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Comment by ThePadawan | Hacker News Reader

When I was in high school AV, one of the favorite projects we were involved in was a short doc/trailer for an abstract exhibit in a local museum.

We interviewed several people. The artistic director. Some people from our school who were painting a Sol LeWitt performance piece on the wall.

All in all pretty generic stuff. People describing what abstract art meant to them, how people could interact with it.

And then we interviewed the janitor (I was behind the camera observing).

He talked about how he hung paintings.

How there is a standard wire they put on the back of frames to ensure it was easy to hang frames level.

What the typical height of a hung artwork was. Based on how tall the average visitor was, and from how far away they would observe the painting.

It was the absolute highlight of that trailer.

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My gripe with abstract art is a lot of artists settle on one gimmick. Mondrian? Space subdivided by lines. Pollock? Paint drips. It's the same as the Youtuber criticism: they have two years of ideas, then try to make a career out of it.

By pure coincidence, I just visited Kunstmuseum today in The Hague that has a large Mandria(a)n exhibit, so the following is fresh on the mind.

It took Mandria(a)n 30 years of professional painting to arrive at his spaces and lines. He was already in his 50s by that time, and it ended up being enormously popular and influential.

Artists have to eat too. Why fix something that isn't broken?

At the same museum they had a gallery of Josef Albers. He painted concentric squares of different colors for the last 26 years of his life.

* Mondriaan

Perhaps it's just hard to come up with more.

But you do see the same effect on Twitter. Guy will be normal, then get popular for one tweet, and then spend the rest of his life trying to pander to that audience.

A lot of bands barely have enough quality songs to fill a single side of a record, but they've managed to spread it out to a 4-album deal, a Best Of, and a comeback tour two decades later.

And they hate every day of it. I saw someone do a set, and when someone asked to hear one of his band's popular songs, he said "I have to play that 37 times this summer. I'm not playing it here."

This is almost entirely because of the art market and not because of the artist themselves. Few artists want to repeat the same thing repeatedly for decades.

I think artists are just happy if they can make a living. If it becomes lucrative to do the same kind of work repeatedly, I think most artist will jump at the chance because it beats working at an office 9-5 every day

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