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from the sufficiently-broad-definitions dept.
To me, it looked like a child's crude attempt at a mosaic. About a dozen small square tiles of different colours. Glued to the wall in a geometric design vaguely resembling a face with two square eyes.
It stood out in the otherwise empty and dingy Paris flat. Once my home, I was moving back in, after nearly 20 years away. My tenants, three young single men, were showing me round before they left.
"What's that?" I asked, pointing at the cluster of tiles.
"That's by Invader," my tenant replied. "He's a street artist. He's like a French Banksy."
I quite liked Banksy, but the young man must have seen that I didn't appear overly impressed by his French counterpart.
"You must leave this," he said earnestly. "One day it will be worth a lot of money."
Being British, I nodded politely - but inwardly I chortled at the notion that a few tiles stuck on a bedroom wall could ever be considered a work of art.
[...] It was bigger, but otherwise similar to the one I'd unceremoniously stripped out of my flat.
Invader was a global phenomenon, famous in New York, Hong Kong, London, and of course Paris.
Then came the real blow. To my horror, I learned that one of his works had sold for more than €200,000 (£178,000; $233,000).
So, I had this guy named Claude staying in my place who painted a picture on the wall...what was his name, dear? Oh, right, Monet. But I wanted the room painted fuchsia so I told the painters to get rid of it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by KiloByte on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:19AM (3 children)
While you forfeited a chance at fleecing some bozos of their money, your contribution to the quality of art was worth it.
With Sturgeon's law, improvements are not possible or at least severely hobbled as long as worst "art" is not culled.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday November 04 2017, @08:19AM (2 children)
+1
Modern art is about $. Buyers wanting to get something that appreciates. Artists striving for a style personal enough that the casual buyer can recognize, after reading enough shit magazines. There is more marketing involved in modern art than in burgers, because a burger has an inherent value.
Your gesture involved putting the observer back into its place, the one that either gets a meaning or not, but according to its own taste and culture.
If everybody did the same we would have less masterpieces, but also much less propaganda laden shit.
The french banksy is reason enough to dump. Banksy is overrated. Burn every picasso but one, one is enough to get cubism. Keep almost all graffiti on bathroom stalls, they are genuine expression instead. "Bob has a big cock - Sally" "Sally hasnt seen mine - Bruce" "Yet - Sally" (which also yields the interesting metadata, what's Sally doing in the male bathroom)
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:42PM (1 child)
I have no idea about Banksy, but you both underrate and don't understand Picasso. That said, I don't really understand him, and I don't really like him, but the idea that everyone should like every artist is ... to be charitable, stupid.
Now if you'd criticized Andy Warhol I might have agreed. He's vastly overrated, and but he was making a comment on modern tastes in art that most people don't really appreciate.
In a way it's like styles in programming. There really is a place for functional programming, and Object Oriented Programming can definitely be overdone, but you need to study the particular style to really understand what it's about. I tend to concentrate on procedural programming in an Object Oriented context. This means I like languages like D and C++. (Well, not really. C++ has become a garbage dump. But a selected subset of C++.) And I find languages like Python, Ruby, and Java to be acceptable. And I don't like Erlang or Scheme (I feel entities need changeable state, though not necessarily changes in externally observable state). But this is a matter of both taste and the particular set of problems I work on (which interact).
So when someone comes along and says "C is the only good programming language" I want to tell him to go back to coding in assembler (since just about nobody uses hex anymore for writing programs...but if they did...). And I understand that there are people who *believe* in Scheme, or Lisp, or OCaML, or Haskell, or ... and they they may have valid reasons in their context.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday November 05 2017, @01:34AM
Scheme does allow changes in state. But the Scheme proselytizers are using Scheme as a vehicle to explain functional programming, which it is also good at.
Look for the functions with exclamation marks in their names. Those are the state-changers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:21AM (20 children)
People appreciate effort, skill, and an attempt to please or at least be understood. Works of art that clearly have taken no skill, time, effort, or care to create are an insult to the gallery viewer.
Clearly, I am not saying that ALL modern (or 'contemporary' if you prefer) art is insulting. I am just explaining why much of it is. Great art in the past was not all understood by everybody, but it didn't insult those who didn't understand it.
Similarly, I am not saying that any art that took ages to make is good. Boris Vallejo is an amazing draughtsman, but his works are not good art.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN9iJCZ5Il8
Worth making a VM to access, even though youtube is utter trash.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Whoever on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:32AM (3 children)
If only it were just modern art.
Why is it that the value of a painting that might have been painted by an old master depends very heavily on whether it is genuine or not? From an pure artistic point of view who created the art should be much less important than the quality of the art.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Arik on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:51AM (2 children)
They're 'collectors items' instead, which means that their value depends more on historical significance. Or I should say perceived historical significance.
"Cary Grant was once told, "Every time I see you on the screen, I think, 'I wish I was Cary Grant.'" He replied, "That's just what I think!""
...
"An art dealer once went to Pablo Picasso and said, "I have a bunch of 'Picasso' canvasses that I was thinking of buying. Would you look them over and tell me which are real and which are forgeries?" Picasso obligingly began sorting the paintings into two piles. Then, as the Great Man added one particular picture to the fake pile, the dealer cried, "Wait a minute, Pablo. That's no forgery. I was visiting you the weekend you painted it." Picasso replied imperturbably, "No matter. I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe.""
Source: http://www.rawilson.com/ishtar.html
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @08:36AM (1 child)
Or as a tax dodge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSdbASDdwU4 [youtube.com]
The journalists do propaganda, the teachers do brainwashing and the comedians do education :).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:57PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by KiloByte on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:36AM (8 children)
If an 'expert' in the field can't tell "real" stuff from a toddler's scribbling, that field as a whole is worthless.
This applies to basically the whole of Postmodernism. Including:
• theatre where a play consist of guys mostly sitting for an hour, with content limited to a shout "Art! Poetry!" in the middle
• ALL modern/postmodern "art" (_not_ contemporary — actual art is widespread today — I mean the movement so named)
• so-called "science" (Sokal affair, etc)
• especially "gender studies" (“The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct”) — serious taxpayer money goes there
• paying taxpayer money for scams like a soup can, a toilet seat, an unmade bed or a pile of bricks (with explicit orders for those moving the "artwork" that the order or shape doesn't matter)
If someone is willing to pay his own money, you're free to! Anything else would be censorship. But please don't force this crap onto kids, especially not for my taxes.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:42AM (6 children)
It will never cease to amaze me that people pay navel-gazers and call it gender "studies" when they could be doing real science with brain imaging studies. Nobody is interested in replicating several interesting brain imaging studies that may show the physiological basis for the brain as a gendered organ with larger and more credible sample sizes. Instead, "gender studies" as it exists today is an exercise in throwing every person unfortunate enough to be born with mismatched brain and reproductive gender under a big fucking bus.
We could have science, but instead we get cynical identity politics. Hopefully our resident ancient astronomer at least understands how frustrating it is when some idiots decide that intellectual constructs are more real than observable reality, which they hold as unworthy of study next to their geometrically perfect castles in the sky, and everybody goes along with it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by lx on Saturday November 04 2017, @08:40AM (5 children)
Ah the magical neuroscience sauce that turns everything into "real science" Sadly Brain imaging is often as scientific as Kirlian photography.
Brain imaging in action [scientificamerican.com]
Neurobollocks [wordpress.com] The name is self-explanatory.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:03PM (3 children)
From your first link:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @07:08PM (1 child)
Did they ever "correct their stats"? http://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900.abstract [pnas.org]
Have the standards changed so that they have corrected the model criticized in that paper? I bet somehow it "didn't matter anyway" and they just continue pumping out the statistical significance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @07:15PM
Thank you. At least somebody here is interested in science instead of authoritarian follower (both SJW and alt-right) navel-gazing. We cannot have science without criticism, because harsh criticism is what enables us to find the truth.
(Score: 3, Funny) by patrick on Sunday November 05 2017, @05:13AM
An alternative explanation... [smbc-comics.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @07:12PM
GP here. You've linked an IgNobel prize:
and a criticism of some Neuro"Business" thing--I assume a conference for the gaslighting asshole managers who are the source of sexual harassment in STEM--that didn't invite a single neuroscientist:
And that is an astounding example of what the science does not say are the potential differences between male and female brains.
Why do you people think that gender is a social construct? Don't you remember that gender differences present themselves in the crib?!
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Sunday November 05 2017, @01:41AM
But the conceptual penis is a social construct. It's the physical penis that isn't.
I wish that the people parodying postmodernism wouldn't pick the few random postmodern items that actually have a slight grain of truth in them. It makes the parody look stupid.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:53AM
Perhaps, perhaps not. I do know I'd much prefer one of Vallejo's mediocre works on my wall than anything I have seen in a museum of "modern" or "contemporary" art.
I am starting to get the sneaking suspicion a good part of the "art world" is just a money laundering operation anyway. Explains why they don't actually care about what they pay insane amount of cash for.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:52AM (4 children)
But a good fraud is an art! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:06AM (3 children)
The summary reads like a faggot's prelude to a homsexual orgy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:06PM
of course. you'd be so aware of such things.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 04 2017, @11:08PM (1 child)
I know when I saw the article I said to myself,"you know would really love this? Ethanol-fueled, that's who!"
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Funny) by dwilson on Sunday November 05 2017, @01:45AM
It took longer than I care to admit, but once I realized "Ethanol-fueled" could be literally taken as a euphemism for a drunken rant, everything I've ever read from him snapped in to a completely new context and started making a lot more sense.
- D
(Score: 3, Interesting) by terryk30 on Saturday November 04 2017, @10:16AM
Rudolph Guiliani said it best: "If I can do it, it's not art..."
(re. the portrait of the Virgin Mary stained with elephant dung [nytimes.com].)
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:22AM (9 children)
And, just because the emperor SAYS his clothes are beautiful, doesn't make them so. He still has a fat wrinkled ass, and a shriveled pecker, hanging out in front of everyone. The entire imperial court can be fawning over the fat bastard, but he's still uglier than an old boar hog.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:11AM (8 children)
There're very good reasons so many artists over the years have used naked women as their subjects. The primary two of course being they enjoy seeing naked women and so do a whole lot of other people.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:09AM (4 children)
The primary reason why so many have used naked people is because it's a prerequisite for decent portrait work. If you can't draw what's under the clothes, then you're unlikely to be successful with the much more difficult practice of drawing clothing on top of that.
Believe it or not, not all people are pigs. But, given that you're intellectual development was stunted at about the middle school level, I'm not surprised that you're advancing this bullshit.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 04 2017, @11:49AM (2 children)
You're really going with the Puritanical Asshole argument? Is it just the only thing you could come up with or are you really one of those pathetic, repressed douchebags who think your parents only had sex for procreation and did so in a businesslike manner?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:49PM (1 child)
Nope, I'm going for the, some people are evolved enough to see the body as more than something to fuck argument. The fact that you're accusing me of being having the values of a Puritan pretty much backs the assertion I made. There's nothing inherently wrong in getting off on a naked body, but it's mostly the descendants of the Puritans that can't separate sex from nudity.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:57PM
Yup, puritanical asshole then. Mentally healthy people know there is nothing wrong with sex and enjoy having it as often as is practical. Were you abused as a child or something? Show us on the doll where the babysitter touched you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:00PM
I'm going with choice "not" here. At least it was easy on the eyes.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:07AM (2 children)
The ideal of feminine beauty in antiquity was fat chicks.
Hrrmhynumhumhnyumhum....fatties. Yum! [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by baldrick on Saturday November 04 2017, @07:39AM (1 child)
yes - fat , but not obese
... I obey the Laws of Physics
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Saturday November 04 2017, @09:29AM
Peter Paul Rubens? [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:26AM (12 children)
A friend and I inherited the contents of our older friend's house (friend died with no children or other relatives). The house is filled with postage stamps, seems that their parent collected stamps starting c.1900, there must be something over 20 000 stamps and only about a quarter are sorted into books. There are even thousands of cancelled stamps, saved from envelopes from around the world (they had a large correspondence, at one time).
How can we know that we aren't tossing away a valuable stamp? Or being hoodwinked by a dealer (or a few dealers that collude with each other)?
Other things in the house have more obvious value and can be price checked fairly easily.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:35AM (8 children)
"How can we know that we aren't tossing away a valuable stamp? Or being hoodwinked by a dealer (or a few dealers that collude with each other)?"
Research, of course. I collected coins, and that is comparatively easy. They are easy to identify, date, and grade. There are many catalogs available, listing a coin's value. Stamps take a little more work. But, if you plan to sell them, that work is a necessity.
Either work, or trust those dealers. You really don't have many other choices. Maybe you can pawn off the research on some kid with lots of time on his/her hands. You'll have to give him some real motivation to do all that work. You may even have to trust him. How can you know that he doesn't carry home a couple moderately valuable stamps every time he goes home? Gonna strip search him? YOU PEDO!!
Just do the research yourself. You'll be a better person for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:12AM (7 children)
Or course, if you want something done right do it yourself, no quibble with that, but some people have a busy life already.
How long does it take to research a stamp? If AC gets good, could it be as fast as five minutes on average, is that possible? If there are 20,000 that is 100K minutes or 1666 hours, approaching a full year of 40 hour weeks.
(Score: 3, Funny) by KiloByte on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:31AM (4 children)
Do this research on a sample of randomly selected stamps. Those considered especially rare tend to be put prominently of display, and it is those which you want to research first.
I'm unlucky[1] to have a father who's a collector of razor blade wrappers, this takes a good part of his life and money for over 30 years. A mid-sized collection is easily worth $10-20k when mindlessly dumped in bulk; my father's is far bigger than that. I wouldn't have the slightest clue how to sell it, though (and I hope this issue doesn't arise any time soon).
[1]. I mean, having a father is not that bad, I'd prefer one without this addiction, though.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:00AM (2 children)
Seriously? Razor blade wrappers? Sorry, no offense to your dad, but WTF?
Hmmm. Maybe I should start collecting candy bar wrappers or mac & cheese boxes. Apparently, people will pay money for anything!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:16AM (1 child)
Weirdest collection I've heard of is sugar packets -- the ones that restaurants put on the tables. Don't think these have any monetary value, but I could be wrong. And I suspect SN posters will come up with something even weirder!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:43AM
AOL shipped CDs in metal cans, wood boxes, and so many other weird contraptions. They'd do whatever they could to catch your eye.
They'd give you a 30-day free trial, limited to some number of hours. The amount of hours kept increasing until it was roughly the amount in 30 days.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Saturday November 04 2017, @09:32AM
Just count yourself lucky that you don't have to handle and categorize tens of thousands of razor blades!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:19PM (1 child)
I suspect that a lot of stamps, probably the bulk of them, can average five or ten minutes' work. There will be some that defy you. Very uncommon stamps may be very hard to identify. Yet, that uncommon one that took the most work may well be the most valuable stamp in the collection.
Of course, the more you learn, the better and faster you would become at identifying something unique. After you've been at it for a decade, you will find it hard to believe that it took you six months just to identify something that is now obvious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @08:48PM
You're working at this far too hard. Just ask Stanleyhttps://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Stanley_Howler [lspace.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:22PM
The original stamp collector may be a help here. If they had some idea of the value or rarity of what they were collecting, then how they treated the stamps may indicate the relative value of them. But if they're collecting them in a typical OCD fashion (like in coins, making sure they have all the years represented), then what's been sorted and displayed may be of little use to you (unless a rare stamp happens to find its way into a display book).
Really, unless you're fully researching these stamps and then auctioning off this stuff on eBay in appropriate-sized lots (with any hypothetical valuable stamps sold separately), you're not going to get anywhere near the sale price of these stamps.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:59PM
1900? I don't think that there are many really valuable stamps from that period, but you could look for a US air postage stamp the has the plane upside down. That one was pretty rare.
That said, I'm not expert, and haven't collected stamps since grade school. But check what possible valuable there are before, say, 1930. There probably won't be many. For the rest, trust the dealers. Your time is worth something, and there isn't much that wasn't widely collected. (You might check out what "first day covers" look like, though. I don't remember them, and never had one. I know they're more valuable than most stamps, and I think they require cancellation in some special way. But there will only be a few dates that are significant, i.e. the first day any particular stamp went on sale. So that should be relatively easy to check.)
FWIW, most stamp collectors don't have *anything* that's particularly valuable. Many of them are just hoarders that happened to settle on stamps instead of something else. Even coin collectors don't usually have anything thats particularly valuable...though it's not unusual for someone (either them, or a relative) to think that they do.
Of course, "most" is a statement of probability. Sometimes someone does have something valuable, even if they don't know it. But it's a low probability kind of thing.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Monday November 06 2017, @01:58AM
Another option is to divvy them up into lots and sell them on eBay as "unsearched" stamps and see what you can get for them, preferably with a really good story to go with it . I don't know about stamps so much, but it's a pretty common thing on the coin side, done mostly by sellers who I suspect actually have a pretty good idea what's in their "unsearched" lots.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:50AM (13 children)
Seriously [independent.co.uk]. You can find countless other reputable sources as well (just google for 'modern art and CIA'), not the least of all including the CIA themselves.
The CIA organized propaganda framing modern art as emphasizing creativity, intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. It was a propaganda weapon against the Soviet Union. And the only thing Americans have shown time and again is that we're absurdly susceptible to propaganda. Thus we continue to hold what is essentially child like art as indeed emphasizing the same values the CIA mostly invented when pushing modern art in the first place. It's kind of interesting how American individualism is supposed to be its biggest strength, yet we fall for propaganda with a disconcerting degree of regularity. Maybe we should blame the Russians for that too.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:54AM (5 children)
Perhaps most amusing of all. The next time you find an art expert looking down at those wondering why they can't understand how a blue rectangle with a random splash of red in the center is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars -- consider that that individual is about as well informed as a North Korean who thinks Kin Jong Un doesn't urinate or defecate. Seriously, they've got some strange propaganda over there. But at least they don't sell drawings of rectangles for 6 figures.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:23AM (3 children)
If somebody is paying that much for the painting, you can bet there's more to it than just what's on the canvas. In the vast majority of cases, a part of is that the painter is significant in some way to the art community.
There's a lot to a piece of art that isn't necessarily obvious to people that don't study painting. Unfortunately, with the modern stuff it can be difficult to spot the difference between a brilliant work and one created by an animal. Outsider art tends to be the most problematic, but stuff by established artists can creep into the realm of fraud as well.
Some artists, such as Rothko could have their work described like that, but if you actually see the original work in person, it's very, very different from what it looks like as a print or when described.
Ultimately, valuation is largely arbitrary. For one reason or another one piece resonates with people in a way that an equally skilled piece doesn't or has some tie to a historical figure or event that leads people to open their wallets to acquire the piece. Sometimes a piece that gets a few dollars at auction as an unknown winds up getting hundreds of thousands if it's identified as belonging to a significant artist.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:10PM (2 children)
"valuation is largely arbitrary"
Yup. Met a lady in Maine, long ago, whose name was pretty well known. She wanted to give me a painting - showed me a couple rooms filled with her work. Some was nicer than others, but nothing really appealed to me. Stumbled over a painting in a corner, that wasn't even on display. The image was of a girl, of indeterminate age, looking down, with a wide brimmed straw hat hiding most of her face. No bust, very little of her shoulders, her chin and a bit of her nose were peeking out from under that brim. I fell in love with that painting. Jo was shocked - "Oh, that painting is worthless, I want you to have one of my nicer paintings!!" I thought she was crazy. I was intrigued with the girl who I would never see! (I did actually meet Jo's granddaughter, some weeks later - very pretty young lady, about fifteen years old when I met her, and that just added a bit of personal value to the painting.)
So, not even the artist is a final arbiter of the value of his/her art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:53PM (1 child)
That's the nature of art. There are some things that are universally reviled in a painting/sculpture/song, but that special it factor that some works have and others don't isn't something that anybody can count on showing up.
The best the artist can do is work to learn how to express themselves, learn how to perfect their techniques because without that the it factor won't show up. Unfortunately, just being technically excellent won't guarantee that an artist becomes one of the masters or have a piece that stands up like that. Even the masters had a lot of crap early on that's only valuable now because it shows their development into mastery of the art.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:07PM
It's not that simple. Even masters in the years of their greatest quality will occasionally turn out a work that isn't quality. This shouldn't be surprising. Even good programmers occasionally write crap programs, and even my favorite authors occasionally turn out inferior works. One particular author I can think of I buy everything he publishes, but I file half of it on the "reject" shelf, and only keep it so I don't go out any buy it again. The other half I read multiple times, trying to really understand the message. And it is clear that the author can't tell the difference in quality. (Unlike programming, there are fewer objective measures of quality.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday November 05 2017, @01:52AM
I used to have this dismissive attitude to modern abstract art until the day I climbed a staircse in a Winipeg museum and saw the wall at the top. It contained one canvas, painted in three broad vertical stripes of different colours, and it just floored me. I was impressed. I spent a good five minutes under its spell.
To this day I can't say what was so impressive about it. There must have been something about it. because most such panels have no effect at all on me.
But at that point I concluded that some modern abstract artists are the real thing, at least some of the time, and others are just poseurs.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday November 04 2017, @10:50AM
Don't worry, in two generations you'll be immune to propaganda - the first one will still have something to lose, the second one will just sit and think what the hell can be done about it. Until then, you'll have to suck it**... ah, yes, and throw a revolution at the end to get rid of them.
---
** If you want it faster, just start and lose a serious war on your soil, like the Nazi Germany did.
It all depends on the winner, though, somehow I don't think Russia or China will let you free of propaganda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:58PM (3 children)
"American individualism is supposed to be its biggest strength,"
There are still several dozens of us left. The job just keeps getting tougher, with each one who passes on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:58PM (2 children)
The problem with individualism is that it was always exaggerated and it was mostly there because we didn't have the resources to have a social safety net and those that couldn't hack it ultimately suffered in ways that aren't acceptable in a developed society.
These days it's just an excuse used to screw other people over and get something resembling a good night's sleep afterwards knowing full well that nothing you earned was actually earned without a huge helping of luck.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:36PM
Did anyone understand WTF AC just mumbled?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 05 2017, @03:36AM
I could see how someone who is unable to string together a coherent thought in writing might find individualism scary. But here's my take. If we all fend for ourselves most of the time, even if it is impossible to do so all the time, then that means less work and less need for a social safety net to handle. And frankly, you'd have to be pretty poor off before it makes sense for someone else to be wiping your ass for you.
You might find this odd, but I think the same thing of the people who advocate social safety nets when they could be taking care of their own lives without unnecessary assistance from society. It's just an excuse to screw other people over.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:34PM (1 child)
Because that's relevant to the foreign venues in which this art was placed. For example:
Lots of gullible Americans in London, right?
As to the assertion that modern art is a product of the CIA, the artists existed already. The CIA just gave them more visibility in Western Europe and elsewhere.
Because the primary reason that the CIA was so secretive about this in the first place was the well-known hostility of US populace and politicians to said modern art. And really what population of Americans past or present is going for modern art in the first place? It's the wealthy, status signalers and maybe some snooty post-modern intellectuals. What's the point of trying to shoe-horn this narrative into some imaginary one about the mass of gullible US citizens, when that's not even remotely the case?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:21PM
There *is* modern art that I like, but, not being a connoisseur of brush strokes, a good copy works as well for me as the original. But there are people, and I know a few, for whom the actual 3-d shape of the brush stroke is important, and if you are following the details of the interaction of color as the viewpoint moves back and forth (especially left and right, but even near and far) then that can be significant. I've seen a few of the minor masterworks in the original, and for some you really do need the original to get the full impression....those just didn't happen to be ones that I liked, so I wouldn't have given them wall space anyway, but there are those who *do* appreciate them. And, of course, if the work is air-brush or one of the other smooth styles that it never matters. All that matters is the quality of the reproduction.
I expect that soon (10 years?) 3-d scanners/printers will even turn out reasonable copies of the works that need 3-d representations. But things being as they are, don't expect colors to match. Cadmium yellow is a hazardous material, so is Prussian blue, etc. most of the bright colors in the older works are made out of things too poisonous to allow to be widely distributed. There *are* mechanical ways to produce equally brilliant colors, but they require nano- structured materials. Some birds use that approach in their feathers.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @09:37AM (2 children)
others will pay for it ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:41PM (1 child)
I do. Two self-imposed requirements before I buy art -- first I have met (better, am friends with) the artist, and second, it strikes me in some way. Have paid up to a few hundred dollars and never expect to get that back in the future. Have not regretted any of these purchases, some more than 20 years ago.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Sunday November 05 2017, @05:31AM
Almost bought a $10k painting the other day. Was walking through a gallery of ugly modern stuff, turned a corner, and just stopped there staring at a beautiful vivid painting of a garden. Loved the style and the colors.
The artist is trying to use lineage to a famous painter, I didn't like that at all. I didn't like the price, which is more than my car. I didn't like the vendor faking to be nice, because he failed to realize my watch is a lot cheaper than it looks, so he thought I actually belonged in Beverly Hills.
But the painting was beautiful, in a style I like (not modern abstract crap), and just grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go.
I need a new 10K roof more than I need a 10k painting. That painting might be worth 6 figures by the time I die, but my kids will have to do with having grown up in a dry house.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:27PM (1 child)
Buy your art from a nice starving street artist and you might actually do some good. Fuck anything high profile. Adam Ruins Everything - How the Fine Art Market is a Scam [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @09:45PM
Can you summarize the message of the video? It took them too long to get to the point.