It’s important to stay curious. Instead of asking, “Why should I care?” a more interesting question is, “How did the artist get here?” or “What unique experiences shaped this artist’s journey?”...
The least interesting critique you could make of a piece of art is, “I could have painted that.” […] The question is: would you have painted that?
If you are alive…you have artistic value. […] Saying “I could have painted that”…is just a criticism of yourself.
We’re being encouraged to abandon our natural creativity in the name of “convenience.” And that disregards the only prerequisite for something to be considered art: life.
It’s important to stay curious. Instead of asking, “Why should I care?” a more interesting question is, “How did the artist get here?” or “What unique experiences shaped this artist’s journey?” And if we can’t bring ourselves to lead with that sort of curious query, are we engaging in ~arts because we actually like art? Or because someone told us that we need “taste” to be perceived as cultured?
In the Museum, we are glimpsing a story. Art history is really the art, which is why many exhibits attempt to showcase the interplay between historical contemporaries. But its meaning is interactive and not deterministic. Formalism was never the end of history—the human experience necessarily envelops it.
Craft, and physical technique, is evidently computable and infinitely replicable within a relatively tight margin of error. And craft has always been admirable, but traditionally for at least two reasons: respect for the work, and respect for the artifact. Today, if any person can instantly create an artifact perfectly mimicking preceding artifacts by using the correct computational tools, then the focus of admiration shifts toward that earlier question: “What went into this?” Do we believe there’s value in interior experience, in laborious creation? Or just in output?
It’s interesting to read about LLMs solving mathematical conjectures. But the reason this is useful is not the display of mathematical characters in LaTeX, which already exists somewhere in the Library of Babel and could be generated randomly by monkeys with typewriters. Rather, we are excited by the knowledge of how these runes connect to a history of prior knowledge. Our theory of knowledge requires the interpreter to situate robot-articulated mathematics in context and independently evaluate the model’s chain of “thought” to understand the output’s correctness—in other words: methodology, a secretly creative experience, underlies verification. Artistic endeavors are parallel: the artifact is interesting when it’s part of something with memory, life, and rhythm to it.
I dance because anyone can do it and not despite it. The real joy of watching an expert performance is less the spectacle and more the knowledge that you are part of a community that supports such effort.
Disclaimer
The video responds to a specific critique about a specific kind of art in a specific context. The presenter is probably not thinking of you personally. It is not telling you that you must like the subjective form of any specific piece. Yes, you are permitted to dislike the strange modern sculpture in front of some building near you, and I probably agree with you that it’s ugly and I wouldn’t have installed it there either. I shared this video because it is simple, short, and has a nice message, which is that you should lean into your own creativity to escape self-minimizing platitudes like this.
Wow, the comments under the video made me realize that people probably didn't actually watch it and more interesting to me, People don't know what money laundering is or how it works. Buying an...
Wow, the comments under the video made me realize that
people probably didn't actually watch it
and more interesting to me,
People don't know what money laundering is or how it works.
Buying an extremely expensive, famous, one of a kind piece of art would be one of the absolute worst ways to launder money.
The whole point of laundering money is take money that's "dirty", ie; gotten from some sort of illegal activity, and turn it "clean"; ie, give you a plausible way to have gotten it.
An extremely famous, expensive piece of art magically materializing in your custody, which you then have to sell at a very publicized auction in order to get your money back is the exact opposite of laundering money. It would be basically just broadcasting to the authorities that you've done something illegal.
Money is usually laundered through actual businesses, because it's hard to comb through tens of thousands of receipts and purchase orders to correlate that the business is generating more income than it should be.
Does money get laundered through art? Yeah, sure, but it also gets laundered through basically anything you can buy or sell. I could pay a guy that's willing to cooperate with me to sell me a million cans of tuna fish for 1000 dollars on the books, and the rest under the table, and then sell the tuna at market rates to get my $500k "clean" just as easily as I could with a piece of art.
That doesn't mean tuna fish is "just valuable because of money laundering"
I agree with her: saying "I could have painted that" is cringe. She rightly criticizes those she calls “Regular Joe” for this statement as it betrays a certain level of disengagement with art. At...
I agree with her: saying "I could have painted that" is cringe. She rightly criticizes those she calls “Regular Joe” for this statement as it betrays a certain level of disengagement with art.
At some point in the video, she does the same thing herself but with philosophy.
She says “the only prerequisite for something to be considered art [...] is life” and later, “[...] as long as it's made by people or animals or trees. Just not AI.”
Now, I'm emphatically not here to argue that AI is “alive”, or that AI-generated images are “art”. But what I do feel the need to say is that it's an interesting question in philosophy, and that I find the flippant, out-of-hand dismissal... cringe. (Not just from her.) It betrays the same level of disengagement with philosophy.
People get confused and think art museum curators are divine creatures that decide what is good art and what is not. They have their own tastes and are merely human. Exhibits also often completely...
People get confused and think art museum curators are divine creatures that decide what is good art and what is not. They have their own tastes and are merely human. Exhibits also often completely fail to educate outsiders on why a piece is there in the first place. If you see this abstract painting in isolation with some meaningless placard that tells you who painted it, where they were born, and when the piece was completed, you’re depriving the viewer of critical information. If anything it’s snobbery to exclude that context.
I’ve seen this abstract artwork online before. The story of how it came to be is - to me - more interesting than the final piece. I’ve complained about this on tildes before but museum exhibit design is generally mediocre. I find this to be the case with art, science, and history museums. The human story behind pieces is usually largely absent. I took a few art courses at a university and later got to see famous works I learned about in person. It was super interesting and enriching to see in person. But reading what was provided by the museum would have left me mildly entertained at best.
One such example are the Benin Bronzes. The British Museum keeps the juicy details off of the placard (they’re largely at fault for stringing along the rightful owners so I understand why…). I remember there was one sentence about how they were in active talks about their return. But that was it.
I sometimes enjoy visiting an art piece without any prior knowledge of its background or creator. For film, I think this increases rewatchability: my first interpretation can be totally different...
I sometimes enjoy visiting an art piece without any prior knowledge of its background or creator. For film, I think this increases rewatchability: my first interpretation can be totally different than after I read about the director’s intentions.
But I don’t feel this way about most visual art. I love the stories behind paintings—without them, the art is still nice to look at, but it’s not really any nicer than the art in my living room. I think some curators withhold analysis and history to avoid poisoning the audience with their own views, but often I find that this leads to an excessively minimalist and dry exhibit.
In a similar vein, I’m reminded of the new Barnes Museum. The original site in Merion was a carefully arranged collection in the collector’s actual house and the art was meant to remain that way in perpetuity. The aesthetics and feeling of the house became part of the art. I understand the circumstances that necessitated a move to the Parkway, but I feel like it reduces the meaning a bit.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending a house concert with a Gaelic-inspired ensemble. The music itself was excellent, of course. Yet it was the intimacy of the venue that charged them with energy and lightened the whole affair. When a string broke, the singer recounted the history of the band, which turned out to be hyper-local. I struck up a couple conversations with the musicians during tea and was delighted to hear about their lifelong connections to the tradition. The guitarist was a native speaker of Irish and his family was involved in the revival of the language; the singer was also a step dancer who had grown up in the folk community (and knew many of the halls I once danced in!); the percussionist came from Montréal and brought with her a Canadian flair with its own path from the Isles; a band member was friends with another famous singer of Scots Gaelic whom I’ve recently thought to collaborate with, etc. Because the atmosphere of the concert was so warm, we had the opportunity to connect on a meaningful level and everyone walked away that much more pleased with the course of the evening. It wouldn’t have felt the same in a massive concert venue or listening on a streaming app! The story matters.
Considering how many art pieces travel around the world and aren't stuck in one museum it would actually be kind of interesting to have them presented through different lenses in each location....
Considering how many art pieces travel around the world and aren't stuck in one museum it would actually be kind of interesting to have them presented through different lenses in each location. Each exhibit's designer can put a different spin on a work or collection.
It’s important to stay curious. Instead of asking, “Why should I care?” a more interesting question is, “How did the artist get here?” or “What unique experiences shaped this artist’s journey?” And if we can’t bring ourselves to lead with that sort of curious query, are we engaging in ~arts because we actually like art? Or because someone told us that we need “taste” to be perceived as cultured?
In the Museum, we are glimpsing a story. Art history is really the art, which is why many exhibits attempt to showcase the interplay between historical contemporaries. But its meaning is interactive and not deterministic. Formalism was never the end of history—the human experience necessarily envelops it.
Craft, and physical technique, is evidently computable and infinitely replicable within a relatively tight margin of error. And craft has always been admirable, but traditionally for at least two reasons: respect for the work, and respect for the artifact. Today, if any person can instantly create an artifact perfectly mimicking preceding artifacts by using the correct computational tools, then the focus of admiration shifts toward that earlier question: “What went into this?” Do we believe there’s value in interior experience, in laborious creation? Or just in output?
It’s interesting to read about LLMs solving mathematical conjectures. But the reason this is useful is not the display of mathematical characters in LaTeX, which already exists somewhere in the Library of Babel and could be generated randomly by monkeys with typewriters. Rather, we are excited by the knowledge of how these runes connect to a history of prior knowledge. Our theory of knowledge requires the interpreter to situate robot-articulated mathematics in context and independently evaluate the model’s chain of “thought” to understand the output’s correctness—in other words: methodology, a secretly creative experience, underlies verification. Artistic endeavors are parallel: the artifact is interesting when it’s part of something with memory, life, and rhythm to it.
I dance because anyone can do it and not despite it. The real joy of watching an expert performance is less the spectacle and more the knowledge that you are part of a community that supports such effort.
Disclaimer
The video responds to a specific critique about a specific kind of art in a specific context. The presenter is probably not thinking of you personally. It is not telling you that you must like the subjective form of any specific piece. Yes, you are permitted to dislike the strange modern sculpture in front of some building near you, and I probably agree with you that it’s ugly and I wouldn’t have installed it there either. I shared this video because it is simple, short, and has a nice message, which is that you should lean into your own creativity to escape self-minimizing platitudes like this.Wow, the comments under the video made me realize that
people probably didn't actually watch it
and more interesting to me,
People don't know what money laundering is or how it works.
Buying an extremely expensive, famous, one of a kind piece of art would be one of the absolute worst ways to launder money.
The whole point of laundering money is take money that's "dirty", ie; gotten from some sort of illegal activity, and turn it "clean"; ie, give you a plausible way to have gotten it.
An extremely famous, expensive piece of art magically materializing in your custody, which you then have to sell at a very publicized auction in order to get your money back is the exact opposite of laundering money. It would be basically just broadcasting to the authorities that you've done something illegal.
Money is usually laundered through actual businesses, because it's hard to comb through tens of thousands of receipts and purchase orders to correlate that the business is generating more income than it should be.
Does money get laundered through art? Yeah, sure, but it also gets laundered through basically anything you can buy or sell. I could pay a guy that's willing to cooperate with me to sell me a million cans of tuna fish for 1000 dollars on the books, and the rest under the table, and then sell the tuna at market rates to get my $500k "clean" just as easily as I could with a piece of art.
That doesn't mean tuna fish is "just valuable because of money laundering"
I agree with her: saying "I could have painted that" is cringe. She rightly criticizes those she calls “Regular Joe” for this statement as it betrays a certain level of disengagement with art.
At some point in the video, she does the same thing herself but with philosophy.
She says “the only prerequisite for something to be considered art [...] is life” and later, “[...] as long as it's made by people or animals or trees. Just not AI.”
Now, I'm emphatically not here to argue that AI is “alive”, or that AI-generated images are “art”. But what I do feel the need to say is that it's an interesting question in philosophy, and that I find the flippant, out-of-hand dismissal... cringe. (Not just from her.) It betrays the same level of disengagement with philosophy.
People get confused and think art museum curators are divine creatures that decide what is good art and what is not. They have their own tastes and are merely human. Exhibits also often completely fail to educate outsiders on why a piece is there in the first place. If you see this abstract painting in isolation with some meaningless placard that tells you who painted it, where they were born, and when the piece was completed, you’re depriving the viewer of critical information. If anything it’s snobbery to exclude that context.
I’ve seen this abstract artwork online before. The story of how it came to be is - to me - more interesting than the final piece. I’ve complained about this on tildes before but museum exhibit design is generally mediocre. I find this to be the case with art, science, and history museums. The human story behind pieces is usually largely absent. I took a few art courses at a university and later got to see famous works I learned about in person. It was super interesting and enriching to see in person. But reading what was provided by the museum would have left me mildly entertained at best.
One such example are the Benin Bronzes. The British Museum keeps the juicy details off of the placard (they’re largely at fault for stringing along the rightful owners so I understand why…). I remember there was one sentence about how they were in active talks about their return. But that was it.
I sometimes enjoy visiting an art piece without any prior knowledge of its background or creator. For film, I think this increases rewatchability: my first interpretation can be totally different than after I read about the director’s intentions.
But I don’t feel this way about most visual art. I love the stories behind paintings—without them, the art is still nice to look at, but it’s not really any nicer than the art in my living room. I think some curators withhold analysis and history to avoid poisoning the audience with their own views, but often I find that this leads to an excessively minimalist and dry exhibit.
In a similar vein, I’m reminded of the new Barnes Museum. The original site in Merion was a carefully arranged collection in the collector’s actual house and the art was meant to remain that way in perpetuity. The aesthetics and feeling of the house became part of the art. I understand the circumstances that necessitated a move to the Parkway, but I feel like it reduces the meaning a bit.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending a house concert with a Gaelic-inspired ensemble. The music itself was excellent, of course. Yet it was the intimacy of the venue that charged them with energy and lightened the whole affair. When a string broke, the singer recounted the history of the band, which turned out to be hyper-local. I struck up a couple conversations with the musicians during tea and was delighted to hear about their lifelong connections to the tradition. The guitarist was a native speaker of Irish and his family was involved in the revival of the language; the singer was also a step dancer who had grown up in the folk community (and knew many of the halls I once danced in!); the percussionist came from Montréal and brought with her a Canadian flair with its own path from the Isles; a band member was friends with another famous singer of Scots Gaelic whom I’ve recently thought to collaborate with, etc. Because the atmosphere of the concert was so warm, we had the opportunity to connect on a meaningful level and everyone walked away that much more pleased with the course of the evening. It wouldn’t have felt the same in a massive concert venue or listening on a streaming app! The story matters.
Considering how many art pieces travel around the world and aren't stuck in one museum it would actually be kind of interesting to have them presented through different lenses in each location. Each exhibit's designer can put a different spin on a work or collection.