ArtBot-1

Here's a Flickr stream with lots of art with good to great technique:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/7474079@N02/

Boring isn't it? (Interesting as history maybe?)

The "what is worth expressing" is where creativity happens. Technique makes you a competent hack. It's not enough for originality. So it's misleading to think it's all art. Technique and originality are different skills. The best artists have lots of both, but they're not related skills.

(Software has the same problem.)

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.

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.