>On the other hand, if he had spent 5 months on photoshop at any point in the past 20 years,
On yet another (third) hand maybe not. It is like saying. "Yeah look he can bike 100 miles _but_ just imagine if he had his drivers' license, he could have driven 2000 miles!". Yeah maybe he could. But it wouldn't be the same story.
> The art is (would be) much better, and useful without the story.
Not matter how much we try it is always tied to the creator. The same doodle can be made by me, but if an elephant does it OMG it is amazing, sell it for $200k! If you don't see the creator or know how they are, it is tied indirectly to them via understanding of the work went into it. For example, maybe I don't know the name but if someone shows me a a large pointillist painting it will be impressive and the work put into it is part of it.
How someone looks at a beautiful piece of art (regardless of whether it's done in Paint, Photoshop or yak dung) and claim "the examples shown have 0 value of any kind" without the age, software and year prefix, is beyond me.
I'd love to have the forest paint in particular in my living room.
Edit: And you've heavily edited your original post to the point it has completely lost its original context. As I recall, what you originally wrote left no room for "misinterpretation" or else that's rather like claiming you intended to fly to Canada and bought a plane ticket to Russia.
Pieces like these (and others, like a 5 year old's painting) can have monetary value.
People might place value on its level of enjoyment, such as yourself.
But artistically, you'd be hard pressed to find any value in this due to its only merit being "made in Windows 95 in 2013" or "made by a 7 year old" or whatever.
Typically, intentionally doing work in a difficult manner for the sake of making it hard on yourself isn't rewarded because it doesn't really add anything.
This piece isn't made better because it was made in Windows 95 and Paint, yet that's the only reason why we're talking about it.
I couldn't disagree with you more. There's a rich tradition[1] in the creative world of improving a product through self-imposed restrictions. Sure, you don't get any artistic credit just because you did something in a difficult way; a single red square has the same merit whether you clicked each pixel in turn or used a flood tool. But exploring the limits of a medium itself certainly does.
How something is made can be a significant part of the price. I remember a report on a painting that was unsigned. Experts were divided on who had painted it. I can't recall the painter's name, but if it was him, the painting was worth $200k. If it was one of his students, as half the experts thought, it was worth $2k. Same painting - only thing different is the 'metadata' for who made it, which made up literally 99% of the value.
Similarly, there is art out there where an aficionado knows how difficult it is to do and hence will pay more for it, where a layperson will say "what crap" and refuse it. The story of a piece often has value over and above the piece itself - and making something to a certain level of quality while using inferior tools can be a valid part of that story.
Typically, extra labor -- that is rewarded -- for an art piece is going to be something that is pertinent for some common end.
Using Windows 95 to paint something doesn't add anything to the end of a piece.
Using marble and creating a structure that looks like a fluid river (or flowing something) adds value to the piece even though it was hard.
Using marble, period, adds value simply because the work is in marble (monetary value) and represents a skill that you can produce works of art in marble. Using Windows 95 means you can use dated technology to produce literally the same thing that Photoshop CS6 could product (most likely in less time): a JPG.
It literally is the same difference as painting a scene with your hands, and then doing it with your feet. Nothing was added and the work is no different, but you did it with your feet.
Again, how it's made forms the story around the piece. If you saw that painting in a jumble sale, with no story, it is irrelevant how it's made. But if you know it was painted with someone's feet, then that becomes part of your appreciation of it, and hence it can become more valuable to you.
I have a small framed bit of Chinese calligraphy ("Laugh") in my bedroom. It's nice in its own way, but nothing special. It was, however, given to me by my half-sister who I only got to know for a couple of years before she died from cancer. That bit of art has a particular story attached to it now, and that story makes it worth so much more to certain people (being 'me', basically) despite the art itself being mundane. The story associated with a piece has a value of its own, sometimes entirely orthogonal to the piece itself.
> But artistically, you'd be hard pressed to find any value in this due to its only merit being "made in Windows 95 in 2013" or "made by a 7 year old" or whatever.
Erm..maybe. Is Erwin Wurm's art art? It is in galleries. It does have monetary value. But it is conceptual. It is basically says here put 15 sweaters on. Or stick your head into a hole in the wooden fence. Is that art? What if I stuck my head in a wooden fence would that be art. What if I told by Wurm to do it and someone took a photo or video of it? Is that art?
It is hard to defend the position of inherent objective artistic value. You are welcome to try it. Art to me has always been an extension of the artist, their life, story motivation and work. On its own it is just up to the art critics to tell us from their high places what is art and what isn't. And that seems to be pretty arbitrary to me so I don't buy that. But maybe you can humor us and give a set of criteria so we can better pick between genuine art and the fake art.
Art is quite subjective, and opinions are... well, personal. Can you declare I'd like Mona Lisa, and not like Hal's work? This guy's work is specifically 8-bit art, where you are meant to see the pixels.
But this argument is like telling painters they produce stuff of no value because they could just take a photograph. Or use a painting effect if they insist on the style.
Art has often a self-limiting aspect that makes it beautiful.
Do you mean that they're worthless because he could have done so much better? Or that the methods are worthless because they won't translate to other programs? Or do you literally mean that they're worthless because they were done in MS paint?
EDIT: Ah, your edit clarified. Yes, you want to move away from bad tools ASAP. Which means that nobody here should be using MS paint when Gimp, Paint.net, Krita and others are available free of charge.
They're both limiting media; the only variant here is degree. The Excel artist prints at a higher resolution... and that's about the only difference really. This is contradictory to your original assertion that it was "worthless" because of the technique used.
Quality of the lines, the resolution, the medium are all irrelevant when art considered on an individual basis and not comparatively.
For the record, I feel like creating my own piece. Not in Paint, but with snips of fabric, paper and glue. It will be a lot of effort, but that effort will be fulfilling. Maybe that's another reason why I appreciate this. There's effort involved that aren't necessary.
But then most of Pollock's work is just splatters of paint without "passion" isn't?
Edit: Arrrgh! I hate it when people delete posts. Now I don't remember what the hell I was replying to or what arguments were made.
Actually, I think Pollock's work is more the other way around — the pieces are the remnant of a bit of performance art the viewer never got to see. While I'm not in any sense a fan of the work aesthetically, it feels even more of a cheat since the process was what was important, not the product. Neither do I particularly care what sort of anguish Mark Rothko may have been feeling when he put a black border around a yellow rectangle — however poetic his intent may have been, he had a piss-poor way of expressing himself. At least the Warhols and Lichtensteins of the period were authentic: they were unashamedly in it for the fame and the bucks.
Apply a filter. There is a Photoshop filter for it, I am pretty sure. Which again brings us to a discussion point. Would that be art? What if this man spend time building a Photoshop filter and starting applying the "pointillism" filter to random images. What if he wrote a script scraped the web, applied the filter and then published it out in his image archive. Would that be impressive? Would we have heard about him?
That's not what he is doing though. He is actually manipulating the pixels, applying the filter will not give him any control over the pixels. He wants to do pointillism, not achieve a pointillism-like effect on a regular painting.
Sorry, I think you misunderstood my intention. I was sarcastic. Read my other post. The GP was saying how well had he spent more hours with Photoshop he could have gotten so much better. Then Parent post said how exactly would have improved the art and my sarcastic response was well just applying a filter.
