Comment by artpolice | Hacker News Reader

Comment by artpolice | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Escher was reviled by the other artists of his day because they regarded his work as revoltingly ugly.

I think this is still true, or at least aesthetic objections remain the principal rationalizations for deprecating Escher that I hear from the artists in my life.

My wife and I live in The Hague. She's an illustrator and photographer from a family of artists: her mother, a painter and now an art therapist; her sister also an art therapist; her father, an abstract painter. (Not as hobbies, or idle trustafarian pursuits, these are their real livelihoods.) When her family comes to visit, "going to see the Escher museum" is a recurring joke, as in "ha ha, never going to do that." Whenever I ask why, the mumbled complaint is usually "it's ugly and boring."

Really, 'reviled' remains the right word.

I think it's snobbery, to a great and unacknowledged degree - the visual art equivalent of "genre fiction" in the literary world. The problem I have with lumping Escher with hack painters of cowboys and motorcycles, or airbrushers of vans as "unserious art" is that it ignores his innovations in subject, form, and style and mastery of technique. But then, the "serious" art world of the west is very much a class construct of which snobbery is essential part.

I think that's all true. Escher's art is accessible, it has very fine technical control, superficially it's a one trick pony.

Isn't real art messy? Escher isn't messy.

But it's one hell of a trick. The math is more complicated than it looks, the draughtsmanship is incredible, and there's real mood and atmosphere.

I wouldn't say it's ugly or revolting. I would say it's unique. It's a new visual language, and no one has ever copied it successfully.

But I could be biased. I'm an artist, I work with code and math, and I can appreciate the technique and the content.

Artists who hate code and math probably don't get it at all. If all they see is some monks climbing an infinite staircase then yeah - that's going to seem gimmicky and boring.

It reminds of a conversation R.P. Feynman had with an artist friend that goes like Artist:"When I see a flower, I see beauty; you scientists pick it apart, examine meticulously and it ceases being so beautiful.", while it seemed Feynman had a hard time explaining that he saw other, (sometimes) more profound beauties, not just the one arising from it's color and immediate looks. It's probably because the artist didn't even know what he was missing, so the discussion is very asymmetrical in a way.

I really agree with all of this.

Small, related rant:

It is really sad to me that any artist that works primarily in a medium meant to be reproduced (printmaking, illustration, and probably now digital art), is immediately and automatically lowered to a lesser tier by the art establishment. It makes appreciating their actual art works, the actual form and content of their of their work, much more difficult. It is a categorization without any other distinction other than "I saw this in a magazine or a book, or on a computer screen. How can it have any merit as real art?"

Illustrators and printmakers are seen as "artists for rent" and their work is not taken seriously.

MC Escher was a great draughtsman whose work had a very distinct personality and outlook. He was a very skilled 2D designer, his work has "presence", which is a purposefully nebulous phrase by which I mean that it radiates a particular point-of-view. It vibrates with an energy in a way that pulls you into the work. It is a marriage of great skill, great execution and more importantly, great vision. Works with presence become a small world to you while you examine them. there are many, many artists whose works have this quality. It is a force that makes no distinction between "modern" (non-objective) art and "traditional" (objective) art.

MC Escher may not be one's cup of tea, or speak to everyone the way he speaks to me, but to write off and classify and entire world of images as inferior simply because they were meant to be reproduced is just short-sighted.

I know people will argue that there were great painters that also made prints and they are appreciated as fine art, and I agree that there are degrees to this prejudice. I think it has more to do with the perception of a particular artist's primary purpose. Escher was classified by the art establishment as "that guy who does those realistic illusion prints" and then was never taken seriously after that.

It may also be the old 20th century prejudice (now coming back around, I think) against objective art. The baby had to be thrown out with the bath water in order for everyone to feel good about not actually going to art school and working hard at a craft.

(Jeez, sorry for the wide-ranging bitterness there! You never know what's going to come out!)

The art world is a social game played by rich people who want valuable objects. Art is used as a store of value and conspicuous wealth, and to show that the owner is someone who can afford to pay for an artist's time.

You can't do that with a digital file that can be reprinted and copied ad lib.

But you can try. There's a new project which uses the blockchain to deal with the issue of provenance, so that art world people can be sure that their copy of a digital file is the valuable one that matters.

This is useless madness. It's using a 21st century technology to solve a 19th century problem. But it's run by art world people who used to work at big auction houses, and they're not thinking about art like normal people do.

Which is the contradiction exploited by Banksy.

Yeah. The "serious" art world has a big problem if it thinks Escher [1] is ugly but Basquiat [2] is beautiful.

[1] http://www.museumshoppers.com/product_images/g/518/SE4__9105...

[2] http://paintingandframe.com/uploadpic/jean-michel_basquiat/b...

I used to be into "serious" art, but now I'm more into illustration and concept art. There's tons and tons of great artists today, whose work is beautiful and expresses its themes clearly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com