I have a page for quotes in Notion. There are only a few, I try to save it for really good ones. But this quote from Ira Glass made the cut:
"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
I love this, thanks for sharing. When I was younger I used to make a lot of music. A majority of it sucked, but some of it was legitimately good. So much so that some of my friends would go out of their way to listen to it even if they had other options. Funnily enough they'd still listen even if the tracks were always super low quality (I was young and didn't know how to mix it and I didn't have any kind of equipment or resources to master it.)
My parents were the "artistry isn't a real profession" kind, and even seeing me persevering with all of these crazy constraints (like having to make music with an Intel Pentium II with no sound card) wasn't enough to convince them. After about four years I stopped making music altogether and I regret it so much. I always wonder what would have happened had I waited for the era that we're in today. Granted, my life trajectory still went in a great direction, but I miss making music.
I have a similar story, as I'm sure many people with musical or other artistic talents, but who don't come from families that have artists in them do. I finally decided to get back to studying music with a private teacher after nearly 20 years away from it and it's great. Try out some teachers near you and just commit to spending 30-60 minutes a day practicing. You'll spend a bunch of time in that in between phase the quote from Ira Glass mentions, but it's worth it to do that for yourself if you can!
It's impossible to overstate how amazingly effective having a teacher can be. I recently started taking guitar lessons again after over a decade of noodling (I took lessons in high school, and kept playing, but never sought instruction after leaving home for college).
It is crazy how quickly I've improved in the last few months. Some of it is mechanical stuff, some of it is knowledge stuff, but I think the biggest thing is just knowing that every two weeks I'm going to chat with my teacher, which keeps me motivated to keep working on things and also just gives me a reason to play.
For sure. Just having someone to keep you on track and to lend their ears to your playing is a beautiful thing. And in most cases with a teacher that's been doing it for a while, whatever problems you're encountering they've probably hit with a bunch of other students in the past. My teacher has been teaching for 50 years, so he knows where to point you. It's up to you to show up to your instrument and do the thing though.
> "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners".
Then they went to a bad school. Chuck Jones, the animator, wrote in his biography that when he went to art school, he was told "Everyone has ten thousand bad drawings in them. Our job is to get them out of you as fast as possible."
I also found a thousand variations of this online in the early 2000s when I was interested in writing. This isn’t hard wisdom to find. Anyone trying to learn a craft should come across it before king.
I basically quit writing when I was 12 because of this. I really wish I hadn't, it took another 10 years to get the ball rolling on that again (and from there about 10 years to actually get good enough to like what I was writing). I could have been writing good stuff in my 20s instead of my 30s if I'd stuck with it.
I really wish I had learned this as a kid, too. I gave up on so many interests over my teens and 20s, because I didn't just get good at them the way I did with games. I'm not blaming games, they're doing what they're supposed to. I just wish people around me had taught me to put in effort, rather than praise me for what I could accomplish without effort (spoiler: it ended up being nothing).
I love when he plays the old crappy broadcast. Ira's current (casual, conversational) radio voice is so distinct that you'd almost think he just knew how to do that from day one. But even people who have a signature style need time to cultivate it.
Saved. This idea has been my ethos since my early teenage years and was how I motivated myself to self-learn to code despite being laughed at by my peers because the results weren't as fancy as software made by professionals.
From this philosophy, I gained a lot of confidence in just diving into anything I was interested in, regardless of how embarrassing my early attempts ended up being.
Great quote. Checked Ira Glass out and he seems interesting.
I totally agree with what he has to say. I used to be super apprehensive when writing my blog posts but I don't care as much these day. I don't care if people think I am a noob in some topic. At the end of the day, we are all trying to improve in our craft and being a beginner is the most excusable thing there is in this aspect. I write these days because, writing makes me a better thinker and I learn more about the topic when researching a blog post.
> "You know, the whole thing about perfectionism.. perfectionism is very dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you
never do anything. Because doing anything results in— it's actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is." -- David Foster Wallace
I like this quote a lot. There's something about actually instantiating what's in our head into the world that always seems to result in some kind of fundamental loss of fidelity. But at the same time, that's kind of what makes things beautiful, in a wabi-sabi "there is a crack in everything" kind of way.
This has been coming to my mind in the context of fiction writing.
Today, the writer's gold standard is publication. In fact, many readers say they won't read anything that hasn't been "published" by a publisher.
But the incentive of a publisher is money and sales, which means they will search for things that sell in volume, or handicap the writer's work so that "it sells." And how the publisher guesses if something will sell? They will look for things that have sold in the past, they have no other way. And they will do it even if it crushes the bibliophile's soul of everybody at the editorial, because they got bills to pay. And it results in...more of the same. It's not art anymore, it's commercial fulfillment, and it's not enjoyed to the point of being remembered.
There is one good thing about fiction writing though, it's called beta-reading. It's a thing authors do, but it's also a great opportunity for readers to contribute to a story, to make it more to their liking. If you ever are feeling hyper-critic of a piece of contemporary fiction, as an alternative to cancel-bombing the author because they produce "bad work" and have the daring of publishing it on their own, consider doing some beta-reading.
Remember, Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was traditionally published and an amazing commercial success[^1].
This interesting (and I might personally add destructive) thing is happening in the romance genre where authors are going back and doctoring up all their prose from the 90s and 00s to address "consent issues" as the current cultural zeitgeist understands consent. It's not that I'm not okay with people's definition of consent changing and with writing new works to be acceptable under the new definition. And I even quite like well-integrated examples of affirmative consent in romantic literature, because a good author can weave it in ever so subtly and naturally when working with a blank slate. But this need to go back and "fix" the older works really kills me. If I could buy the older edition from the publisher that would be one thing, but in the age of digital publishing the new edition just clobbers the older ones, sometimes forcibly in your library or collection. I think there's value to being able to read literature from the 90s and understand what that time period was like, culturally. Or even works set historically back in previous centuries. I think it's important to be able to read old works and critique them, etc. I would even go as far as to say that it's okay to write modern works that lack strict adherence to affirmative consent so that they can be critiqued regardless (this might make them unpopular to the masses as pleasure reading, but it makes them interesting as social commentary). It really breaks the illusion for me when you're reading a scene from an older work and you encounter a section that was clearly doctored, or which just doesn't fit with the time period the story is set in. It's just not realistic in any way and I don't think it benefits the catalog of writing we have today to expect that authors go back and "fix" their work from 20 years ago that's suddenly become controversial by today's standards.
Publishing - actually all the arts - are two separate businesses.
There's the entertainment side, which is basically market-driven - as in creating work for a market. If it's unsubtle and relatively crude, it lives here. It can be a very polished and professional kind of crude - superhero movies, the best pop productions, and so on - but it's not subtle, complicated, difficult, or understated.
There's the cultural landmark side, which is about unusually powerful and fluent work that changes culture itself in some way. [1]
Publishing pretends to be the latter but it's really the former. It's thrilled to make a lot of money from entertainment projects like Dan Brown, Fifty Shades, and the rest, while somehow maintaining the impression that the entire industry is Culturally Important.
[1] This mostly means white well-educated upper middle class culture. But even so.
You really see this in the music world. Nobody comes fully formed ... you're playing covers or recording practically unlistenable demos and experiments, "getting your chops" and getting feedback from your piano teacher or whoever happens to be in the club that night. It's excruciating.
But over time, you get better. Practice pays off. Playing with other people of varying skill levels pays off. You stop doing covers and start making your own compositions. You learn to improvise.
And, you encounter catalysts. It could be a recording by someone else. It could be a musician who lets you do things on your own instrument that you never thought possible. It could be a club or even a clothing store that becomes the center of a local music "scene."
No one remembers Jimmy Page's skiffle band, John Paul Jones' 1965 studio sessions with a half-forgotten R&B singer, or Robert Plant's and John Bonham's first band. But when those 4 came together for the first time in the summer of 1968, BOOM!
Oh man, thousands of up votes for a Led Zeppelin reference. This mirrors my experience as a musician. Learning to play gave me the confidence to go into different scenarios and recognize that I had to tolerate being bad first and then I would get it. It's a journey. It's a sacrifice. Strangely, it never felt like a sacrifice at the time.
I thought this was already the case, considering most "art" is garbage anyways (well, 90% of everything, according to that rule).
I do not thinks artist are "punished" more for making bad works, as much as they are loosing that extra "excess attention" that our media-high society gives them. Of course, if you put regular human beings on a pedestal and make an Idol of them then any minor misstep will be unforgivable.
Perhaps related, in software development there is the idea of the "Marimba Phenomenon" as first described in the Joel on Software blog [1], where the author observes that: "PR grows faster than the quality of your code. Result: everybody checks out your code, and it’s not good yet. These people will be permanently convinced that your code is simple and inadequate, even if you improve it drastically later. I call this the Marimba phenomenon."
So, in the arguably creative work of creating new software, you are allowed to ship mediocre software at the start, but you do risk making a bad first impression that may be difficult to recover from.
But on the other hand, if you never ship the software product, your software can become outdated by the time you eventually release it, or you can put it off indefinitely and miss out on growth as a developer. So, there can definitely be a balance between releasing a product too early and making a poor first impression, and waiting excessively to polish a product, to the point where the software becomes no longer relevant or outdated.
> I do not thinks artist are "punished" more for making bad works, as much as they are loosing that extra "excess attention" that our media-high society gives them.
It might be partially about attention, but the problem with fine art is probably that it needs to be something novel or reach beyond the mundane somehow. Most people can keep doing more or less the same mundane work with mundane results every day and it's still passable or even completely fulfills expectations. You can't really do that when the work kind of by definition is expected to spark something or speak to its audience.
What I don't understand about this sort of point is why it matters. Yes, it's hard to be novel or popular in some way.
That's when anyone at all cares, because they add value in that way alone. No house is built, or disease is cured, or road is laid by their work.
They choose to do something that is failure-prone, ill-defined, and almost by definition isn't intrinsically useful. They cannot be surprised when that turns out to have problems as well as advantages.
I truly think of science and engineering, software development included, as an artistic feat in part. And we can easily see how the opinion expressed in this interview easily applies to what we do. Yes, we all have periods where we should be allowed to do bad work, learn on it and eventually come out with better ideas. Yes, the "public" pressure and the focus on novelty is there (right now on HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955336).
P.S. I have just realized that I have the "Steal Like An Artist" by Austin Kleon in my library. Proves the point of being an artist I guess :D
?> Yes, we all have periods where we should be allowed to do bad work, learn on it and eventually come out with better ideas.
Most people's GitHub pages are full of this kind of junk. And in this case, "junk" is absolutely not a pejorative. It's necessary, and it can show growth if somebody's looking for it.
My thoughts exactly. OKR- and measurement-based management -- so ubiquitous as to be almost synonymous with "management" -- seem to accelerate certain short-term movement, at the cost of stagnation in the long term. Punctuated equilibrium is replaced by a whirling vortex.
That's the free market pressure. The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. And it is by many believed to be a good thing, because it's very meritocratic.
But it has downsides, too. People are human, not machines, and sometimes need to rest too. That's why we shouldn't leave everything up to the free market (not even the one that works in liberal theory and is perfectly meritocratic).
It was also one of the justifications behind copyright, to give artists more stability.
People aren't judging (or pricing) random Da Vinci sketches as art, but as investments and historic artefacts. In fact I'd go as far as saying that anybody paying more than ~$300k-$500k for a piece of 'art' isn't paying for the art any more, but are investing in a financial asset (that may or may not look nice displayed in their living room)
I'd say the treshold is much lower, and depends on the area and wealth of the person. But I doubt even a billionaire would pay $200k for a piece of an unknown artists just because he loves it. Maybe he'd pay $50k. For regular people, it's more like $5k.
I think for actually regular people threshold is in hundreds or tens. Art isn't very expensive on the low end. Paintings by no name authors don't cost much at all.
Free market assumes that goods from different producers are substitutable. Da Vinci has, clearly, a monopoly on original items from Da Vinci.
So if you're an artist and people value your name, regardless of the product it's written on, you don't have the OP's problem. The problem described only applies if the consumer can get some other art that gives them equivalent satisfaction.
> Free market assumes that goods from different producers are substitutable
No it doesn't. A free market assumes that there are no constraining influences on trade except supply and demand. With the possible exception of a working contract law system.
Free markets happily allow for people to make buying and selling decisions for any reason they choose. If it happens to be for a non-fungible asset, no matter how pointless it may be to other parties, so be it.
Efficient markets imply restricting assumptions on fungibility, so that there can be a meaningful fair price, but it's not required in general.
I'm interested in your comment about copyright being proposed for stability. Can you direct me to a source please? If you have a reference or a hint for further research, I'd like to read into it more.
You're probably reading too much into that comment. In the U.S., the copyright was justified "to promote progress of science and useful arts", which I interpret in a way that it provides certain stability of income needed to promote learning and experimentation (and also allows for a failure). It was understood even then that it is an anti-free market policy.
And that seems to be what OP was complaining about, the lack of this security for artists. Unfortunately, the copyright (like most other property) today has been mostly captured by rentier class, so it no longer provides these protections for most artists, if it ever really did.
So I was really just pointing out this connection between OP's woes and copyright.
That's simply not true. Almost all the value will be because it's attributed to da Vinci. You simply won't get the same valuation if it's attributed to a lesser known contemporary.
And you don't need to go historical. I just picked da Vinci as an example. If you or I made a balloon dog sculpture, it won't be valued the same as a Jeff Koons one [0]. Even if it's essentially identical.
There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object.
[0] I'm assuming you're not Jeff Koons. The problem with HN is that, sometimes, you are actually chatting to a celebrity in the field without knowing.
Well, the balloon dog example simply boils down to the fact that your work will only be seen as a rip-off.
> There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object.
Subset? I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning. Duchamp's urinal neatly exemplifies this.
> I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning.
I've never "understood art", but when you phrased it like that it makes perfect sense. To me, provenance just isn't interesting. So I judge the pieces as they stand in front of me.
This is a good point for Da Vinci, one of the most famous artists of all time. But how do things work for the rest of all the millions of not-very-famous artists? A few select pieces are valued by name, and then there’s the vast ocean of work that isn’t.
> But it has downsides, too. People are human, not machines, and sometimes need to rest too. That's why we shouldn't leave everything up to the free market
People are competing against other humans, who need rest too. Hence, everybody rests, and things work out for everybody in the free market scenario.
Um, no. This could only work out if there was no capital accumulation, which is pretty much a prerequisite for a civilization.
And even in hunter-gatherer societies humans evolved past that. I mean, this guy got sick for a month, let's not feed him anymore, he's not competitive enough. Surely humans would flourish with that attitude!
What capital accumulation has to do with it? People with enough capital obviously don't have to work anymore, so they're out of the working pool, and don't have an impact on the level of competition. There are intermediate states, like someone drawing a pension from his capital, but still working part-time for extra income, but there aren't enough of them to disrupt the fundamental dynamics.
This has always been the case and always will be. Unfortently most people feel like they have to put everything online right away now. Most art is bad and doesnt need to go out into the world.
The most creative I've ever been was when I was writing new work every day. MOST, maybe as much as 95%, of what I was creating was just okay. 4% was something that could be developed into something good. 1% was actually good.
That meant in 100 days of writing 95 of those days I would feel like a failure if my measure of success was creating something good or useable. I had to shift my thinking so creating something was the measure of success and creating something good only came from creating a lot and seeing what actually stood out.
If I was putting all of that work online right away I'm positive the negative feedback, or entire lack of feedback, would have been discouraging and I would have stopped.
It's worth asking who counts as an artist for the purpose of this argument. Is an artist someone primarily concerned with creating art for art's sake, and their value is in expanding the public consciousness and deepening the discourse? Or, are they an entertainer, primarily concerned with popularity and commercial success? Are these different roles judged by the same standards?
For instance, we could very well say that, if you are primarily making art as a product, you are like a vendor in a marketplace. And, as a vendor in a marketplace, we consumers don't need to nurture you, or be patient with your failures. If you make a bad batch, we just move on to the next vendor selling a similar product.
The definitions of art and artists have changed a lot since 1969. We used to have this concept of selling out, and if you engaged in it, you weren't a serious artist to a lot of people. We don't really have that concept today, at least not in the same way. You also might not have been considered a serious artist if you worked in a popular medium: popular music, television, comic books, etc., all of which I think most people consider valid art forms today.
I'm not saying this was the right way to think about art. I'm saying that's how it was. And while I don't know a lot about David Sylvester, I see that he was a fine art critic and curator, so I am assuming he might have been talking about a particular kind of artist when he said this.
One of my pet peeves is artists (and journalists) setting themselves apart as a “high priesthood” and claiming things for themselves specially which should apply to humans in general.
Yes, artists should be allowed to make bad work and go through bad times because humans must be allowed to make bad work and go through bad times.
Yes, creativity and freedom is important for artists because creativity and freedom is important for all humans.
Yes the government should not be spying on journalists, because it shouldn’t be spying on people in general.
"Must be allowed to” sounds like a weasel word. It is not illegal to make bad work. I doubt any contract an artist signs usually has a clause against producing bad work either. That phrase may sound sophisticated and provocative but it means nothing, at least to me.
It seems pretty clear to me, especially with the context provided in the article itself: don't judge an artist solely by the last thing they made; don't write them off just because they're going through a bad patch.
At the same time, artists of every kind have to contend with the fact that this is currently a golden age for art. We are confronted with more art of every kind than we could ever consume. The cost for moving on has never been lower.
So while an artist should be allowed to have down periods, it also shouldn't be surprising if people move on. We're not looking for needles in haystacks anymore, we're looking for needles in a stack of needles. There may be value in coveting needles and hay from a particular artist, but that's an intensely personal decision to make.
It is preferable to take a more nuanced approach to judging artists, looking at their entire career and recognizing the inherent subjectivity of artistic appreciation, but people have a perfect right to judge an artist on a work of art, it simply shows a certain closed-mindedness
Depends on whether the artist "owns" themself. If I go to a Harry Styles concert and the guy is unable to perform on the stage, I should get a refund, the corporations behind Harry Styles failed to deliver a product. If I go to a Marc Rebillet [1] concert, well, I know exactly what I am getting even if Marc is barely able to yell 3 times in the microphone (and those screams would be exquisite anyhow).
If you get stuck on words, expressions, or idioms and constantly interpret them wrong, it usually means that you can't parse context well. If the expression "must be allowed" bothers you in this text, your OECD literacy level is most likely below 3.
It's easy to fix if you start reading more books, you start to improve.
you are behaving quite patronising to this guy for no reason. He is challenging the premise of the piece and you are telling him he is too stupid to read the piece at all.
Do you not see the irony here? Commenters, too, should be allowed to have bad takes
Challenging the premise of the article based on reading only title while not really understanding the language the title is written on is not actually something praise worthy. If he is a.) not reading article and b.) not understanding normal and common English idiom, then pointing out he should stay away from the discussion is valid.
And that is assuming it is genuine misunderstanding and not, like, typical nerdy "I refuse to actual engage with those idiots from other fields, better just make up something".
I criticize the title because it says something vague piggybacking on the idea of freedom to guilt-trip its readers to support a controversial opinion that has barely anything to do with the title in question. And I can only learn the content by clicking on that clickbait title that provides no information.
Well, if it is common in English to refer to the situation when the public opinion about you is allegedly shaped by your last work as "not allowed to make bad work" than indeed I do not know English on the third level of OECD literacy. But that sounds like a very peculiar trait of English, and a very deep ideological commitment incorporated into the language on a level that I couldn't expect.
> it says something vague piggybacking on the idea of freedom
This is where you are wrong.
It is not based on the idea of freedom. The point of the article, and the title, has nothing to do with whether someone is legally allowed to make bad art, or has some fundamental human rights, that are being infringed on, related to freedom.
Instead, the purpose of the article, and the title, is that because artists are more in the public eye these days, this extra scrutiny on every single piece of work that they do, has anti-creative effects on artists, and this is bad.
The only person who invented a fictional narrative about freedom, was you. The actual point of the title, and the article, was actually pretty obvious though, if you aren't looking for some gotcha.
> that I couldn't expect.
It was actually very easy to understand the article, if you start from the idea of "This article author isn't completely stupid, let me think for a second as to what such a person might be attempting to say, assuming they do not believe the obviously untrue statement that making bad art is illegal".
> Instead, the purpose of the article, and the title, is that because artists are more in the public eye these days, this extra scrutiny on every single piece of work that they do, has anti-creative effects on artists, and this is bad.
So, explain what does any of that has to do with “not being allowed” to do something?
> So, explain what does any of that has to do with “not being allowed"
What it has to do with that, is not that artists are literally prevented by the law from making bad art.
Instead, it is that artists should be able to make bad art, without suffering significant negative consequences from doing so.
So, you should interpret the statement as being "artists must be able to make bad art, without suffering significant negative consequences for doing so"
That is the intent of the title.
This is what "allowed" means in this context.
It means "it must be possible for them to do this, while not suffering significant negative consequences."
Given that your writing supports the notion that he knew exactly why you said what you said, it seems like he can parse the context of your writing just fine.
To my mind "must be allowed to" an English idiom. The "must" is a form of exaggeration, the effect being that the speaker is acknowledging that they are stating an opinion.
Social pressure is not higher now than in the other periods, when art could be called degenerate or heresy. Newspapers were influential and before them it was church and favoritism in the high society. Van Gogh, Mark Rothko and many others were not happy people who enjoyed a lot of support from the public. We do not know the names of artists from earlier periods who vanished because they were not understood. Suffering is the fuel of art. Take your broken heart and make it into art - that’s how it works. If the pressure of social media is painful, you cannot do anything with it, so either you create or find something else to do, as it has always been.
Visual art is overrated and misunderstood IMO. Artists of the past were basically human rendering engines, which was very important because we didn’t have any other kind of rendering engine and looking at artificial images can be pleasing.
Can you imagine what seeing a nice painting of a person was like when you had never seen any other kind of artificial image in your life besides handmade ones? It was probably mind blowing.
Photography has probably totally destroyed our relative reaction to visual art, like someone who eats way too much sugar trying a sweet apple.
But now we seem to be running on cultural fumes in this area. It’s as if people still bought hand cobbled shoes for millions of dollars and displayed them pretentiously.
I think it’s likely you’re projecting your personal experience onto others. I knew someone who was obsessed with the Red Room by Matisse. He was in no way pretentious or academic in inclination, but something about the actual painting itself entranced him and he could disappear into it for long periods of time. I honestly don’t know what was so powerful about it for him, but he was clearly having a genuine experience different than mine. Authoritatively providing my conjecture regarding his ‘relative reaction’ would be immensely pompous.
Art is more than technique, the music performances that move us are very often not the absolute highest level of virtuosity. Photographs were incredibly common in my lifetime, but I was still very strongly affected by paintings on books, album covers and in museums.
Further, non-representative visual art has a rich history. You merely have to look at the amazing art produced out of Islamic aniconism.
It's not unique to art, nor does it speak to its importance. You could easily find someone who stares at ants for hours on end. What does it prove?
I think we have to understand its meaning and impact on a societal level and determine its usefulness or uselessness[1]. Not all art is useful and not all art is useless but some are one or the other.
[1]Very broadly defined and not focused on economic value, though being a. Inner dial success is also valid.
Art really shouldn't be measured on a useful or useless scale. How would we even determine adequate metrics for that? If we look at impact we'd need to consider The Bodyguard Soundtrack as high musical art.
Picasso was worth $250 million at his death in 1973 dollars. 1.6 billion in 2022 dollars from selling his own paintings.
Painters at one point were rock stars. Just like today's rock stars are social media stars and not a group of guys playing guitar/bass/drum/vocals.
Artistic mediums have their moment in time and then become niche, historical and retro once their time has passed.
Marble sculpture is no less amazing than in times past. That mediums time in the sun though passed a long time ago.
Just like if you go to an art gallery that arranges the paintings in period rooms, it completely obvious when photography became an up and coming medium and its effect on painting at the time.
I'm sorry but this really betrays history, even contemporary history.
We could point to a number of contemporary artists that are worth millions of dollars for whatever they are known for - you might even consider them 'rockstars', regardless of how myopic I find the term - but headlines that make it onto the "4 big websites" is not the same thing as being irrelevant.
For every "Picasso" you can cherry-pick from history there's a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Ai Weiwei, etc - All worth millions or, at the very least, "Rockstars" in their own right.
The idea that Marble Sculptures in Ancient Rome or whatever had passersby standing in amazement compared to today is not accurate. People walking into whatever temple for whatever God they were visiting would be just as bored by the marble back then as you are of marble now.
What's really changed is that accessibility to these things have exploded. More people than ever have access to Art, Art Tools, Art Education, and new Art Mediums. "Art" is in no-way dying out. Focusing so much on the "Medium" is missing the forest for the trees, honestly. (Which is to say, modern technology and socio/economic trends have a bigger effect on the use of Marble than "Marble as a medium", whatever that means. Sculpture is alive and well, I promise you)
This is a little bit rambly because your post just kinda says, "Art changes over time" and doesn't, in my view, have a wide-enough vision of the "why" but this is all to say that like, as far as this thread is concerned, Visual Art, if anything, is omnipresent in our lives - not less relevant than in times past. If anything, the presence of "Rock Stars" is an indication of too few talented people, instead of what we have historically which is an ever increasing number of extremely talented people. I just don't know how we can say Painting is less relevant now when more people than ever are doing it lol.
> People walking into whatever temple for whatever God they were visiting would be just as bored by the marble back then as you are of marble now.
What gives you this idea? You don’t think that constant exposure to having one’s human recognition instinct stimulated artificially has a tolerance effect? Isn’t it a bit strange that people put so much effort and resources into e.g. statues despite finding them as boring as we do today?
I'm having trouble deciding if your post is tongue-in-cheek agreeing with me or not so I'll just add some earnest flavor. I'm going to answer your questions in reverse order.
No, I don't think it strange at all that people put so much effort and resources into Art. The creator of the work gets a different kind of satisfaction than the people viewing it. These reasons vary from person to person but I've always liked my Highschool's Motto "Art for Art's sake". So it makes sense to put effort into creation. Personally, I love narrative and so when I'm creating sculptures or art of any kind I'm considering the narrative that goes into it. The effort is to achieve the narrative while considering tone and taste. A Nightmare Before Christmas would not be the same movie if it were all rendered as naturalistically as possible.
I'm not going to pretend to know the entirety of reasons people have for liking their spaces designed, but we do like shiny things and people can be particular about their environments. Yeah, it might be most efficient to put people into perfect cubes but I doubt the emotional well-being of most people would be met by this kind of environment. So, on that basis alone we have a reason to put effort and resources into decorating our spaces.
I don't really understand your second sentence. I'm not sure what "Human recognition instinct simulated artificially" even means. Do you mean our ability to recognize humans? Or our ability to recognize anything? Its a little short-sighted to view the whole of "Marble Statues in Ancient Greece/Rome, etc" as "Activating, artificially, our Human Recognition Instinct". Like, not only was a majority of the Art from that time lost/destroyed, and not all of the statues were of people, but those statues were humongous. David is like 17 feet tall. No one is going to mistake him for a human. Humans from antiquity weren't that different than the ones from today, at least no biologically/evolutionarily. So it'd be the same for them as any memorial statue is today - they fade into the background (While still providing some aesthetics, mind you)
What you're really missing by pulling out this single quote is something I touched on later in the post - Focusing on any individual "medium" is myopic in the conversation of Art's Cultural relevance, and the thread you sparked is just as marrow-minded. We're definitely in a period of time absolutely saturated with Art but we are by no means running on cultural fumes. Maybe the spaces you occupy are dead-zones but that's a personal choice IMO - Its beautiful and full of culture out here.
Lol no. It’s an interesting idea but photography didn’t kill the purpose of painting on the 1850’s, it just nudged human creativity into new dimensions of abstraction and images that were not attempts at rendering reality. There’s no end of history, and we’re certainly not sitting at the death of visual media. The drive for art, beauty, culture, and shared experience will continue. Creativity will meet that demand. Yes many of us have seen a lot and maybe can’t predict what for new creativity will take.
Gross take. I generally loathe impressionist work for a number of reasons I won't get into here, but that doesn't change the fact that standing in a gallery in front of Monet's "Woman with a parasol" you can -feel- a light see breeze and smell salt. A powerful and (correctly) celebrated work done after the advent of photography.
Gauguin is the best example to me. I could never understand why anyone would think his childish looking paintings were so great until I seen some of his masterpieces in person.
The amount of colors is just flooring and mind bending.
I don't believe classical style visual art is overrated. My local art gallery, the AGO, had a large exhibition on Caravaggio a few years ago and I remember seeing the shocked expressions on the majority of the visitors.
What is interesting and telling is that they showed a 'name' like Caravaggio, and not any of the countless contemporary painters who are every bit is technically skilled as Caravaggio was, and perfectly capable of emulating his style. If the classical visual style was still relevant in itself, every art gallery would be showing off those contemporary artists.
By this standard, Beethoven's 9th Symphony is also no longer "relevant".
The first to do something are remembered, those who come after must be significantly better or different to be recognized. If someone wants to see Caravaggio's style, they are likely to simply see Caravaggio - it's just name recognition, nothing to do with the "relevancy" of the style itself, whatever that means (Popularity? Or a self-fulfilling justification for whatever style the art world elite is pushing?)
And there are in fact newer artists with name recognition that painted in a representational style (but not the exact same style), e.g. Dali, Frazetta, Giger, Beksiński.
You're missing my point. People like Beethoven because it's Beethoven, they're on the whole not interested in new music that sounds a bit like Beethoven. If you're a contemporary musician and composer you're going to have a very hard time making a successful career out of composing and performing new music in the classical and romantic style.
I thought we were talking about relevancy of the style, not how difficult it is to make a living competing with Beethoven. If people still turn up in droves to perform and listen to Beethoven, that seems very "relevant" to me.
There is social pressure to have this reaction to appear cultured, which is a bit of a confounder.
Not knocking the skill involved, being a high fidelity human rendering engine takes a lifetime of dedication as well as a base level of natural talent which very few possess.
Oh wow, what an uninformed opinion. Not surprising, sadly, given that so many in tech are so one-dimensional.
Perhaps a course in art history would help you understand that visual art has never been solely about image reproduction. Even cave paintings were allegorical. My goodness.
I think you're misunderstanding the history of art. Art up until the invention of the camera wasn't simply to generate the most realistic image possible.
I donno, this comment feels like saying, "Machines have really destroyed our relative reaction to the Olympics. Who cares how far someone can throw a heavy ball when a cannon can do it much better and more accurately."
When the reality is that people are still very much interested in the extent of human prowess AND other folks (often overlapping) are interested in the extent of mechanical prowess (We call those folks engineers and they are much closer to Art enjoyers than not).
There's no doubt that Photography had an affect on "Peoples" idea of "What is Art" or "What do I value in visual Art" but... so does everything? Being extremely wealthy or extremely impoverished can destroy a relationship to Art. Its not so linear as, "All people care about is the ability to render images realistically"
I feel like I could type a novel around this concept but I'll leave these seeds planted, for now.
B) What an artist produces with a rendering engine will be starkly different from that of an amateur with the same engine. Art isn’t medium or technology.
Ah, yes. Single-minded tech guys' take on art. Not sure what to comment here, but art has nearly nothing to do with replicating a photograph/"rendering". Photorealistic art doesn't count as art to me at all.
>Artists of the past were basically human rendering engines, which was very important because we didn’t have any other kind of rendering engine and looking at artificial images can be pleasing.
If this were true then the Impressionism movement would never have come after the Renaissance. But it's not, there's more to visual art than just reproducing what we see with our eyes.
> Artists of the past were basically human rendering engines
A lie promulgated by modern art as justification for forcing out all prior art styles and aesthetics, but nothing could be further from the truth. Have you ever seen photos like the following?
Of course they should. There are countless fantastic musicians, for example, who have albums that have both great tracks and filler tracks on them. Just because someone has demonstrated greatness (even consistently) doesn't mean that every track that comes out of their studio is destined to top the charts or win some sort of award.
Even the best athletes have "bad days at the office" (just yesterday, the #1 tennis player in the world lost to a guy ranked #133). Why should artists of any given medium?
Also, having good tracks will make up for the crap tracks on the album. Fans don't listen to the crap tracks as much. That's a benefit of throwing a bunch of darts at dartboard at once.
One of the fundamental principles of art is that the artist is allowed to do whatever they want.
To the extent the artist is acting as a true artist, the public has no say in what they may or may not do. In that sense, their work is neither "good" nor "bad."
But to the extent the artist is acting as a commercial entity – one who intends to sell a consumable product – the public has every say in the value and merit of a piece.
The artist may do whatever kind of work she wants. The company may not.
In science the analogy is : “yeah this person did good work five years ago, but what have they done recently?” as a way to reject people for jobs, grants, and promotions.
It's difficult for me to reason this sort of thing. Success, or even just being able to scrape out a living from art seems like a lottery. That is, there's not really any strong correlation between talent, effort and success. Plenty of starving, yet talented and/or hard-working artists. And plenty of successful artists with less talent or effort than their starving peers. So in this case, pushing for an environment that allows for bad periods is really only trying to improve things for those that won that initial lottery.
Something that blew my mind after I spent a few years learning art is that: everyone makes bad art.. even the best artists. For every good painting an artist produces, there are several that have been trashed or painted over. Sketchbooks are often encouraged in the artist community in order to allow ourselves to do bad art that doesn't have to see the light of day.
And finally, when a customer buys a piece of art, they're not just paying for that piece but also for the time that the artist spent finding themselves :)
There is necessarily a correlation between talent, effort and success, because you need at least one of the two parameters to succeed. And the third parameter that will be decisive is luck, but you need a pillar to allow luck to serve a purpose. The pillar is work, done with talent, effort or both. I agree that many artists who are very talented or who put in a lot of work may be less recognized than others. But in general, a great majority of artists, before having the luck, had the talent and the effort, it should not be denied. The only thing that really separates these artists from other talented artists is luck. So I would say that success is the result of a mixture of these 3 main ingredients: effort, talent and luck.
Even those. When the cost of failure is too high, we need to invest in practices that allow them fail safely. And get as much from failures as possible.
It means giving doctors and nurses simulators, someone to look over their shoulder when learning new techniques, giving them high-quality followup data, finding top performers and make them explain what they do and so on. Which is currently very hard to do, because teaching others means you lose your advantage.
It also means learning from failures of others. That means writing about the fuckups and telling them. Which is currently almost impossible to do, because admitting failure can often result in an end to your career.
And all of this is exacerbated with consolidated, privatized healthcare where the shots are called not by outcome-oriented caregivers, but by profit-oriented MBAs.
For doctors looking to innovate, there are actually a lot of ways to fail fast and safely if you introduce a new drug.
First, establish that a drug binds to the target in laboratory conditions (relatively quick). After that, test the drug in an animal model. After that, proceed to clinical trials, which are phased (phase I, II, III) to first establish whether a dosage exists that is safe (Phase I), what an effective dosage is (Phase II), and only after than testing if it improves upon the current standard of care (Phase III).
Each phase is more costly (both in time and money) than the previous phase and will eliminate a significant portion of drug candidates.
"The success rate of each drug discovery stage in academia was 31.8% for preclinical, 75.1% for phase I, 50.0% for phase II, 58.6% for phase III."
Possibly yes, but on emulators/training data/virtual patients. One of the advantages of today's digital world is that you don't have to jump to the real thing immediately.
Come to think of it, maybe even laws should be tested in a laboratory first. We cannot emulate the human society fully, but some unwanted effects could be detected this way anyway.
It's easy to find issues in laws with some brainstorming over a pizza. The problem is people pushing certain laws frequently don't give a damn about side effects. Why would they care about results coming out from a simulation?
It is easy to find theoretical issues through brainstorming, but weeding out the false positives is much less easy.
As an example, religious conservatives will brainstorm a lot of issues that are bound to rise (according to them) from gay emancipation. In practice, these failed to manifest.
You can easily manipulate results in a lab test too by messing with the environment and cherry picking results. And focusing on different outcomes.
I'm pretty sure same religious conservatives will claim that issues they saw did come up. While the other extreme would just shrug off the same issues as non-issue. Different people value different things... More at 11.
My grandfather, a photographer, told me this story:
20 years ago in a doctor's graduation ceremony held somewhere in Spain the old doctor who gave the speech told the graduates: "Now your job is to kill people. Along the years you'll learn, and if you are good, you'll kill less people and save some."
At least for photography, it's important to not take yourself too seriously. You might see something amazing, and every single shot ends up out of focus, or overexposed or with garbage bag in the foreground ruining the mood. In some ways, dedicated cameras are intentionally glitchy to achieve artistic effects, so sometimes they glitch in ways you have not intended. I would imagine that in the same ways a violin is not intended to be as precise as a digital music player and oil paints are not intended to be as true to reality as a smartphone photo. The point is to keep going without overthinking and let good stuff come once in a while by serendipity, while you gain experience to gradually increase average quality. If I was a novelist with a writer block, I would try to come up with a parody of my own writing and see if some comic relief helps me relax. Sometimes I take trippy photos through a water bottle when I am bored and can't think of anything else to do.
> Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on. The kind of attention that they get now, the kind of atmosphere of excitement which attends today the creation of works of art, the way that everything is done too much in the public eye, it’s really too much. The pressures are of a kind which are anti-creative.
I think the same applies to developing technology. Certainly resonates with me and the phases I go through.
Between the collapse of the music industry, GPT/Midjourney, big tech penny pinching ad-sponsored artists, copyright strikes for BS reasons, smaller attention spans, and a long recession (affecting disposable income), artists probably wont be allowed to make any work at all...
It depends on both the hit rate (success / attempts), the churn rate (length of time a success is successful for) and finally the output rate (length of time it takes do one attempt).
"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."