put serious thought into each work and came in with an idea and a vision and, a lot of the time, they realized those in truly unique ways. Just because they're not "pretty" or "technically impressive" doesn't mean they're bad or aren't art.
"Certain disciples of the new school, much occupying themselves with the measured dividing of the tempora, display their prolation in notes that are new to us, preferring to devise new methods of their own rather than to continue singing in the old way. Therefore the music of the Divine Office is disturbed with notes of these small values. Moreover, they hinder the melody with hockets, they deprave them with descants, and sometimes they pad them out with upper parts made out of secular songs. The result is that they often seem to be losing sight of the fundamental sources of our melodies in the Antiphoner and Gradual, and forget what it is that they are burying under their superstructures. They may become entirely ignorant of the ecclesiastical modes, which they have already ceased to distinguish and the limits of which they abuse in the prolixity of their notes. The modest rise and temperate descents of plainsong, by which the modes themselves are recognized, are entirely obscured. The voices move incessantly to and fro, intoxicating rather than soothing the ear, while the singers themselves try to convey the emotion of the music by their gestures. The consequence of all this is that devotion, the true aim of all worship, is neglected, and wantonness, which ought to be eschewed, increases."
- Pope John XXII, docta sanctorum patrum, ca. 1324
I think the complaint is about attribution. If a friend takes you to the park to watch the cranes and ducks, it would be a stretch to call them a great artist for facilitating that potentially sublime experience, because anyone could have taken you. Similarly Pollock's paintings may be aesthetic, but if they are easily imitated, it's hard to argue the works themselves make their author a great artist.
To be fair to Pollock, he had the creative insight to make his work in a less permissive period of art, so it's fair to argue he was a great innovator or artist on that merit, but it's a different type of achievement vs 'timeless' pieces of art like (imho) Bernini.
> Why is it controversial for someone to like Pollock’s paintings which give the same type of space?
Because the abstract style has actively pushed out other styles. The great majority of people in art museums will see nothing beautiful in the post-WWII sections. When 90% of people find 90% of what is lauded as "high art" worthless, of course there is controversy, or more accurately, anger at what is being pushed on them.
Modern art is far more than abstract though. A lot is figurative in various forms, from Picasso to Lucien Freud, and genres like photorealism and hyperrealism. Unless you have been to a museum specifically dedicated to abstract art.
It’s a sad commentary on the state of the web that (a) we’d consider waiting a good couple of minutes for a website to load, and (b) scrolling down to sidestep rendering issues is a reasonable tactic.
I just saw an interesting video on "How Jackson Pollock became so overrated."[1] Summary: It was due to the enormous influence of a single critic who was a Pollock fan.
As an artist, I find it incredibly sad that critics and other gatekeepers (such as museum curators and gallery owners) have any influence at all.
Fortunately, these days the need for such gatekeepers is diminishing, as artists can get their art (at least in digital form) directly in front of their audience, though at the same time new gatekeepers like search engines and platform owners are arising.
> As an artist, I find it incredibly sad that critics and other gatekeepers (such as museum curators and gallery owners) have any influence at all.
You sound like Banksy in the forward to "War and Piece".
I'm somewhat convinced that Art to a large extent is marketing. How some art gets noticed and into museums confuses me. (Piling things on the floor, no matter how clever the explanation, isn't great. Hanging wood boards on the wall is nice, I love wood grain but no..). Its frustrating to some extent because there is some fantastic art out there by relatively unknown artists.
I help out with a local open studios event (visit artists in their studio spaces). Very few of the 300+ member artists can make a living solely from their art. Under lockdown its even harder.
I think there's a certain amount of risk each artist needs to take, in any medium, where on one side you see the intentionally accessible art of the television show, and on the other side you see art that challenges the audience in some way: be it obscure, or inherently referential, or historically situated. I love challenging art, but without an art history degree I often can't appreciate it fully without also immersing myself in some critical writing on it.
Challenging art almost need to be paired with critics who can provide useful metaphors, historical contexts, or what-have-you to help appreciate the art. Part of my appreciation of challenging works of art comes from reading interesting critical appraisals of them. In those situations I think of the critics and the artists as being somewhat intertwined.
I quite agree on the gatekeeper side of things, e.g. critiques who are mainly concerned with questions of taste and judgement, where art that challenges certain norms is judged poorly.
There is a role for art education, and for providing context in which art can be understood. However, the hierarchical ranking of artists by critics in to "great" and "minor" is often just a matter of taste and opinion, and that's what I object to.
I can't count the number of times I've gone in to famous museums and galleries and found them stocked to the gills with art that I considered absolute and utter garbage.
Now, of course the curators, critics, and gallery owners who extol such art have a different opinion of this art than I do, or they wouldn't have put it in to their museums and galleries, but really who's to say their opinion is any better than anyone else's?
Jackson Pollock -- and in general, abstract expressionism -- was also used by the CIA as a covert Cold War weapon against the USSR. This was a major source of funding for this kind of art, in fact.
Does this sound bonkers and like a conspiracy theory? It does -- but it's also pretty mainstream knowledge by now: the CIA thought abstract expressionism was the polar opposite of Soviet "socialist realism". Any form of art denounced by the Soviet Union was worth supporting by the US.
> “We recognized that this was the kind of art that did not have anything to do with socialist realism… Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of nonconformity… So one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticized that much and that heavyhandedly was worth support in one way or another.”
and later
> Fundamentally, the CIA made Jackson Pollock rich. They made De Kooning and Rothko household names. And in doing so, they won the cold war. Not with guns, but with abstract expressionism and rock and roll.
This does sound bonkers to me but it's not a fringe theory mentioned by conspiracy websites. See other mainstream references:
It's important to know the supported artists weren't necessarily aware of how they were being used. In fact, almost surely they weren't. But this was a major source of funding, and it was political in aim.
What a wonderful surprise! I remember playing with this back in 3rd and 4th grade during our computer lab, it was an absolute pleasure. I haven't seen it in over 15 years, and am just floored by how timeless this is. It just so happened that I walked by my old elementary school on Monday of this week. What a strange coincidence.
For those who question Pollock’s artistry - see his paintings in person first. They have a mesmerizing quality that grabs you from across the room. Looking at them, it’s easy to get lost in a sort of meditative trance, which also happens with Rothko (another ‘my kid could do that’ artist.)
How much of that is because of skill as an artist vs just venue and size. In other words what other things would be just as interesting if presented similarly.
If a computer can generate something of equal quality without human input, I don't consider it art. Sure, CGI looks realistic. But realistic imagery is not enough for something to be art, and neither is random splashes of color. There is nothing here that points to beauty, higher values, truth, or anything. If it helps you zone out, sure, but again, not art. White noises helps some people zone out. This is basically white noise with extra steps.
And Im referring to Pollock's work. This website is arguably more artistic than his painting.
Pollack's works have an extreme textural effect when seen in person that can't be conveyed with flat media like computer screens or printed reproductions — they are three dimensional, because the paint blobs are thick, and sharp.
This interactive site is a beautiful and intense way to experience Pollack. If you get the chance, I hope you also get to experience Pollack's works live and in the flesh.
Using this site just leaves me feeling bored and kind of annoyed, just like a pollack painting! I was just moving the mouse around thinking "Man, this is going to take all day. I don't have time for this. I'm mortal." It's so weird, because I haven't felt that way for a long time. I've been making good life choices so far, up until I clicked on that website, and I just had to go away and do something else.
Love the website. I'm not sure how I missed that when it came out. this site shows some of the evolution of Jackson Pollock's work. In it you can see him moving from imitation of the masters of earlier 20th century art to his own unmistakable thing. Clark Terry, a revered jazz trumpet player and teacher famously said "Imitate. Assimilate. Innovate." That same process can be seen here. http://www.all-art.org/art_20th_century/pollock1.html
The site is absolutely delightful. You also get the feeling after having fun for a while that there's much more art in Pollock's canvases than it first appeared. :)
I am a huge fan of The Art Assignment on youtube. I came in as a skeptic of modern art but grew to appreciate it and with it my notions of what I consider art or work in general. Jackson Pollock video essay[0] is worth watching as well.
[0] https://youtu.be/1U19VOF4qfs
A lot of people also don't realize that Pollock's wife was essentially the curator of his work. He would complete a painting and have her approve it. There have been tons of pieces that we haven't been able to see simply because they didn't pass this test.
There used to be a 99¢ app on the iOS app store which did pretty much the same as this site. I loved it a lot, but unfortunately, it was gone from the app store some day.
Its disappointing to me how this community responds to Jackson Pollack. Most of the Pollack supporter's comments seem to assume that if a person doesn't think he's a genius of incredible technical ability, then that means that person is automatically an ignorant person that's making wild, uninformed, random guesses about how art is created.
I think Pollack's paintings are aesthetically pleasing. I'm not a professional artist, however I am an art and art history hobbyist. I have been for decades. I like his paintings. I don't, however, think they are special or that he was an artistic genius whose paintings should have broken the record at one point for the most expensive work of art ever sold. That's OK though, we all have different tastes and a guy with $100 million just happened to have different tastes from this guy with no millions.
However, my opinion isn't random or uninformed. I know how a painting is created. How the surfaces are prepared. How preparatory drawings and smaller studies are done. How the final drawing is made. How the underpainting is done. My art is pretty bad compared to professionals. However, studying it for decades means I've watched actual masters do their thing for a countless number of hours. I know how the Italian masters created their works of art in great detail. I know how Pollack created his. The level of technical skill required to become a master of classical realism is absurd. Pollack's strength was executing and publishing an idea no one had done before. In the grand scheme of all of art, I don't think that's a particularly strong strength when compared to masters of classical realism.
My opinion is based on an intimate knowledge of what it takes to be that good. If you disagree with my conclusion that's fine and reasonable but to pretend that everyone doesn't consider him a highly skilled genius is ignorant is in itself pretty ignorant.
If I wanted to create a work like Pollack's, there would likely be a learning curve, but we aren't talking the same amount of practice and preparation that classically trained artists require to even be semi-competent. Like I said before, the biggest strength of the work he is known for was originality, not technical competence. He might have also been technically competent as an artist, but when I look at the works that made him famous I don't see it.
I'd be willing to hang all kinds of abstract / modern / postmodern art on my wall because it adds color, sometimes has great composition, and is aesthetically pleasing. However, most of it just isn't meaningful to me in the same way that other genres of art are like classical realism and impressionism. I don't think anyone should feel like that's a personal attack on their preferences. I'm not missing something, it just has a different effect on me. If you don't like classical realism you aren't missing something either, you just like different things.
Thanks for sharing that, it's good to read it in textual form. What do you make of Twombly? I've been trying to understand what there is to see in his work; I am a scientist rather than an artist and I appreciate that I may not understand some skills.
However, I am still in favour of an "emperor's new clothes" type interpretation of his work - his initial work was panned by critics; but when the later critics write about his work, they reference his history as a "cryptologist" in the Army, and they say things like "you can see AMOR here and ROMA here in the scrawls" (in the book "Your Kid Could Not Do This" or some similar title) as if there's something _deep_ there. ("others can't see it, but he was a cryptologist once, so there must be something I'm missing")
So my take is similar to one up above here - Pollock became huge when he got a great review from a highly influential critic. Same with Twombly.
I was reading the Smithsonian's transcript of Jim Sanborn's Oral History and I see that theme a few times in there -- like his dad was an artist, and at a young age he went to an art opening where he, his parents and the artist knew the art was terrible but his parents were praising the work as profound, confusing him; and later when he recognized the importance of being in the good books of influential curators and gallery owners in DC; e.g. when Yuri Schwebler became upset with him, he said it set his career back 10 years. So, a "who you know" game. Praise everyone, stay in everyone's good books, and hope you get noticed.
Some of Twombly's work is aesthetically pleasing and well composed, but some of them could have easily been a page of doodles ripped out of any middle schooler's notebook, like the $800,000 "Murder of Olefernes".
Overall I think he's far worse than Pollack and unless he had some kind of mental illness that deluded him into thinking the work he produced took any amount of effort whatsoever he was obviously a troll or a con man.
Then again maybe the picture above was indeed just some scribblings that he never intended for anyone to see. I'm not overly familiar with his history.
Pollock and DeKooning were thoroughly disinterested in painting in the classical or modernist sense. So to look for the skill or traditional aesthetic in these paintings is starting off on the wrong foot. They were good traditional/modernist painters but in their seminal stage they were struggling badly to erase from themselves any trace of el Greco, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, etc. My read is that they ended up making explicit in the painting the process of this struggle for self liberation. The painting is a record of these guys living in there, in the painting, struggling. It’s the socks on the floor and crumbs on the table of a messy lived-in apartment. DeKooning erased and covered and added, obsessively for years, often leaving the “final product” as an aesthetically disharmonious “ugly painting”. He’s destroying anything recognizable, that looks like a reference. All the while looking for some kind of semblance, because he knew total destruction was meaningless. He wants some kind of sweet spot between something and nothing. The work is deep, it’s philosophical, it’s a real struggle with meaning and identity. Pollock is similar in his disdain for recognizable forms. He loathed the idea of being associated with the cubists, which is what his earlier work pointed to and he actively tried to escape it. The verbatim image is a second class citizen in these guys’ work. The image is not supposed to give you that “art-like vibe” that you get from “good art”. These are precisely the lame, obvious things they’re working against. Their work is a struggle to liberate themselves from stereotypes and the image is a record of the struggle. If one doesn’t find a DeKooning painting beautiful it doesn’t mean anything. They haven’t even begun digging into the wealth of knowledge inside it.
I'm not starting off on the wrong foot. I started off fully aware that the point of Pollack's action painting wasn't technical ability. I only mentioned it because there are lots of people in this thread who actually seem to think his paintings displayed a genius level of technical ability that mere mortals could not possibly attain through any level of hard work.
The issue I have is that within the high art community and art historians and art critics there is no limit to the amount of shit they will swallow from con-men. They eagerly await the next completely ridiculous story. I'm certain there were lots of modern/abstract/etc artists that were legitimate, and as you said, struggled and worked hard their entire lives to produce work.
One of the biggest problems I have with finding meaning in such work is that given the fact that the resulting product of such artists can either be a flag draped on a toilet, a black dot drawn in the center of a piece of paper, random plaint splashes repeated in a semi methodical way in order to create a coherent composition, or even shit in a can, I am not convinced that we have managed to accurately separate charlatans and con men from people that actually put effort into what they did. And if you have an industry where mediocre or even laughably bad end products are similar in apparent quality to celebrated masterpieces and there are millions of dollars at stake you can be certain that the con men have shown up in droves.
You can derive great meaning from Pollack and others that it didn't inherently possess. It can have a real impact on you, your life, and how you see the world. That doesn't mean there's an inherent wealth of knowledge to be found that I'm missing out of ignorance. It just means that the art work speaks to you in some way.
Picasso was actually a highly skilled classically trained artist and that experience was an important part of what he became. I only like a few of his paintings, but in some of them while it looks strange to a person accustomed to traditional art, the competence and technical mastery is clearly apparent to someone that knows what they are looking at. Nude Descending a Staircase is a legitimate masterpiece, for example.
And also, to be clear, I'm not saying that any of the examples I listed are not "real" art. They are all real art, I just find master level works of classical realism, expressionism, and many other genres more interesting, due to the undeniable difference in technical mastery and work ethic required to produce them. And by work ethic I don't just mean the number of hours a person spends doing a thing. If I spend 10 years playing basketball 16 hours a day with my kid in my driveway I wouldn't get to magically claim that what I'm doing makes me just as good at basketball as NBA players and demand that the world ignores the fact that my results aren't even close to what theirs are.
I get it that they weren't interested in being considered "good" artists. That's fine, they can do whatever they want and the world has enough room for everyone. I am just not interested in people that don't care about being good at what they do for a living. I'm not interested in social statements or political statements that aren't accompanied by substance. Other people might be and that's great.
When it comes to all forms of art, media, music, film, etc, the things I find most interesting are when people or groups of people are operating at such a high level of skill that almost nobody in history can compare to the work they produce.
Much of the value of Pollock's work is that he did that kind of work first. Though I'm not sure why he had to repeat himself once he made his first action painting.
I have a lot more respect for artists like Marcel Duchamp, who was always developing in radically new directions and did not like to repeat himself, in great contrast to one-trick ponies like Pollock.
Neat. Art snobs always defend Pollock by claiming it's actually really difficult to forge a true Pollock and that even though it looks easy, real Pollock paintings have subtleties that are impossible to reproduce unless you've practiced for a long time.
I say... who cares. If it's easy to imitate something and get 90+% of the way with no skill or practice, then the art isn't worth admiring.
This is the quintessential HN comment. Completely dismiss an entire region of the human experience and entire field of experts by assuming that your own unfamiliarity means there must be nothing there worth learning.
An equivalent claim is, "Windows 95 can do 90% of what Linux can do already. Operating system programmers aren't worth admiring."
If I've learned anything in my life, it's that when a group of people take something very seriously that seems pointless to me, 99% of the time, it is my own ignorance preventing me from seeing what they see.
What you've described is especially pernicious over multiple iterations.
Windows 95 can do 90% of what Linux can.
Windows 3.1 can do 90% of what Windows 95 can.
DOS can do 90% of what Window 3.1 can.
In this (contrived and counter-chronological) example, at each iteration we lost something that was only ever valuable to connoisseurs. In the case of software, we're talking about developers and power users.
But yeah, let's all keep mocking Pollock, and the art history students who cherish the work, until we end up with nothing but the most commercial, easily-digestible, and trite art.
An equivalent claim could also be that some collection of 3-line Python scripts is among the most important accomplishments in computer science and engineering. Being clearly trivial, it probably isn't that great.
So another possibility is that there indeed is such a thing as an emperor without clothes, and he might show up in abstract art.
People find it and other post-modernist works "beautiful" mainly because it pisses off the previous generation of artists. It has no other reason for existing otherwise. It's bereft of any soul or meaning. David Foster Wallace highlights this best.
This reeks of literal illiteracy, as well as a lack of visual aesthetic literacy. I'm not trying to sling mud here but I'd be really embarrassed by this if I were you. This is near saying that jazz music is just noise, despite whoever saying it likely not being able to even keep up with a basic chord chart. Or possibly it would be more appropriate, to imagine someone able to do a quick and dirty script in python, not understanding that CPU architecture is more nuanced and complicated simply because they know nothing about it. One is not necessarily better than the other, but you yourself are the one losing out from your inability to appreciate things outside of your comfort zone.
I can't think of less meaningful information than why someone believes why someone else believes something is beautiful. How could you possibly know that?
That's fine, of course you're not obligated to like or admire anything in particular.
Generally, if I don't see value in something a large number of people do, it causes me to reflect a little to try to figure out what I'm missing. And indeed, frequently I find I don't care (pick any pop star of the last few decades, for instance).
But sometimes it opens up a whole world I've been missing.
> Generally, if I don't see value in something a large number of people do, it causes me to reflect a little to try to figure out what I'm missing
I do as well.
But a lot of times I come to the conclusion that everyone is just participating in a social meta-game aka "the emperor's new clothes". The art community (in my opinion) is especially vulnerable to these social meta-games (because there is no way to objectively measure art in a way everyone agrees on), where you have to pretend to like and admire stuff to curry favor with peers and critics. Criticize Pollock and you stand to lose a lot of social standing. Praise him and show your learnedness and you climb the social ladder. And as you climb the ladder pretty soon you've fully bought into the status quo yourself.
There are a lot of games in the art world, no question. Mostly comes from the fact that money flows are super opaque and most folks aren't making any.
Anyway, I dunno. I don't think I've ever lost social favor for not liking some dead artist. (Live ones are like everyone else, and tribal bullshit applies. Just like in any other group of humans.)
One thing to be aware of is most folks with an interest in art aren't going to find "I could do that" to be meaningful criticism. Yeah, and? You didn't. Someone other than Armstrong could have been the first man on the Moon, but they weren't, either.
There was a discussion on HN not long ago about things that are obvious in hindsight[1], and I think Pollock's work might fit this category. Beyond the aesthetics, and even if his artworks were easy to reproduce, there's some value not just in the art itself but the discussion that it sparked in the community, and the impact that it had on perceptions of modern art.
Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that meta art or performance art, are not themselves art. This is quite a strange argument. Perhaps you should read about conceptual art, like Duchamps fountain, which is certainly art. Or if you really want to get upset read about Cattelan’s latest piece involving a banana and a piece of duct tape.
But don’t diminish Pollock’s hard earned technical ability that was necessary for his breakthrough in abstract expressionism. It can be difficult for artists to get past the hurdle of mastering their medium so they can arrive at a place where they can really begin to express their intuitions.
Acknowledging and admiring this does not make it snobbish.
"don’t diminish Pollock’s hard earned technical ability"
What technical ability was that?
I view Pollock's success as more of a result of stumbling in to a bit of the art world's search space that hadn't been explored before, and his championing by a highly influential art critic that liked his work. After that there was a Life magazine spread that brought him to popular attention.
None of this had anything to do with his technical ability, and I would be very surprised if even Pollock himself claimed that his paintings were technically difficult to accomplish.
The use of pigments and their combination to form a palette, the way he held the brush and moved his body, the amount of force he applied, the viscosity of paint...
As someone who works extensively in an art medium (ceramics), I relate to these as technical challenges. It's very time consuming to reign in control over these factors to the point where they become "right", however subjective, to the artist.
The consistency of Pollock's work, to me, shows that he had a systematic approach to how he technically achieved his work (fractal analysis also seems to prove this [1]). I won't argue if it made his work more successful, but he clearly had a level of intention and skill that I personally admire.
"The use of pigments and their combination to form a palette, the way he held the brush and moved his body, the amount of force he applied, the viscosity of paint. As someone who works extensively in an art medium (ceramics), I relate to these as technical challenges."
I make art in various media myself, but don't look at the elements you list as technical challenges as much as they are expressive choices which provide a sort of a "fingerprint" or signature on an artist's work.
In contrast, technical challenges that require a high amount of skill would be the creation, purely by hand and without mechanical assistance, of something like Albrecht Durer's Meloncolia[1], Michelangelo's Moses[2] or Sistine Chapel, to name but a few.
These works require not just the artist's personal distinctive "fingerprint" but the skill to create great verisimilitude in approximating the appearance of living beings and other things in the "external", "real" world. Any number of mistakes, from proportion to lighting to texture to anatomy, could have been made that would have made their work look "wrong".
The same couldn't be said of Pollock's work. Whether he chose to fling his paint right or left, up or down, would have resulted in more or less the same splatter effect, as long as he kept to pretty much the same paint density and color scheme. That's really not much of a skill compared to the master draftsmen like Michelangelo and Durer.
I also don't believe being systematic is evidence of skill. It's just evidence of organization.
Don't get me wrong, though. I like Pollock myself and consider that at its best his work achieves a high level of energy and harmony that is appealing to me. However, I believe that if just about anyone makes enough random splatter paintings, then those kinds of happy accidents are bound to come along eventually. It really doesn't take much, if any, skill in my eyes. He just happened to do it first.
My favorite "Pollock is easy" critique is The Connoisseur by Norman Rockwell.[1]
Of course, what Rockwell was missing is doing a Pollock-style action painting first. After Pollock, any paintings in his style are just worthless imitations.
It doesn't matter how "easy" it is, getting there first and pushing the boundaries of what is considered art still has a lot of value in the art world.
Norman Rockwell did not push any boundaries of art, and that's why he will always be a minor footnote in the history of art, no matter how much more technically accomplished his paintings in a realistic style are compared to some much more significant but technically "easy" abstract art.
I did it first, so admire me for pushing the boundaries of ascii art. Also, you'll never be able to truly reproduce this type of ascii art unless you spend 4 years at art school studying stylometry to be able to identify my unique technique. You can imitate it, but there are subtleties only connoisseurs will recognize.
You're at least 100 years too late for your random art to be considered novel.
Mozart was creating random compositions with dice as far back as 1792.[1] Pollock was playing with randomness in painting in the 1940's, around the same time that John Cage was innovating with randomness in musical compositions.
The use of randomness in the arts and music has been going on for a long time, so something like your ascii art is probably not going to raise an eyebrow today, though maybe if you did it 100 years ago and managed to get it in to a museum or gallery it might have looked novel then.
That said, I wouldn't put it past some galleries to display it anyway, especially if you do it in a large quantity -- say having random text cover all the gallery walls, or make the font really gigantic. I'm sure some people will love it and consider it some kind of profound statement on the mechanization of modern life or something.
You're not the audience. I think art has always been a game of finding something unique in the sea of mainstream. If there were 50 other artists who made art similar to Pollock, he would never have achieved this fame.
I'm sure you've encountered someone saying something along the lines of "Oh, I like it a lot but it's so common, literally every other person has it.". That's the kind of audience art is targeted towards. It's easy to classify if art is good or bad:
1. Is unique. If something is very similar to other famous
and sought-after pieces of art then it's not good.
2. Is popular in the art-community and sought after among the rich.
If something satisfies these two requirements then it's good art. Otherwise it's not.
Remember the $120,000 banana? It satisfies both conditions. So it was "good art". It also got three buyers apparently.
The worlds already plenty hypercritical-against art, but more than just art. Really wondering what progress this is meant to do for society.
I’d suggest anyone genuinely interested in experiencing art to just do some exploration. The Artsy app has been great for this. No purchase necessary to simply see what’s out there and some valuations. (Note that the art business is seemingly used for not just selling art but other nefarious things - so laugh at the prices as they’re possibly representative of more than just the art.)
I find much of his work beautiful. It clearly stands out amongst the crowd.
Pollack isn't easy to imitate and get 90+% of the way with no skill or practice. Cheap imitations don't look similar. The jacksonpollack.org website is a silly farce.
If you picked random people on the street and asked them to choose between a picture of a real pollock and a picture generated from this website, what % of people would choose the correct painting?
Ability to reproduce - or imitate - has very little relation to the cultural 'value' or 'goodness' of art. Viewing art as simply technical skill alone is meaningless when you have a photograph, a printer, or a robot.
Think about the introduction of photography. Like you said, the ability to imitate something (in this case 100%) with no skill or practice. That's photography. And it changed everything. Impressionism came from this period.
And I think it's interesting when placing Pollock on this timeline, he only did the drip paintings for a couple years of his career. But a lot of people would place these paintings towards the start of AbEx. Which some define as an opposing reaction to encroaching government, McCarthyism, lack of individuality and conformity, communism, etc. It's not just one technique or style. It's a way of expressing individuality and emotion.
Pollock's drip paintings and that type of 'action painting' directly tears apart that narrow view of art you expressed. These pieces purposely make the individual 'building blocks' visible. the brush strokes, paint etc.
What art was before is now being broken down, the parts put on display. One has to view it in the context of the time. Think about the Hollywood blacklist, USSR, control and conformity built from fear.
And Pollock goes and does that.
It was a protest of individuality and expression and is about SO much much more than reproducibility.
This would be like going through the full material of calculus (1,2,3) and saying “it’s trivial and therefore not impressive nor worth learning” after every single proof, derivation, lecture, and homework problem. You can do it, but you’ve not actually demonstrated any knowledge of the material. Nor would such refutation actually prove that calculus doesn’t contribute greatly to the modern world.
"Did you see that painting what Rothko did?,
Looks like it was painted by a two year old kid,
Hot air,
Hot air,
Ignorance is bliss, yeah?,
Well I'm not pleased,
Because you spread your opinion like a rectal disease,
Hot air,
Hot air,
Did you see that photo what Bellingham took?,
He needs to take a leaf out the screensaver book,
Hot air,
Hot air,
If all photos were as you wanted them to be,
That would be page three as far as the eye could see,
Hot air,
Hot air,
Forgive me you sound stupid,
Here lies the one I love,
Forgive me you sound stupid,
Here lies the one I love"
--Stendhal Syndrome by IDLES
I found this 6 minute YouTube video titled "I could do that" to be an excellent response to this "standard" critique of some modern art: https://youtu.be/67EKAIY43kg
Basically there are good reasons that modern art sometimes does not display a lot of technical skill. It might for example exactly be the point of the artwork, that it can't be sold or reproduced.
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Curiosity, which we're trying for here, doesn't sneer. It is open, more genuinely satisfying, and makes for a place that's better for everyone. That's in all of our interests.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html