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Comment by doctorhandshake | Hacker News Reader

Having had my mind changed when visiting some massive and site-specific art, my recommendation to those who say from photos that they don’t like it: withhold judgement until you’ve been there. Immersion in something of this scale, in a setting like this, in a place so remote that getting there is a journey, is likely to have an effect on you that aerial photos you look at on your phone do not.

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That's how I felt about the Rothko color wash paintings.

Not gonna say the prestige around them (aka, the dollar valuations that contribute to the hype surrounding those works) didn't influence me. I'm sure it does on some level (but other hyped-up works of art don't really do it for me, like stuff that Koons & Damien Hirst make).

But seeing Rothko's paintings in a huge room, as a series, is very imposing, ominous, and for lack of better word, cool. Felt like a sensory immersion experience that taps into other parts of you that you didn't expect, not unlike looking at a vast beautiful landscape.

If you only see it as a jpeg/ png that's like, 4-6" on your monitor, or as a 8" x 11" print in a coffee table book, it'll pale in comparison. Even if the discrepancy sounds utterly obvious, the in-situ experience is so vastly different, that even if it doesn't hit you like it does for others (i.e., me), it's still worth it to go see it as is, just to see how you'll respond to it or not.

I felt that way about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire

+1 for Guernica

It's 11.5ft (3.5m) tall by 25.5ft (7.75m) wide.

When you're standing in front of it, and it fills your entire vision, the horror comes through in a way that a postage stamp sized picture cannot trigger.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)

Totally agree with you, but not sure the comparison is apt. When I look at Guernica on my phone, I think "Wow, that's cool, I bet it would be so imposing at full size."

When I look at parent's link to Voice of Fire, I think, "Am I getting punked?" Point being that the small version makes me think "this is dumb", but I can appreciate that the scale of the original leaves a totally different impression.

I can't speak to Voice of Fire, as I've never seen it in person, but the reaction seems rooted in whether people value color equally to shape. I.e. "The shapes in the piece are simple, therefore the piece is simple."

Edit insert: I dated an artist for a while who did a lot of color theory work, and IMHO the choosing of precise colors (especially over large areas) is underappreciated as a stimulus for ultimate experience.

It's difficult to say from white balance on photos, but from memory Guernica isn't simply white, gray, and black. It's an ugly, uncomfortably hued, just barely noticable off-pure color palette.

https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/8562495a....

Voice of Fire is likely a much more extreme example, but my experience with Guernica was not that it was more... but that it was fundamentally different than reproduction in miniature.

Today's ease of access to a color gamut exceeding any pre-~1940 artist's wildest dreams, at high detail and on demand, is hard to overstate. I think people can still understand vaguely that something like vantablack or color-shift or things outside some gamut are "different" because they can't appear on a screen at all, but overall most people think "oh yes, I've seed red, I've seen blue, that's not art per se." But even though a screen is capable of reproduction of the basic frequencies of something like a "Rothko blue", actually seeing Rothko blue in real life - at that scale, with that texture, etc. - is a completely different experience. We think we can anticipate the experience by screen, but we are totally wrong. And the idea that something like cochineal's mere use to make "rich red" exist could be a artistic revolution is simply too foreign for us to sit with.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense, I appreciate the explanation.

Having seen Voice of Fire in person, I thought, “this is dumb,” only bigger.

These are some of the rare instances where I think VR may be actually useful. You're still not 'there' but you're a lot closer than with a crummy iphone

One artist whose work you really must see in person is James Turrell. His work is to construct massive and immersive “light installations”, where the play of colored light is the art piece. I saw an installation of his in San Francisco in the early 2000s and it was not unlike entering a sort of sensory deprivation tank, except instead of being enveloped by darkness you’re enveloped by different frequencies of color spectra.

Had similar experiences with van Gogh. On a screen it's just some swirly images and color. On paper, the colors are better, but still just some swirly images. But in person, woah. You get to see the real colors. And those subtle differences between RGB and CMYK and reality do end up mattering. And the way he used his brush. It wasn't so much that he was painting, he was more sculpting with paint. The swirls aren't swirls, the strokes aren't strokes. They're glops of paint that get smoothed and cut into the right places. To do the color mixing with that much paint off canvas is really tough, especially in the sunlight. In person, I finally got to experience the technical mastery of painting that van Gogh had, something I never knew was there before.

Exactly. It’s literally the core concept to consider when considering art. You have to actually see the real thing to experience it.

That doesn’t mean you’ll like it there’s an excellent chance you won’t. But experiencing art in real life is fundamentally different than seeing images of it, and this is doubly true for larger scale or more installation oriented pieces.

A good example that’s a little closer to home and easier to experience for many is DIA Beacon outside of NYC.

Dia beacon is a really great museum and fun to explore.

The subject artist Michael Heizer artist has a piece there.

https://www.diaart.org/collection/collection/heizer-michael-...

Walking through the Richard Sera pieces was a trip.

https://www.diaart.org/exhibition/exhibitions-projects/richa...

>A good example that’s a little closer to home and easier to experience for many is DIA Beacon outside of NYC.

Just want to add, if you're heading to DIA Beacon and the weather is nice, don't miss Storm King on the other side of the river.

Yeah def had Serra and Beacon in mind as well as Naoshima, Teshima, Turrell, etc.

"look at on your phone on the toilet"

FTFY. ;)

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