[khendron]

This brings to mind the time I was at the national art gallery listening to a tour/talk by a well renowned sculptor.

Somebody in the group gestured to one of the pieces and asked “does the transition of the floor from green to grey signify the subject’s disillusionment with current environmental policies and the increasing hopelessness of contemporary civilization?”

The artist’s reply was “I ran out of green.”

[Cass]

The fun thing about art criticism, and the reason I firmly believe in the "death of the author" school of critique, is that even the choices an artist made in the face of constraints, or as a snap decision at three am, often do carry some meaning, and not always one the artist themselves recognize, either.

Presumably they could've gone out and gotten more green. They could've transitioned to bright blue, or purple, or yellow. But they looked at the piece done in grey, and instead of going "Yikes, that's way more bleak than I thought it would be, I'm gonna buy some more green and redo this," they seem to be satisfied with the final piece.

And that means that interpretations that find meaning in the color choice aren't necessarily invalid just because the artist wasn't consciously thinking about what they were doing when they ran out of green at 3 am. Or, for that matter, that an interpretation of an art piece can't be valid just because it's counter to what the artist themselves had in mind.

[willhinsa]

I believe in “death of the author” because I know how GIF should be pronounced!

I hope this comment is a gift of laughter to you in your day.

[SllX]

Today I learned I have been pronouncing “gift” wrong my entire life and I should have been conforming to the “g” in “gif” or in “ginger”.

[jjulius]

Gee, I know some gigantic, gentle, geriatric giraffes who would take umbridge with that pronunciation.

[nosianu]

Because everybody knows GIF means Giraffe Interchange Format!

It was invented by rangers in the Serengeti for keeping track of Giraffes changing between areas. They made graphics illustrating those movements, and the format they used became knows as GIF. That's the secret history of the image format.

[sparky_z]

The P in JPEG stands for "photographic". Do you pronounce it "jay-feg"?

[nosianu]

The situation is different. The first letter in "photo" is not the "p" but the "ph". They are one. The "h" is a modifier. In "graphics" there is no modifier on the "g".

TL;DR H as modifier was introduced when translating Greek and they were lacking appropriate letters in Latin.

https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29625/origin...

https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-88... -- last answer by Anastasio de la Luna (and a few other answers there too)

> I'm a phoneticist and a general linguist and "PH" and "F" are, indeed, pronounced the same, and are both represented by /f/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Greek Phi was once pronounced as a hard "P" in Ancient Greek. So, Latin inscriptions wrote it as "PH" to show that it's a P sound, but with more air with H. As Greek changed, so did the Greek based English words. In Modern Greek, Phi is pronounced as "F", and no longer like "PH"/a hard P.

[PickledHotdog]

"What if F Scott Fitzgerald came up to earth, said "It's pronounced Jatsby", then left?"

[GoodbyeMrChips]

> "What if F Scott Fitzgerald came up to earth, said "It's pronounced Jatsby", then left?"

Oh what you don't know!

Robert Louis Stevensons 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', the pronunciation of Jekyll should be "Jyeec-ill" (rhymes with 'treacle') and not "Jek-ill".

Stevenson was of course Scottish, and this is how the Scots name is pronounced. However, the latter pronunciation for the books title has come into more common use for some reason.

[PickledHotdog]

.....I so badly don't want this to be true, but in my heart I think I know it is!

[sangnoir]

Yikes! The gig is up,after all that overwhelming evidence.

[karmakaze]

Does this mean that 'char' is also pronounced 'care'?

[aspenmayer]

When it’s short for character, sure.

[karmakaze]

Are you being serious? I only knew one person who did this in real life, and even they said it almost like 'car'.

[aspenmayer]

Totally serious. I think this pronunciation varies with accent.

[mordymoop]

Or “charisma”!

[0xabe]

I had a professor who pronounced char as in “char-broiled”. At least it rhymed when she constantly repeated “char star”, referring to char pointers (char*).

[karmakaze]

That's how I learned it using C in the 80s. Maybe Millennials are redefining it too.

[ralferoo]

This is how most programmers in the UK refer to it too.

[echelon]

I like that we're looking at random gesticulations in state space traversal and ascribing complex social meaning to them.

Nobody ever ponders whether the artist's blood sugar was low or if their gut microbiome was misbehaving.

I think it speaks volumes for how the human brain works. How we interpret the world and look for the meaning in things.

[dTal]

https://xkcd.com/904/

[vidarh]

The problem I have with this is that you rarely have the information to do anything more than take wild guesses, and way to often it is used to make confident assertions without basis in anything but preconceptions.

It makes me see art criticism as largely an exercise in fiction writing.

[kennywinker]

To push back a little on this “it’s not that deep” line of thinking - maybe not in this case but certainly in the past when colours were rare and expensive - “i ran out of green” is something an artist with a patron or a wealthy background would be much less likely to say - while another artist with less sound financials might be constantly running short of green.

The colours used by an artist can hint at their financial position, it is certainly influenced by the science of pigments at the time, and even global trade patterns, extreme weather events in the past, war, etc.

I ran out of green can mean different things depending on circumstances. Some of those things are pretty interesting. Sometimes even a not that deep reason is actually pretty deep. :)

[ivanhoe]

The realistic style of old times also forced the authors to use subtle and hidden symbolism to express themselves so that the main story of the image (which was usually pre-ordered) was not affected. Paintings were meant to be a decoration or a source of religious inspiration, and certainly not an artist's personal expression - and they'd be out of business very quickly if they didn't follow the rules. Now we view the art very differently.

[TomK32]

Samuel Beckett on the question who or what is Godot answered "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." [1]

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/r...

[code_duck]

This is what drove me nuts about literary and art classes, in addition to working in an artistic field. I would read artist statements from other artists and think wow, that’s a bit overblown, then talk to them, and it turned they thought it was BS too. But it was what curators and collectors were looking for. In literature classes, teachers would have specific interpretations about symbolism of small details and expect us to share the same interpretation and repeat it on tests.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Curators and gallery owners absolutely demand this.

"Everything you need to know is already hanging on the wall" is not considered an acceptable response.

The work needs to question, challenge, interrogate, and subvert, and artists definitely need to Be Interested in specific culturally niche things.

Lit crit, curation, the gallery scene, and visual and musical criticism are alternative industries - somewhere between symbiotic and parasitic on the creators who make the art.

You can make a very fine career for yourself by developing a reputation for making outrageous statements about other people's work. Popular music journalism isn't too bad at this, but by the time you get to academia it all gets very rarefied, meta, bullshitty, and (in reality) aggressively careerist.

[zitterbewegung]

One day I was doing a presentation about my startup and one of the video files wasn't playing so I had to stall for time. I gave an anecdote about my background and after the presentation people started asking me if I did standup comedy and I responded "I guess I do now".

Also, I think I was stalling too well because people remember me being funny instead of what the presentation was about ...

[voidfunc]

I have a liberal arts degree and this reminds me so hard of basically every literary or artwork analysis I did. People spending way too much time trying to come up with the most bullshit interpretation of things.

[gonehome]

It reminds me of that pg essay - the more bogus the liberal arts the more bullshit is used to obscure and complicate meaning.

It was specifically about writing, but the attempt to over complicate still applies imo.

“And then of course there are cases where writers don't want to make it easy to understand what they're saying—in corporate announcements of bad news, for example, or at the more bogus end of the humanities. But for nearly everyone else, spoken language is better.”

http://paulgraham.com/talk.html

[prox]

Studied too. First thing my teacher said “You have the world of artists, we create whatever we feel the need to create. And there is a completely different world of the art critic. Never let the two meet. There is no license to paint.”

[dbuxton]

Reminds me of this James Blunt tweet I saw the other day: https://twitter.com/JamesBlunt/status/1485182825070567432

[Digit-Al]

James Blunt is always entertaining on twitter. He's one of the few people who manage to turn that toxic turd into gold.

[pmarreck]

I mean... They're kind of both right? That's the wonderful thing about art: it is kind of a free-form catalyst to your own interpretation

EDIT: ah I see others have said essentially the same thing