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Comment by PowerfulWizard | Hacker News Reader

So, I personally get an emotional response to Pollock, especially that particular one, I actually have a MoMA catalog on my bookshelf with that entry bookmarked with my admission ticket from 2010 when I went to see it ( https://imgur.com/a/hFBR7Nu ). The size is a factor as well, there is no way to look at it on a computer screen that is close to how you look at it in person ( https://www.moma.org/wp/inside_out/wp-content/uploads/2012/0... ). But we definitely have different tastes.

Regarding those soviet paintings, Goya depicted war and suffering, and is very well known and highly regarded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_of_May_1808 . But your point is the core of what the article is trying to get at. The people who evaluate art are looking for something that isn't being satisfied by the same criteria as i.e. journalism, cuisine, even music to a certain extent.

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I also get an emotional response to Pollack, similar to the emotional response I get to the painting of a colored square done on the TV show "House Refabbers" where they take a canvas, paint a background in one color and then a square on the background in another color.

It's not a deep emotion, of course, it's a fleeting sensation, really, like smelling a flower or listening to a "boop boop" sound effect on the tram. It's a trite emotion, which is the best way to describe the reaction I get to Pollock - trite.

I think that particular Pollock piece would make for a great panel or wallpaper in a basement. There's a certain movement and a not-unpleasant interplay with the colors - again, similar to the "boop, boop" on various public transportation system sound effects.

You can call it "art" sure, I think "craft" would be better, or perhaps "decorative arts" is probably the best way to describe Pollock. I recall a youtube video of the painting of a countertop in a kind of "hip, modern" kitchen that had a similar aesthetic.

Of course those Soviet paintings of WWI are far more meaningful than Pollack's visually not-unpleasant background color mix.

The soviets are just craftsmen, people skilled at doing the mechanical work of a camera. They are precursors to the modern soap opera or shock website or GoFundMe scam. It's easy to elicit a strong emotional response by playing on the well understood heartstrings.

This game is silly. Denigrating a work of art for being different from another work of art is not critique, it is bitterness. Life is short. Speak up for the beautiful things you understand, not against the things you don't understand.

I tried to understand contemporary art, up to a point, there was a time when I used to buy each issue of the FT - Weekend Edition so that I could read Georgina Adam’s articles on what was the hippest thing being transacted and the like, but in the end pretty much all of it meant nothing to me.

Reguarding the representation of war, I’m afraid 200-year old paintings don’t do it for me anymore, modern warfare is so much more different and more atrocious and industrialized compared to how things happened two or three centuries ago that we do need the power of art to make us, humans, help us understand at least some part of it all. I pretty much admire the new-Hollywood directors who had the guts to put on screen what the Vietnam war meant for all those involved, from the local Vietnamese population to the US soldiers to the relatives of the US soldiers at home. For comparison the Iraqi and the Afghan wars were pretty much invisible for today’s artists, with notable and very few exceptions (like Brian de Palma).

I like the Goya painting in particular because a firing squad still looks the same: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Du39t4jWsAIe6_b.jpg .

If any notable art came out of the Iraqi wars it is probably hanging in Baghdad, we might find out about it eventually.

ISIS has put out a great deal of notable art, in the form of propaganda videos.

In the same way that Mao era paintings are valuable in understanding the history of early communist China, I believe the ISIS videos will be valuable to future historians in understanding how the radicalization and subsequent wars in the Middle East happened.

FT?

Financial Times, their weekend supplement can be quite interesting at times.

Goya's black paintings do a pretty good job of depicting the horrors of war, and being timeless as well. At least to me.

I got to see these in the Prado last year. It was a piety emotionally stunning experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Paintings#/media/File:Fr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Paintings#/media/File:La...

Contemporary anti Vietnam-War art was set up as Korean war or older. It's un-PC to directly criticize a current war, so artists apply a thin veil of barely plausible deniability to get past censorship.

I went to the Pollock's Wikipedia page and at first thought that the photo of his studio floor was one of his paintings.

Apparently, this is considered a very good result for abstract paintings: "Throughout the experiments, the students typically picked the professional pieces between 60% and 70% of the time."

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/03/1...

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