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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: 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.