Friday, June 30, 2023

THE EFFORT THAT COUNTS


James Dougherty

Lou Reed recalled the time Andy Warhol scolded him for not working hard enough:

No matter what I did it never seemed enough.He said I was lazy, I said that I was young.He said, "how many songs did you write?"I'd written zero, I'd lied and said "ten.""You won't be young forever.You should have written fifteen."

When Reed explained he was uncertain what to write, Warhol brushed him off. 

                    You think too much. 
                    That's cause there's work that you don't want to do.
                    It's work. The most important thing is work.

Milton Glaser was a different type of artist, but agreed on the importance of work.  In fact, he urged that we abandon the word "art" and replace it with the word "work."  Calling it work, like every other type of honest labor, would not only "restore art to a central, useful activity in daily life" but would also eliminate anxiety for everyone who is obsessing about whether they are artists or not.

Saul Tepper

Before the era of video games, civilizations that valued hard work and disparaged slackers were often rewarded with great art.  The Italian Renaissance and the golden age of Greece were two such periods; those cultures faced political strife, religious violence, civil uncertainty and military threats as great as ours yet their artists accomplished great things without electric lights or air conditioning. 

The Stuart period in England (1603 - 1714), a culture which shamed idleness, produced Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Herbert,  followed by Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, before ending the century with Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift.  It became the cultural home of great painters such as Rubens and Van Dyck.  While this was going on,  Isaac Newton was transforming human understanding of the universe,  Francis Bacon was inventing the modern scientific method and William Harvey was discovering the circulation of the blood. Newspapers were invented and indolent minds which for centuries had dwelt on witchcraft and superstition were challenged.  Great architects such as Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones flourished.  What a fruitful century! 

Of course, not all work pays the same dividends.  A lot of what passes for artistic effort today doesn't seem directed at enhancing the quality of the work.  

  • During the last century, fine art became more fixated on pure self-expression.  Illustration, which involved purposeful work in the empirical world, was demoted to a lower spiritual plane.  But as Glaser wrote, "The dissociation of art from other human activities has impoverished our lives."  He noted, "Michelangelo didn't paint the last judgment to express himself.  He painted it because the Pope wanted to scare the bejeesus out of the congregation."  The type of "work" involved in pure self-expression primarily involves emoting-- which can be difficult to distinguish from laziness.  That's why it helps if fine artists can establish their bona fides with suicide, addiction or emotional incapacity.
  • A second type of effort which preoccupies many of today's artists is self-promotion. Artists such as Hirst and Koons have become sensationalists, achieving fame by causing commotions.  This is the work involved in smashing plates and gluing them to a great big canvas.  While there seems to be no artistic growth or edification from this type of labor, the financial growth can be considerable. 
  • Perhaps the most slippery and inimical challenge of all is the work currently outsourced to labor-saving software such as ChatGPT and its progeny.  "Effortless" art presumes that there was nothing to be gained from the effort.  This assumption may resonate easily with a culture centered around "labor saving" kitchen appliances, but it's not clear that art functions the same way.  Previous civilizations that were less afraid of hard work would be wary of "easy art."  If ChatGPT had spared Michelangelo's four years of hard labor painting the Sistine Chapel, how would that have affected the outcome?


John Cuneo

   

The type of "work" that goes into creating what we now call art has become increasingly wobbly.  At the same time, much of the art turns out to be increasingly minor compared to what past civilizations have produced.  Are the two trends related? It's too early to say.


30 comments:

  1. Love that Dougherty drawing. Cuneo nails it like always.

    JSL

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  2. Andy Walhor was a true Madison Avenue production pro. From mid-century to the 70s, the stunning banality of his output allowed him to progress in stimulants from ice cream and soda, to caffeine and cigarettes, to amphetamines and cocaine without any change in artistic depth.

    A ‘Factory’ is a far cry from an Art Studio. If you have nothing to say, you might as well churn it out while a party is going on around you. If Walhor were still alive, he’d have an entire warehouse full of AI generated artwork for sale by now.

    I like that Cuneo a lot. He has a very high hit rate. Though I hate that he finally landed the piece in the rather lowly Chronogram. It would seem to me that it belongs in The New Yorker.

    Agree with most of your points. Regarding AI, I’d add in that ‘democratization’ has always been about flattering wanna-bes in the act of selling them technology that will “do the hard work for them” via some cheap shortcut method. From Photographs, to Pantographs, to Artographs, to Airbrushes, to Photoshop, to Fractal Painter, to Sketchup, and so on. It always comes from the production side of things. Never the artistic side.

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  3. JSL-- Thanks, I'm fond of all three of these images on the nature of work. You don't hear much about Dougherty these days but I think this is a very strong drawing. As for Cuneo, in my opinion he's one of the most fearless, incisive, cutting artists in the world today. He really gets the problem.

    Kev Ferrara-- I think Warhol is an interesting phenomenon. I don't have a use for 99% of his work, although I do like his gold Marilyn Monroe painting at MoMA very much, and think it bespeaks a genuine talent. I admit I'm unimpressed by his concept of a factory and bored by its output but I do like what he told Lou Reed.

    Going back to his career as an illustrator, Warhol obviously doesn't understand drawing (which of course is one of my primary interests). Still, I think Warhol was a colorful, odd, original thinker who asserted some surprising views about our culture and-- against all odds-- got away with it. I wouldn't collect his pictures but I would listen to what he has to say on those rare occasions when he was willing to communicate it.

    By the way, if you haven't listened to Lou Reed's album "Songs for Drella" (his name for Warhol) I'd recommend it. It's an insider perspective which helped open up my own views of Warhol.

    When it comes to Cuneo, I don't know much about Chronogram but I fear Cuneo's work may be too good for today's New Yorker, which seems to have entered a post-visual stage. In my opinion his work is smarter, better drawn and more truthful than 90% of the pablum that now appears on the New Yorker covers. Today's covers seem a sad echo of the NYer's former visual excellence-- the stimulating art of Steinberg, Searle, Steig, Getz and a half dozen other creators who worked both inside and outside the magazine and brought it distinction. When I saw the NYer showcasing David Hockney's puerile digital art I had to rub my eyes. Genuine, talented artists who still care about taste, skill, line, craft, aesthetics-- artists with fresh and telling opinions to convey-- were being displaced by a winded old geezer playing with his new toy. It spoke volumes about the lack of artistic conviction at the gentrified NYer.

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  4. This part is awesome:

    "Effortless" art presumes that there was nothing to be gained from the effort. This assumption may resonate easily with a culture centered around "labor saving" kitchen appliances, but it's not clear that art functions the same way.

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  5. "I don't have a use for 99% of his work, although I do like his gold Marilyn Monroe painting at MoMA very much, and think it bespeaks a genuine talent."

    I find it completely unfathomable that you find something in the gold Marilyn photo-silkscreen that makes it qualitatively distinct from all the rest of his work that you have 'no use for'.

    I also find it unfathomable that one semi-charmer out of a thousand duds 'bespeaks of genuine talent.' It seems to me, that ratio is the definition of anti-talent, or at least evidence of a dedicated habit of mindless and soulless production.

    As far as Warhol's sagacity, he seemed to me a cipher. As far as I could tell, he wasn't really there, like a photograph; and lived his pasty, glitzy life as some addled and haunted embodiment of camp.

    ------

    Do you have an overarching explanation for the "gentrification" of The New Yorker's visual taste?

    -------

    I'm sorry, but that one linked song by Reed and Cage (and a brief listen to a bit of different song from the album) was enough to prevent me from listening to more. 'Perfect Day' is a fine song. 'Work' is anecdotal barking to Serialism. (I'd read the lyrics if they're available to hear the story, however.)

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  6. Kev Ferrara-- I think the gold Marilyn Monroe is very different from Warhol's mass produced silkscreens of Marilyn or Mao or Elvis or dozens of other subjects. For me, the gold painting is a beautifully rich, variegated wall of gold (7 feet tall) which comes across as a blend of Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer and a golden tribute from King Tut's tomb. Strategically placed in that shimmering wall is well designed and colored portrait of Marilyn. There are respectable editorial points to discuss about Marilyn being the equivalent goddess of American culture, for better or worse, but putting those aside I think the golden Marilyn is a powerful and bold abstract design-- not the kind of thing that can be achieved by accident in 1 out of 100 works. Contrast that painting with Warhol's lazy, sloppy later silkscreens that account for the majority of his work, and I hope you can at least see (if not agree with) the distinction I'm trying to draw.

    And I didn't mean to suggest that everything else Warhol did was a total waste of time. I think his portraits of the electric chair are conceptually strong and well executed, as was his Five Deaths series. But perhaps I'm mostly willing to invest more time in exploring his work because Warhol took commercial art from humble sources (Campbell's soup cans, Brillo boxes) and thrust it in front of people in ways that forced them to consider the inherent designs of the product in the context of lofty fine art museums. In that sense, he challenges people's prejudices in much the way we challenge them here, only-- given his world wide influence-- he does it much more successfully.

    I admit Warhol is a cipher, but I thought the album, Songs for Drella, was a fascinating insider's perspective on that wild period in the 1960s when people were just making up all kinds of audacious things, some of which stuck and others which were dismissed as crazy. How did a weird, "pink eyed albino"with "bad skin, bad eyes, gay and fatty" come mumbling incomprehensibly from a small town and conquer all the sophisticates in Manhattan? The craziness of the drug use back then, the nuttiness of Valerie Solanas shooting Warhol, the huge gambles he took with films that seemed absurd on their face. And the tenderness (try the song, "Hello, It's Me") behind some of the uncertainty, the deaths and human wreckage, the wrong paths taken, all help illuminate the cipher.

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  7. Kev Ferrara wrote: "Do you have an overarching explanation for the "gentrification" of The New Yorker's visual taste?"

    I have several theories, most of them obvious, but I'm not enough of an insider to contribute much value here. I know there was a conscious decision, at the end of the Saxon / Lorenz era, to try a new, unskilled, naive look. Perhaps that was because they had no one in the new crowd capable of competing with Lorenz / Saxon on those terms.

    Other than that, one might point to the circulation problems threatening all magazines today and forcing them to cater to a less challenging demographic. Or, the decline of taste which seems to be accelerating the general disintegration of western civilization. Or, (and this is my personal favorite) an editorial management that has been seduced by the currently trendy notion that "I'm so smart I don't need to worry about the visual aspects of art; I'm a word person who understands concepts and that's all it takes to pass judgment on pictures." (I'm guessing that's where Remnick comes from.)

    Whatever the cause, it's a shame, given the history of that grand magazine

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  8. As an inveterate slacker, I have a lot of sympathy for those artists who don't really care about the effort, those who say "I wish I had a machine I could plug into my brain and just print what I have in mind". I do understand why some people (dare I call them artists too?) would gladly skip the hard part, just to be able to see conjured up in front of them what they can clearly see in their minds. On the other hand, I would not like to use such magical machine myself. I still get a kick from the process, because when it's hard, I get to learn a thing or two, and when it's easy, I can just show off.

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  9. "For me, the gold painting is a beautifully rich, variegated wall of gold (7 feet tall) which comes across as a blend of Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer and a golden tribute from King Tut's tomb."

    Just as a reminder as to the quality of the workmanship and design of what was found in Tutankhamen’s tomb….

    Sarcophagus

    Treasure Tribute – Exhibit A

    Treasure Tribute – Exhibit B

    Treasure Tribute – Exhibit C

    Annnnnnd this is the Andy Walhor screenprint done from a photo you think measures up…

    Gold Marilyn Monroe Screenprint

    As you are under oath sir, I offer you the opportunity to retract your statement.

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  10. How did a weird, "pink eyed albino"with "bad skin, bad eyes, gay and fatty" come mumbling incomprehensibly from a small town and conquer all the sophisticates in Manhattan?

    Sophisticates aren't all that sophisticated. It was another party scene at the end of the world, when and where even the bookish find Bacchus, and even the losers get laid. Warhol provided one of the main party houses and staffed it, sent out the invites on the daily.

    When the thin veneer of culture - and thus status - fell away from the neverending downtown jam - as it must because hard drugs beat art every time - all that was left was dissipation and dissociation; the strung-out seventies.

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  11. The physical work and the required duration employed to fashion whatever medium has a meaningful effect on the aesthetic consciousness that is shaping it. It is a reciprocal marriage, a dance where both sides influence the other.
    For example:
    The ancient Egyptian sculptors, not possessing steel chisels, used harder granite to pumice away at the granite carving itself. Hence the patient majesty of their stone art, the slow, hefting, dense turns of its forms, like creatures disclosed from inside a neutron star.

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  12. This is one of the reasons why mechanically sawn and polished sheets of limestones, marbles and granites one sees in modern buildings are so meaningless in and of themselves.

    The same applies to AI generated images - along with other points made about the reasons for its impotency in the posts above.

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  13. Kev Ferrara wrote: "As you are under oath sir, I offer you the opportunity to retract your statement."

    I am second to none in my admiration for the artistic achievements of the ancient Egyptians; I made a pilgrimage to Egypt to see the treasures in person, and what I saw took my breath away. Yet, I still say that the Warhol Marilyn Monroe is a beautiful and rich painting in that same spirit.

    Your unfortunate photo of the Warhol captures none of the quality of the paint or the design (as it doesn't show the size, proportion or location of the portrait within the monolith). I would urge people to visit MoMA to see the original. Warhol, before he turned lazy, customized a paint with brass and copper metallic elements and applied it with a combination of brush strokes and spray paint so it has a richness which makes it shimmer. I like the way the gold contrasts with his silk screened image of Marilyn which is kind of a tarted up image, deliberately left with a mass produced feel. This is not intended to be a sensitive and revealing portrait of its subject. Marilyn's heavy eye makeup is intentionally slightly off register. It has a clear message: this is what we value, this is our society's version of gold (or as MoMA describes it on their web site, "With this updated version of a Byzantine icon, Warhol canonized and eulogized Monroe as a goddess of popular culture") but it is not too literal or obvious, and it allows plenty of space for rumination. For example, the gold feels like Warhol doesn't quite believe in this god the way Egyptian artists were sincere in their belief in Ramses II. Remember, this tribute was made post-Ozymandias and perhaps no one will ever be able to believe in their gods that much anymore.

    At 7 feet tall, Warhol's painting seems as imposing and powerful as an ancient Assyrian tribute. I think it's smart, and in a purely visual way-- no long written explanations of the type that plague so much of conceptual and post-modern art.


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  14. chris bennett-- I mostly agree, and yet there's an additional complexity to the relationship between effort and quality. Prehistoric cave painters using pine torches would travel as far as a mile into dark caves inhabited by bears and other predators in order to find the perfect wall where they would paint their masterpieces using pigments they'd made themselves by the earth. They devoted substantial time to making art in an era when few people lived past 25, and the ones who lived needed to worry full time about finding food. I think no one would deny in that case that "physical work and the required duration employed to fashion whatever medium has a meaningful effect on the aesthetic consciousness that is shaping it."

    However, what do you make of the fact that we now have electric lights and air conditioning that allow us to work longer hours, in physical comfort, using superior art supplies that are provided to us readymade by someone else? We use eyeglasses that help us see better and modern medicine that eliminates distracting discomforts. And if all those aren't enough to erode "the aesthetic consciousness," what about the aids such as photography, or Photoshop? And then yes, AI? Where on this chain of labor saving devices do you think quality begins to be seriously harmed?

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  15. David, the problem begins when artists are not aware of the way that their devices construct visual structures in an automatic, apoetic way and decide to copy the flaws of their soulless mechanical nature. That is why photography is a dangerous labor saving aid for many artists.

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  16. However, what do you make of the fact that we now have electric lights and air conditioning that allow us to work longer hours, in physical comfort, using superior art supplies that are provided to us readymade by someone else? We use eyeglasses that help us see better and modern medicine that eliminates distracting discomforts. And if all those aren't enough to erode "the aesthetic consciousness," what about the aids such as photography, or Photoshop? And then yes, AI? Where on this chain of labor saving devices do you think quality begins to be seriously harmed?

    Well David, Ales has put his finger right on it. However, in light of the things you have just mentioned, let me expand the idea a little:

    It seems to me that suffering is what orientates and grounds us to and in the world. This is 'the purpose of suffering' if you will. Whereas easefulness disassociates us from the world. Both these states taken to extreme become two sides of the same coin; the currency of meaninglessness and hopelessness cashed in for despair. Hence we find that a meaningful, fulfilled life is a necessary dynamic, or marriage, of both.

    And the making of good art, being as it must, a condensation of the business of life itself, must therefore involve the encounter with some manner of material resistance. However, it is not our relationship to the tools that is the issue here, but rather our tools' relationship to the material world.

    The aesthetic problem with Photoshop or Zbrush right up to the recent LLM image prompt machines lies precisely in their wholesale divorce from direct interface with the material world.


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  17. I agree, Chris.

    Many people nowadays perceive work, skill or craftsmanship as a mindless monotony of sequencing movements and protocols like working on an assembly line. But as Alexandre Kojeve said, "The man who works recognizes his own product in the world that has actually been transformed by his work. He recognizes himself in it, he sees his own human reality in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself”. It’s about self realization.

    When you work on something you develop understanding of the structural properties of things and you develop the ability to manage all structural elements into a finished product. You plan the product, you design it, you mentally embrace it in its entirety, its functionality and its meaning, you understand its implementation from the fundamental elements to a complete stand alone result. You control everything that the product includes, you demonstrate competence that people can assess, you mentally operate with how you will serve your fellow man through your work and how the product will make sense in the real world.

    Becoming good at work is a long and difficult road, but it benefits you as an important process of shaping your capacity for patience and understanding. When you saw and assemble some wooden elements and the holes do not match or when the perspective/anatomy just does not end up being correct you tear it all in a fit of anger. There is something sobering at failing in the real world which leads to shaping your capacity for patience, respect and humility. “Easefulness disassociates us from the world” as you said, Chris. Each failure requires a new approach to solving the problem and it helps you develop ability to be honest and allow yourself to be taught by unknown possibilities. So the moral dimension of work/skill is also implied in the fact that you become attentive recipient of information and less selfindulgent smartass whose primary criteria are your own desires.

    Diagnosing the causes of your failures demonstrates dedication and care. Someone who aspires to mastery will pay more attention to the nuances of individuality/specificity, will be a more indepth student of the infinitely subtle world out there. And to become reliable and respectable, it will require development of concrete definition of what constitutes quality and standards (that exist independently of you, so you cannot own them). By creating standards, the social character is automatically reflected in them. And development of your skills leads to awareness of competence, leads to cooperation, to growing alongside more successful masters and reliance on one another.

    Being able to make something well also means that you develop autonomy, independence and selfreliance. Being good at work embraces you with confidence, when you achieve a certain skill, a well finished product enables peace of mind, a well deserved sense of pride, the concentration of accumulated experience resonates with your inner value. We all recognize good craftsmanship, a solid, long term product gives us a pleasant feeling of belonging to something bigger.

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  18. Now look at polar opposite - pomo quasi art. These people are not guided by the same motivation and the same ethical principles as true masters, they are not ready to invest sweat and blood for an exceptional skill and do not see a deeper meaning in such actions. Just remember that video of Goldsmiths Art Uni students and teachers that proudly described themselves as creators of shit. If we do not perceive deeper meaning in what we do, it is difficult to act with dedication, care and morality. These type of “artists” are living in the virtual world of their own head, where their pride is not formed through the confirmation of abilities in the real world (so a defectively constructed drawing can not deny their knowledge), they simply own definitions and quality standards and build an imaginative self image through invented criteria, interpretations about themselves, excuses and self indulgent delusions. They don't step on a long and difficult road of hard work, their perception of pride comes from their whims and desires, and because their mistakes can’t explode in their faces, they build a false sense of authority and self confidence that exists only inside their skulls.

    They don’t understand that mastery that makes a large spectrum of knowledge and abilities available to a person, is the one that also opens up creativity, so a sloppy way of working inhibits imagination. They lie to themselves and enjoy the feeling of self importance, but it is precisely this narcissistic self image that represents an obstacle that will prevent them from progressing. While working under clear standards binds masters together, inventing one's own criteria within one's own head conveniently enables and perpetuates egotism. It all also leads to adoption of premature, generic decision making, which by definition leads to half work. If our work neglects skill, then we communicate that attitude through our work to other people and no wonder everything these people produce is nihilistic, cynical, depressing, meaningless and forgettable.

    I don’t know where we are going, man. Humans are born into the physical world and through work and crafts we actually get to know nature, and skill is the way through which we also define ourselves. Anaxagoras said that man is the most intelligent of the animals because he has hands. Meaning that activities that we do to manipulate and interact with our environment stimulate our brains and contribute to our cognitive development. But these tools that we are now facing are not passive tools that require skillfull and active human activity, these are devices that make us passive and dependent.

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  19. “Your unfortunate photo of the Warhol captures none of the quality of the paint or the design (as it doesn't show the size, proportion or location of the portrait within the monolith).”

    Even in bad light, from a weird angle, the face of a truly beautiful girl at the peak of her powers will never appear anything less than alluring.

    ” the gold contrasts with his silk screened image of Marilyn which is kind of a tarted up image, deliberately left with a mass produced feel. (…) the gold feels like Warhol doesn't quite believe in this god...”

    Okay. Then what’s the apt comparison here? The wall-size fake gold area with the metal flake in it? Her face surrounded by the fake gold? The mocking coloring? The fact that her face is smudged like a 4th generation Xerox?

    What’s “the same spirit” at play?

    Yes, there’s some superficial, reductive similarities. But if they are enough to seal an equivalence, any wall-sized gold sparkly representation of anybody would compare to the finest entombed treasures of Ancient Egypt. But they aren’t, so they don’t.

    Just because you once believed there was a salient comparison here – for whatever reason, under whatever influence – doesn’t mean you can’t simply drop the idea now. After all, you wouldn’t want to unintentionally slander the Ancient Egyptian artists you so clearly appreciate by comparing them with glitzed-up visual commentary from the Pharaoh of Shallow.

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  20. Aleš and chris bennett-- I sympathize with much of what you say, but I have the uneasy feeling that part of my concurrence is because I love the romantic vision, the historical traditions, the resistance to the looming spectre of AI. But if I burrow down into your binary analysis (or what you call "polar opposites") the middle realities seem a little more complex to me. (And if you're awarding trophies for "understanding the structural properties of things," that should apply to understanding reality at least as much as it does to art supplies.) The path from cave paintings to Zbrush to ChatGPT is incremental and non-linear. It may be, as you say, a path to "easefulness" which risks disassociating us from the world and the meaningfulness of suffering, but it is simultaneously a path to increased productivity, greater efficiency, more leisure time for thinking and studying art, better eyesight, longer careers, etc.

    An alternative perspective is to assess art solely from the end product; if a picture is good, it can be self-legitimizing regardless of the level of suffering or the resistance that went into producing it. People assumed photography and photoshop would inevitably "construct visual structures in an automatic, apoetic way" but they were wrong. Look at what Nathan Fowkes or Tom Fluharty do with Photoshop. Look at what Norman Rockwell or Bernie Fuchs did with photography. Will AI finally tip the scales and poison the end product with too much effortlessness? Too soon to tell. But if you see a poetic work and you cant't tell whether it was produced effortlessly by ChatGPT or by a long suffering poetic soul, then I suspect you'll have to rethink your arguments.

    As for Anaxagoras, I'd recommend Loren Eisley's beautiful essay, "The Long Loneliness" which distinguishes the kind of intelligence geared to hands and tools from other kinds of intelligence. For present purposes, I think it's a stretch to say that the invention of computers, the mastery of electricity, the writing of software, the crafting of photographic lenses, and the manipulation / coordination of these elements isn't a more unique badge of human intelligence than the use of hands. Many animals have hands or other prehensile, grasping organs which they use to manipulate the material world. It may teach them the lessons you describe but it doesn't make them inventors.

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  22. "Many animals have hands or other prehensile, grasping organs which they use to manipulate the material world. It may teach them the lessons you describe but it doesn't make them inventors."

    Human hands are unique in that they have structural solidity, tremendous malleability, and tremendous strength coupled with far more fine motor control than all the other primates.

    Every time you reshape your hand to do a unique physical task, you are inventing. You are forming a brand new tool for a brand new job... out of the materials you have on hand.

    The ability and will to do this arrives with logic in tow. Unbreakable physics-based logic - experience-based logic - not the ghost logic of so much non-haptic intellection where contradicting abstract symbols pass through each other without making refutational contact in the imagination.

    The basic premise involved here - the necessary physical fitness of a tool to its task -- scales out to every other useful invention. Even every other useful endeavor.

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  23. CONTINUED...

    The re-shaping of the hand to properly form a tool for a task is the physical reification of a mental abstraction process as flesh and bone. The shape made is the victor of a virtual wrestling match in the imaginative mind.

    This virtual wrestling match is only successful if it sufficiently models what would have resulted from an actual wrestling match. If it does not, attempting to use the resulting tool in real life will explain just how it doesn’t function, and that the mental operation failed.

    There is nothing you can find in any invention which does not have a physical basis. All logic is abstracted from the physical. And our primary tool for logical discovery through physical experience are the hands.

    In any given conversation we lock and unlock gates, diffuse bombs, build and escape traps, shield valuables, mold and exchange tools, try to hold on to sturdy supports and step on solid ground, reiterate a movement because we didn't finish a subtask, and plan achievable routes to a goal.

    And you will find that each one of these processes above can be done with the hands and fingers (sometimes with help from arm extension).

    The hands and fingers build the most accurate models we have because errors in the models happen physically in hand models. If you try to trap a Praying Mantis and there is a hole in your hand cage, it will escape. Same as failed counter argument that fails to trap an assertion. Same as a missing piece of computer code.

    This point applies to all logical operators, even seemingly abstract ones. For instance, contradiction is just a reflection of a very basic human experience; the inability of 2 things to occupy the same space at the same time. Try to pass one hand through the other to experience the truth of contradiction first hand and irrefutably.

    The amazing things about hand models is that they instantly recycle their materials.

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  24. I like your insightful explanation Kev.


    David,
    if a picture is good, it can be self-legitimizing regardless of the level of suffering or the resistance that went into producing it. 

    I agree, a long time ago Giambattista Vico recognized aesthetics as a self-sufficient form of communication, where its significance is not communicated through external factors, but is located in the very structure of the work of art, which carries its own blood within itself and does not receive it from the outside, as Hippolyte Taine said.

    People assumed photography and photoshop would inevitably "construct visual structures in an automatic, apoetic way" but they were wrong. “

    They were not wrong. Photography can’t do anything but construct visual structures in an automatic way. That is why a photographer can be as clueless as he wants, as it is the Chinese mechanism that instantly makes the image. And artists were well aware of that problem, that’s why Adolph Menzel was convinced that photography is diametrically opposed to the artist's responsibility to art and that the painter's reliance on photographs leads to a decline in the discipline of certain faculties of the eyes, hands, memory and perception of animated nature. Harold Speed ​​wrote in his drawing manual that photography doesn’t offer the impression of a living, individual consciousness, and that the replacement of manual production by such machinery has impoverished the world more than we probably imagine. Many expressed similar things, from Cornwell to Schaeffer who lived in the golden age and then regretted that the art of illustration went to hell because of photography, I think Kev also showed a paper where Thomas Craven laid the blame for the decline in quality illustration on photography (among other things), saying that it debauched the appreciation of drawing and replaced it with cheap ways to satisfy the growing needs for realism, mechanical finish and cheapness.

    Everything they said is still true today, just look at the never ending stream of drawings and paintings on social media where artists rely on photos in their cozy studios. Everyone who believes a photo creates bad art.

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  25. Look at what Norman Rockwell or Bernie Fuchs did with photography. 

    They ignored its dangerous nature. They were knowledgable and talented enough to tear its structure apart, they disbelieved the presence of its static frozen nature and discarded its sterile fabric and meaningless interrelationship of content, until they were left with a pile of facts that they selectively picked according to their needs in order to construct their intimate, preconceived idea/composition. That is how they produced actual artworks, which they could not do if they thought the photographic structure was meaningful and true on its own.

    Personally I’m not the biggest fan of Fuchs and Rockwell because despite their many qualities it bothers me that I still notice the presence of a photographic source. There are several illustrators from that period who have the same flaw (I remember Kev once explained that when struggling magazines were full of poor imitators and hacks using camera, talented illustrators had to combine those hack methods with their own poetic intentions in order to survive commercially), but they were all aware of dangers of photography. Briggs described camera as a collector of information that had not yet been digested and Fawcett said that relying on photography demonstrates a lack of knowledge of what drawing is.

    So I believe the answer to your question regarding dangers of labor saving devices reverberates through art history quite clearly. These are not simple tools, these are devices that can fool an artist and then he becomes passive and dependent. You quoted Milton Glaser before: “There is no instrument more direct than a pencil and paper for the expression of ideas. Everything else that interferes with that direct relationship with the eyes, the mind, the arm and the hand causes a loss of fidelity…. I find such relief when I look at old masters like Rembrandt and see no signs of photographic nature.

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  26. ERRATA:

    "The hands and fingers build the most accurate models we have because errors in the models happen physically in hand models."

    REPLACE WITH:

    The hands and fingers build the most immediate accurate models we have because errors in the models happen physically.

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  27. How beautifully this conversation has flowered, in the spirit of true dia-logos, thank you Ales, Kev and of course David for triggering it.

    Just a pick-up on David's "...if I burrow down into your binary analysis (or what you call "polar opposites") the middle realities seem a little more complex to me."
    You may have missed my point David; the polar opposites are the limit cases of the riches between the poles whilst at the same time the riches necessarily define the poles themselves. This is why I referred to resistance (a more appropriate word here than 'suffering') and easefulness as a marriage, a reciprocating dance whose stationary nodes are the inert extremes of total resistance or total easefulness.

    The AI image generator is wholesale parasitic in its nature, and the mediocre, journeyman human practitioner behaves, by definition, in the same way. Accordingly it is these people who will be put out of business by the coming technology. For my own part, as a 'gallery artist' I realized that the only way forward now is in the domain of consciousness and a commitment to realising a masterpiece every time I sit before my easel. Curiously enough it's actually a relief.

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  28. Kev Ferrara wrote: "What’s “the same spirit” at play?"

    I think that both the ancient Egyptians and Warhol were dealing with their culture's notion of the sacred. The Egyptians were devout worshipers of their gods and their pharaohs, and that devotion fueled their arts and their entire empire. But by the time Warhol came along, the church had been replaced by capitalism; pharaohs and popes were no longer commissioning art to inspire reverence; corn flake manufacturers were commissioning art to inspire purchases. Our deities were no longer falcon gods, they were celebrities on the covers of movie magazines.

    What accounts for this change? Are people less spiritual today? A big part of it is economic. Churches today no longer have the money to hire the best artists to paint the sistine chapel; the money is all in the hands of big corporations with a different spiritual agenda. (But if you think Italians during the Renaissance were dazzled by the Sistine Chapel, imagine showing them a Marilyn Monroe movie! They'd fall down on their knees in awe before such miracles, and immediately change their church to the church of Hollywood.)

    Another major reason for the change is that the Egyptian gods (and their successors) repeatedly failed. After 4,000 years miracles are harder to believe in and the disappointed faithful have turned their devotion elsewhere. In the long run, Amun Ra or Osiris or Isis couldn't protect their worshipers from plague or invasion or drought so people lost faith and stopped devoting their lives to crafting beautiful, precious objects.

    I think that Warhol's treatment is very smart, and visually encompasses the complexity of the change. He doesn't try to make cheap propaganda against capitalism, such as a dollar bill, or agains the church; his sympathies are wisely left uncertain. Personally I think his choice of Marilyn Monroe as the face of the new deity is brilliant. ("What rough beast, its hour come round at last...") His wall of gold, certainly at first glance, grabs the attention of the viewers and commands their respect, just as gold did 4,000 years ago. But linger a while. As you say, Marilyn's face "is smudged like a 4th generation Xerox," when it would've been easy for Warhol to steal a flattering, perfect photograph. By the same token, if you look long enough at the gold it acquires a slightly cheesy feel, like casinos that at first glance seem regal with crystal chandeliers and gold everywhere, but on second look are designed with industrial carpet and faux glamour to attract the hicks.

    I like the uncertainty about where Warhol's affections lie. Even with its gaudiness, this might not just be society's new god, it might be Warhol's too. I like that he sees value in both sides.

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  29. David,

    I do not accept the underlying reasoning behind your equivalence: that one can conflate intellectual similarities with aesthetic similarities and historical parallels with qualitative parallels. This is deranging to artistic understanding.

    The apparent reason you like this painting is not because you like the painting as some complex and beautiful integration of meaning and form that causes aesthetic epiphany and possibly catharsis. That can’t happen because Warhol’s “choices” are all typographic (symbolic surface treatments) in the context of simple presentational design.

    No. You like it because you get its references. You understand its “smart” editorial content and agree with it. You get the joke. And now you can springboard from it to talk with erudition about this very, very “smart” subject – the rise and spiritual fall of the west. And get your good grade on the class discussion that follows the presentation. The Painted Word once again.

    That what you have to say following the viewing is more compelling than the vacuous construction itself is no surprise when it comes to Postmodern editorial art. But that situation is exactly the wrong way around.

    A great work of art should render you speechless; because it is not written in speech. You should struggle to talk about it in any worthwhile way. The art should be the thing in the communication that is doing the saying and aesthetically so. It should not pander to you or flatter you by deferring to you. It should be beyond your talk, not dependent on it.

    And what kind of editorial is it anyhow? In its glitzy, cheesy shallowness, pat historical-literary commentary (which is easily explained in words, as you have done), and PR hype – it is actually a perfect reflection of the cultural dip it pretends to decry. Thus it contributes to the problem it purports to address. This doesn’t seem to land for you.

    It’s like those pseudo-news “exposé” shows on the pornography industry that constantly refer back to the same b-roll footage of half-nude women pole dancing. It is part of the problem.

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