After many experiments, the most realistic was painting a thick line and then erasing tiny randomly sized rectangles out of it.
bleakenthusiasm 34 days ago [-]
It looks really good. Like, really good.
I have one thing that throws me, though: if you keep drawing over the same section, you don't get more coverage. It always looks like the first pass.
But I'm so surprised at how well this works to emulate chalk.
KTibow 34 days ago [-]
It seems the only thing that changes how covered a section is the speed you go over it with.
buggy6257 34 days ago [-]
I need this combined with Excalidraw somehow and I would be so happy. There's something so viscerally satisfying about chalkboards, even virtual. Thanks for this! You did a phenomenal job on the chalk effect.
gilleain 34 days ago [-]
Hah I did something similar around the same time, using random white/gray/black pixels (apparently, I don't remember any details any more!)
Wow, that would make a great HN submission in its own right—though not anytime soon! one has to let the hivemind caches clear first.
TheSpiceIsLife 34 days ago [-]
On the other hand, when brick and mortar stores of the same kind are located near each other they all sell more.
And we often see two of the same topics thriving on the HN front page.
dang 33 days ago [-]
> we often see two of the same topics thriving on the HN front page
Most often that would be a failure on our part. But it's good for the mods to fail sometimes.
TheSpiceIsLife 30 days ago [-]
I meant more: two of the same category of thing, where a submission will spur interest in closely related submissions, or something tangential related.
Like, say, a submission on Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s art follow by a submission on the 27 Club.
Pollock used a lot of connected ink splotches, Steadman's 'inkling' stuff is usually large white-space separated splotches, an effect that is impossible with this tool.
also Steadman moved away from that eventually, whereas Pollock leaned into it until death.
Moreover Pollocks' art was the splotches, whereas it was usually an accoutrement for Steadman around a different -- usually framed -- perspective.
pkdpic 34 days ago [-]
Agreed, super cool project. All it seems like it would need for a full pollock vibe would be a color palette selector. And maybe this audio track on loop and a transparent overlay of animated cigarette smoke. Great url.
Also maybe a random cigarette butt once in a while.
tanseydavid 30 days ago [-]
Agreed. The results look more Steadman-like.
adamredwoods 34 days ago [-]
I absolutely love this and here's why: many people who criticize art as being "child's doodles" lack the experience and process of art. Education raises all boats. This is that type of simple education.
So now, I hope every here tries to make their own Pollock art.
Because Pollock would smash it with a masterpiece right out of his cellphone? This is cute but not a great device to reveal the truth to the uneducated
InsideOutSanta 34 days ago [-]
I think what he would do is better than what most others would.
This reminds me of something that happened to me in the early 90s. I went to a local computer show (where local distributors would show new hardware) with a friend who's an artist. There was a booth with a color Mac, probably an LC or something like that, running Mac Paint. People were doodling on it, playing around with the spray can and the text tool, and it looked like random stuff thrown on a canvas. Not having a computer at home, my friend was curious, and queued to play with it.
When my friend got a turn on the Mac, first time on a Mac using Mac Paint, he made a drawing that genuinely looked like a piece of art. If there had been a printer nearby, I could have printed it out and put it on my wall, and nobody would have thought that this was a somebody's first time using Mac Paint.
Art is a genuine skill, and you will see the difference between an artist and a random person regardless of the canvas they use.
I guess this also reminds me of the introduction of the Amiga, with Warhol using the paint can to fill in sections of a photo of Debbie Harry. Technically, this is something everybody can do, but Warhol knew which colors to pick, which sections to color, and which choices to make to create something that actually looks great.
adamredwoods 34 days ago [-]
Nope. To think to is create. I want more people to think. Trying to make a masterpiece with this is not the point.
every 34 days ago [-]
I find it interesting that Pollock was a student of the American Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton[1]. No two artists could have been more unalike...
Jackson Pollock's style evolved throughout his life. The Whitney had a show with his early works and it's nothing like his splatter painting style we all know[1].
> Here's a topic I don't see people engaging with: I could in principle make the same kinds of completely abstract paintings Pollock did, but if I do it, it won't be art because I'm not in the art world. I have no access to galleries, I have no patrons, and I generally don't move in those circles, so I have no ability to be taken seriously for doing it.
motoxpro 28 days ago [-]
Interesting that people miss that so much of art is about the idea, not the execution. Most musicians can play a beatles song (ex. thousands of dead on cover bands), anyone can take a photo (ex. see shot on iPhone campaign), a lot of people can paint the mona lisa or other famous art (ex. see faked paintings).
It's that someone had the wild thought to do it in the first place.
A cynical take is that people are just so far away from the level that they see the execution as the difficult part. Like saying, I could type out the linux kernal.
msla 28 days ago [-]
No, my point is that even if I had the idea (abstract art) I wouldn't be taken seriously as an artist because my art would never make it into galleries. I'm not in the art world, so it doesn't matter what my ideas are.
motoxpro 27 days ago [-]
In terms of distribution or fitting in, this is not unique to you or this moment in time. Art has always been this way, even worse back in the day of having to get a painting in the Salons in Paris where it was judged by a few people. It's actually more common for this to be the case, as a truly unique idea doesn't fit in the the critics opinion of "art" ex. painters who only get famous years after death.
There are not many things in life that you can just "be good at" and the world unlocks. Even as an athlete, something very meritocratic, you have to convince someone to hire you onto a team and if you don't do it the correct way (college -> NBA/NFL) no one will care because you're not in the right "circles"
krapp 32 days ago [-]
I don't know, but the commenter would be wrong. Art is art regardless of its credibility in "the art world," whatever that means. I suppose they meant they couldn't be as famous as Jackson Pollock for doing what he did, which seems to be confusing the value of art with the value of celebrity (the "ability to be taken seriously".)
What made Jackson Pollock's work art was the intent behind it. What made him and others like him famous was the CIA (as inevitably mentioned elsewhere in this thread.)
randall 34 days ago [-]
wow. that’s awesome. i don’t understand why but i’m happy.
aqueueaqueue 34 days ago [-]
There is a question as to whether it used SWF back in the day. It is likely but also would Java Applets have still been an option then?
rasso 34 days ago [-]
I remember. It was written in Flash
jccalhoun 34 days ago [-]
archive.org's cache of the 2003 version tried to download a swf file. so it was flash
milesrout 34 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 34 days ago [-]
Could you please follow the site guidelines when posting to HN? They include:
"Please don't sneer"
and
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Of topics like these my father, a lover of all things art and photography, would say: "It doesn't matter if it's bad, and it doesn't matter that anyone can do it; he was the one who did it first."
bigstrat2003 34 days ago [-]
I don't agree with your dad. Whether something is good (a notoriously loaded question) and whether it's easy for anyone to do themselves matter a great deal. Being the first person to do something abhorrent would not be praiseworthy, nor would being the first to do something uninteresting. Pollock may well have been the first to do what he did, but it is still low effort slop that any three year old could trivially reproduce. Therefore he gets no points for being first, because he didn't do something worth doing to begin with.
noirbot 34 days ago [-]
This feels unnecessarily harsh - I can understand thinking Pollock shouldn't be as decorated or recognized, but "not worth doing to begin with" seems to cast a judgement on him having created something that feels mean-sprited. It's not as if Pollock was causing harm to others by making his pieces. I have plenty of friends who work out their stresses and needs to create by making things that will never be in a museum or sell for money. They may not even qualify for your approval as "art". Many are equally non-representational - just a mix of colors that struck their mood that day on a canvas. That doesn't mean they're not worth doing for them or maybe for those who care about them and received a piece of their work. I find some of them beautiful for reasons I can't explain.
The critique of if Pollock should be canonized as "a great artist" is and should be a different discussion. As far as I know, he wasn't out there trying to get his works in museums. Dismissing something he clearly cared about and had passion for as a complete waste of his life is insane to me. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, he was decidedly capable of other works that were more representational, but decided that he wanted to express himself in this way. This wasn't some hack with no other skills who got lucky.
yieldcrv 34 days ago [-]
It looks like people are more appreciate of everyone’s ability to express themselves adequately and garner influence to share
very onbrand with how this debate has gone so far!
I’m glad
34 days ago [-]
amadeuspagel 34 days ago [-]
Beautiful. Minimal interface. The domain itself is the only necessary explanation.
cattown 34 days ago [-]
People seem confused about the UI. You don't need to click, just move. Most keys on the keyboard correspond to a color. Shift + those keys sets the background.
I like it that there's no hint, it just rewards exploration and experimentation.
macintux 34 days ago [-]
Launching it on an iPad was a mystery. I assumed it was suffering from the HN hug of death until I tried to swipe back.
Wistar 33 days ago [-]
Me, too. Thought a script failed to fire on iPad/Safari.
cactusplant7374 34 days ago [-]
Clicking changes the color too.
hifikuno 34 days ago [-]
Hah! I waited far too long for the page to load. It wasn't until I moved my mouse to another window that I realized.
cjonas 34 days ago [-]
Same here! Figured it was the HN hug of death and left.
julianz 34 days ago [-]
It's cool, but that's definitely a Ralph Steadman background generator, much more than Pollock.
I've commented [0] on some of the hidden features (changing foreground and background colors with <letter/number> and <shift + letter/number> respectively) but also to note is there's some nice ascii art in the raw source (though the main bit is cut out by HN filters): view-source:https://jacksonpollock.org
I remember when the Jacksonpollock.org first came online there was a bit of drama around the fact that Miltos Manetas had taken Stamen’s original Flash file (well known within the flash community at the time but not so much outside) and re-hosted it without credit or permission. They sorted it out and Stamen were credited in the end but it opened my eyes to how much of contemporary art it’s actually marketing. (With reference here to Manetas not Pollock)
quanto 34 days ago [-]
What a wonderful demonstration of how a simple UI can create so much joy. Utility to Kolmogorov complexity ratio is quite high on this one.
CaramelGrudge 34 days ago [-]
I’ve played a lot with this years ago. Could have been between 10 and 15 years back even! Didn’t know it still existed. Thanks for sharing
qoez 34 days ago [-]
2003? Canvas wasn't a thing until the 2010s
jccalhoun 34 days ago [-]
I went on archive.org and it looks like the 2003 version used flash.
"Canvas was initially introduced by Apple for use in their own Mac OS X WebKit component in 2004,[1] powering applications like Dashboard widgets and the Safari browser. Later, in 2005, it was adopted in version 1.8 of Gecko browsers,[2] and Opera in 2006,[3] and standardized by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) on new proposed specifications for next generation web technologies.[4]
To think that someone actually made a lucrative career out of the analogue version of this. I suppose it was one step above hanging a blank canvas with a pretentious caption underneath.
codingdave 33 days ago [-]
He did not make a lucrative career out of his painting. He was fairly poor... just famous. And not even that until the last few years of his life.
"By 1989 Bacon was the most expensive living artist after one of his triptychs sold at Sotheby's for over US$6 million."
And:
"He died of a heart attack on 28 April 1992, aged 82. He bequeathed his estate (then valued at £11 million) to his heir and sole legatee John Edwards."
Sounds quite lucrative to me.
codingdave 33 days ago [-]
That would totally prove your point if this post was about Francis Bacon. It isn't.
hermitcrab 33 days ago [-]
Oops! ;0)
profunctor 33 days ago [-]
Have you seen them in real life? They are much more interesting in person.
gizajob 33 days ago [-]
“To me they look like bits of old lace” - Francis Bacon
Sn0wCoder 34 days ago [-]
The Paper.js library is neat if you like this site (found it looking through the source).
http://paperjs.org/
chris_wot 34 days ago [-]
Has anyone seen Blue Poles? It nearly brought down a government.
More fun than panda dataframes, at least at this hour.
ascorbic 34 days ago [-]
It's a lot of fun building these kinds of things. I made this a few years ago and got obsessed with modelling bezier curves for individual bristles and tweaking the tiny details of blend modes https://react-artboard.netlify.app/
viggity 34 days ago [-]
If splines/beziers are of any interest to you, I could not recommend these videos from Freya Holmer enough.
someone, once, attached different paint brushes to the branches of a tree, that could touch a canvas placed below.
The completely random, but compelling results, resemble nothing so much as a pollock
one of the few mad artists that I admire there work.
Also have lived with paintings done in his studio by an X's relative, who was attempting the same style, but in no way achiving what pollock himself did.
I do have a few random unknown artist works, that come close, and have a partial back story on two, and they were also, mad!
Mad but precious, and in this time there is little physical and financial room for people and the subculters they create to thrive, and so we are impoverished.
The app is cute, but it trivialises what was a huge reach into the unknown.
kilroy123 34 days ago [-]
How cool to see this. This last year, I helped the artist fix this and bring this back to life. Makes me smile to see it here. :)
Fun fact! Jackson Pollock, along with other abstract expressionists, was a CIA propaganda asset!
The CIA believed that abstract expressionism, with its unbound and individualistic style, could be associated with American freedoms, so they secretly funded the "Congress for Cultural Freedom", an anti-communist advocacy group that promoted American arts and culture, including abstract expressionism, through international art shows and publications.
Art or writings that touched on US racism (Pollock was contemporaneous with numerous lynchings) and imperialism (Guatemala, Iran, Greece, Korea) were, of course, passed over.
Ever since I learned this, I have lost all emotional appreciation for his works. While before they seemed free, now they seem cheap.
bazoom42 34 days ago [-]
CIA also promoted jazz music which was very effective in getting European intellectuals and artists to appreciate American culture more.
But I don’t see how that should make you appreciate jazz music itself any more or less.
When I look at ludicrously priced 'conceptual art' and 'abstract expressionism' I see decadence, not freedom.
krapp 32 days ago [-]
The freedom to express a decadence that would be forbidden by the USSR. That's the entire point.
skrebbel 34 days ago [-]
> Ever since I learned this, I have lost all emotional appreciation for his works. While before they seemed free, now they seem cheap.
I don't understand this. Because he got paid for it, the work is cheap? Do you think he would've made different works if the CIA hadn't funded his art shows? I struggle to imagine what a Pollock "about" racism would look like, and how the CIA would notice that it's about racism.
I mean you do you, I don't mean to tell you you can't dislike someone's art. I just really don't get it :D
alt227 34 days ago [-]
It reeks of the same stench as cancel culture. Once some people have seen a connection to something they dont like, they just cant bring themselves to enjoy that thing anymore. I guess those sorts of people like to fixate on what they hate.
rexpop 33 days ago [-]
> I struggle to imagine what a Pollock "about" racism would look like
That Pollock's style cannot address racism is, possibly, why it was promoted over more politically salient schools.
0x1ceb00da 34 days ago [-]
It was a money laundering scheme.
Deprogrammer9 34 days ago [-]
They killed him knowing his art would skyrocket in price. They still have his art on their walls to this day.
rexpop 34 days ago [-]
This is a vague and baseless conspiracy theory.
fitsumbelay 34 days ago [-]
the main reason why I el-you-vee love this is that it's what my first sketches in processing ( minus the obligatory "random" color generation on every mouse click ( somehow those colors where never really random ) ) plus some algo for extra splotches around curves, it looks like. a very simple starting point elevated to a super cool thing.
Can someone help me? I can't get to the main page, but it draws what looks like a toddlers art work when I try and use it.
Firefox on Linux.
Waterluvian 34 days ago [-]
I want this but multitouch so badly.
BeFlatXIII 34 days ago [-]
This brings back fond memories of playing around in KidPix in elementary school.
osehgol 34 days ago [-]
absolutely wonderful, thank you
Deprogrammer9 34 days ago [-]
Pollock’s art is not just random splashes but a sophisticated interaction of movement, gravity, and fluid dynamics, creating fractal-like structures. This fractal nature might contribute to why people find his work visually compelling—it resonates with patterns we see in nature.
jfengel 34 days ago [-]
What are your thoughts if I don't find it compelling? Is that the end of it, or is there some reason for me to keep seeking emotional resonance in it?
bigstrat2003 34 days ago [-]
I mean, it's just random splashes. I don't think there's a reason to convince yourself that there is some compelling hidden meaning to it.
noirbot 34 days ago [-]
It's not any more random than where you happen to be standing in relation to the clouds at sunset. There's plenty of days that doesn't have any emotional resonance to me, but some days it does. I wouldn't dwell on it, and if you happen to see a piece in person some day, maybe it strikes you differently.
jfengel 34 days ago [-]
I haven't spent much time with Pollock, but I've seen an awful lot of Rothkos. Very different style but similar levels of "that looks like it took no thought and has nothing to say".
I'm content to say Rothko isn't for me, but I'll reserve judgment on Pollock until I can spend more time in those galleries.
That is a really good point. I've put a lot of effort into understanding things that didn't appeal and some of them are now very meaningful to me. I thought literature was absurd and now I direct Shakespeare plays.
So... I'll think on that.
chefandy 34 days ago [-]
This is a fun toy. I have no problem naming toys after the serious people and things that inspired it. For all I know, that is exactly what the author of this toy intended to do. Toy isn’t even a denigrating term — play is critically important to many things, especially in visual art.
What gets old is the hubris of the tech world thinking that an artist’s intention and methods boil down to a superficial ‘style’— devoid of granular stroke-by-stroke intention, context, or meaning which you can apply to any arbitrary subject or setting to effectively create new works by that artist.
34 days ago [-]
umvi 34 days ago [-]
To me this reads like someone praising the exquisite quality of the invisible Egyptian cotton forming the emperor's clothes
psytrancefan 34 days ago [-]
This app is as interesting as Pollocks's art. A few moments of "interesting" then you close the browser and move on.
UberFly 34 days ago [-]
Pollock's "art" is generous. The guy splashed random paint around. Buyers would come in and point to the section that "spoke" to them. He'd cut out that section, sign it, and extract thousands from these idiots. Actually, good for him come to think of it.
criddell 34 days ago [-]
Idiots, eh? I’m guessing most of those original buyers don’t have a lot of regret for buying something that made them happy.
UberFly 33 days ago [-]
Ok fine. Happy idiots.
criddell 33 days ago [-]
How about happy, wealthy idiots? Any JP piece bought directly early on probably is worth 100x now.
34 days ago [-]
smrtkobylam 34 days ago [-]
Great! Is this website funded by CIA as well?
thesparks 34 days ago [-]
Can someone with ChatGPT Pro use Operator and ask it to move the mouse to create a beautiful painting and see what happens?
FWIW the CIA does not run Hacker News. (that I know of)
tptacek 34 days ago [-]
You believe what we want you to believe.
bdangubic 34 days ago [-]
if you have to ask this question you are in a wrong place :)
krism 34 days ago [-]
Amazing!!!
helsinki 34 days ago [-]
Make this a Vision Pro app, please.
yapyap 34 days ago [-]
lol not gonna lie I thought it got the HN hug of death at first
Deprogrammer9 34 days ago [-]
it got old fast lol but for a few minutes I was into it.
msla 34 days ago [-]
Here's a topic I don't see people engaging with: I could in principle make the same kinds of completely abstract paintings Pollock did, but if I do it, it won't be art because I'm not in the art world. I have no access to galleries, I have no patrons, and I generally don't move in those circles, so I have no ability to be taken seriously for doing it.
jonahx 34 days ago [-]
It would be still be art but no, you wouldn't be taken seriously.
To some extent succeeding at art is by definition succeeding in those circles, whether through politics, a chance patron or gallery owner fixating on you, raw unignorable talent, etc. A related definition is succeeding by sheer popularity and fame, like a Banksy, though he's succeeded in both ways. I don't think this insight undermines the art world wholesale, though it definitely suggests (correctly) that luck plays role, that not all great artists succeed, and that not all successful artists are great. Most games in life are like this.
plufz 34 days ago [-]
Do you think simply copying a 70 year old idea would make you a world famous artist if you had more connections in art?
(Not that abstract painting really describes what made Pollock famous, action painting is obviously it.)
msla 34 days ago [-]
> Do you think simply copying a 70 year old idea would make you a world famous artist if you had more connections in art?
No, I meant like Pollock in terms of being completely non-representational.
schneems 34 days ago [-]
I think part of what makes an artist stand out in a medium like this is that they are able to stand out in a medium like this.
Going and seeing something like “the fountain” (Duchamp) is surely accompanied by many people remarking “I could have made that” and it could be true, but they didn’t. And that’s the difference.
To some degree that accessibility makes some of these things even more interesting.
I brought up a Dadaism piece on purpose. In fascism, one tool of the leaders was to declare some art pure and acceptable and some as “not art.” Dadaism was a rebuke of the idea: that authority can or cannot tell us what art is and isn’t.
Dadaism is intentionally absurdist. And it’s that quality that many would use to discredit it, is the very thing that makes it so powerful (to some).
Not saying that pollock is playing with absurdism, but saying that sometimes the things that make something “not art” or “not interesting” to one person are the things that elevate it to another.
Not sure if that’s what you were asking, but that’s a riff I was inspired to share.
ggm 34 days ago [-]
There are now suggestions he buried representational subjects in the field. Suggestions his bipolar made it happen and then get buried.
I tend to think it's post hoc reasoning by bored art critics and Pareidolia.
(I took out several dozen lines of whitespace from this post. Looks like the green graphic didn't come through.)
msuvakov 34 days ago [-]
Thanks. It seems that some UTF-8 characters are not accepted as part of the comment. Anyone who wants to see the rabbit should check the page source :)
Repin 33 days ago [-]
[dead]
34 days ago [-]
nayeem3650 34 days ago [-]
[dead]
osehgol 34 days ago [-]
[dupe]
codr7 34 days ago [-]
Cool, but needs color.
NAHWheatCracker 34 days ago [-]
Click and it changes colors.
KTibow 34 days ago [-]
Checking the source, you could also use your keyboard (eg 0-9 is a grayscale palette).
After many experiments, the most realistic was painting a thick line and then erasing tiny randomly sized rectangles out of it.
https://gilleain.blogspot.com/2008/11/chalky.html
Numbers set grey scale.
Letters set colors (b=blue, r=red, y=yellow, etc).
Mouse click sets random color.
Spacebar or double-click resets canvas.
I didn't discover this, comment stolen from previous discussion (thank you Cactus2018!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24284711
Shift+w = white background
Shift+9 = dark gray background
Shift+d = black background
Also I found out the color letters aren't limited to "rgbyo", there's a color for nearly every letter.
d = black
w = white
u = umber (nice brown)
i = teal
p = cream
s = salmon
l = slightly muted yellow
Check the code at view-source:https://jacksonpollock.org/js/myScript.js for more!
"m" brings up some info about the person who made this, Miltos Manetas. Thank you Miltos!
Something funny is happening; as I understand it, it is a flash thing reimplemented.
https://aaqeastend.com/contents/aaq-portfolio-jackson-polloc...
And we often see two of the same topics thriving on the HN front page.
Most often that would be a failure on our part. But it's good for the mods to fail sometimes.
Like, say, a submission on Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s art follow by a submission on the 27 Club.
Usually the best place for such links is in the comments of the existing thread.
Of course, once enough time has gone by, such links can become first-rate submissions in their own right!
Pollock used a lot of connected ink splotches, Steadman's 'inkling' stuff is usually large white-space separated splotches, an effect that is impossible with this tool.
also Steadman moved away from that eventually, whereas Pollock leaned into it until death.
Moreover Pollocks' art was the splotches, whereas it was usually an accoutrement for Steadman around a different -- usually framed -- perspective.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nmzppQU-lqA
So now, I hope every here tries to make their own Pollock art.
https://www.moma.org/artists/4675-jackson-pollock
This reminds me of something that happened to me in the early 90s. I went to a local computer show (where local distributors would show new hardware) with a friend who's an artist. There was a booth with a color Mac, probably an LC or something like that, running Mac Paint. People were doodling on it, playing around with the spray can and the text tool, and it looked like random stuff thrown on a canvas. Not having a computer at home, my friend was curious, and queued to play with it.
When my friend got a turn on the Mac, first time on a Mac using Mac Paint, he made a drawing that genuinely looked like a piece of art. If there had been a printer nearby, I could have printed it out and put it on my wall, and nobody would have thought that this was a somebody's first time using Mac Paint.
Art is a genuine skill, and you will see the difference between an artist and a random person regardless of the canvas they use.
I guess this also reminds me of the introduction of the Amiga, with Warhol using the paint can to fill in sections of a photo of Debbie Harry. Technically, this is something everybody can do, but Warhol knew which colors to pick, which sections to color, and which choices to make to create something that actually looks great.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hart_Benton_(painter)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/nyregion/a-review-of-men-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269430
Jackson Pollock - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37876645 - Oct 2023 (2 comments)
Jacksonpollock.org (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269430 - Aug 2020 (151 comments)
> Here's a topic I don't see people engaging with: I could in principle make the same kinds of completely abstract paintings Pollock did, but if I do it, it won't be art because I'm not in the art world. I have no access to galleries, I have no patrons, and I generally don't move in those circles, so I have no ability to be taken seriously for doing it.
It's that someone had the wild thought to do it in the first place.
A cynical take is that people are just so far away from the level that they see the execution as the difficult part. Like saying, I could type out the linux kernal.
There are not many things in life that you can just "be good at" and the world unlocks. Even as an athlete, something very meritocratic, you have to convince someone to hire you onto a team and if you don't do it the correct way (college -> NBA/NFL) no one will care because you're not in the right "circles"
What made Jackson Pollock's work art was the intent behind it. What made him and others like him famous was the CIA (as inevitably mentioned elsewhere in this thread.)
"Please don't sneer"
and
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The critique of if Pollock should be canonized as "a great artist" is and should be a different discussion. As far as I know, he wasn't out there trying to get his works in museums. Dismissing something he clearly cared about and had passion for as a complete waste of his life is insane to me. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, he was decidedly capable of other works that were more representational, but decided that he wanted to express himself in this way. This wasn't some hack with no other skills who got lucky.
very onbrand with how this debate has gone so far!
I’m glad
I like it that there's no hint, it just rewards exploration and experimentation.
The double-click to clear is too sensitive for me. I keep accidentally clearing when I try to go fast.
0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487092
"Canvas was initially introduced by Apple for use in their own Mac OS X WebKit component in 2004,[1] powering applications like Dashboard widgets and the Safari browser. Later, in 2005, it was adopted in version 1.8 of Gecko browsers,[2] and Opera in 2006,[3] and standardized by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) on new proposed specifications for next generation web technologies.[4]
"
https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
"By 1989 Bacon was the most expensive living artist after one of his triptychs sold at Sotheby's for over US$6 million."
And:
"He died of a heart attack on 28 April 1992, aged 82. He bequeathed his estate (then valued at £11 million) to his heir and sole legatee John Edwards."
Sounds quite lucrative to me.
There is one born every minute.
"You should also try Mondrian and Me."
I did, and it's as you would expect:
https://mondrianandme.com/
More fun than panda dataframes, at least at this hour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwxzDHniEw
Here is the Artist's home page, btw:
https://manetas.com/timeline.com/en/
The CIA believed that abstract expressionism, with its unbound and individualistic style, could be associated with American freedoms, so they secretly funded the "Congress for Cultural Freedom", an anti-communist advocacy group that promoted American arts and culture, including abstract expressionism, through international art shows and publications.
Art or writings that touched on US racism (Pollock was contemporaneous with numerous lynchings) and imperialism (Guatemala, Iran, Greece, Korea) were, of course, passed over.
Ever since I learned this, I have lost all emotional appreciation for his works. While before they seemed free, now they seem cheap.
But I don’t see how that should make you appreciate jazz music itself any more or less.
Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204 - June 2023 (332 comments)
https://www.openculture.com/2023/10/how-the-cia-secretly-use...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10462602
I don't understand this. Because he got paid for it, the work is cheap? Do you think he would've made different works if the CIA hadn't funded his art shows? I struggle to imagine what a Pollock "about" racism would look like, and how the CIA would notice that it's about racism.
I mean you do you, I don't mean to tell you you can't dislike someone's art. I just really don't get it :D
That Pollock's style cannot address racism is, possibly, why it was promoted over more politically salient schools.
Firefox on Linux.
I'm content to say Rothko isn't for me, but I'll reserve judgment on Pollock until I can spend more time in those galleries.
So... I'll think on that.
What gets old is the hubris of the tech world thinking that an artist’s intention and methods boil down to a superficial ‘style’— devoid of granular stroke-by-stroke intention, context, or meaning which you can apply to any arbitrary subject or setting to effectively create new works by that artist.
FWIW the CIA does not run Hacker News. (that I know of)
To some extent succeeding at art is by definition succeeding in those circles, whether through politics, a chance patron or gallery owner fixating on you, raw unignorable talent, etc. A related definition is succeeding by sheer popularity and fame, like a Banksy, though he's succeeded in both ways. I don't think this insight undermines the art world wholesale, though it definitely suggests (correctly) that luck plays role, that not all great artists succeed, and that not all successful artists are great. Most games in life are like this.
(Not that abstract painting really describes what made Pollock famous, action painting is obviously it.)
No, I meant like Pollock in terms of being completely non-representational.
Going and seeing something like “the fountain” (Duchamp) is surely accompanied by many people remarking “I could have made that” and it could be true, but they didn’t. And that’s the difference.
To some degree that accessibility makes some of these things even more interesting.
I brought up a Dadaism piece on purpose. In fascism, one tool of the leaders was to declare some art pure and acceptable and some as “not art.” Dadaism was a rebuke of the idea: that authority can or cannot tell us what art is and isn’t.
Dadaism is intentionally absurdist. And it’s that quality that many would use to discredit it, is the very thing that makes it so powerful (to some).
Not saying that pollock is playing with absurdism, but saying that sometimes the things that make something “not art” or “not interesting” to one person are the things that elevate it to another.
Not sure if that’s what you were asking, but that’s a riff I was inspired to share.
I tend to think it's post hoc reasoning by bored art critics and Pareidolia.