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Nobody would give two shits about me or my painting if I drew colored squares first.

Actually let me propose an experiment: Take two people: One a famous artist, and one an unknown complete amateur. Someone who hasn't held a brush since primary school. Have them both paint 6 pieces each in a unique but low technical skill style. Then randomize which artist signs which piece.

The success of the artworks will be strongly correlated with who is claimed to have drawn it, and uncorrelated with who actually did.

Yes. There was that anecdote of someone bringing a painting and being told it was clearly a fake after examination because the real one was exposed in a museum. TL;DR: the one exposed in the museum was the fake, the real one was stolen, and that's the one the person brought.

Double-blind wine experiments where people talk about earthy-mushroomy-fruity tones, then have the label revealed are fun.

Wine's are a little bit different imo, because there is a definitely legit basis there just the border with bullshit and marketing is fuzzy.

My take away from those double-blind experiments isn't that it's all made up, but rather that people need to practice more rigor.

Well yeah, appreciating art and owning art are different things. Owning art is an investment, you want the possibility of selling it to someone else with interest later. Can't do that if it's not famous

How do you measure the success of art? I'd go with eyeballs per year, you've picked sales figures, someone else would probably say a third thing

Sorry for the ninja edit there, I kinda went back and forth, settled on a more neutral success.

>I think you may have fallen prey to a common misconception about art: Art - not only the modern kind - has and always very much had a "first mover advantage".

There is no first mover advantage in a piece that says "I could have done this". Michael Scott from The Office probably did it first.

>You could also easily extrapolate your argument about scribbling on the canvas to the realm of software development and argue that creating e.g. Facebook or Amazon or Wikipedia is really nothing special.

That would be quite an extrapolation, though.

>A few lines of code will get you a usable MVP.

There was a documentary about Google on a french tv channel (M6) called Capital. The moment the narrator said "Discover how they built a fortune with a few lines of code", I left.

>I'm sure you could have done it (I'm saying this completely unironically). However you didn't. Someone else did it first.

I'll argue to your side: I'm not sure I could have done, but I understand what you're saying and I often say this to people who say "I thought of that idea" when they see something successful. I always retort: "Yes, I thought of Uber as well. Have I built it? No. We all have ideas we don't materialize".

Here's what I just did. Magritte style piping hot finger:

   __________________________________________
  |                                          |
  |    _________________________________     |
  |   |                                 |    |
  |   |                                 |    |
  |   |    I could have done that.      |    |
  |   |                                 |    |
  |   |_________________________________|    |
  |                                          |
  |                                          |
  |        Ceci n'est pas de l'art.          |
  |                                          |
  |__________________________________________|

> It's that he did it first.

By that logic Kim Kardashian is also a great artist. Because she is the first to popularize idea of being famous for being famous. As long as people, who claim Pollock is a great artist, also admit that Kim Kardashian is a great artist, I am good with the argument.

I'm pretty sure that was Paris Hilton?

In fact, from Kim Kardashian's wiki page:

> Kardashian first gained media attention as a friend and stylist of Paris Hilton...

And from Paris' page:

> Credited with influencing the revival of the famous for being famous phenomenon throughout the 2000s,[6] Hilton was, for a number of years, one of the world's most ubiquitous public figures.