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Modern Art or Toddler Art?

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Nicky

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What are you talking about?!!!! Heh.

 

Anyway, here are ten images that are cropped just like the images in the quiz

Just like it, huh? That's odd, your images seem a good 5-6 times smaller than the ones in the quiz. Either the Internet just broke, or you're being your usual dishonest self. I wonder which it is.

I bet they're smaller portions of the paintings too, and you're obviously picking backgrounds. The quiz didn't do that, it showed the most identifiable part of the works. That's three out of three on ways I expected you to cheat.

versus which are items that were created by children (possibly with as much adult supervision and guidance as was present during the creation of the children's images from the quiz linked to in the initial post).

The paintings on buzzfeed were all created by toddlers. Toddlers are children between the age of one and three. The age of the children is one I didn't expect you to cheat on, so congrats on finding innovative ways to be a fraud.

Btw, nr. 9 is a copy of a very famous photograph. It's neither quality art, nor the work of a toddler. So I don't know what angle you were trying to work there, but either way you're cheating.

Try again. This time, come up with same sized, similarly cropped (in terms of proportion and position) segments, and use paintings of children between the age of 1 and 3. Things the children have done themselves. The ones in the quiz are obviously all done by little children, there is no sign of adult input.

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Just like it, huh? That's odd, on my screen your images seem a good 5-6 times smaller than the ones in the quiz. Either the Internet just broke, or you're being your usual dishonest self. I wonder which it is.

Irrelevant. Are you claiming that you can't see the images? Some of mine, though smaller, are higher resolution than those in the original quiz.

Now, are you going to identify which are art works created by adults versus which are items made by children? Right now it appears that you can't tell the difference! Just as I had suspected.

 

I bet they're smaller portions of the paintings too, and you're obviously picking backgrounds. The quiz didn't do that, it showed the most identifiable part of the works. That's three out of three on ways I expected you to cheat.

 

Your unsupported assertion about "the most identifiable part of the works" has already been addresses and thoroughly refuted in posts 21 and 22. The "center of attention" or "most identifiable part" of abstract paintings, and other abstract forms such as architecture, is the composition.

J

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The ones in the quiz are obviously all done by little children, there is no sign of adult input.

 

Apparently you didn't research the issue very carefully. Look again, this time more closely, and you'll discover that there was quite a lot of adult guidance involved in some of the "toddler" images from the initial quiz.

 

J

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Btw, nr. 9 is a copy of a very famous photograph. It's neither quality art, nor the work of a toddler. So I don't know what angle you were trying to work there, but either way you're cheating.

 

 

No, it is not a "copy" of a photograph. It is a painting based on a photograph. It is no different than many other realist paintings which Objectivism accepts as legitimate -- paintings which used photographic reference in their production. There is nothing in Objectivism which states that using photographic reference invalidates a painting and makes it non-art. Objectivism defines art as a re-creation of reality, and a portrait painted from a photograph of a person is just as much a re-creation of reality as a portrait painted by directly looking at the person.

 

Btw, Nicky, please stop with your highly emotional accusations. You really should start looking before you leap. Your rushing to judgment and then being shown to be wrong, over and over again, and your never learning from it, is really embarrassing.

 

J

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I bet they're smaller portions of the paintings too, and you're obviously picking backgrounds. The quiz didn't do that, it showed the most identifiable part of the works. That's three out of three on ways I expected you to cheat.

The paintings on buzzfeed were all created by toddlers. Toddlers are children between the age of one and three. The age of the children is one I didn't expect you to cheat on, so congrats on finding innovative ways to be a fraud.

 

All Jonathan did is post a very similar test/survey. I would say "cutouts" of art aren't helpful, but it's interesting to note that there are rarely obvious answers. Is Jonathan really picking backgrounds? If it's so obvious, point it out - or do they just seem to be backgrounds? Also, how do you know anyway what the most identifiable parts were? You (anyone even) can't make assumptions like that before seeing the whole image. The point to me seems to be that while the buzzfeed thing could be fun, it doesn't prove anything. Cropped images never do art justice. You seem to be saying cropped images too easily crop out important parts. That's the point. Please, less assumptions about art theory absent of content (what is the most identifiable part of a painting, and how do you find it?) , and more making reasoned arguments. A topic like this shouldn't be a character assault.

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I just spent a few more minutes looking over the info at the original quiz, and I have to wonder why they claim that the quiz is about distinguishing between modern art and toddler art. The truth doesn't seem to be a high priority for whoever put the quiz together. For example, the answer to question #7 falsely states that "This colorful, complex piece is by a toddler." It is not. It's an adult artist's palette, and a couple of the colors have been slightly smudged by a child. Apparently the person who made the quiz didn't read very carefully, and didn't bring much thought or any intellectual precision to the quiz.

 

J

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Jonathan, haven't you hashed out your own theory of esthetics in numerous other threads with anyone who is going to want to do that with you by now?

Yes, you've proved half a point that there is some better art which can be cropped to look like lesser art. But that doesn't make the case that the abstract paintings in the original quiz are better than the ones in your quiz, or better than non-abstract art. Nor does it take away from the spirit of the original quiz, which was true, which I would be surprised if you manage to convince anyone otherwise, which is: most abstract "art" sucks, and you really can't tell it apart from a messy child's painting.

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Yes, you've proved half a point that there is some better art which can be cropped to look like lesser art.

The half of the point that you're missing is that four of the fifteen images that I posted are not cropped. They are the full images of realist Romanticist paintings. They are quite famous. They are considered by many to be the height of Romanticism. They share Rand's signature style of employing the Sublime. And people here apparently can't tell them apart from toddler art.

By what objective standard do you call them "lesser art"?

But that doesn't make the case that the abstract paintings in the original quiz are better than the ones in your quiz, or better than non-abstract art.

I haven't been making the case that abstract paintings are better. Rather, the case that I've been making is that those who can't tell the difference between selectively cropped abstract art and selectively cropped toddler art also can't tell the difference not only between toddler art and selectively cropped realist art, but also between toddler art and certain examples of uncropped great Romanticist art.

Nor does it take away from the spirit of the original quiz, which was true, which I would be surprised if you manage to convince anyone otherwise, which is: most abstract "art" sucks, and you really can't tell it apart from a messy child's painting.

The fact that you may not be able to tell it apart doesn't mean that I and others can't tell it apart. Apparently you see only a "mess" where I and others see color choices and expressiveness of forms that children could not achieve. And that's apparently also true of the uncropped Romanticist paintings that I posted. It seems that you can't see the difference between a world-renowned master Romanticist artist's carefully selected, dramatic color choices and a child's using whichever random colors were placed in front of him.

J

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Ok, well you did the thing I said in my last post: hashing out your own theory and ignoring the fact that most abstract art is crap. But I'm not one of those guys who wants to argue your theory. For me, it's good enough to acknowledge that a paint splatterer (or a product that looks it) is not as good as a purposeful stylized image with a subject. If art is supposed to serve some inspirational purpose, common sense tells is colors and subject and style reflect the human mind better than just colors, or just colors and style --- since the human mind is what art is all about, in the end.

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Ok, well you did the thing I said in my last post: hashing out your own theory and ignoring the fact that most abstract art is crap. But I'm not one of those guys who wants to argue your theory. For me, it's good enough to acknowledge that a paint splatterer (or a product that looks it) is not as good as a purposeful stylized image with a subject. If art is supposed to serve some inspirational purpose, common sense tells is colors and subject and style reflect the human mind better than just colors, or just colors and style --- since the human mind is what art is all about, in the end.

 

James, which of the images that I posted are Romanticist paintings, which are abstract art, and which are items created by toddlers? As I said, four of them are uncropped, full-frame images of Romanticist paintings. They are realistic, selective dramatized re-creations of things from reality.

 

When you talk about "the human mind," why do you not account for differences among individuals? We all don't have the same intellectual capacities, knowledge, interests and tastes. You seem to be asserting that your mind is universally representative of "the human mind," and that mine and others' are not -- you seem to be saying that whatever you experience in a work of art is the limit of legitimate experience, and nothing may be experienced beyond that. Is that what you think?

 

If you don't recognize the subject matter in a painting, you seem to be saying that no one else can either, and the painting therefore has no subject, but is "just colors and style." If I and millions of others see a Romantic painting of a sky and sea and think, "Wow, what a beautiful painting of a sky and sea! It's a Romantic, dramatic and inspiring vision of the joy of confronting the challenges of existence," and you look at it and think that it's just a bunch of smears without a subject, which of us represents what "the human mind" is capable of?

 

To whom must a work of art present an intelligible subject? If a person can't identify the subject, does it logically follow that the subject is unidentifiable and that the artwork is therefore bad, or might it also suggest the logical possibility that the person might not be very good at identifying subjects in art?

 

J

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Ok, well you did the thing I said in my last post: hashing out your own theory and ignoring the fact that most abstract art is crap.

 

Why are you claiming to know what "most abstract art" is? You haven't studied or viewed "most abstract art." As this thread has made abundantly clear, you and others haven't even studied and viewed most Romanticist art. Something doesn't become a "fact" just because you assert it and feel strongly about it.

 

J

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I had pretty good success by looking at which ones blended colors, and which ones simply mushed unlike colors together with no regard to what shade of brown they'd create. Using that method, I would have said all five of your latest images were produced by adults.

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