[joe_mamba]

>Art isn't special, as far as I can tell, it's just a shared cultural perception.

This. The Mona Lisa didn't get famous until it got stolen. Famous paintings are just 3D NFTs for the wealthy elite, doesn't mean they're more beautiful than paintings made by noname authors.

[lifeisstillgood]

The Mona Lisa was famous before the 20th C because da Vinci carried it around for 20 years saying “this is the greatest painting I have ever done”. That kept it famous for 500 years. It then gained modern new media celebrity by getting nicked (and because the person who stole it did not do it for cash but because he thought it was the greatest painting ever)

So it’s hard for people to judge brilliance themselves, but we can rely on other peoples judgement if enough people follow the crowd or put enough passion in. (Not saying that makes it right - science is not a democracy, but it’s a great heuristic for 8 billion people)

[applfanboysbgon]

Yeah, but da Vinci's art sucks. It was good for its time, when the entire world population was 400m and literally 90% of those people were farmers and only the very well-to-do had the time and resources to practice a non-practical craft. Now we have a population of 8 billion, everyone has access to incredible art tools for a fraction of a month's minimum wage, there is an absolute wealth of information including books and in-depth video tutorials for everyone to learn from, and countless millions of people have time to try their hand at art. The quality of art produced today absolutely blows away the Mona Lisa, which might as well be garbage. The only reason people pretend to like it and most of the rest of the 'fine art' is an emperor has no clothes schtick, a sort of snobby social game where everyone has to act like it's so special and good because that makes you cultured, even though there are literally millions of art pieces produced today of vastly superior quality but which are not famous.

[kergonath]

> The quality of art produced today absolutely blows away the Mona Lisa

I don’t like the Mona Lisa, but this is shortsighted. I agree that more people would tend to generate more instances of good art, it has nothing to do with the tools or the technical aspects. The point of art is beauty and emotion. Better tools do not always help and in fact modern art is often famously opaque and inaccessible.

> The only reason people pretend to like it and most of the rest of the 'fine art' is an emperor has no clothes schtick, a sort of snobby cultural pressure where everyone has to act like it's so special and good because that makes you cultured

It’s all subjective. People liking something you don’t does not make them brainwashed, and it does not make you better.

If you are genuinely interested in this, you could have a read at this https://dynomight.net/bourdieu/ . It’s a bit more subtle than you say.

[applfanboysbgon]

> The point of art is beauty and emotion

I feel nothing when I look at the Mona Lisa, and even accounting for subjectivity, I would honestly be surprised if very many do. You can get an art snob to wax poetic with fifteen paragraphs about what emotions it's meant to convey in you, or alternatively, you could just look at good art produced today which evokes emotions on its own merit, without needing somebody to tell you why and what emotions it's supposed to evoke in you.

> People liking something you don’t does not make them brainwashed

It very much does when you get to the points of comical absurdity like this bullshit[1] and that bullshit[2]. Once people are committed to the social status game of art snobbery, they have to take it further and further, justifying the artistic merit of increasingly meritless 'art', lest they reveal their snobbery was fake all along, and then you have a blank fucking canvas selling for millions. It's not even that people like something I don't, but rather that the idea they actually like it at all is a charade.

[1]https://nypost.com/2024/12/03/lifestyle/blank-pure-white-art... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._5,_1948

---

Skimming the article you linked, I don't think it's in contention with what I'm saying? It essentially points out that "taste" is not about actually liking something, but responding to social incentives, which is exactly what I mean by a social status game.

[4ndrewl]

The only reason people write comments like this is because they've unconsciously normalised the contrarian/rage/emotionally-charged-comment economy.

They clearly don't really mean what they write and to suggest that "everyone" has access to incredible art tools in a world where millions don't even have reliable access to clean water is trite.

[applfanboysbgon]

Yeah, yeah, Africa exists. The vast, vast majority of people in the societies I've lived in can afford a $100 tablet, though. Even the very poor, of which I was growing up. I didn't have air conditioning or working plumbing for years of my life but I still had access to art tools.

I'd also suggest your comment is rather more contrarian than mine. I laid out logical reasoning at length for my beliefs. You mostly gainsayed my comment, engaging with only one tiny pedantic point and otherwise ignoring what I said to instead insult me.