[tptacek]

From Maciej:

As for 1, Aaron Swartz sent us both this quote the first time you and I had this argument, and I'm surprised you've forgotten it. It's from Graham Larkin, curator of the National Gallery of Canada, whom he asked to adjudicate your claim:

""By even the most conservative standards (which your buddy seem to be applying), you'd need to go at least a few decades further, into the High Renaissance. Julius II's didn't even start commissioning Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Vatican Stanze (School of Athens &c) didn't start until 1508. These works don't exactly represent a decline, except by Preraphealite standards which would judge them as over-sophisitcated and lacking in primitive simplicity.

(That's IT: your friend's a Preraphaelite! Well history is not on his or her side; such Victorian predilections are a mere blip in the history of Western aesthetics.)

The generation after the giant Raphael (and the giant Durer in the North) is a much better candidate for cultural and artistic decline--a story complicated by Michaelangelo's inconvenient longevity. Historians have often pointed to the 1527 Sack of Rome as a downturn in artistic ferment, or at least in the unparalleled ascendancy of Italy. I would add that Western painting of around 1500 can scarcely be separated from the other visual arts, including the still-young (to the West) technology of print, brought to incredible levels of sophistication by Durer and others in precisely the post-1500 decades. One wonders whether your friend meant "1500" or "like, 1500.""

I don't know who got the better half of the argument but I'm unprepared to respond to the curator of the National Gallery of Canada, enjoined to resolve an Internet message board argument, by suggesting that Maciej simply wrote copy that made sense to people who know nothing about art.

Again: I have no idea who's right or wrong in this "debate", but I find it fascinating, and I found Maciej's "essay" a joy to read. It was stylish, it was fun, it got me to buy that Minnaert book for my wife which earned me huge relationship points, and now I can at least tell you who Hals is.

[pg]

I hesitate to wade into this dispute again, but what this curator says doesn't contradict what I wrote. In fact, I agree with him. What I wrote in H&P was

"The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed."

I didn't say that nothing after was as good as the work of that period, just that nothing after was better.

I thought carefully about that sentence when I wrote it. If I'd meant to say that the fifteenth century represented a peak no one since had attained, I would have written that. I didn't because (a) it's probably not true, and (b) that wasn't the point I was trying to make. If you go back and read the part of the essay where I said this, the point I was making was that in some fields, some of the best work is done very early on; that instead of the slow buildup you might expect, people are so excited about the new possibilities that work in the field reaches "cruising altitude" almost immediately.

To refute what I actually wrote, someone would have to produce something made after 1500 that they were willing to claim was better than everything made between 1430 and 1500. Not just as good, but better. That's not what our curator is claiming, and I doubt you could find any art historian who would.

[idlewords]

You've now tied yourself in the curious knot of claiming that there are some paintings created after 1500 that are exactly as good as the best works of the earlier era, but no better, and that that's what you meant to say all along.

What's particularly weird about this argument is that is would not affect your essay at all to concede that, say, the period called the 'Golden Age of Dutch Painting', or the Golden Age of Spanish Painting, or one of the several other periods that art historians (inconveniently for you) commonly refer to as Golden ages of painting produced better work that the somewhat fussy and stylized paintings of the Renaissance, and that you just got excited because you really like Leonardo.

But you seem unwilling to back down from any claim once you've made it in print, no matter how silly ("Cezanne couldn't draw!"), and so we get this peculiar kind of weaseling.

Western art, like Western music or mathematics, is a cumulative enterprise, but you've done the equivalent of claiming Pythagoras was the best mathematician ever, and as evidence pointing to the fact that no serious historian of mathematics has ever said in print that Pythagoras was a worse mathematician than Euler or Gauss, when it would not occur to anyone else to think in those terms.

Apart from the fact that this is just blatant argument from authority ("no art historian would disagree with me! Not even this one, who just disagreed!"), it also a disservice to your readers, who are taking it on faith that you know what you are talking about. As Aaron's correspondence demonstrates, when someone finally does corner an art historian, and bends the poor guy's mind into thinking of the history of Western painting in the same weird categories you do, he'll politely say that you're completely full of it.

Not being an expert in philosophy, or economic history, or the trade union movement, but being a longtime student of your writing style, I suspect the same thing would happen in those fields. I just happen to know art history, so when you write about that I can poke the holes myself.

You've been coasting on the fact that most of your readers are technical people who will take the analogies you strip-mine from the humanities at face value because of their respect for you as a clever guy. You can probably continue coasting on it for the remainder of your career.

But I think you'll find that a little more humility, intellectual honesty and the confidence to abandon the occasional overeager metaphor, rather than trying at all costs to defend it, would make you an even better writer than you think you are now. Maybe not a better writer than EB White, but possibly exactly as good.

[gruseom]

You've now tied yourself in the curious knot of [...]

You keep saying things like this (here and in earlier threads) as if that must make them true. But you haven't shown anything of the kind.

"Unsurpassed" means ≧, not ﹥. You're critiquing as if PG wrote ﹥, which would have been a much stronger claim (indeed, one everyone agrees is silly). When PG says he chose the word "unsurpassed" precisely because it means ≧, you respond with accusations of disingenuousness. Exactly what part is he supposed to be lying about: what he wrote, or what the word means?

Your curator's quote (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984644) doesn't fit what you claim either. It's clear that he's refuting ﹥, not ≧: he says that paintings after 1500 "don't represent a decline" (i.e. ﹥ is wrong), not that they do represent an improvement (which would be the negation of ≧).

Meanwhile you point to authority left and right while claiming that the other guy is doing it and make all kinds of personal attacks ("weenis"? really?) while accusing the other guy of arrogance. It makes the reader (this reader, at least) wonder what your problem is.

Incidentally, I appreciate most of what you write. It's smart and incisive, and when it's funny it's often damn funny. That's what makes this thread and its predecessor so weird.

[pg]

Only as good using the usual large margins for error people use when judging art. E.g. I'm willing to say that Leonardo was better than Parmigianino. I'd think twice before saying he was better than Rembrandt. Or vice versa.

This isn't some idiosyncracy of mine. Most art historians make comparisons at about that level of precision.

I'm willing to concede the point on anything that (a) I actually wrote, and (b) that's been refuted. E.g. I pointed out what I actually wrote, and invited you to refute it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=985662

Though you claim to be an expert in art history, mistakes on the scale of the one I quoted in the link above make me think you haven't studied it as thoroughly as I have. I'm not trying to be snarky by emphasizing your mistakes; there's just no other way for the "technical people" you mention to decide who to believe.

It's actually an interesting question which fields are cumulative, and to what degree, and why they differ. E.g. math is entirely so, which is why I'd be very reluctant to compare different mathematicians from different eras. Whereas progress in the "soft" sciences is less cumulative, and in the arts much less.

[ellyagg]

It's funny you talk about argument from authority. Perhaps you don't realize this, but the steady ad hominem undercurrent of your commentary doesn't make you seem very convincing. "I must be right because Graham isn't humble, intellectually honest, and confident." And, of course, "confidence to abandon the occasional overeager metaphor" is a sneaky way to assert that you've proved an overeager metaphor, which you haven't.

[wglb]

You seem to be criticizing pg for arguing from authority, but your (poorly toned, impolite) rant claims authority 1) by your claim to know about art history 2) the cornered art historian.