We're talking here about a very narrow segment of Fine Art that has practically nothing to do with the lives or work of the vast majority of artists -- even successful working artists. It attracts a lot of attention, and is often spoken of as if it's the most refined and pure and important form of art, but most artists don't see their art that way.

Don't worry about the "banana on the wall". It's the art equivalent of a reality show.

If you want to be interested in art, go to some galleries, talk with the people there, and ask what the art means to them. There are lots of different kinds of art and poke around until you find one that interests you.

And if you don't want to be interested in art, don't. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, despite the implication from some circles that there's some kind of taste you're failing at. Just ignore them. It's not really the "circle jerk" you imagine it is, but neither is it really that important that you're not inside this particular circle, jerking or otherwise.

I think your comment really helped me. I don't have anything against art itself. It's more about glorifying artists and artworks to level that just can't get explained.

You are probably missing the context. To a non-programmer, C and Python look the same.

Take Citizen Kane. I'd call it a 7/10 film and kinda boring, but that's because I'm seeing it in a "post-Kane" world. At the time, however, it was so revolutionary that people still call it the best film ever made. Nowadays it's quite standard because everyone has been building on it ever since

While I'm not going to disagree with you regarding some art, there is a point to be made that what to us, un-cultured people, may seem like random scribbles could actually be something revolutionary. We simply don't notice it because we are missing the context.

I do believe, however, that you are right and that there's an element of luck too. But that's not exclusive to art - how many technologies are we using right now not because they are the best but because they got a lucky break at the right time? And then again, while many good painters may never get their big break, I doubt there are that many bad painters who get famous.

Thanks for your opinion. I just tend to disagree with your examples.

Programming languages are in their core something like a craft. There are about 700 languages and even if you know nothing about programming languages at all, if I explain to you the concept of how difficult it is to make one and that only about 700 of them ever got made, you will probably understand that this is not something a lot of people could do even if they try. It's also something that can be compared and gets popular and approved because of its usefulness.

The same can be applied to technology, the best technology will may not be the most adaptive one but we can compare them and if they would get the same possibilities (exposure, marketing, timing etc) people would probably agree which one is the better one to some extend (ebay vs amazon) I don't see the component in art. There is just to many of it and if we would show 10.000 people 20 artworks and let them rank them from best to worst I would imagine the list would be different from the ranking of art critics.

>Programming languages are in their core something like a craft.

Art has that too and programming is art to some extent. Art has a technology component too! Think about the hardware - in art that is called the medium which has its chemistry (materials highly depend on that), it's got tools and while the art process is analogous to the methodology of writing software, in art you have techniques and so on. While it is not a one to one relationship, if you're willing to stretch things a bit (solely for this exercise) you can see plenty of analogies. Your parent commenter has a very good point about context and your unwillingness to look further into it will keep you from seeing a wider picture. Sometimes it takes years to understand some fundamentals but in the end you still get people who disagree and the same goes in programming. Think about the enlightenment one gets when understand LISPs while others see it as a bunch of useless parentheses and so on. Art may be more fluid but so is software if you look at the bigger picture.

Thanks that's a very good point and definitely a new perspective

> For me artists are nothing more like the embodiment of the survivor ship bias. I can appreciate something that takes skill to create, be it a craft, a poetry, or even a photorealistic drawing. I can appreciate something that raises emotions in me (I'm aware that rasing emotions is a highly subject criteria as well). I can appreciate something that is new and unique.

A lot of reasons to like art.

> None of these things is true for 99.9% of art, this artist included. I think these artworks are not different from atleast thousands of other graffiti doodles from other people. Somehow people start to praise this guy (seemingly random?) instead of anyone else. That's just survivor ship bias.

I would rather say it's some sort of network effect. The better known you are, the more interest in your art, the higher the price. Interest and higher prices attract more interest generating even higher prices, loop.

> I know people say it all the time but it's true "I could have made this". My point is that probably most of art critic's couldn't tell the difference between a random doodle of some random art student and most famous abstract art.

Isn't this the same every developer said about Dropbox? Amazon? Writing an online file-storage/sharing app is not hard, writing an online bookstore is not hard. But actually executing it for 26 years (in Amazons) case and building in from there to the empire it is today, that's the art.

> It's also not about having an unique idea, banana on the wall is not something special, people do crazy things all the time. There are probably thousand of wanna be artists that tape things on walls and make some random things in hope of getting famous and could tell you some deep thinking why it criticises our modern society.

I'd say it's about execution as well as marketing, sometimes one can compensate for the other.

> So for me art is just a random circle jerk of people telling each other that this special guy is good and the rest isn't and if you don't agree or see it you are just someone that has no idea about art. And my take on really high expensive art is that it's just a form of tax evasion or similar goals.

It certainly is also an investment and way to signal status, probably always was. But does that minimize the value for you, if you find an attribute of it to be appreciable?

All arts are a form of story telling, and all story tellings are a form of art.

What makes a story? Or better yet, what makes a good story? There're a lot of good answers for that, which means there isn't a one-liner fits all answer.

There is, though, a common ground for all the answers: stories are about all the different and complex ways we communicate, with ourself and each other. The ancient paintings were epic. They were big, full of gods and battles. It easy for us to look at those and think that this is what people liked at the time, but the truth is that this is the only thing the knew. When Van Gough presented a photo of a simple room or a pair of shoes, it is not is paintings techniques (though very good) that was exclaimed, it was the message and the novelty: a pair of shoes also exist, and therefore can be an object of a painting - they deserve a story.

There are infinite amount of ways to tell a good story, but there is only one way to distinguish one: a good story will always stick.

I'm not going to try to convince you you're wrong. You can change you own mind about this, but it takes investment. Many, many people have found that journey toward "getting art" to be life enriching.

I'll say that for me, what blows my mind about modern and contemporary art is the willingness of individual artists to follow a conceptual idea waaay beyond what is reasonable. Whether the destination ends up being critically acclaimed is beside the point. You have to at some point be able to not care in order to play, because artists, more than anybody, know just how much of a crapshoot it is to get commercial attention.

"I could have made this"

That is a common trope but it misses the immediate counter...."but you didn't".

Many can code, not all come up with something that takes off, regardless of talent or skill. Any number of things can go into that. Art is very similar in that regard.

I say this as someone with a bias; I've worked in tech for the last 20 years and I've been a paid illustrator and painter since high school (Art and Commerce isn't alien to me).

I remember I talked to a writer friend, and said to her how I had a lot of great ideas of stories, and I'd perhaps one day quit my job and become a novelist. Back in high school, I wrote quite a bit of short stories and thought myself as pretty okay. I was encouraged to actually write something about it, a scene, an outline, a beginning, anything.

I tried for a weekend, scratched my head through it, and came up with an embarrassing draft for a chapter. As I tried to translate the ideas in my mind to actual words, all the flaws, holes, and awkward characters suddenly showed up. My ingenious ideas were not a blueprint of grand palaces, but a pile of ugly rocks scattered all over the place. I barely managed to connect them in a circle.

She told me, that the fact that I had a scene written was already better than most people who regarded themselves as "wanting to write".

There is a mismatch in people's expectations. Without going through the actual work, many people regarded their vague concepts in their imagination as genius. They are often not.

That's why I've stopped listening to people who say "I've never done XXX, but how hard can it be".

Well I did it. I made art myself, even special one. I made one of the biggest perler bead art in europe with about 70.000 beads (maybe even the world?). Would I appreciate my artwork? As some kind of skill - yes (having immense duration and boredom), as something that has a special intrinsic variable beside being bigger than other pieces - no.

I'm aware that every skill and talent takes some kind of luck to "make it". I just say that art lacks any objective qualities and is just based on choices of some elite circle that don't even match public opinion.

Do you get the music world and how it works? It's very similar, and someone who didn't get music could make the exact same arguments you're making.

The visual arts take a tiny bit more effort to get into but once you're over that hump it's very similar.

Of which kind of music are we talking about? If you mean some art of abstract music or music that gets approved from some elite circle, I would indeed make the same arguments and don't see a flaw.

My main point is that there is no objective comparison between thousand of pieces and when we take the choices of the elite circle and compare it to intersubjective choices of the masses there would be little to no overlapping. So my point would still be "Why is your elite opinion more worth or correct than the collective opinion of the whole world?"

All music.

> My main point is that there is no objective comparison between thousand of pieces and when we take the choices of the elite circle and compare it to intersubjective choices of the masses there would be little to no overlapping. So my point would still be "Why is your elite opinion more worth or correct than the collective opinion of the whole world?"

Exactly. This is more or less the same in the music world as it is in the visual arts.