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Artists must be allowed to make bad work

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Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#111

Post by twobitshifter »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #63

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…

A) Photography is visual art

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.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#112

Post by shadowfoxx »

laratied wrote: post #98
antiterra wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#114

Post by epiccoleman »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #106
epiccoleman wrote: post #84

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,…

Made into a nice little video here: https://vimeo.com/85040589 Hugely useful if you are starting to get into something new or are young and frustrated that your X isnt as good as you think it should be.

That was great, thanks for sharing! I'll have to file that away on my Notion page for the quote so I can watch it again.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#115

Post by robertlagrant »

Delk wrote: post #71
jcarrano wrote: post #51

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.

> 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…

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.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#116

Post by pfannkuchen »

shadowfoxx wrote: post #112
laratied wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 hist…

> 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?

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#117

Post by eslaught »

epiccoleman wrote: post #84

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,…

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.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#118

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dsign wrote: post #72

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…

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.

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#119

Post by ilamont »

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!

Re: Artists must be allowed to make bad work

#120

Post by digging »

eslaught wrote: post #117
epiccoleman wrote: post #84

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,…

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).
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