I don't get into these kinds of discussions with people anymore, because they're not socially palatable. I try to stay open minded too about perspectives that are not mine, and try to be objective about my own biases. But I can't shake the feeling that much as someone might validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce Michaelangelo's work or vice versa? Peter Thiel made a similar remark in one of his anti higher ed rants about pitting a group of PhD physicists vs. French lit. PhDs in a contest to reproduce each other's work better - whom would you bet on?
It's really not that anyone prefers an abstract dot on a white canvas over the Sistine Chapel. It helps to think of art as a historical dialogue with other art, as well as an exploration of how our senses experience the world. Minimalist abstract art (Ad Reinhardt is one of the more famous practitioners) was pushing viewers to pay attentions to subtleties and small differences in our perceptions of color and shapes. That type of art isn't even fashionable or popular anymore (though many works from the 60s-80s are still revered, exhibited and expensive because of how they contributed to the art canon), in part because, as you can imagine after a while it was no longer fresh and new and making people think differently about art. What's hip now is video, multi-media sculpture and art that makes more of a comment on the state of world. Also a lot of art that uses new technologies. And a lot of irony.
Feel free to not like any of it, it is subjective, that's the point. You shouldn't let anyone tell you what art to like. Group think is bad in the art world as well (though it can be good for art dealers). But I thought it was worth the time to speak up against your characterization of the values of the art world. I have my own critiques of the art world but it's absolutely unfair to generalize that people see no difference between minimalist abstract art and the Sistine Chapel. And I believe it is interesting to understand why people consider particular works of art important even if that doesn't mean you should also subjectively like the piece.
Like is the wrong word. I think the closest appropriate idea is "appreciate".
You probably should not "like" some of the best art at all, because it should have made you uncomfortable and think things you would rather not.
Of course I say "some", because art has all kinds of different purposes or intents, and that is only the purpose of some art, not all art.
So I think recognize, acknowledge, or appreciate are the kinds of words to apply rather than like.
And art can even be good even if you not only don't like it but don't even appreciate it. It can be skillfully effective on you whether or not you like it or even have the background or perception to recognize it's quality.
It's perfectly reasonable to appreciate a piece of art, recognize its importance and subjectively dislike it. I believe it's going in the wrong direction to try to completely disconnect your subjective like or dislike of art in an effort to better understand or recognize its value. If anything I try to go the other direction and acknowledge my subjective like/dislike/etc sense experience and then intellectualize from there.
Ironically, the "white dot" type of art was popularized by CIA who poured money into cultural promotion following remarks by the USSR that the US was a culturally barren wasteland:
The CIA backed American abstract expressionists, which is a different, more visually complex style of abstract painting that is distinct from minimalist abstract painting.
For what it’s worth, Felix Gonzalez Torres’ work pushed me from “I don’t understand this modern stuff” to “oh I get it now.” Maybe it can do that for others?
I think there’s this notion that art has to be technically sophisticated to be of value. But really, all art has to do is communicate something interesting or meaningful. If a white dot does this then who cares how it was made?
Finally, people make a big deal about the price of art. Well, artists (the ones I like anyway…) don’t have much to do with what a piece of art will sell for. Ultimately the piece of art is just some interesting exchange between artist and viewer, the price has nothing to do with any of this exchange.
I’m just a guy that walked into a museum and thought this guy has communicated something profound and beautiful. When someone come up and says “but that must’ve taken 5 minutes to make!!” they look like assholes.
This might be overly reductive, but if you use Twitter or any social platform where people indirectly reference other posts, I think you can maybe understand how a dot on a white canvas can have impact. The "Loss" meme [1] borders on being that exact thing.
might validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas
No one prefers a random dot on a random piece of canvas. They prefer a very particular dot on a very particular canvas made by a very particular person at a very particular point in history. Remove any one one those and it loses all meaning and value. And even the most ardent fan of that work would never argue that that artist was a greater painter or even artist than Michaelangelo.
At the end of the day the "Art" is not in the craft and as such art cannot be reproduced. The world is full of Sistine Chapel pastiches on rich peoples ceilings, painted by great craftsmen, many whom might be talented artists in their own rights, and no one is in awe by them.
But it doesn't hold up the other way when you remove one piece. I'd wager most people would select a Michaelangelo replica even if they were directly told it was a replica than the dot on the canvas if told it was a replica of whatever artist made it.
Select as what though, by what criteria and for what purpose? No one is arguing that the Michelangelo replica isn't a more beautiful object or representative of better craftsmanship.
And anyway I feel that putting our unnamed theoretical artist up against one of the all time great artists in history is a bit unfair. Anything recognizable as a Michelangelo will automatically win just because he's Michelangelo. Probably more fair to put him up against a second-rate contemporary of Michelangelo that most people haven't heard of if you want to remove 'name recognition' from the equation.
> Anything recognizable as a Michelangelo will automatically win just because he's Michelangelo.
It wins because it’s good work, not because it’s Michelangelo. A Michelangelo work will win even when the viewer doesn’t know it’s Michelangelo or even who that is.
That the point: people will appreciate it without having to be told “oh this is the high-status guy, you’re supposed to like it”, “only the high-status people can see the emperor’s clothes”, etc.
Why is it a big assumption that most people don't need to know "This is by Michelangelo and he is a high status artist" to enjoy the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (or whatever else)?
If you're going to demand copious evidence solely of the hypotheses you don't like, you're going to be locked into confirmation bias.
But yes, there are easy tests you could do: get the ratios of "can't identify who made this" to "I like this" for visitors to Michaelangelo (or any still-displayed Renaissance artist, really) vs random high-status super-edgy modern.
I never demanded "copius evidence" I asked a clarifying question. If you are going to make specific claims, people might ask for evidence of those claims. It's not confirmation bias to ask for supporting details, quite the opposite.
> Why is it a big assumption that most people don't need to know "This is by Michelangelo and he is a high status artist" to enjoy the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (or whatever else)?
This is an entirely different statement than your original comment. Of course, you don't need to know Michelangelo to "enjoy" the Sistine Chapel, nobody argued otherwise. Your claim was that, "A Michelangelo work will win even if the viewer doesn't know it's Michelangelo or even who that is." This implies a measure of comparison to something or someone else, which is far different than enjoying a single piece of art.
Surely, there are people who prefer Bertoldo di Giovanni [1] to Michelangelo.
>I never demanded "copius evidence" I asked a clarifying question. If you are going to make specific claims, people might ask for evidence of those claims. It's not confirmation bias to ask for supporting details, quite the opposite.
It is when you don't ask for the same evidence of the opposite, original assertion, and when the test you demand/clarify-the-existence-of is a strangely narrow test that no one would have reason to do in the first place because the core problem is that no one is subjecting the more modern art to that kind of rigor to begin with! (Which would obviate the whole debate.[1])
So yes, when you come in and single out my response as needing a very specific test before you'll consider it plausible, aren't being epistemically fair.
>Of course, you don't need to know Michelangelo to "enjoy" the Sistine Chapel, nobody argued otherwise.
Are we looking at the same thread? From earlier in this same thread:
>>Anything recognizable as a Michelangelo will automatically win just because he's Michelangelo.
The assertion is that the knowledge of Michelangelo and his association with that work is artificially raising the viewer's appreciation of it. My contrary claim was that it's appreciated as good work, more so than the garbage you see in modern art museums, because it's good, not because the average viewer cares about Michelangelo specifically, which dagw was saying that the later art does (apparently) require (knowledge of the artist and other "context").
>Your claim was that, "A Michelangelo work will win even if the viewer doesn't know it's Michelangelo or even who that is." This implies a measure of comparison to something or someone else, which is far different than enjoying a single piece of art.
It implies exactly what it meant in the original comment and thread:
That is, a comparison against the later super-edgey modern art.
[1] Except maybe the time that troll passed off a monkey's art as prestigious, which made the duped critics double down and say, "well ... maybe that monkey has artistic talent!"
The assertion is that the knowledge of Michelangelo and his association with that work is artificially raising the viewer's appreciation of it. My contrary claim was that it's appreciated as good work,
Both of these statements can be true at the same time. As an extreme example, take the Mona Lisa. No matter how much you think it's a good painting, there is no way that people would travel from around the world in their thousands to see that painting if it wasn't for the whole story/mythology/history around that painting and its creator. It's not THAT good a painting. There are dozens of technically more interesting and 'better' painting hanging in the Louvre that those people happily run past just to see the Mona Lisa. Or go to the Galleria dell'Accademia and count how many people who are just interested in the David statue and ignore all the other, equally 'good', statues they have.
Or take an uninteresting commissioned portrait of a minor nobelmans daughter and tell people it's an original Michelangelo. They will all of a sudden find the painting much more interesting than if you told them it was by an unknown contemporary of Michelangelo.
And there is nothing weird about this. A rusty sword that you can prove has been used by a famous general in a great battle will attract more interest and attention than a rusty sword of unknown provenance.
All of this can be true without taking anything away from Michelangelo as one of the greatest artists who has ever lived.
Okay I can better see where you're coming from, I just cringe at your unironic endorsement of the status game. To the extent that these people are flocking to the paintings just to get its (South Park-style) status "goo", that is something not to be lauded or encouraged, and an indication of the non-seriousness of the artistic appreciation.
The "acid test" of Renaissance art being more praiseworthy than the exhibits in modern art museums is that people can know nothing about the "goo" of the artists and still go away thinking "damn, that's awesome". The fact that some of the artists have "name currency" is noise in this dynamic, not signal.
If the best you can say about the super edgy, more modern art is that "oh yeah, people flock to see it because they think other people like it who think other people like it" -- well, you either aren't familiar with "The Emperor's New Clothes", or you sorely missed its point.
> So yes, when you come in and single out my response as needing a very specific test before you'll consider it plausible, aren't being epistemically fair.
It seems you felt attacked by my comment, which was not the intent. Apologies if it came off confrontationally. I never asked you to supply “a specific test”, I asked if there was one. Not sure why you took it as a personal attack on your point. I was genuinely interested in if the topic has been studied/tested.
Then why the bit about "This seems like a big assumption", if you weren't also asserting that it seemed implausible to you that anyone could like any Renaissance art without having someone tell them "this is good, this high status, this is what you like now".
If this is true, I would bet it has more to do with metadata of the art rather than the art itself. Taste might not even enter the equation. The Michelangelo piece has many things going for it before you even get to the art itself: Painter's name value, importance to a Catholics (and probably other Christians, too), the original is a larger part of pop culture, the original is hung in a more iconic building, the importance of who commissioned it, people are more likely to have seen the Michelangelo in person and are likely to have a personal connection to it, etc.
Ask someone, you can have a replica of a piece you've seen, maybe even in person, that has cultural importance to their religion and it is by {famous artist} or you can have a replica of a piece by {some other artist}. I'd guess they'd go with what they know, sight unseen.
Fair challenge. But go to a totally different culture where no one has heard of either of the two artists or at least produce a replica of a very obscure work from each of them and ask the unknowing, uneducated person would rather have hanging on their wall for their equally ignorant friends to come and see. I have a really tough time believing that even an African bushman living as a hunter gatherer would rather have an abstract paint spatter to a figured scene with complex light and composition. The difference in the skilled labor is compellingly hard to ignore.
Select for what? Art students nowdays can create Michealengelo like art. Not just reproduction, but own pieces with same style. They are not admired nor anything like that.
Also, I would not picked any of those for living room. Might pick dot for background screen. And this choice have nothing to do with actual value of either.
No one is arguing the Michelangelo wasn't a fantastic and talented craftsman, far more so than our made up modern artist. Everybody agrees that to do what he did takes decades of practice and schooling.
But equally, that is not what made Michelangelo a great artist. There where dozens of extremely technically skilled painters that lived around the same time, none of whom most people have heard of. So if you want to argue for Michelangelo as a great artists, you cannot simply say "well he was very good at painting and made pretty pictures". Lots of people did that, so why is Michelangelo famous today and none of them.
I do always find it funny that billionaires finally finally get on board with the "labor is what makes something valuable" idea when comparing abstract art and other art.
You could still spend 1,000 hours painting a blue dot on a white canvas if you used a tiny paintbrush.
The pareto frontier of possible artworks approaches higher quality with increased labor input. This doesn't mean the Labor Theory of Value isn't totally bonkers.
The whole point of conceptual art is that reproduction of figurative art is trivial now, so we move up a level. It's easy to reproduce the dot, but it's the conceptual move to dotness that's non-trivial. These ideas are 60 years old (Walter Benjamin) and you're doing a bit of a Two Cultures in reverse by being this simplistic about it.
Now I'm no art fancy man like the ones you're describing, but I'm fairly certain that people who like the dot also like the Sistine Chapel, it's just that the Sistine Chapel has been... _done_, and your reproduction of the Sistine Chapel will be enjoyable but forgettable because it will never be as good or as important as the real one.
So, people talk about works that are memorable. Like that one abstract dot of historical interest, or the original paintings from the old masters that perfected the techniques that artists emulate.
The skill required to create a thing is not the sole arbiter of its value, whether in art, physics, or business. After all, it would be foolish to claim that the most useful discoveries in physics were the ones that required the most difficult advanced math or that the most valuable companies are the ones that require the most skill to manage.
There are many technically skilled artists, physicists, and entrepreneurs whose names you will never learn because the never ended up doing anything particularly original. (And of course there are many original thinkers who will never be known because they're just not technically skilled enough to execute on their vision.)
In my opinion, value in many fields ends up being the cross product of "doing the thing right" and "doing the right thing".
> pitting a group of PhD physicists vs. French lit. PhDs in a contest to reproduce each other's work better - whom would you bet on?
I know that Thiel is clearly trying to get the audience to go "oh wow, physics is harder than lit!"
But strangely enough this runs counter to my personal experience. While not physics in particular, I know far more lit/classics/humanities people doing advanced/research work in technical areas than I do technically trained people excelling in anything humanities related.
My experience has also been that most physicists, when confronted with challenging French critical theory, simply dismiss it as nonsense rather than taking any time to understand it. I have met far more people who were trained on reading Derrida who can converse casually about advanced calculus topics than the reverse.
Additionally I find something like Lagrangian mechanics to take far less time to under stand than not just learning French, but learning French well enough to engage deeply with texts and theory spanning a fairly broad period of history.
As to your question:
> Sistine Chapel ceiling, who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce Michaelangelo's work or vice versa?
That's a combination of a straw man and a false equivalency. First the "dot on a white canvas" represents a very, very narrow part of a very specific field of Modern art which the vast majority of trained academic artists and theorists will agree is not particularly their taste. There's plenty of niche physicists doing work that most physicists find questionable. A better example of postmodern art is Pulp Fiction, and I think if you polled the general public on whether or not they wanted to see the Sistine chapter or watch Pulp Fiction you'd find a bigger split, and likewise each artist would have an equally hard time.
The false equivalency is that you're comparing Michelangelo to some imagined Modernist painting that I'm guessing you don't have a name for. This is a bit like comparing Einstein to an imaginary string theorist a liberal arts college.
You’ve substantially moved the goalposts. Your argument about the French Lit. PhDs involves understanding the field at a roughly undergraduate level not producing new work. Developing a deep enough understanding of physics to create novel ideas in it is far harder than this. I’d argue that producing relevant new work in French Lit. is easier because of the high degree of subjectivity creating a low bar for relevance. The low bar for relevance makes it far easier to be novel since one can explore almost any tangential point of the work one can imagine. It’s far harder to come up with new interesting ideas in a field where ideas have standards of correctness than in a field where it’s sufficient to be novel and vaguely relevant.
Paul did not discuss the merits of academic art versus modern art. He simply attempted to proof that it is "less wrong" to say there can be good taste, than that there is no taste.
The argument works in any recognized genre or art - the claim is "In a particular chosen genre, a person can be more skilled than an 8 year old who has no idea what they are doing".
The genre can be whatever that has no known established numeric metric. I.e. sports do not generally qualify for this argument as they most of the time have a metric that is more or less objective, and you can say based on numbers who is better without the need for "taste".
To my understanding, Paul is familiar with academic art so he feels confident in using it as the example genre as he is comfortable in discussing it's nuances.
sports do not generally qualify for this argument as they most of the time have a metric that is more or less objective
You see arguments about aesthetics and taste all the time in sport. "Team A may have won the championship, but they have a very ugly style. Team B played a much more beautiful game" or "I love watching Team C play even if they lose almost all the time, because they have such a fun and interesting way of playing". In some sports like MMA you have fighters with near perfect records and impressive win streaks against the best in the league, but no one watches them because they're "boring".
Essentially there are two ways of viewing sport. From the player/teams point of view where it is all about winning, or from the spectators point of view where the primary goal is to be entertained.
The only relevant skill an artist can have is to capture their emotions in their work in such a way that the audience of it is made to both experience and ponder those. Extra points for complex compositions.
There is something to be said about the kind of feeling you chose to share. You can be a dick about it while stil perfecting the challange.
The white dot on canvas or the entirely white canvas are simpel displays of arrogance mixed with some prestige. Not a particularly refined combination of and it reduces to anger in many viewers. It doesnt enrich the spectators life, they know those emotions well enough which, like love songs, makes it poor taste.
> But I can't shake the feeling that much as someone might validly prefer some abstract dot on a white canvas to the Sistine Chapel ceiling,
That is straw position.
> who would more likely impress the fans of the other, that artist trying to reproduce Michaelangelo's work or vice versa?
There are many artist capable to reproduce Michaelangelo's work. They are not impressing people who admire Michaelangelo or classical art. People who admire Michaelangelo typically fully understand that people after Michaelangelo learned from him. They also understand Michaelangelo was working, learning and studying having limitations we don't have.
You're missing my point: it isn't that Michaelangelo himself is unsurpassable. It's that his style insofar as it's appreciated for its quality cannot be reproduced in a convincing way to people with an eye for that without some much higher minimum skill as opposed to the minimum level it takes to impress a connoisseur of abstract art with the painter's alleged talent. At least, this is my unshakable feeling.
But that is not the same thing as "validly prefering". The "how much skill and effort it takes to reproduce it" is completely different criteri then "which one do you prefer".
