Was the aspect of using YouTube's servers so critical to the artistic quality of this project that he couldn't just substitute a shell script that encodes the video 1000 times over? Would've taken a heck of a lot less time than the year he spent.
The other thing about art is that time is usually not a large motivating factor...
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Since your account is brand new for this comment, you more than likely are aware this is the type of comment that gets an account banned, and hope that something is in place to handle this situation. But if you are genuinely new, then I dont think I am out of place to say comments like yours have absolutely no place here.
Only a supremely self-involved, judgmental, narcissistic asshole would think it's appropriate to look down on others for having different ideas about how they want to spend the short time we get on this planet.
Truly, it's hard to imagine how badly one's parents would have to fuck up to raise a child that thought that such sentiments were appropriate.
Those who might look down upon others for engaging in an inefficient activity are not just hypocrites, they are arrogant fools. They are asserting that they know the best way for every person to spend their life.
It is sad that HN appears to support such thoughtless, worthless, bigoted, narcissistic behavior.
I could even imagine a bunch of every-day normal freelance laborers cleaning an art gallery and accidentally throwing thousand of dollars worth of art piece simply because it is indistinguishable from a mess.
Art may be subjective, but people can perceive skills in the painting of a nude human figure. They cannot however, see anything in an art piece that are simply lines, colors, texture, with no forms whatsoever.
People like me and others will never be able to understand the extreme abstractionism that exists in art today and ages past. Art to me are nude painting, landscape, cartoons, and comics, not the silly cubism, the colors and the texture, or just a bunch of splattered paints.
I'm guessing you're a reasonable person and just say 'I don't get it, and don't care.' As opposed to the utterly unreasonable opinion espoused by the OP, in which instead of not caring, he looks down upon the artist.
Some people do get it. The artist gets it. His or her peers get it. A certain group of aficionados get it. Some chunk of the general public gets it. Decades later, many many more people may get it.
Believe it or not, some art is hard to understand. It requires an understanding of what came before it, it might require a lot of experience with similar work. It may require careful study or deep reflection. It may require changing your mental state or viewing it differently.
For instance, you talk a lot about what a piece of art means, but much of art embraced concepts of subjectivity and meaninglessness before social psychology even existed as a proper discipline.
In fact, some of the seemingly obscure art is a meta-critique on obscure art.
The very goal of looking for the meaning of a piece in the sense of a message it is trying to convey is going to be wrong-headed in a large number of cases right out of the gate.
What's the meaning of jazz music? What's the meaning of architecture? Or the movements of modern dance or a Rothko painting?
My point is, while you can imagine a scenario in which the artist is being smug jerk trying to look smart by being impossible, that's much, much more rare than someone approaching a work of art and arrogantly saying, "That is just garbage," about something that a large number of educated people recognize as brilliance.
And Calvin's got a good point about art snobs, not artists and not the audience for art at large.
Calvin: People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance.
Hobbes: You misspelled Weltanschauung.
Calvin: A good artist's statement says more than his art ever does.
Most of them would be thrilled if they did just one groundbreaking thing in their entire careers.
Clearly their work is totally useless. Clearly they should be ignored. Clearly the process has no value.
And worst of all, many of them will, when this is pointed out to them, tell you that their work is incredibly important even if it has only made a minor iterative change to some obscure corner of the world, recognizable only by fellow experts in their field.
It's those little iterative advances that are the foundation of all major discoveries and all substantive technologies.
In case you didn't notice (which you apparently didn't), my post was satire. Of course incremental progress has value, and even failure has value. (particularly if the failure occurs publicly.)
I'd never look down on an academic because he'd documented 100 ways not to do something, nor because he operated in an obscure corner of an obscure field with no obvious and immediate utility to society.
The world changes too often and too unpredictably for me to guess what will end up being important for society in the long haul.
We're on the same team! High-five.
You can look at a piece of art and determine that nobody anywhere will ever gain anything from it's existence.
<sigh>
The alternate position--which you seem to espouse--is that it's fundamentally impossible to judge art, hence we have to accept all purported attempts at art as "good art". I'm arguing that we can make imperfect judgments; you're arguing we can make no judgments. The very notion of "good art" loses its meaning if the term "good" can no longer distinguish some art from other art, hence your position is completely nihilistic and far more denigrating of art than mine is, because you condemn all art to an indistinguishable morass.
My original point, long ago, was that criticizing art is separate from criticizing the artist personally, and that it's absurd to "look down on" the artist simply because you don't like some or all of their art. Even if you hate their art, you're not necessarily better than the artist.
As for the critiquing of art, I don't say that nobody should say their thoughts on it. But your thoughts are not the final word on anything. If you say 'that is horrible' and I say 'it moves me', then it has value to me and none to you. For one of us it is bad art, for the other it is important.
From a society standpoint, we tend to value works of art that have some sort of influence. This is exceptionally hard to measure real-time, and is the reason so many great artists made little money during their lifetime.
As such, I don't say that all art is "good art", even though you dishonestly put those words into my mouth. I simply say that criticism is personal, and that real-time, societal criticism has large error (particularly when done by people who aren't familiar with what else has been tried before), because you're predicting the results of the art rather than waiting and observing the effects.
But mostly, my point has always been that it's absurd to "look down on" the artist because you don't like a particular piece of work.
Fine, granted. In the general case, judging personalities is boring. That's not the point I've been arguing.
"As for the critiquing of art, I don't say that nobody should say their thoughts on it. But your thoughts are not the final word on anything. If you say 'that is horrible' and I say 'it moves me', then it has value to me and none to you. For one of us it is bad art, for the other it is important."
So you think it's impossible to make objective judgments of art. I disagree.
"As such, I don't say that all art is "good art", even though you dishonestly put those words into my mouth."
Like art, your comments are difficult to correctly interpret. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
It would say nothing about your opinion of the artist as a person.
It would in no way say 'i look down upon the artist' or 'i am superior to the artist'.
Classic art doesn't need that much rationalization to be meaningful. I think that art isn't first of all a product of thought, but an expression of feelings. So the access to the art is by looking and feeling.
Modern art isn't per se meaningful, you can't understand it by just looking at it. There has to be a rational superstructure which creates the meaning for it. And some artist push too hard the creation of this superstructure. So that the explanations seem arbitrary.
Calling somebody an asshole isn't a positional declaration. It does not say you are better or worse than them, just that they are an asshole. Presumably you have flaws as well. Everyone does.
Saying you look down on them, on the other hand, is a direct claim to superiority.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor." - Nikola Tesla
And even if he did not enjoy it at all, patio11 makes another good point about it being a better background story for the piece.
Art isn't the only thing that has stories, incidentally. Tomatoes have stories these days. (OK, the kind of tomatoes rich people eat have stories. Only poor people eat tomatoes that have no stories.)
After I went to Art Basel last year and happened on a display which was, quite literally, a few kilograms of nutella dumped on the floor, I was hard pressed to disagree...
why would advertisers neglect to exploit human psychology at all socioeconomic levels?
If you look at the history of art, in the western world and elsewhere, it is strongly tied to some sort of religion.
Religious practice typically implements some sort of repetitive behavior or meditation, where the goal is not necessarily to get something done in the physical world.
If you run the process through some sort of reductionist approach, you wouldn't have art to begin with. Why even make a piece of art? What's the point?
While it is interesting to view the creation of art through the lens of an engineer, any attempt to criticize the work through only this lens is not going to stand up very well.
Something tells me this project was not about efficiency.
One day for 1000 iterations means 86.4 seconds to upload to youtube, wait for encoding to finish, then download it.
Youtube is slower than that. :-)
Better give it a week. Maybe a month.
The product tastes the same as the stuff I can buy from my neighbor's maple stand for a fraction of the cost and effort. It's wholly irrational.
And I'll do it again next year.
Sometimes the joy comes from doing it the hard way.