[adnmcq999]

Rembrandt’s self portrait in London

David in Florence

There have been some others I really liked, having been to about 5 really top museums, but I remember those ones as being like “whoa”

I’ve never really understood why Picasso is considered as good as he is

[dvt]

> I’ve never really understood why Picasso is considered as good as he is

Picasso (with Georges Braque) literally invented, pioneered, and perfected a new artistic style, cubism. It's like saying "I've never really understood why Isaac Newton is considered as good as he is."

[zeven7]

> It's like saying "I've never really understood why Isaac Newton is considered as good as he is."

I think there's something to be appreciated in Picasso, but that's a bad example. Physics has Newton, Einstein, maybe Galileo, and then no one who can match those 3. Art easily has dozens of people who can match Picasso. Just because he invented something new doesn't mean the work he did extends throughout the entire discipline, like Newton does. Picasso is not that important.

It would be better to compare to, say, Wilt Chamberlain in basketball or something. Or if you want to reach to physics, say Neils Bohr or James Clerk Maxwell. But then I think Bohr might even be reaching too far. Schrodinger?

I know: Hugh Everett is the Picasso of physics. He gave us an interesting and different way to see the world (many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics). He was no doubt brilliant, and many modern physicists continue to lean on his ideas regularly. But, of course, tons of physics would exist without him.

[toolz]

I have a hard time taking this comment seriously. How am I supposed to equate a drawing any graduate art-school student could reproduce with foundational discoveries in mathematics that have changed the world in ways that quite literally were only imagined in fictional stories before the production of technology that was created on the back of mathematics.

Give me a picasso painting and a year and I guarantee you I could reproduce something indistinguishable to 99% of people. If I gave anybody a year to learn and make mathematical discoveries even 1/100th as impactful as Newton, it's likely no one would come close.

[rabbiteared]

Of course you could reproduce such a painting easily enough. I can also reproduce F = ma ... look, I just did!

Invent an entirely new and impactful style of painting, that hasn't been seen before, from dust. Just like Newton invented a whole new "style" of mathematics.

I still think Picasso is less important but you haven't even begun to draw the correct analogy here.

[vharuck]

>How am I supposed to equate a drawing any graduate art-school student could reproduce with foundational discoveries in mathematics

Pretty sure that's GP's point. Nowadays, any graduate physics student can solve calculus problems. The amazing part is the creation of new ways to see and describe the world.

[toolz]

A year of training would have anyone reproducing picassos art with likely high accuracy. A year of training in calculus is effectively what you have with juniors in high school. To be honest, saying it would take most people a year to reproduce picassos artwork feels very generous. His artwork is not particularly skillful.

[rnjesus]

his point is that the skill does not lie in the manual process of making the art, but in the process of _creating_ the art. copying something (even with a high degree of precision) is less difficult than imagining the thing in the first place.

[sytelus]

It's not same thing. I used be amazed by many of these works because I would try to think if I would have drawn that and why and how. It took me a while that lot of these works have no reasoning and rational or even internal representation or mystery whatsoever. Many of these works even stem directly due to mental health conditions.

While working in AI research, we have known that many of the similar works gets generated when you accidently wire networks differently or if network has short of schizophrenia and works on a region and then sort of randomly but still somehow similar way does something else on other region. There is no rhym or reason except that our brains gets surprised by patterns that it hadn't expected.

I feel people who appreciate this art and put down others for not seeing things are in same category as wine testers. As one of the commentor said, if you didn't knew if this was from Picaso, your level of appreciation would be much less.

[jacobolus]

Just to clarify:

You think that Picasso’s style was nothing more than mental illness?

You think Picasso used no “reasoning”, and there is no “mystery” involved, because it was not intentional/skillful?

And you think everyone who likes it is just a snob?

[blackoil]

You can call it whatever you want. But as an art it fails to amaze or inspire me in same way as Van Gogh or Michelangelo do.

Anyone with basic knowledge of history of Physics or Maths can tell why Newton is considered good, I don't see same happening with Picasso.

[gfaregan]

They say skill without creativity is craftsmanship and creativity without skill is modern art. I wonder what creativity without skill would be in science...

[glitchc]

Psychology?

[gfaregan]

I guess what I'm trying to say is that art and science aren't really comparable like this. If science us a synonym for precision, you need skill to do things precisely and logically. As for modern art, I wouldn't mind having a few Picassos ;)