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Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

artsy.net

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Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#31

Post by pintxo »

tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

> For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate something that raises emotions in me (I'm aware that rasing emotions is a highly subject criteria as well). I can appreciate something that is new and unique.

A lot of reasons to like art.

> None of these things is true for 99.9% of art, this artist included. I think these artworks are not different from atleast thousands of other graffiti doodles from other people. Somehow people start to praise this guy (seemingly random?) instead of anyone else. That's just survivor ship bias.

I would rather say it's some sort of network effect. The better known you are, the more interest in your art, the higher the price. Interest and higher prices attract more interest generating even higher prices, loop.

> I know people say it all the time but it's true "I could have made this". My point is that probably most of art critic's couldn't tell the difference between a random doodle of some random art student and most famous abstract art.

Isn't this the same every developer said about Dropbox? Amazon? Writing an online file-storage/sharing app is not hard, writing an online bookstore is not hard. But actually executing it for 26 years (in Amazons) case and building in from there to the empire it is today, that's the art.

> It's also not about having an unique idea, banana on the wall is not something special, people do crazy things all the time. There are probably thousand of wanna be artists that tape things on walls and make some random things in hope of getting famous and could tell you some deep thinking why it criticises our modern society.

I'd say it's about execution as well as marketing, sometimes one can compensate for the other.

> So for me art is just a random circle jerk of people telling each other that this special guy is good and the rest isn't and if you don't agree or see it you are just someone that has no idea about art. And my take on really high expensive art is that it's just a form of tax evasion or similar goals.

It certainly is also an investment and way to signal status, probably always was. But does that minimize the value for you, if you find an attribute of it to be appreciable?

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#32

Post by jfengel »

tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

We're talking here about a very narrow segment of Fine Art that has practically nothing to do with the lives or work of the vast majority of artists -- even successful working artists. It attracts a lot of attention, and is often spoken of as if it's the most refined and pure and important form of art, but most artists don't see their art that way.

Don't worry about the "banana on the wall". It's the art equivalent of a reality show.

If you want to be interested in art, go to some galleries, talk with the people there, and ask what the art means to them. There are lots of different kinds of art and poke around until you find one that interests you.

And if you don't want to be interested in art, don't. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, despite the implication from some circles that there's some kind of taste you're failing at. Just ignore them. It's not really the "circle jerk" you imagine it is, but neither is it really that important that you're not inside this particular circle, jerking or otherwise.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#33

Post by probably_wrong »

tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

You are probably missing the context. To a non-programmer, C and Python look the same.

Take Citizen Kane. I'd call it a 7/10 film and kinda boring, but that's because I'm seeing it in a "post-Kane" world. At the time, however, it was so revolutionary that people still call it the best film ever made. Nowadays it's quite standard because everyone has been building on it ever since

While I'm not going to disagree with you regarding some art, there is a point to be made that what to us, un-cultured people, may seem like random scribbles could actually be something revolutionary. We simply don't notice it because we are missing the context.

I do believe, however, that you are right and that there's an element of luck too. But that's not exclusive to art - how many technologies are we using right now not because they are the best but because they got a lucky break at the right time? And then again, while many good painters may never get their big break, I doubt there are that many bad painters who get famous.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#34

Post by tigertigertiger »

jfengel wrote: post #32
tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

We're talking here about a very narrow segment of Fine Art that has practically nothing to do with the lives or work of the vast majority of artists -- even successful working artists. It attracts a lot of attention, and is often spoken of as if it's the most refined and pure and important form of art, but most artists don't see their art that way. Don't worry about the "banana on the wall". It's the art equivalent o…

I think your comment really helped me. I don't have anything against art itself. It's more about glorifying artists and artworks to level that just can't get explained.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#35

Post by keyrat »

tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

Do you get the music world and how it works? It's very similar, and someone who didn't get music could make the exact same arguments you're making.

The visual arts take a tiny bit more effort to get into but once you're over that hump it's very similar.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#36

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

i_love_limes wrote: post #14
keiferski wrote: post #11

I printed this HN comment out about 3 years ago and still have it on my wall as motivation. It's from an article about a lifelong artist that never quite "made it" and I think it is a good answer to the question. Compare him to Picasso. Picasso never said "I had to pay the rent." He never considered earning money with anything other than painting. When he had no money he lived in friends' apartments. He faced and acc…

I agree far more with the top response to that quote than I do to the quote.

I think you and that commenter misunderstand that quote. Picasso's is not the only story that an artist must follow to become renowned, just one of them. The fame and fortune around an artist are nearly entirely the product of the mythology surrounding them and the connections they have with other influential people rather than their output.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#37

Post by [deleted] »

itronitron wrote: post #20
phnofive wrote: post #2

I feel like I’m looking at a magic eye ( I also haven’t yet been able to ‘’see’’ one of those ) when I see art like that linked here. Is there a trick to appreciating it beyond what I can see?

There is no trick to appreciating it, just that people that own work by a particular artist have a vested interest in talking that artist up and getting others to 'appreciate it.' The best advice I can give is to spend time with a particular work of art. Go to a museum or gallery, pick a specific painting or sculpture, and then come back to visit the same work of art multiple times, preferably on different days of th…

[deleted]

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#38

Post by tigertigertiger »

probably_wrong wrote: post #33
tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

You are probably missing the context. To a non-programmer, C and Python look the same. Take Citizen Kane. I'd call it a 7/10 film and kinda boring, but that's because I'm seeing it in a "post-Kane" world. At the time, however, it was so revolutionary that people still call it the best film ever made. Nowadays it's quite standard because everyone has been building on it ever since While I'm not going to disagree with…

Thanks for your opinion. I just tend to disagree with your examples.

Programming languages are in their core something like a craft. There are about 700 languages and even if you know nothing about programming languages at all, if I explain to you the concept of how difficult it is to make one and that only about 700 of them ever got made, you will probably understand that this is not something a lot of people could do even if they try. It's also something that can be compared and gets popular and approved because of its usefulness.

The same can be applied to technology, the best technology will may not be the most adaptive one but we can compare them and if they would get the same possibilities (exposure, marketing, timing etc) people would probably agree which one is the better one to some extend (ebay vs amazon) I don't see the component in art. There is just to many of it and if we would show 10.000 people 20 artworks and let them rank them from best to worst I would imagine the list would be different from the ranking of art critics.

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#39

Post by tigertigertiger »

keyrat wrote: post #35
tigertigertiger wrote: post #28

I know I will be down voted to hell for this but maybe somebody can tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking. First of all I know nothing about art so that already disqualifies everything I will rant now. For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate somethi…

Do you get the music world and how it works? It's very similar, and someone who didn't get music could make the exact same arguments you're making. The visual arts take a tiny bit more effort to get into but once you're over that hump it's very similar.

Of which kind of music are we talking about? If you mean some art of abstract music or music that gets approved from some elite circle, I would indeed make the same arguments and don't see a flaw.

My main point is that there is no objective comparison between thousand of pieces and when we take the choices of the elite circle and compare it to intersubjective choices of the masses there would be little to no overlapping. So my point would still be "Why is your elite opinion more worth or correct than the collective opinion of the whole world?"

Re: Jean-Michel Basquiat on How to Be an Artist

#40

Post by tartoran »

i_love_limes wrote: post #14
keiferski wrote: post #11

I printed this HN comment out about 3 years ago and still have it on my wall as motivation. It's from an article about a lifelong artist that never quite "made it" and I think it is a good answer to the question. Compare him to Picasso. Picasso never said "I had to pay the rent." He never considered earning money with anything other than painting. When he had no money he lived in friends' apartments. He faced and acc…

I agree far more with the top response to that quote than I do to the quote.

That commenter retired their account:

Account retired April 2020 (would delete but mere users aren't entrusted with this ability). Reasons? Legion.

Proximate: the moderator "dang" discourages contributors from questioning billionaire ubermenschens' statements from on high. Obedience to the megaconsuming 1% is the last thing we need right now.

Ultimate: The SV locus of the tech scene, of which HN is a cog, is a marketing tool for extremist hypergrowthers (and their propagandised aspirants to world-consuming greed). This is the most dangerous class of humans ever to have existed, constituting a grave threat to the entire biosphere. Undermining it, a task beyond my talents, would be valuable. Continuing to contribute to it is however unconscionable.

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