Having had my mind changed when visiting some massive and site-specific art, my recommendation to those who say from photos that they don’t like it: withhold judgement until you’ve been there. Immersion in something of this scale, in a setting like this, in a place so remote that getting there is a journey, is likely to have an effect on you that aerial photos you look at on your phone do not.
That's how I felt about the Rothko color wash paintings.
Not gonna say the prestige around them (aka, the dollar valuations that contribute to the hype surrounding those works) didn't influence me. I'm sure it does on some level (but other hyped-up works of art don't really do it for me, like stuff that Koons & Damien Hirst make).
But seeing Rothko's paintings in a huge room, as a series, is very imposing, ominous, and for lack of better word, cool. Felt like a sensory immersion experience that taps into other parts of you that you didn't expect, not unlike looking at a vast beautiful landscape.
If you only see it as a jpeg/ png that's like, 4-6" on your monitor, or as a 8" x 11" print in a coffee table book, it'll pale in comparison. Even if the discrepancy sounds utterly obvious, the in-situ experience is so vastly different, that even if it doesn't hit you like it does for others (i.e., me), it's still worth it to go see it as is, just to see how you'll respond to it or not.
When you're standing in front of it, and it fills your entire vision, the horror comes through in a way that a postage stamp sized picture cannot trigger.
Totally agree with you, but not sure the comparison is apt. When I look at Guernica on my phone, I think "Wow, that's cool, I bet it would be so imposing at full size."
When I look at parent's link to Voice of Fire, I think, "Am I getting punked?" Point being that the small version makes me think "this is dumb", but I can appreciate that the scale of the original leaves a totally different impression.
I can't speak to Voice of Fire, as I've never seen it in person, but the reaction seems rooted in whether people value color equally to shape. I.e. "The shapes in the piece are simple, therefore the piece is simple."
Edit insert: I dated an artist for a while who did a lot of color theory work, and IMHO the choosing of precise colors (especially over large areas) is underappreciated as a stimulus for ultimate experience.
It's difficult to say from white balance on photos, but from memory Guernica isn't simply white, gray, and black. It's an ugly, uncomfortably hued, just barely noticable off-pure color palette.
Voice of Fire is likely a much more extreme example, but my experience with Guernica was not that it was more... but that it was fundamentally different than reproduction in miniature.
Today's ease of access to a color gamut exceeding any pre-~1940 artist's wildest dreams, at high detail and on demand, is hard to overstate. I think people can still understand vaguely that something like vantablack or color-shift or things outside some gamut are "different" because they can't appear on a screen at all, but overall most people think "oh yes, I've seed red, I've seen blue, that's not art per se." But even though a screen is capable of reproduction of the basic frequencies of something like a "Rothko blue", actually seeing Rothko blue in real life - at that scale, with that texture, etc. - is a completely different experience. We think we can anticipate the experience by screen, but we are totally wrong. And the idea that something like cochineal's mere use to make "rich red" exist could be a artistic revolution is simply too foreign for us to sit with.
These are some of the rare instances where I think VR may be actually useful. You're still not 'there' but you're a lot closer than with a crummy iphone
One artist whose work you really must see in person is James Turrell. His work is to construct massive and immersive “light installations”, where the play of colored light is the art piece. I saw an installation of his in San Francisco in the early 2000s and it was not unlike entering a sort of sensory deprivation tank, except instead of being enveloped by darkness you’re enveloped by different frequencies of color spectra.
Had similar experiences with van Gogh. On a screen it's just some swirly images and color. On paper, the colors are better, but still just some swirly images. But in person, woah. You get to see the real colors. And those subtle differences between RGB and CMYK and reality do end up mattering. And the way he used his brush. It wasn't so much that he was painting, he was more sculpting with paint. The swirls aren't swirls, the strokes aren't strokes. They're glops of paint that get smoothed and cut into the right places. To do the color mixing with that much paint off canvas is really tough, especially in the sunlight. In person, I finally got to experience the technical mastery of painting that van Gogh had, something I never knew was there before.
Exactly. It’s literally the core concept to consider when considering art. You have to actually see the real thing to experience it.
That doesn’t mean you’ll like it there’s an excellent chance you won’t. But experiencing art in real life is fundamentally different than seeing images of it, and this is doubly true for larger scale or more installation oriented pieces.
A good example that’s a little closer to home and easier to experience for many is DIA Beacon outside of NYC.
The "I don't like it, therefore it's crap" rude comments are so disappointing.
I'm no art buff at all, my personal definition of art is "useless & captivating". I'd like to visit this one. The creator must be obsessed and crazy, which is like it should be. I expect it to give otherworldly, abstract melancholic vibes when being on-site. Case in point, during the years I lived in Mexico City, I went several times to the Teotihuacan site, a great experience when there are few visitors: https://cdn.kastatic.org/ka-perseus-images/9c44c543a72dbe187...
I felt this way too. This structure is a single artist's vision, made solid over the course of 50 years. I can't get a feeling/reaction from it just by looking at photos but, maybe give the chance to visit, I expect I'd be able to prod the artist's vision, see if it resonates with me.
Then again, I can get joy/awe/wonder/ennui/whatever from wandering around abandoned villages, ancient ruins (even the partly reconstructed ones), cemeteries, woods, wastelands, abandoned infrastructure, etc. Or even working places/venues, but at times of least activity. The key thing, for me, is that there must be few/no people around me - to let my mind unleash itself from the trivia and go roaming - that, for me, is when the 'art' (whatever 'art' is) happens.
I could get jealous of the financial support the artist has received over the years as he strives to make his vision solid. But I have a suspicion that he would probably built something even without support. It reminds me of Outsider Art in that way: people driven to create despite the barriers others put in their way. That such people exist gives me hope for the species.
I spent my 40th birthday wandering around Uxmal. No crowds; no tourists coached in on the hour. Just me and my partner and a collapsed civilisation surrounding us. Best birthday I've ever had! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uxmal
Respectfully, and not to start an argument, but I think you don't need to defend the artist or say people shouldn't comment if they want to criticise. I don't think artists who do this stuff care if people think it's pointless or bad. That other people can enjoy it at all is something. Artists who created things this big aren't overly sensitive people, if they were they would have stopped decades back, after the first thousand people said it was an expensive waste of time. So I think people should be honest and say if they think it's crap. And the artist may get a kick out of it, or not care. Likewise don't say nice things about it if you think it's crap, just be honest.
Thank you for putting this to words. It is not art unless it is open for criticism. That’s kind of the whole point. An artist is vulnerable->releases new work into the world->it passes through the filter of criticism->work is determine to be beautiful art or crap. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but at scale, beauty is in the eyes of the masses.
How does the “I don’t like it, therefore it’s crap” differ from “I like it, therefore it’s amazing”. They are both opinions. You may think that the critical opinion is “rude”, but conversely, I may think the glowing opinion is ignorant or quaint. Critics have been panning art for millennia or has all criticism been fully cancelled now? This guy was surely obsessed and crazy, which I wholeheartedly respect. But it’s simply not that impressive for 50 years of work. Personally, I don’t think it’s crap or amazing, I just think it’s disappointing and I feel bad this guy wasted his time. Consider what Egyptians built in the desert at least 5 thousand of years earlier with much less tools. Now that is an art installation. Granted, they had an army of builders, but still, the access to better tools and concrete should still allow 1 guy to do something more epic than what he did here. Further, the much more recent coral castle I find to be more impressive and that was also 1 guy and it only took him 30 years.
Why "useless"? In my view, art that inspires meaningful thoughts and feelings that the viewer might never have otherwise experienced is more "useful" than 90% of jobs that exist in, say, the tech industry.
Thanks very much for posting, I get a much better appreciation for the potential impact of the work at scale than I did just looking at the individual pics in the article. I think it's really cool.
I think this looks pretty. Complex One has some Cold War and Hyperion Time Tombs vibe to it, and the whole thing feels like the garden of the drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie in the Hydrogen Sonata.
It generally reminds me of what the Banksian Culture allowed by its post-scarcity: exploration of grand artistic endeavours for no other reason than that's what the artist wanted to create.
I've always had a soft spot for architectural and land art. Though this kind of brutal sterility has its beauty, Arcosanti[1] has a more human appeal.
I always wonder what will anyone think in a 1000 years if they dig it out of the desert. Will there will be wild speculations on the religious significance of the structures and how the proportions line up to x natural or universal constants. Did aliens build it? :)
Same for lots of structures maybe. Imagine finding the remnants of CERN near an ancient ruined city if you're part of civilisation that's regressed technologically. What would pre-nuclear people make of a kilometres-wide perfectly circular tunnel full of strange items?
At least I think they'd probably try to excavate the centre of the circle, assuming there to be something important there (and come up empty).
Certainly cern will cease to be useful at some point? 100 years? I wonder how much thought goes in to end of life for huge long lived projects like these. Will it be disassembled at great cost? Left to rot?
Looking at the (probably?) trillions of pounds worth of Cold War infrastructure like bunkers, silos, airstrips, sub pens etc. that is not really used any more, I guess just left.
Though a collider tunnel that size may still be useful in 100 years. The SPS was built in 1976 and it's still useful nearly 50 years later. The tunnel can also be reused, just as the LHC used the tunnel for the LEP experiment.
It reminds of a (somewhat recent) article and discussion here on the design parameters for long-term nuclear waste storage facilities. One of the points was that to deter interference from pesky curious humans across the time scales considered, pictographic or lexical warnings may get degraded or lose meaning: the structure and area itself must convey a message of menace, drabness or inhospitability.
I'd have bet this was a test site for such a project. Which given the name of the installation might be the goal. If anyone remembers the paper in question, my algolia-fu is failing me.
> “This place is not a place of honor,” reads the text. “No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”
> The plan calls for huge 25ft (7.6m) tall granite columns marking the four-sq-mile (10 sq km) outer boundary of the entire site. Inside this perimeter, there is an earth berm 33ft (10m) tall and 100ft (30m) wide marking the repository’s actual footprint. Then inside the berm will be another square of granite columns.
"If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
Yeah; I'd want to visit every one of these proposals on vacation.
The only exception is the one from Emil Kowalski. That proposal would make it so difficult to excavate the site that the civilization performing the excavation would likely have radiation detectors.
Step one in that is probably burying it sufficiently deep that it can't be found without advanced seismology.
You might be interested in the Michael Madsen documentary "Into eternity" about the Onkalo waste repository in Finland, that should supposedly last 100 thousands years. It's mostly about the difficulties of conveying a message of danger to future generations (or civilizations)
A very interesting topic is that they hope that the repo is forgotten, nobody will remember about it and nobody will go looking for it or become curious about it and what's inside of it, as it is described "a place we have to remember to forget".
If the “not” somehow got effaced, that message would suddenly have the opposite effect, so… This kind of thing is difficult. Hopefully, there would be some redundancy to the message.
Development of a small yachting community was underway full steam in the early 1970's when The Bahamas gained independence from the UK, after that those not born there were no longer allowed to own property, only able to lease it for a period of 99 years at most.
I was pretty excited to go, then saw this at the end of the article:
> Visitors will also need to get themselves to Alamo, Nev., a nearish town. They’ll then be picked up, allowed to roam “City” for a few hours and, because there are no lights on the road and no cellphone service, they will be driven back before dark, meaning they won’t get to see the sun rise and set, prime hours.
The "no lights" thing is a pretty lame excuse. It sounds like an exercise in minimum compliance with the order to open it to the public.
Separately, Salvation Mountain in California is worth a look too.
I've always wanted to see people do something similar to Wavefield in a desertscape. I'm travelling from the other side of the planet to be reasonably close to City in a month or so, and even "reasonably close" makes it a 4-5+ hour detour. :(
Storm king is great fun. The one Near me when I lived in white plains NY was the PepsiCo headquarters sculpture gardens. Smaller and the hours are limited to weekends and you can’t go inside the offices, but free!
Dia Beacon is modern art in a old cracker factory that is huge and fun to explore. I have a love/hate relationship with modern art, but in the context of this giant building it was fun.
I liked the Crawick Multiverse by Charles Jencks, located south of Glasgow. Sort of like this City thing, but smaller, more varied, much more accessible, and most importantly, cool, green and inviting.
It’s like he designed it for humans, not despite them.
Far as much discussion as there is here about how this was a colossal waste of time and resources, I’d be curious how many people here work for a company that’s net profitable. It’s very easy to be moralistic about other peoples money, especially when it comes to art. However, I wonder if it’s a bit hypocritical.
A lot of people feel this way about modern art in general. At some point along the way, art stopped being about trying to bring beauty and happiness and clarity into the human condition. Since then, art has become a pure signalling death spiral.
What passes as “good art” these days is completely relegated to the art community and utterly unintelligible to regular people. Is there any wonder that people dismiss it as a waste of resources? It’s every bit as bad as NFTs, academic turf wars, and Twitter purity spirals [1]. It’s yet another warning sign of the impending decline of civilization, if Toynbee’s thesis is to be believed.
> At some point along the way, art stopped being about trying to bring beauty and happiness and clarity into the human condition.
I suggest dating that at around 19 BC, when Virgil created the absolute masterpiece that is the Aeneid, probably the greatest work of Latin literature that has ever existed... as a nationalist propaganda piece designed to justify the existence of the newly-formed empire and to retroactively proclaim the divine and heroic heritage of the Roman emperor of the time.
Sure, and one might also quibble and say that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling as a piece of pro-Christian propaganda. And yet there is some difference between those gorgeous frescos and a banana duct-taped to a plain wall that goes much deeper than the time and effort they took to create.
Whatever his reasons, Michelangelo created something which awes and inspires millions of people every year, regardless of religious affiliation or belief. Cattelan, on the other hand, has succeeded only in reminding the public how utterly irrelevant modern art has become: a lame joke for people with too much money and too little taste.
Nitpick: you’re talking about contemporary art, not modern art. Contemporary art is like contemporary music or anything we currently live in: some things may be good, other not, and we don’t know yet what will be remembered as “good art” or “good music” in 50 or 200 years. But without these experimentations art can’t evolve. People stopped doing paintings like Michelangelo did not because they weren’t beautiful, but because they wanted to experiment with something else, to exprime their ideas in different ways.
Comparing old art and contemporary art is irrelevant for this reason. You’re comparing what we remember from one era to what’s currently being experimented.
It would be very reductive to describe art as “something that’s beautiful”. A more general definition would be “a creation that makes you react”. You may be in awe or caught with disgust; in both cases the artwork creates a reaction.
Cattelan’s art is built on provocation. Whether you like it or not, this is some kind of art.
>People stopped doing paintings like Michelangelo did
Seems to me most people never started doing paintings like Michelangelo did, most likely because they were not capable and recognized their own limitations.
> Seems to me most people never started doing paintings like Michelangelo did, most likely because they were not capable and recognized their own limitations.
It’s a bit more complicated; Michelangelo was not a random artist painting alone in his workshop and you wouldn’t have been able to do what he did just because you were technically able. He was active durant the High Renaissance (like Raffaello and Leonardo), a period that ended with the Sack of Rome and the end of the Republic of Florence. It’s not that you couldn’t do it after him, it’s that the conditions that allowed him (and Raffaello, Leonardo and others) to do what he did were gone.
Just wondering, how would you compare this work to the Nazca Lines or Stonehenge? To me it seems like a modern take on the both of them. Does all art have to be pretty paintings?
No, not all art has to be paintings. But I do believe that all art is rooted in an aesthetics.
This work (Michael Heizer's) is a lot more beautiful and interesting than typical modern art (such as Cattelan's Comedian). I would even go so far as to call it an anachronism: it has all of the sincerity and none of the cynicism.
My original comment was about modern art in general. The more I look at Michael's work, the less I think my previous take applies to it. I think it's an exception to the rule, however.
Comedian is designed to be a joke though, it's literally poking fun at the stupidity of modern art and all the gatekeeping in the art world. More than that, it's a true meme: it's an idea more than it is an artwork. How many other artworks are memes?
> At some point along the way, art stopped being about trying to bring beauty and happiness and clarity into the human condition
I’m no art critic, but you’ve only described one purpose of art as far as I can see.
Art is about communicating emotion. Some art attempts to make you feel “happiness and clarity into the human condition”, sure - but other works make you feel all kinds of things, including horror in disillusionment.
I think this is why I see some value in at least the idea of Dada, while others look at it and see nothing worthwhile. In fact, in that case, the reaction of those people is itself part of the installation. I remember coming to that conclusion in a city museum, where someone had taken a (new, obviously) toilet bowl and installed it as a water fountain. I had never heard of Duchamp at the time, but I immediately felt like I was seeing something that was, in fact, “art”.
I came away from it thinking things like “we all have preconditions that color how we see the world”, “objects with common uses can fit other uses”, “just because something fits a purpose, doesn’t mean it’s a good choice”, “people are pretentious for scoffing at this without even considering why it was created”, etc. The point is, it caused me to feel things, and think about things that I wouldn’t have otherwise considered.
My youngest child at the time was probably 3 or 4, and I remember her sitting in a stroller and looking at me like horns had sprouted from my head when I took a drink from it. I filled one of her sippy cups from it, and she refused to drink it.
On one hand - it was just a porcelain fixture with municipal water piped into it, like every other fountain that we’d ever used. On the other, the mere fact that it looked like something that she associated with human waste meant that she was unwilling to consider that it was clean.
The way other people looked at me when I drank from it carried between amusement, shock, and outright disgust. At that point the bystanders became the “art”. Hell, my actions became the art when I drank from it. A couple of others followed, some shook their heads, etc.
So… yeah. I got wordy there, but from my perspective I’d say that anything that evokes emotions in others is in fact art.
The Nazis were also anti-smoking. It stands to reason the problem with the Nazis is related to the war and crimes against humanity and not every stance they took on every issue.
While I agree with the larger point you're making here, asking whether or not the company people are working for is net profitable is a poor counter here, specifically because it centers "meaning" purely around monetary amount. There is value to be derived and created that has nothing to do with the dollar amount that ends up in your's or someone else's bank account at the end of the day.
> Visitors will also need to get themselves to Alamo, Nev., a nearish town. They’ll then be picked up, allowed to roam “City” for a few hours and, because there are no lights on the road and no cellphone service, they will be driven back before dark, meaning they won’t get to see the sun rise and set, prime hours.
I feel this is such a bad decision, hope they reconsider.
Well, it looks like an art object, definitely - idea, style, composition. But it will only look good in a desert.
Real cities should be green.
In Barcelona, we have a place called “Parc del Fòrum” - a huge area covered by asphalt (14 acres, 5.7 ha), with just a few buildings. Looks great, for sure (you can ride a bike/scooter here with a wind). Mostly being used for music festivals.
But before every festival, organizers put artificial grass to create the areas in front of the stages. And the rest of the time you can find just a few young souls riding here (2-5 persons). There is only one place in Forum Park where you can always find a lot of people - the children's playground. Because it has trees, grass, and shadow.
What might look great and stylish isn’t always comfortable. I love Parc del Forum because I like to ride and it has spectacular sea views, but I think it was a great experiment to highlight the importance of trees in a city design.
I like it. It's big, abstract, depressing. I imagine walking there alone at night, must be something.
Edit: also, i dont think 50 years of one person is a lot of time. 50 persons startup working for one year and then closing is also a waste of 50 years, not yet talking about the vc money.
> It’s also a great reminder of what you can achieve if you focus a considerable amount of time on something.
Is it? 50 years for a bunch of cement? Is it a great reminder? I'm so confused by the positivist tilt on every piece of grey meh that exudes from the armpits of these supposed apex artistic cogitators. We are allowed to just say how rubbish it is, right? This artist has projected it into the world of public opinion. And while I respect his autonomous ambitions and sheer willpower, I don't believe this is an exemplar of achievement, and I struggle in good faith to see how such a perception is arrived at. FWIW I guess nobody here has skin in the game. I get to sit here like you and froth on the sidelines. I best get back to my own toils.
Well it’s art isn’t it? What’s the reason you believe I shouldn’t be liking it? When I watched the NYT flyover videos I got an instant positive gut reaction, a sort of resonance. I was skeptical at first but changed my mind.
In a transient world where people mindlessly swipe TikTok videos, focusing 50 years on something is just mind blowing.
Ok. I would kind of like it, but environmental impact of that needs to be insane. I guess 50 years ago people were not that concerned about it. And then how much energy they will have to spend just removing sand. Seems like a pretty pointless job for someone.
I'd guess this is one of the least environmentally disruptive constructions in the Nevada desert. The green fields across the street look infinitely worse.
This provides some perspective to our paleoarcheology of today. Imagine we find something odd from a past civilization that we can't explain (like a large complex of concrete with rolling forms and sharp angles in the desert). The natural tendency would be to assume this was a collective thing, a place built by many for some mysterious purpose. But humans have been doing art almost as long as they have been around.
I would guess it's just as possible that we sometimes come across something from a single individual, built with the express purpose of making people think. It's kind of interesting.
Yeah, some guy jacking off in the desert for 50 years. Good luck with that mate. Not really my cup of tea, and frankly a bit of a shame you couldn't have done something a little more productive with your 50 years, than move a bit of sand around...
This obsession on here with 'productivity' is depressing. I thought the HN crowd was beyond all that. Frankly, to suggest that this man should have given up on his dream so he could.. what? be an office drone for 50 years?... is lame.
99% of us will live un-noteworthy lives and then die. This man has built something that will be inviting thought and discussion for potentially hundreds of years.
Humans have always built monuments. Should the Hopewell peoples have not built their burial mounds because there were more productive things for them to do?
If you don't understand this piece (and I sure don't), that's fine. I just think it's a pretty callous thing to dismiss someone's life passion as "jacking off in the desert."
Why not build things, and interesting things, things that get us to talk about these things with each other? I love the energy this project creates among us.
Edit: having read the NY Times article, clearly inspired by the ancient neighbours in the south.
> City will soon begin to receive visitors on September 2, 2022. Only short day trips will be possible for a maximum of six visitors, with prior reservations only, and only in favorable weather. City is on private property in rural terrain, and it has no habitable structures. Visiting without a pre-arranged visit is thus potentially dangerous, and it is strictly prohibited and is trespassing.
> Visitors will be accommodated on a first come, first serve basis, and visitations will end for the 2022 season on November 1. The price of a visit is $150/adult, $100/student...
I applaud the vision and perseverance of the artist, although it's not necessarily my cup of tea. But I dislike the exclusivity aspect often present in the art world. It's not high brow in this case so much, as it is manufactured scarcity. The artist probably thinks a crowd would destroy the feeling of isolation he wanted to achieve, but only 6 visitors at a time???
I think this is really cool. I'm tempted to pony up the $150 to go see it, but it'd have to be in winter; I live in Nevada and there's no way in hell that'd be a pleasant experience in summer. Zero shade, zero plants, just heat, for 1½ miles on foot. Even in spring/fall, I'd definitely hydrating beforehand and bringing lots of water.
Experiencing art takes work in itself. If you are inclined to look at 2D photos of a 1.5 mile work of art and make your final decision about its merits, I don’t think you’ve done the work to experience it. That makes your opinion valid but uninteresting overall.
Ah yes the “work” to travel to a remote part of the country and stand amazed at the concrete erections of this is great man. The work that only few of the inclined can afford. Of course, this installation requires space, and choosing it to be “out there” affords it some additional conceptual credit, but who is this meant to impress except for a certain class of people who have the time and means to do “the work” and actually interpret its profound artistic message? Your comment seems to me to prioritize the artist’s prerogative, and with a $30 million endowment for this installation, I’d say quite a few people agree with you. But shouldn’t we also afford the beholder some respect? I’m quite skeptical of this installation, but I’d go see it if I was ever in Central Eastern Nevada, which I’m guessing, like many people, won’t be any time soon. We shouldn’t discount anyone’s opinion for having not seen it in person because who is it really speaking to in the first place?
> But shouldn’t we also afford the beholder some respect?
Yep. As I said: the opinion of the observer, in whatever capacity they have observed, is valid. But uninteresting overall. In the same way I don’t value the literary criticism of the student who only read the Cliff’s Notes.
Moreover, the “work” need not exclusively be traveling to the site itself. The work was just unveiled. Everyone here heard about it for the first time today. How much context have you taken in about this work?
They'll be fine. Evidence will point out that people traveled long distances to be there, supposedly to participate in some kind of ritual. Which is all true.
I don't really get the art. But with that said I can very much appreciate that someone devoted their life to this and that it will likely live on and signal their existence long after they pass. All of us should have such a purpose and be so lucky.
I'm a bit confused as to how people have so much trouble "getting" this. I might even go as far to say that the whole thing is uniquely low-brow. It's like a realization of a kid thinking "what if there was a skate park, but it went for miles?", or an early-2000s amateur CGI render, or a CS:S surf map 30 years before that string of words was a twinkle in anybody's eye. Yes, 50 years and tens of millions of dollars is extreme, but there's all sorts of impractical things that are still cool in spite of how little practical sense they make.
He's obviously using the historical definition of "masterpiece" here inviting judgement of it - not the pop culture one, which means almost the opposite in placing it beyond casual judgement.
Oh so it's a a piece of work presented to a medieval guild as evidence of qualification for the rank of master? Unless you're saying he's using a definition of the word that literally doesn't exist in the dictionary?
I'm mostly impressed by the fact that he stuck with it for 50 years. I can't fathom having a concrete(pun intended) concept that survives 50 years of new information and experiences.
I call this record art. It's nice and I don't mind the naked concrete but if this was made in a smaller scale over a shorter period of time I can't imagine it would make such a splash.
Some fairly negative comments here. I think it looks fantastic. I'd love to roam the site, imagining that I just stepped through a farcaster portal into some alien civilization. I can't recall seeing anything that would be able to provide the same sort of experience at scale like this.
For me it's not fantastical at all, it's an utterly spot-on take on our actual real life experience of urban life in America: giant parking lots, freeways, corporate parks, long walks through airport terminals and other liminal spaces designed at car-scale. But taken out of context so we're forced to reckon with it's weirdness, oppressiveness, scale, how starkly it juxtaposes against the natural world, how it will all last far beyond our own lifetimes and make us feel like lemmings in a giant maze devised by deities, and so on.
I think the way it looks like some kind of landing bay on Mars speaks just as much to how our sci-fi stories were influenced by our urban architecture as it does the reverse.
This is my favorite take. For me, desert landscapes prove fascinating. The unnatural geometric forms set against the mountains and desert and blue sky sounds utterly unreal.
Everyone here going off about how they don’t “get” this—well, neither do I. I just think it would be cool to experience. It’s ultimately as pointless as love or music.
Hope someone spends an afternoon to building this in Unreal Engine. I know art world gets indulgent, but this project always seemed very extra. Looks like fun counterstrike map though.
While I agree there's a lot of value in wider distribution of arts funding, I suspect the people giving $30mm to this are also giving immeasurably more to other artists than the VCs funding the next cycle of food delivery startups are. More likely the rest of their portfolio is full of straight-up negative value stuff like more payday loan companies.
What if in order to get city dwellers (who were already able to get food, albeit having to wait 5 more minutes for it) food the app makes unreasonable demands on delivery workers (who probably won’t be employees but “associates” instead) to the point that it becomes a high-risk job, except it’s not a job so they’re on their own when they have an accident, and if they don’t, they barely make ends meet anyway? Honestly, my moral framework prefers the art.
I thjnk there is a sort of societal sickness where we’ve stopped making things that are beautiful and glorify humanity and instead make things which are bland and ugly and depressing.
And sure some post modernist can say “ha that’s what the artist is saying!” Yeah I know. I just think he’s saying it in a boring, ugly way.
The reality of this type of art is that it’s really easy to make. Most of the “skill” required to do stuff like this is the networking required to find somebody who will pay for it.
> The reality of this type of art is that it’s really easy to make. Most of the “skill” required to do stuff like this is the networking required to find somebody who will pay for it.
I disagree with this. Especially the "really easy to make" part. Is this easy from a technical perspective? Yeah I'd probably say so but I wouldn't think to make this or express an idea in this way. Critics of this art might say that's because I have better taste than the artist here but point is, even if something is "easy," execution is all that matters and I'm not confident most people who say it's easy could execute on it.
I concur. Even amongst buddies, colleagues, acquaintances, yada yada, those who insinuate that something is easy to do are often times insulated from the process/ grind, have little to no experience in the work, and/or are in positions of influence and power where they feel entitled to others doing it for them.
Same individuals, when put to the task to do the thing they claim is easy, either refuse constructive criticism from people with more experience and make something pretty bad in quality with many details overlooked and left unaddressed, or give up and come up with excuses.
Makes me think that even crappy movies that are easy to eviscerate, are still pretty dang difficult to make. This isn't to say crappy movies deserve coddling and undue praise when it fails at what it sets out to do, but focusing on the notion that just because something doesn't resonate with you as a consumer of the work of art, and because it appears simple, that somehow, you as the person who rejected it are just as, if not more capable, to make something slightly better, is 99 times out of 100 rooted in a delusional pride. I've def done this as well, and ate plenty of humble pie along the way (just to level the playing field, so to speak).
For many engineers who don't "get" art, I'll try to give an explanation that parallels something many programmers will be familiar with.
Of course, there is a lot of pretentiousness in the art world, but often when you see a painting or artist who is revered in some way, and you wonder "Wut? This is incredibly simple and boring." it's often because the artist was the first person to really look at the world in that way. Probably my favorite example of that is Agnes Martin, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Martin. I look at her work and think "She's famous for drawing graph paper??" but I think the Wikipedia article does a good job explaining how her work was such a departure from what came before. Similarly, Heizer is famous for the scale and site-specific nature of his works, where sculpture and landscape blend.
This may not be a perfect analogy, but PagerDuty has a market cap of about 2.25 billion dollars (and it was recently twice that). I've used PagerDuty extensively, and I've thought "The is basically a calendar system with alerting policies. How can this be worth so much money?" But the fact is that PagerDuty was one of the first applications of its type that solved an important (if mundane) business problem it a straightforward way. It may not be "genius" in the way Einstein is genius, but it was one of the first to address this problem it a way that users really liked.
I think Wordle is similar - it's not some genius accomplishment, but it does so many things in just the right way (the once-a-day nature, the way sharing works, the jiggling of the letters, the fact that most games just take a couple minutes but every now and then one will leave me stumped for a long time, etc.) is why it became a phenomenon when there have been "word jumble" games for ages.
So my point is that if you see some piece of art that you don't "get", at least first try to understand the context and history of what went into making a piece. Even if you still don't get it after that, it can leave you with some appreciation of why that particular work is more renowned than others.
> often because the artist was the first person to really look at the world in that way.
Rarely was that person "the first". Discovery issues are huge. So huge, I would bet that more artists who are revered had better PR and knocked off a peer than were the originator.
Case in point, you go to Wordle. As you point out, it wasn't the first to think of any of the features it had or the basic gameplay. It was a combination of excellent execution, luck, etc. It's an excellent finished product! But it's not novel.
You went hard between "art is important because its novel" and "execution of the nonnovel Wordle is what matters" without recognizing those are the exact opposite point.
> You went hard between "art is important because its novel" and "execution of the nonnovel Wordle is what matters" without recognizing those are the exact opposite point.
Apologies, you've misunderstood my point. Of course all art builds in n what came before, but when I talk about something being unique and novel, I don't mean nothing ever in it was thought of before, I mean it had just all the elements in all the right combinations, usually with just a dash of novelty.
Again, Dropbox is such a great example of this. Of course there were tons of "file sharing/backup" services before Dropbox, but what was unique about Dropbox was how it packaged it up in a dead-simple "folder on my Desktop" manner.
Heizer didn't invent site-specific sculpture, but he has certainly done it on a scale and timeframe that was unprecedented.
I actually really like brutalist-style angular concrete, so I think this piece is pretty neat. My only complaint with brutalism in actual buildings is that the entrance is generally hidden.
It's OK for different people to have different taste in art.
Is this brutalist though? Concrete elements are brutalist in the context of buildings because they're the exposed functional component of the building. This is just geometric shapes made out of concrete. I like brutalism but I think this is some mediocre postmodern deconstruction. Like when an established artist presents a blank canvas as art and the intelligentsia act like it's brilliant.
It's interesting that you are contrasting "things that are beautiful", and then as the main criticism "it's really easy to make".
In the next few years we are going to have this debate over and over again (AI-art). Does art need to be hard to make to be called art? If I create something really beautiful but it only took me a few seconds to make, is it still art? Would your appreciation of an art piece change if you knew the author didn't spend as much time as you thought on it, why? It's still the same piece.
If a future civilization discovers a lost painting, they can't tell how many hours went into it. Art should stand on its own, the difficulty in creating the final piece is a metadata that is biasing our judgement. "Beautiful" and "hard to create" are orthogonal dimensions.
I think that's a pretty interesting conversation, I see two sub-questions:
1) Is our intuition that art requires effort some remnant of the labor theory of value applied to art?
2) Is it simply that as something requires less effort to make it redefines the baseline for what is considered beautiful, and thus to create something that stands out requires more effort than what's commonly available to everyone?
It's where the concept of equity for all leads. When no one is inherently worse or better than anyone else, it becomes mere bigotry to pass any kind of judgment.
That is exactly the thesis of a recent book [0], summarized, more or less, as: "When there is no objective method to rate performance, then the social network becomes the measure of performance."
This type of thinking is the first step to change.
When this spreads, ugly art won’t be edgy or cool anymore, and we’ll look back on this 150-year period like we look at 80’s hairstyles today (“what were they thinking!?”)
A future civilization will uncover this and come up with all sorts of
grand stories about how it was likely used. Nobody will consider “what if this was some esoteric art installation that serves no purpose?”
How can you say you don’t like it if an important component of appreciating this piece is physically walking through and exploring it, which is presumably completely different from viewing a couple low res shots on your cellphone/computer?
> ...making things that are beautiful and glorify humanity...
Oh really? In an ugly and cruel world where humans are terrible to each other, you demand a lie and to glorify the undeserving? Perhaps you think the point of art is to make you feel good? I think what you are looking for is entertainment, there is plenty of that.
You are partially right that what is celebrated as art reflects on (wealthy) society but it is also an expression of perception of reality by the artist which resnoates with those who appreciate it. Perhaps not everyone finds fake portrayals of beauty appealing but many find enjoyment in the beauty of truth as they see it in their reality?
Figurative painting — pretty much the definition of glorifying humanity - has made a HUGE comeback over the past decade or so, to the point where we art nerds make jokes about it.
There is still a lot of “difficult” art out there, and plenty of IMO anti-humanist work, but the breadth of styles that are taken seriously is greater than it ever was in history.
You don’t have to like everything. There’s plenty out there you probably would like.
I'm with you. I never studied art, but if enjoying it (or "getting" it) requires you to brainwash yourself with 5 years of art college then fuck it.
Ever watched "The Shock Of The New"? Amazing BBC 8 part series from 1980 with art critic Robert Hughes. He gives a great history and interpretation of modern art.
Years later, before he died, he made a follow up piece where he interviewed an art collector, and it cemented my armchair theory that modern art's rejection of beauty and mastery unwittingly allowed charlatans and billionaires to subvert it, in much the same way that popular music has been hijacked by businessmen.
> make things which are bland and ugly and depressing
How you feel about art is a reflection of you, not society. If you think this art is "bland and ugly and depressing" then maybe you should examine yourself as to why you feel that way. Plenty of people find concrete art interesting, attractive, and stimulating.
I suppose we could test that. Why don't you give us a couple of examples of where blue collar workers have made this stuff without an artist directing them?
These are just literally giant triangles of concrete, and city curbs holding in gravel. So an example would be: any freeway overpass in the city of Albuquerque, Las Vegas, or Phoenix.
I've only been to the last two and there are certain structures there that begin to evoke the feeling but they don't get there because of their lack of isolation.
I tried to paint you a picture using Dall E of what I mean. The isolation means a lot and the raw structure being present without all of the accompanying stuff really just evokes a feeling.
The desolate isolation of the first picture with the gray concrete of the second, made in simple geometric forms really does it for me. But those pictures don't quite do it because of all the other stuff (the painted curb, the sign, the other materials). I have to imagine the combination because I'm not good enough at prompt engineering yet. And I really wanted a far away shot that really emphasized the isolation.
The prompt I used was something like "daytime photo of an isolated unpainted concrete bus stop in a desert from far away".
I think that many objects that I think you'd describe as built by blue collar workers come close to starting to evoke this feeling. For instance the isolated bus stop thing I was trying to draw there. But this is just like those but with those components of the aesthetics that I appreciate multiplied by a large number.
That’s because this is not art. Contemporary / modern “art” in general is pure crap, and is absolutely NOT art. It’s formed of a circle jerk of people who pretend like their work has a meaning or that they understand each other’s work. Art reflects the life view of the artist, and we can clearly see that this reflects nothing. All people involved know that it’s BS but they’re all afraid to be the odd one out or are directly profiting from people’s stupidity. It always comes down to pretentious elitist assholes who think they’re too intellectual to work for a living.
> “Over the years I would sometimes compare Michael Heizer’s City project to some of the most important ancient monuments and cities,” Govan said in a statement. “But now I only compare it to itself.”
We can argue the merits of the art itself, but I think we can agree that the self-congratulation is nauseating.
I think it’s cool, but if they’re actually only allowing 6 people a day and charging $150, it’s stupid. let people visit as they wish, if someone’s dedicated enough to get out there, they should be able to see the piece.
One of the reasons 'City' is notable, is because it is just so big.
The first time I heard about was in a video "Monumentality" [1], which explores why humans throughout history have tried to make monuments; big things, skyscrapers, pyramids etc.
Michael Heizer will die one day, as will we all. But by its nature of being a huge complex made of rocks and dirt, 'City' will continue to stand for thousands of years probably.
it's a largely flat construction in the desert. it might "stand" for thousands of years, but it'll be covered in sand or other blown debris to the point where it's unrecognizable in ten without constant maintenance. the article quotes $1.3mm annual budget, and i'd guess most of that goes to sweeping.
the average mid-rise building in a real city is much more of a lasting monument than this is.
I don’t know. For me personally if I were building something like this for 50 years, I’d be thinking about its fate in 1000 years. Someone will dig this up long after it’s forgotten, and that person/group will experience this art anew, in a completely different way people experience it today. Perhaps that’s part of the intention?
We see how much delight people take in speculating about Nazca lines. As an artist creating a work like this, I might intend to cause that speculative delight for future generations. Maybe in 1000 years people will flock from around the world to see it because of how mysterious it is.
Look up Roden Crater by Turell, which is a similarly insane project, but maybe easier “to get”.
These artists are both obsessed with shape, size and light. The art is partly environmental. It is exploring how the desert light (harsh bright white at noon, dark violet/orange at sunset) affects the simple shapes.
There is a lot of art whose major criteria is “does it make the uninitiated feel that way”. Anything that makes you want to say “My kid could do this!” probably falls into this category, and it is probably attached to an absurdly large price tag that makes you start wondering how much of its value is simply as a tax dodge for some obscenely rich person.
99% of them hate that you just like it or not. Sometimes the analysis is pointless. Stick to your guns. In the best possible sense and with no intended patronising notes: "you do you"
I think it is something you can only really experience in place. The scale, the desolation and the absence of anything commercial while being in a human-built landscape I think would be an unusual experience.
have you ever experienced positive feelings after visiting a landscape ? this artist is able to synthesize these feelings. And it's not trivial, it requires large scale logistics
You mean if they have a plan ? Or you mean any golf course architect can create a landscape that touches the soul ? because obviously golf landscapes don't provoke emotions
Clearly you haven't played a nice golf course. Or if you have, you haven't stopped to appreciate it the same way you would landscape art. If you did you would think otherwise. Some of the nicest golf courses in the world provoke far more emotion than you would imagine. Look at some photos of bandon dunes; those holes were designed by master artists.
But this doesn't? Where every tree, every mound and turn of the landscape was an intentional alteration of the landscape serving the purposes of both provoking emotions and enabling the game of golf : https://imgur.com/a/E2jwz2x
Sorry but you would have to be delusional to think that. There is a reason people come from all over the world to enjoy bandon dunes. Michael Heizer spent 50 years making a junkyard and you fell for it.
Finally a quote:
“Most of their projects were on beautiful rolling parcels of land, and the geometric shapes which they created contrasted with the rolling topography...This yin and yang would draw the golfers’ attention to the target and create a very interesting or thrilling space to hit to. Raynor’s Fishers Island is a very good example of using geometric shapes to draw one’s attention to the target, while highlighting the beautiful surrounds. The shapes of the targets, putting surfaces, are very similar but the grading of the surrounds and the surfaces themselves varies from hole to hole. The grading conforms to the site and space and the lines draw one’s eye in a very subtle way to the powerful landscape surrounds.
Golfers enjoy beautiful natural surrounds but also are very stimulated when their target is well defined. Geometric features create these types of situation. This is why I believe most golfers respond favorably to this. Pete Dye used hard and straight lines on several of his designs. While some felt that at times he went too far and did not harmoniously blend his design with nature, his targets were well defined and created stimulation and thought.”
On the contrary contrary, some of the best most thought-provoking course designs are in the desert. Check out red rock golf trail. But yes, it probably invokes rage as well :).
Scale is important. Artists used to try and represent things, the invention of perspective was mind blowing, Skill up to hyperrealism stage. But the camera did away with a lot of that endeavour and artists began trying to explore emotion, sensation, paint for paint's sake, the ACT of painting and mark making itself. Jackson Pollock is a great example of a road marker along the way. The act of the brush, the removal of 'the artist', the canvas size growing. In 1970 the year this was started Robert Smithson created 'spiral jetty' - artists making statements more grandiose and more timeless. In some ways there's similarities with the more ancient works like the Nazca lines, but I think this work is best described by the term Magnus Opus in the article - The greatest single work of an artist, writer, or composer. It's an endeavour, a feat, and literally great in scale.
I wonder what future archaeologists will think of this structure in the middle of the desert. Maybe they'll think it was ritual or religious, much like how we think of Stonehenge today.
Did you lose your mind, future archaeologists might be neural networks capable of going back in time or light-fast investigation unless some extinction happens and back to the basics, or you refer to alternative geometric and conceptual future universes /s ^^
I like art. I don't like this work, but that should be ok. It should be ok to not like stuff.
I've spent a fair bit of time in art galleries. I enjoy it. I don't enjoy the art snobbery though. I don't know why people gaze endlessly into paintings and try to discern the meaning or whatever. It's not that deep.
I don't understand the hype around the Mona Lisa. I don't understand why people stand in line for hours and then crowd around this one — in my opinion — bland painting to snap that shot and check it off their list that they've seen that one piece. The Centre Pompidou is just down the road and it's full of way more interesting stuff!
My father is an artist, and any time his work is featured in a gallery he is asked to describe the meaning, the inspiration, the message, and countless other pretentious questions intended to draw in a totally unnecessary air of sophistication. His response is the same every time.
"I don't know. I see shit and I paint it."
I'm massively into wine. Similarly, I find wine snobbery frustrating. I have enjoyed the world's best wines. From Ukraine, from Georgia, from Moldova, Italy, France… But the people who clutch their pearls when you pair a dry red with your grilled salmon? Fuck those people especially.
What's beautiful about art, and wine, and music, is that there's an entire universe of it. There's something for everybody. And it's definitely ok to not like some of it.
The reaction is always bigger than the original action. The physics of culture.
I sometimes wonder if we're hard wired to overreact to heterodoxy. Like maybe that's how early humans managed to have social groups larger than a dozen. Chaos ensues if everyone's running off in different directions.
> ... more people complaining about wine snobbery than there are actual wine snobs
That may be so, but nevertheless, I dread going to dinner at fine restaurants with some of my friends because I've had to pick up a $1200 tab due to their over the top wine selections. Furthermore, I enjoy wine, but I rarely drink more than one glass.
It’s a bit more complicated. Normally with our friends we split the bill in half 50/50 no matter what we order. These friends though always pick wine much more expensive than we would.
It’s a bit more complicated. Normally with our friends we split the bill in half 50/50 no matter what we order. These friends though always pick wine much more expensive than we would.
Ugh, there isn't anything adversarial about memes - and to say otherwise is to accidentally admit a lot more than you likely intended. They propagate for the same reason that stereotypes do: they're useful.
I don't like the turn this thread took, but weighing in here narrowly with something hopefully interesting...
The memes themselves needn't be "adversaries" for it to be to the benefit of one of them to inspire rage against the other. "X makes people angry at people holding Y" can help X spread because people like talking about things they're mad about, and the presence of Y actually makes that more effective; the memes themselves are, to a degree, symbiotic within the broader society even as they maybe do bad things to the people in that society.
That your adversarial framing, at the very least, is aligned with some pretty humorless technocrats who find themselves so thoroughly savaged by ridiculing laughter that they're openly fantasizing about going nuclear with the censorship.
A dull lunatic... that insult isn't even internally coherent. Better tell those wackos at the European Consortium for Political Research that "technocrat" is forbidden Alex Jones mouth noise.
If "technocrat" means expertise driven, I'll take that, please. Better than taking the input of people like you.
Why are all your comments about Europe though? You sound like you've been radicalized. Get off YouTube and stop watching Alex Jones, I'm saying this for you own mental health.
> I don't understand the hype around the Mona Lisa.
Because the Mona Lisa is not just a piece of art, but a piece of history that had a wide ranging influence on art, and it was painted by one of the greatest artists who ever lived, who was also a polymath and excelled in engineering and science. There are also some unsolved mysteries around it. If all you see when looking at the Mona Lisa is flourishes of paint, then maybe you need to consider wider contexts.
Art is valuable because it engages humanity, emotionally, socially, intellectually, and there's no doubt that the Mona Lisa has created a lot of debate and study. Maybe you don't like it by itself, but you should still appreciate the wider context.
A powerful engagement and influence was left by MySpace, but it's not put up in protective glass for ticketed visitors to take snapshots of. I appreciate the nuance of its impact on the world, but... we've moved on.
> A powerful engagement and influence was left by MySpace, but it's not put up in protective glass for ticketed visitors to take snapshots of
Maybe we should have. I'm sure a MySpace archive would have significant anthropological value a century from now. I don't really find this argument convincing to be honest.
I mean, you're basically arguing that we should tear down Ancient Greek and Roman buildings, tear down the Eiffel tower, and so on, "because we've moved on".
On of the reasons we like art, is that it gives humans a window to transcendence.
Admittingly, not all art forms will have this effect on everyone but a specific painting, or sculpture or a melody might suddenly give you a tiny glimpse of this. Perhaps it was the way the colors melded together, or the symmetry in the picture or an obnoxious pattern that garbed your imagination; this is why people travel thousands of miles across the world to visit galleries, touristic sights and music events.
Ever noticed how your wall looks completely dry and uninteresting until you hang a painting or a beautiful image on it? Try removing music, images, paintings and movies from your existence and see if you can bear it for more than a few seconds.
Without art, life is mundane because art is the outpouring of human imagination.
> The Centre Pompidou is just down the road and it's full of way more interesting stuff!
So much this. Don't go to Paris without visiting the Pompidou. Allocate a day because it's huge. But it's also uncrowded so you can wander peacefully and get up close to some amazing art.
Art is that deep, and moreso in some areas than others. Star Wars and centuries of faith based paintings have rich meaning imbued into the end product. All the star wars clones that dropped the meaningful parts didn't succeed.
There's a whole class of landscape and still life paintings which have mundane subjects that express geometry in deep, layered technique. The clues in how it was constructed and are there if you look for them. The appreciation of which can change a painting you thought was 10% interesting on first glance into 110% interesting with a deeper insight.
I agree though, painting what you see is a great way to suceed now.
man I can't taste with your taste buds, but most red wine don't go well with fish. It's not an acquired taste, you know it the first time you pair a good wine with meat. Or a good champagne with smoked salmon. It's like putting salt on food for the first time of your life, it's another level of deliciousness. Of course you can drink whatever liquid with whatever food and like it. But it's not pure snobbery, it's a real thing.
> It's like putting salt on food for the first time of your life, it's another level of deliciousness.
Baby humans dislike salt. Most young children dislike salt. The "deliciousness" is mostly an acquired taste, though there may be some physiological-need-driven component to it under unusual circumstances.
Isn’t this because children don’t taste bitter the same way adults do? Most of what salt does for us is reduce the perception of bitter, iirc (for taste, obviously it does other things).
That would suggest it is physiological , not acquired.
The guidance to prefer white wine with fish isn't a hard and fast rule, but a general suggestion if you don't know enough to make a more considered choice. Grilled salmon in particular has a richness and smokiness that pairs very well with certain reds.
It's about status. It motivates a good portion of the population. When they gaze into that painting, they appear more intelligent, more discerning, more uniquely human. Not casting judgment on them, because we all do it in different ways.
> The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts Across the Globe
> In a sneaky study, Brochet dyed a white wine red and gave it to 54 oenology (wine science) students. The supposedly expert panel overwhelmingly described the beverage like they would a red wine. They were completely fooled.
There’s a reason a wine glass has a stem, after all.
But more seriously, the main reason people don’t hold a glass by the stem is because they are used to receiving too heavy a pour, and it becomes unstable to hold by the stem.
That one is especially funny because (like a lot of stuff) the practical sprawled out into the weird and pretentious.
Hand makes heat, so heat close to liquid will change the temperature a tiny bit, maybe. You can hold it accordingly, but also, probably doesn't matter if you're drinking relatively quickly.
Small picture is that white wines are supposed to pair up better with fish, and chicken while red wines go with red meats.
The big picture is that this is a shibboleth[1]. Humans, or some humans, seems to delight in finding ways to define the in-group and the out-group. Signs marking you as an outsider can be anything. Where i have grown up wearing the wrong kind of shoelaces in your boots meant that you are not a “real” rocker but a wannabe. Listening to the “wrong” bands, or listening to the right bands “wrong” can be a similar signifyer. Or wearing socks with your sandal, or asking for ketchup in a high end italian pizza place, or eating pineappe on your pizza. They all signal that you don’t belong to some group because you don’t behave according to some arbitrary norms the group made up for this very purpose.
1: funnily the word itself acts as one. There is of course the biblical story where soldiers where able to tell undercover enemies apart from the general population based on how they pronounced the word shibolleth. But also the fact that someone knows this story can signify that someone is “cultured”, or at least classically read or whatever. (Or as is the case with me had the pleasure of integrating with the authentication system of the same name.)
They all signal that you don’t belong to some group because you don’t behave according to some arbitrary norms the group made up for this very purpose.
Indeed, and we all do it. vi-vs-emacs or tabs-vs-spaces (or bsd-vs-linux, apple-vs-microsoft) aren't any less arbitrary than the other groups you mentioned.
Typically white wine is paired with fish, which is very lean and delicate of flavor. (Caveat: salmon, swordfish, tuna, etc. are somewhat oddballs due to their unique flavor profiles)
Some would say a dry red wine with grilled salmon is like highlighting with a black sharpie. But, as parent said, if those are flavors you like... it's your tongue you're trying to please, mate!
Same reason I gave people zero pushback at ice in wine at weddings. It's 90+ F (32+ C) outside! Do what makes you most happy.
> What is the stigma about pairing dry red wine with salmon?
Two flavours can coexist, they can complement, or they can conflict. Generally speaking, red wine conflicts with fish dishes (exceptions to every rule of course). It's a whole thing:
Bigger heavy reds that were very popular in the not distant past compete with rather than complementing the flavor of the fish. But, do you and have a big chewy red with you fish if you like that.
Edit: you've unfortunately been posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments repeatedly. That's not ok. Would you please review the rules and stick to them from now on so we don't have to ban you?
>So: why should we--why should anyone--care about your half-arsed opinion?
I don't think you effectively critiqued yakshaving by repeating what he said about the commentating art community. Their opinions are worth no more than his, my, or your half-arsed opinions. You haven't defended them when he's speaking against pretentiousness.
Art is art, and it doesn't need an adhoc recital of catch phrases and in-words performed by those gathered around. In saying "You just don't understand", you gilt no dirt.
There's no need for a bait and switch. Yakshaving didn't criticise the art, he criticised the chatter, which is just a gussied up version of "I like the colour" and "The way it creaks in the breeze gives me the heebie-jeebies".
Its like a party after a hanging, and regardless of whether it is a painting, or an outlaw, there's something uncomfortable and unnatural about people gathering around to nod their heads in satisfaction.
Where does this strawman of art commentating come from? Loud people at parties?
Have you ever read a good book on art theory or art history? By whom? Have you ever, as an artist, sat around with someone in the same practice and wanted to talk about the meat of what it is you're doing? 'I like the colour' is a fine thing to say, but anyone who is even slightly curious will follow it up with I wonder why? or I wonder if there are any colors I don't like or any of a million other questions. Letting it sit at 'I like the colour' is kind of lame.
Or maybe all discussion of art is 'a gussied up version of "I like the colour";' in that case, then all software engineering is making colored lights blink in patterns--see how useless it is to ignore complexity?
There's a lot of "you don't understand" in this response.
Does this imply that all art has some objective meaning, or value, and some people fail to recognize that while others are consistently able to appreciate it?
I'd say that enjoying art is subjective, and if you don't find value in a certain piece (or even in a certain genre) that's not a failing of the observer to "understand" properly.
I also don't find concrete structures in the desert visually appealing, nor do they enrich me in some way. Perhaps in person they would.
Thank you for more eloquently writing the reply I wanted to write.
Even the backlash against art that strays from mere visual sugar isn’t new in our history. This criticism is so stale that it already ran a cycle in the 30s and ended with destroyed art, imprisonments, and the return of neoclassical art under state supervision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_exhibition
Does being this rude normally work well for you in society?
> What you've written, though, is a very, very lazy critique of art appreciation.
No it isn't, because I haven't written a critique at all. I shared a fairly simple opinion broadly in response to some people's reactions of some other people's negative reactions to this work.
> You make a real juvenile start just calling it "snobbery,"
The ad hominem here is inappropriate.
> I'm sure Centre Pompidou is objectively "way more interesting" than the Louvre, why does the Louvre even exist? Thanks for clearing that up.
Objectively? How have you read a position of objectivity into my comment? This is a discussion about art, which is inherently subjective.
> What, did you go to Paris once and have a bad time?
I love Paris. I haven't the slightest clue where you got this idea.
> So: why should we--why should anyone--care about your half-arsed opinion? ... and why should I respond?
Good question. Why did you respond?
> therefore people who do understand that thing are, what, somehow insulting you?
No. I have neither said nor implied that. You should try interpreting other people's comments more charitably in future.
> Just shut up. Let people appreciate things and shut up.
These words — and most of your words that precede them — are entirely inappropriate for this forum.
If you would like to attack me personally, I'd be happy to share my personal phone number with you and you can say all of this to my face.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. Please especially avoid the tedious tit-for-tat flamewar thing.
I haven't written a critique at all. I shared a fairly simple opinion
You shared a negative opinion, and did so in writing. Perhaps you wouldn't call it a critique because you didn't use sound reasoning, but I would call that defense critique snobbery: you still dismissed other people's pastimes by invalidating their experience ("it's not that deep").
I suppose I'm deeply into music snobbery. I enjoy analyzing good pieces of music, and even use high-falootin' words like tritone, dominant, resolution or syncopation. And I enjoy sharing such an analysis with peers, it happens quite often that they see structures or patterns that I haven't noticed yet. Because for me, understanding the structure behind a good piece of art heightens my enjoyment.
I would ask if throwing out unfounded opinions normally works well for you in society, but I suspect it probably does. For the record, I reserve rude comments for the internet.
I don't want to have a phone call with you about your boring, detrimental attitudes towards art and other people's appreciation of it. I go out of my way to inject myself into discussions exactly like this one because, as I said, I repeatedly see engineering-brained people (who have a lot of sway) going out of their way to deride Other People's Good Time, and I want you to stop doing it.
Let people enjoy things, it doesn't hurt you. Leave them alone.
One of the most pointless wastes of money I’ve ever seen. I consider myself an artist and understand it’s value, but a 30M fund for what, some blocks of concrete in a desert??? That money could go to far more useful applications, and instead it’s dedicated to a monument to hubris. ‘Magnum opus’ my ass.
Everyone agrees the new design will be unsafe for bicyclists, and slow down taxi service.
It's replacing a decade-old bus lane that was previously used as a poster child for overpriced SF construction projects. I can't find an article about the previous boondoggle bus lane, but remember it costing at least $10M's, but only covering one city block.
Culture is created therefore by literal dirt on the bottom of my shoe. By the very nature of being. Well, that's great. But eventually the word loses all meaning. It becomes a filler for "this thing exists at least ephemerally in the world we inhabit... how... monumental."
If anything is art, then all judgement is moot. It's pointless for any of us to even engage. Agree. Agree. Disagree. Blah. I may as well throw my mooty mud into the mix of debate. To me, there is not a singular emotion this piece evokes other than a self-indulgent egotistic lump of cement articulated with, (reviews await), likely, essays of arbitrarily cloying fascination. It's fine as a thing that exists. Whatever. But it is equally a sinkhole of value.
Monuments need to be visible to normal people in order to have any cultural value. If the Tour Eiffel or Statue of Liberty were in a secluded forest, they wouldn't have had any real impact on culture.
Fact is, up until recently, monuments were dismantled and their materials used for other purposes both by subsequent rulers and by the population at large. If this art installation were to become the basis of an actual settlement in 100 years I'd say the money wasn't wasted. Unfortunatly we have so much unjustified reverence towards art that doing so would probably be forbidden and these structures will simply rot and disintegrate
Agreed. I love art that challenges our perceptions of reality, society, even that which questions urbanism as a form of aesthetic pursuit. But this is just absolutely poo. A self-indulgent stain of hubris.
I'm genuinely unsure. The photos are alienating. Usually, I don't like that kind of art, but sometimes its interesting and being in something massive, created, somebody else's vision, is occasionally great. Nazca. Different. I saw Richard Serrra's work in Bilbao, it was amazing. Andy Goldsworthy did giant pieces in the forests of the UK and also tiny ones. Art in nature can be fantastic, there are metal figures set into the Nullarbor plain thousands of kilometres from anyone by Anthony Gormley I'd love to see.
Frank Lloyd wrights place in Phoenix AZ would have been monumental if he could have afforded it.
Arcosanti? Christo and the curtain across the valley?
What's not to love? What does it mean? I have no idea.
Some of the sentiments on this thread:
It’s shit, definitely not Art.
It’s decent, what is art anyway.
I like it.
Modern Artists are elitists.
My take. It’s shit. It’s art. It’s some rich dude and his buds finding meaning so good for them. It’s bland. And it fails to challenge society at large in any meaningful way unless you count not being able to get there to see it easily as an artistic merit.
Meh..
Proof of artistic merit or get the frick out!
What a waste. He could have made it livable and relatively self-sustaining.
Instead of "hey look at this" it could have been "hey look at this and real people live here and maintain it".
> The foundation has built a $30 million endowment to care for City. Moving forward, it will be under the custodianship of a coalition of major U.S. institutions: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, Arkansas), Glenstone Museum (Potomac, Maryland), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, California), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).
I used to dream of being an artist, thinking it was an intrinsically noble endeavour. But after a lot of hard work and soul-searching of my own motivations, I eventually reframed my artistic pursuit as a means of solving the problems of 'how to get praise, attention, money and leave a legacy'. These are not bad things to want, but I felt like there were better and less self-indulgent ways of getting there than producing art.
A mega-sculpture in Nevada sounds extremely indulgent, and whilst the project seems to have solved many problems for the artist, I can't help but think that the $30 million endowment could have solved a lot more pressing problems elsewhere.
> I can't help but think that the $30 million endowment could have solved a lot more pressing problems elsewhere
If you consider the construction used primarily on-site materials, it appears the money largely went into laborer's hands. It's not like the region is teeming with employment opportunities for those folks, and they surely didn't just set fire to their compensation. My guess is it fed and housed a bunch of area families, not a total waste - but sure, the labor could have built something more useful.
Now the area is a national monument and will draw tourism, creating jobs and growing the economy in a desert.
> The foundation has built a $30 million endowment to care for City.
The money is in an endowment for a charity to maintain the project, not for the costs of building it. Yes the money will pay for peoples' jobs, and yes it will bring tourism. But honestly, is this what the world really needs?
I know that this is an unpopular view, but such projects do seem hubristic when we are walking into a climate crisis. Particularly when it is built in a desert!
If I were the artist I would not be able to see $30 million go towards a charity for preserving my work, when the money could instead be put towards a charity that worked to ensure there is actually a longterm future for humankind (and therefore people to see and enjoy art for generations to come).
If you are capable of executing something this big, I think you are capable of aiming higher and going for a bigger positive impact on the world. So what I see is a lack of vision, not something awe-inspiring.
> City will soon begin to receive visitors on September 2, 2022. Only short day trips will be possible for a maximum of six visitors, with prior reservations only, and only in favorable weather. City is on private property in rural terrain, and it has no habitable structures. Visiting without a pre-arranged visit is thus potentially dangerous, and it is strictly prohibited and is trespassing.
Having had my mind changed when visiting some massive and site-specific art, my recommendation to those who say from photos that they don’t like it: withhold judgement until you’ve been there. Immersion in something of this scale, in a setting like this, in a place so remote that getting there is a journey, is likely to have an effect on you that aerial photos you look at on your phone do not.
That's how I felt about the Rothko color wash paintings.
Not gonna say the prestige around them (aka, the dollar valuations that contribute to the hype surrounding those works) didn't influence me. I'm sure it does on some level (but other hyped-up works of art don't really do it for me, like stuff that Koons & Damien Hirst make).
But seeing Rothko's paintings in a huge room, as a series, is very imposing, ominous, and for lack of better word, cool. Felt like a sensory immersion experience that taps into other parts of you that you didn't expect, not unlike looking at a vast beautiful landscape.
If you only see it as a jpeg/ png that's like, 4-6" on your monitor, or as a 8" x 11" print in a coffee table book, it'll pale in comparison. Even if the discrepancy sounds utterly obvious, the in-situ experience is so vastly different, that even if it doesn't hit you like it does for others (i.e., me), it's still worth it to go see it as is, just to see how you'll respond to it or not.
I felt that way about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire
+1 for Guernica
It's 11.5ft (3.5m) tall by 25.5ft (7.75m) wide.
When you're standing in front of it, and it fills your entire vision, the horror comes through in a way that a postage stamp sized picture cannot trigger.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)
Totally agree with you, but not sure the comparison is apt. When I look at Guernica on my phone, I think "Wow, that's cool, I bet it would be so imposing at full size."
When I look at parent's link to Voice of Fire, I think, "Am I getting punked?" Point being that the small version makes me think "this is dumb", but I can appreciate that the scale of the original leaves a totally different impression.
I can't speak to Voice of Fire, as I've never seen it in person, but the reaction seems rooted in whether people value color equally to shape. I.e. "The shapes in the piece are simple, therefore the piece is simple."
Edit insert: I dated an artist for a while who did a lot of color theory work, and IMHO the choosing of precise colors (especially over large areas) is underappreciated as a stimulus for ultimate experience.
It's difficult to say from white balance on photos, but from memory Guernica isn't simply white, gray, and black. It's an ugly, uncomfortably hued, just barely noticable off-pure color palette.
https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/8562495a....
Voice of Fire is likely a much more extreme example, but my experience with Guernica was not that it was more... but that it was fundamentally different than reproduction in miniature.
Today's ease of access to a color gamut exceeding any pre-~1940 artist's wildest dreams, at high detail and on demand, is hard to overstate. I think people can still understand vaguely that something like vantablack or color-shift or things outside some gamut are "different" because they can't appear on a screen at all, but overall most people think "oh yes, I've seed red, I've seen blue, that's not art per se." But even though a screen is capable of reproduction of the basic frequencies of something like a "Rothko blue", actually seeing Rothko blue in real life - at that scale, with that texture, etc. - is a completely different experience. We think we can anticipate the experience by screen, but we are totally wrong. And the idea that something like cochineal's mere use to make "rich red" exist could be a artistic revolution is simply too foreign for us to sit with.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense, I appreciate the explanation.
Having seen Voice of Fire in person, I thought, “this is dumb,” only bigger.
These are some of the rare instances where I think VR may be actually useful. You're still not 'there' but you're a lot closer than with a crummy iphone
One artist whose work you really must see in person is James Turrell. His work is to construct massive and immersive “light installations”, where the play of colored light is the art piece. I saw an installation of his in San Francisco in the early 2000s and it was not unlike entering a sort of sensory deprivation tank, except instead of being enveloped by darkness you’re enveloped by different frequencies of color spectra.
Had similar experiences with van Gogh. On a screen it's just some swirly images and color. On paper, the colors are better, but still just some swirly images. But in person, woah. You get to see the real colors. And those subtle differences between RGB and CMYK and reality do end up mattering. And the way he used his brush. It wasn't so much that he was painting, he was more sculpting with paint. The swirls aren't swirls, the strokes aren't strokes. They're glops of paint that get smoothed and cut into the right places. To do the color mixing with that much paint off canvas is really tough, especially in the sunlight. In person, I finally got to experience the technical mastery of painting that van Gogh had, something I never knew was there before.
Exactly. It’s literally the core concept to consider when considering art. You have to actually see the real thing to experience it.
That doesn’t mean you’ll like it there’s an excellent chance you won’t. But experiencing art in real life is fundamentally different than seeing images of it, and this is doubly true for larger scale or more installation oriented pieces.
A good example that’s a little closer to home and easier to experience for many is DIA Beacon outside of NYC.
Dia beacon is a really great museum and fun to explore.
The subject artist Michael Heizer artist has a piece there.
https://www.diaart.org/collection/collection/heizer-michael-...
Walking through the Richard Sera pieces was a trip.
https://www.diaart.org/exhibition/exhibitions-projects/richa...
>A good example that’s a little closer to home and easier to experience for many is DIA Beacon outside of NYC.
Just want to add, if you're heading to DIA Beacon and the weather is nice, don't miss Storm King on the other side of the river.
Yeah def had Serra and Beacon in mind as well as Naoshima, Teshima, Turrell, etc.
"look at on your phone on the toilet"
FTFY. ;)
The "I don't like it, therefore it's crap" rude comments are so disappointing. I'm no art buff at all, my personal definition of art is "useless & captivating". I'd like to visit this one. The creator must be obsessed and crazy, which is like it should be. I expect it to give otherworldly, abstract melancholic vibes when being on-site. Case in point, during the years I lived in Mexico City, I went several times to the Teotihuacan site, a great experience when there are few visitors: https://cdn.kastatic.org/ka-perseus-images/9c44c543a72dbe187...
I felt this way too. This structure is a single artist's vision, made solid over the course of 50 years. I can't get a feeling/reaction from it just by looking at photos but, maybe give the chance to visit, I expect I'd be able to prod the artist's vision, see if it resonates with me.
Then again, I can get joy/awe/wonder/ennui/whatever from wandering around abandoned villages, ancient ruins (even the partly reconstructed ones), cemeteries, woods, wastelands, abandoned infrastructure, etc. Or even working places/venues, but at times of least activity. The key thing, for me, is that there must be few/no people around me - to let my mind unleash itself from the trivia and go roaming - that, for me, is when the 'art' (whatever 'art' is) happens.
I could get jealous of the financial support the artist has received over the years as he strives to make his vision solid. But I have a suspicion that he would probably built something even without support. It reminds me of Outsider Art in that way: people driven to create despite the barriers others put in their way. That such people exist gives me hope for the species.
I spent my 40th birthday wandering around Uxmal. No crowds; no tourists coached in on the hour. Just me and my partner and a collapsed civilisation surrounding us. Best birthday I've ever had! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uxmal
Respectfully, and not to start an argument, but I think you don't need to defend the artist or say people shouldn't comment if they want to criticise. I don't think artists who do this stuff care if people think it's pointless or bad. That other people can enjoy it at all is something. Artists who created things this big aren't overly sensitive people, if they were they would have stopped decades back, after the first thousand people said it was an expensive waste of time. So I think people should be honest and say if they think it's crap. And the artist may get a kick out of it, or not care. Likewise don't say nice things about it if you think it's crap, just be honest.
Thank you for putting this to words. It is not art unless it is open for criticism. That’s kind of the whole point. An artist is vulnerable->releases new work into the world->it passes through the filter of criticism->work is determine to be beautiful art or crap. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but at scale, beauty is in the eyes of the masses.
How does the “I don’t like it, therefore it’s crap” differ from “I like it, therefore it’s amazing”. They are both opinions. You may think that the critical opinion is “rude”, but conversely, I may think the glowing opinion is ignorant or quaint. Critics have been panning art for millennia or has all criticism been fully cancelled now? This guy was surely obsessed and crazy, which I wholeheartedly respect. But it’s simply not that impressive for 50 years of work. Personally, I don’t think it’s crap or amazing, I just think it’s disappointing and I feel bad this guy wasted his time. Consider what Egyptians built in the desert at least 5 thousand of years earlier with much less tools. Now that is an art installation. Granted, they had an army of builders, but still, the access to better tools and concrete should still allow 1 guy to do something more epic than what he did here. Further, the much more recent coral castle I find to be more impressive and that was also 1 guy and it only took him 30 years.
Why "useless"? In my view, art that inspires meaningful thoughts and feelings that the viewer might never have otherwise experienced is more "useful" than 90% of jobs that exist in, say, the tech industry.
To be frank it's a barometer for intelligence when people comment on art, and the "I don't like it, therefore it's crap" is pretty low on the bar.
Which is much different than the "I don't like their opinion, therefore they're stupid" barometer you use.
Don't project, I did not say that. Everyone is on a learning curve.
That's exactly what you said. Go gaslight someone else.
This image does a better job of representing the scale:
https://preview.redd.it/3bnqb0cali771.jpg?width=640&crop=sma...
Reminds me of strip mines:
https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Hanson-...
They often have quite interesting shapes, too.
Bagger 288 could do a special engagement.
It wouldn't take 50 years either.
The obvious access roads sort of spoil the effect from the aerial view.
I tried to find a nice pit mine pictures, but I think lots are pretty (if you like big holes in the ground): https://www.google.com/search?q=open-pit+mine&tbm=isch
I wonder how it manages with flooding if it rains.
Looks more like a skatepark to me
I thought the same for about a second, then I realised the small dots surrounding it are trees.
Well, small trees and large bushes, but still.
That particular sort of ground cover has a name: high chaparral.
It's about waist high, and smells wonderful, being dominated by mesquite and sage.
This is in eastern Nevada - I think it is probably going to be sage and greasewood but I agree it smells wonderful.
I wonder if anyone will maintain it after his death, or if the high desert will reclaim it.
Article says there's a $30 million endowment and 4 museums backing it.
That would be pretty epic if he started 50 years ago and his life's work was a skatepark!
Not sure when they started making skateparks but that would have been extremely forward thinking.
Plus, personally I just love skateparks... hahaha
Well, 50 years ago was 1972, and the first skatepark was built in 1965, so it's definitely plausible.
> 50 years ago was 1972
Please excuse me while I go age in a corner
There must be a mistake 50 years ago is permanently 1950
I was gonna say indeed Id like to bring my rollerblades (yeah Im old).
It’s all gravel, not paved smooth, so maybe a dirt bike would be more appropriate.
That one "little" paved section looks like it could be creatively used as an outdoor court for some type of team racquetball.
1½ miles long and half a mile wide, in terms of actual scale.
Thanks very much for posting, I get a much better appreciation for the potential impact of the work at scale than I did just looking at the individual pics in the article. I think it's really cool.
Wait those dots are trees?
Makes me wonder if the place will be covered with solar panels or sun umbrella vendors.
I think this looks pretty. Complex One has some Cold War and Hyperion Time Tombs vibe to it, and the whole thing feels like the garden of the drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie in the Hydrogen Sonata.
It generally reminds me of what the Banksian Culture allowed by its post-scarcity: exploration of grand artistic endeavours for no other reason than that's what the artist wanted to create.
I've always had a soft spot for architectural and land art. Though this kind of brutal sterility has its beauty, Arcosanti[1] has a more human appeal.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti
I always wonder what will anyone think in a 1000 years if they dig it out of the desert. Will there will be wild speculations on the religious significance of the structures and how the proportions line up to x natural or universal constants. Did aliens build it? :)
Same for lots of structures maybe. Imagine finding the remnants of CERN near an ancient ruined city if you're part of civilisation that's regressed technologically. What would pre-nuclear people make of a kilometres-wide perfectly circular tunnel full of strange items?
At least I think they'd probably try to excavate the centre of the circle, assuming there to be something important there (and come up empty).
> What would pre-nuclear people make of a kilometres-wide perfectly circular tunnel full of strange items?
"Ooh! Copper!" (And niobium-titanium superconducting wires)
But do you dare to anger King Bremsstrahlung by plundering from his crown?
Certainly cern will cease to be useful at some point? 100 years? I wonder how much thought goes in to end of life for huge long lived projects like these. Will it be disassembled at great cost? Left to rot?
Looking at the (probably?) trillions of pounds worth of Cold War infrastructure like bunkers, silos, airstrips, sub pens etc. that is not really used any more, I guess just left.
Though a collider tunnel that size may still be useful in 100 years. The SPS was built in 1976 and it's still useful nearly 50 years later. The tunnel can also be reused, just as the LHC used the tunnel for the LEP experiment.
For the curious, here's the satellite view: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0334984,-115.4461277,1423m/d...
It frankly just looks like a derelict Air Force base. Even has the munitions bunkers.
It reminds of a (somewhat recent) article and discussion here on the design parameters for long-term nuclear waste storage facilities. One of the points was that to deter interference from pesky curious humans across the time scales considered, pictographic or lexical warnings may get degraded or lose meaning: the structure and area itself must convey a message of menace, drabness or inhospitability.
I'd have bet this was a test site for such a project. Which given the name of the installation might be the goal. If anyone remembers the paper in question, my algolia-fu is failing me.
> “This place is not a place of honor,” reads the text. “No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”
> The plan calls for huge 25ft (7.6m) tall granite columns marking the four-sq-mile (10 sq km) outer boundary of the entire site. Inside this perimeter, there is an earth berm 33ft (10m) tall and 100ft (30m) wide marking the repository’s actual footprint. Then inside the berm will be another square of granite columns.
— https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-n...
"If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
― Thief Of Time, Terry Pratchett
Good summary on Wikipedia - Long-term nuclear waste warning messages
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warn...
Notably missing from the page: any special landscape feature is likely to attract observation and achieve the opposite effect.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Better to make it highly deadly or entirely hidden (with the warnings to be uncovered if you start excavating).
Yeah; I'd want to visit every one of these proposals on vacation.
The only exception is the one from Emil Kowalski. That proposal would make it so difficult to excavate the site that the civilization performing the excavation would likely have radiation detectors.
Step one in that is probably burying it sufficiently deep that it can't be found without advanced seismology.
You might be interested in the Michael Madsen documentary "Into eternity" about the Onkalo waste repository in Finland, that should supposedly last 100 thousands years. It's mostly about the difficulties of conveying a message of danger to future generations (or civilizations)
A very interesting topic is that they hope that the repo is forgotten, nobody will remember about it and nobody will go looking for it or become curious about it and what's inside of it, as it is described "a place we have to remember to forget".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)
"This place is not a place of honor"
If the “not” somehow got effaced, that message would suddenly have the opposite effect, so… This kind of thing is difficult. Hopefully, there would be some redundancy to the message.
This was considered in the heavily-studied design. Redundancy is a core component.
Not to be confused with Las Vegas Airport, 160 miles to the south.
Grass is very green next door
Isn't it always
Those isolated green squares when you zoom out. Looks like a ranch. Those cattle are probably going to explore the site at night when they get bored.
Just like most cities.
Reminds me of an odd residential development in Arizona, which actually started around 1973 as well. https://goo.gl/maps/ZAUMABmrkRoL4pTp8
Also a failed real estate development on Freeport GBI.
https://www.google.com/maps/@26.5978301,-78.6086813,2987m/da...
This one is 50 years old now too.
Development of a small yachting community was underway full steam in the early 1970's when The Bahamas gained independence from the UK, after that those not born there were no longer allowed to own property, only able to lease it for a period of 99 years at most.
So never mind.
Link to Homepage according to the sidebar info: http://tripleaughtfoundation.org/
Shows how a single individual can have an outsized effect on the landscape while still keeping a low profile for an extended period of time.
the shapes from above almost make it look like those ancient desert sites in Peru
NYTimes has a nice graphical piece about it:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/19/arts/design/m...
Thanks. Great photos and good background info too. This has been worked on for decades..
They made the valley it’s in a national monument to prevent the yuca mountain nuclear storage from being readable:
So:’ “City,” because it was now part of the national monument, would have to admit public visitors.’
Here is a “gifted article” link for those without a subscription:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/19/arts/design/m...
I was pretty excited to go, then saw this at the end of the article:
> Visitors will also need to get themselves to Alamo, Nev., a nearish town. They’ll then be picked up, allowed to roam “City” for a few hours and, because there are no lights on the road and no cellphone service, they will be driven back before dark, meaning they won’t get to see the sun rise and set, prime hours.
The "no lights" thing is a pretty lame excuse. It sounds like an exercise in minimum compliance with the order to open it to the public.
I could only see the video header, but the shot with a guy walking through it gives a great impression compared to the humanless pics.
The original article really fails to communicate the scale which is a big part of this project.
If you like large format art, Storm King in New York state has some great stuff including Storm King Wall and Storm King Wavefield.
https://collections.stormking.org/Browse/objects
Separately, Salvation Mountain in California is worth a look too.
I've always wanted to see people do something similar to Wavefield in a desertscape. I'm travelling from the other side of the planet to be reasonably close to City in a month or so, and even "reasonably close" makes it a 4-5+ hour detour. :(
Storm king is great fun. The one Near me when I lived in white plains NY was the PepsiCo headquarters sculpture gardens. Smaller and the hours are limited to weekends and you can’t go inside the offices, but free!
https://www.pepsico.com/sculpture-gardens.
Dia Beacon is modern art in a old cracker factory that is huge and fun to explore. I have a love/hate relationship with modern art, but in the context of this giant building it was fun.
https://www.diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/dia-b...
I liked the Crawick Multiverse by Charles Jencks, located south of Glasgow. Sort of like this City thing, but smaller, more varied, much more accessible, and most importantly, cool, green and inviting.
It’s like he designed it for humans, not despite them.
https://www.crawickmultiverse.co.uk/
I love Storm King! If you do during the week, you might be one of the only people there. It feels like you’re exploring a desolate alien planet.
Far as much discussion as there is here about how this was a colossal waste of time and resources, I’d be curious how many people here work for a company that’s net profitable. It’s very easy to be moralistic about other peoples money, especially when it comes to art. However, I wonder if it’s a bit hypocritical.
A lot of people feel this way about modern art in general. At some point along the way, art stopped being about trying to bring beauty and happiness and clarity into the human condition. Since then, art has become a pure signalling death spiral.
What passes as “good art” these days is completely relegated to the art community and utterly unintelligible to regular people. Is there any wonder that people dismiss it as a waste of resources? It’s every bit as bad as NFTs, academic turf wars, and Twitter purity spirals [1]. It’s yet another warning sign of the impending decline of civilization, if Toynbee’s thesis is to be believed.
[1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
> At some point along the way, art stopped being about trying to bring beauty and happiness and clarity into the human condition.
I suggest dating that at around 19 BC, when Virgil created the absolute masterpiece that is the Aeneid, probably the greatest work of Latin literature that has ever existed... as a nationalist propaganda piece designed to justify the existence of the newly-formed empire and to retroactively proclaim the divine and heroic heritage of the Roman emperor of the time.
Sure, and one might also quibble and say that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling as a piece of pro-Christian propaganda. And yet there is some difference between those gorgeous frescos and a banana duct-taped to a plain wall that goes much deeper than the time and effort they took to create.
Whatever his reasons, Michelangelo created something which awes and inspires millions of people every year, regardless of religious affiliation or belief. Cattelan, on the other hand, has succeeded only in reminding the public how utterly irrelevant modern art has become: a lame joke for people with too much money and too little taste.
Nitpick: you’re talking about contemporary art, not modern art. Contemporary art is like contemporary music or anything we currently live in: some things may be good, other not, and we don’t know yet what will be remembered as “good art” or “good music” in 50 or 200 years. But without these experimentations art can’t evolve. People stopped doing paintings like Michelangelo did not because they weren’t beautiful, but because they wanted to experiment with something else, to exprime their ideas in different ways.
Comparing old art and contemporary art is irrelevant for this reason. You’re comparing what we remember from one era to what’s currently being experimented.
It would be very reductive to describe art as “something that’s beautiful”. A more general definition would be “a creation that makes you react”. You may be in awe or caught with disgust; in both cases the artwork creates a reaction.
Cattelan’s art is built on provocation. Whether you like it or not, this is some kind of art.
>People stopped doing paintings like Michelangelo did
Seems to me most people never started doing paintings like Michelangelo did, most likely because they were not capable and recognized their own limitations.
> Seems to me most people never started doing paintings like Michelangelo did, most likely because they were not capable and recognized their own limitations.
It’s a bit more complicated; Michelangelo was not a random artist painting alone in his workshop and you wouldn’t have been able to do what he did just because you were technically able. He was active durant the High Renaissance (like Raffaello and Leonardo), a period that ended with the Sack of Rome and the end of the Republic of Florence. It’s not that you couldn’t do it after him, it’s that the conditions that allowed him (and Raffaello, Leonardo and others) to do what he did were gone.
Just wondering, how would you compare this work to the Nazca Lines or Stonehenge? To me it seems like a modern take on the both of them. Does all art have to be pretty paintings?
No, not all art has to be paintings. But I do believe that all art is rooted in an aesthetics.
This work (Michael Heizer's) is a lot more beautiful and interesting than typical modern art (such as Cattelan's Comedian). I would even go so far as to call it an anachronism: it has all of the sincerity and none of the cynicism.
My original comment was about modern art in general. The more I look at Michael's work, the less I think my previous take applies to it. I think it's an exception to the rule, however.
Comedian is designed to be a joke though, it's literally poking fun at the stupidity of modern art and all the gatekeeping in the art world. More than that, it's a true meme: it's an idea more than it is an artwork. How many other artworks are memes?
> At some point along the way, art stopped being about trying to bring beauty and happiness and clarity into the human condition
I’m no art critic, but you’ve only described one purpose of art as far as I can see.
Art is about communicating emotion. Some art attempts to make you feel “happiness and clarity into the human condition”, sure - but other works make you feel all kinds of things, including horror in disillusionment.
I think this is why I see some value in at least the idea of Dada, while others look at it and see nothing worthwhile. In fact, in that case, the reaction of those people is itself part of the installation. I remember coming to that conclusion in a city museum, where someone had taken a (new, obviously) toilet bowl and installed it as a water fountain. I had never heard of Duchamp at the time, but I immediately felt like I was seeing something that was, in fact, “art”.
I came away from it thinking things like “we all have preconditions that color how we see the world”, “objects with common uses can fit other uses”, “just because something fits a purpose, doesn’t mean it’s a good choice”, “people are pretentious for scoffing at this without even considering why it was created”, etc. The point is, it caused me to feel things, and think about things that I wouldn’t have otherwise considered.
My youngest child at the time was probably 3 or 4, and I remember her sitting in a stroller and looking at me like horns had sprouted from my head when I took a drink from it. I filled one of her sippy cups from it, and she refused to drink it.
On one hand - it was just a porcelain fixture with municipal water piped into it, like every other fountain that we’d ever used. On the other, the mere fact that it looked like something that she associated with human waste meant that she was unwilling to consider that it was clean.
The way other people looked at me when I drank from it carried between amusement, shock, and outright disgust. At that point the bystanders became the “art”. Hell, my actions became the art when I drank from it. A couple of others followed, some shook their heads, etc.
So… yeah. I got wordy there, but from my perspective I’d say that anything that evokes emotions in others is in fact art.
> At some point along the way, art stopped being about trying to bring beauty and happiness and clarity into the human condition.
I read many times that this happened after the 2 world wars. At least as far as western art is concerned.
Were it in German and not English, this comment would be completely indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda.
The Nazis were also anti-smoking. It stands to reason the problem with the Nazis is related to the war and crimes against humanity and not every stance they took on every issue.
Most people include the classification and treatment of entartete Kunst as part of the Nazi crimes against humanity.
While I agree with the larger point you're making here, asking whether or not the company people are working for is net profitable is a poor counter here, specifically because it centers "meaning" purely around monetary amount. There is value to be derived and created that has nothing to do with the dollar amount that ends up in your's or someone else's bank account at the end of the day.
Should we manage to annihilator ourselves with nuclear weapons, it will be proof that we didn’t expend all our resources on killing each other.
Over 13,000 nuclear warheads exist today and nothing is more crazy than that.
Ah finally someone has made a real life version of Gridmap from BeamNG:
https://documentation.beamng.com/official_content/levels/gri...
From the NYT article:
> Visitors will also need to get themselves to Alamo, Nev., a nearish town. They’ll then be picked up, allowed to roam “City” for a few hours and, because there are no lights on the road and no cellphone service, they will be driven back before dark, meaning they won’t get to see the sun rise and set, prime hours.
I feel this is such a bad decision, hope they reconsider.
How long before Burning Man moves in?
https://harvestfestival.org/location/midlothian-castle/ is a great place to party! City might be, too!
Well, it looks like an art object, definitely - idea, style, composition. But it will only look good in a desert.
Real cities should be green. In Barcelona, we have a place called “Parc del Fòrum” - a huge area covered by asphalt (14 acres, 5.7 ha), with just a few buildings. Looks great, for sure (you can ride a bike/scooter here with a wind). Mostly being used for music festivals.
But before every festival, organizers put artificial grass to create the areas in front of the stages. And the rest of the time you can find just a few young souls riding here (2-5 persons). There is only one place in Forum Park where you can always find a lot of people - the children's playground. Because it has trees, grass, and shadow.
What might look great and stylish isn’t always comfortable. I love Parc del Forum because I like to ride and it has spectacular sea views, but I think it was a great experiment to highlight the importance of trees in a city design.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_del_Fòrum
I like it. It's big, abstract, depressing. I imagine walking there alone at night, must be something.
Edit: also, i dont think 50 years of one person is a lot of time. 50 persons startup working for one year and then closing is also a waste of 50 years, not yet talking about the vc money.
I think this is super amazing. What a piece of art. I have seen a couple of Maya city ruins, and this reminds me of them.
It’s also a great reminder of what you can achieve if you focus a considerable amount of time on something.
> It’s also a great reminder of what you can achieve if you focus a considerable amount of time on something.
Is it? 50 years for a bunch of cement? Is it a great reminder? I'm so confused by the positivist tilt on every piece of grey meh that exudes from the armpits of these supposed apex artistic cogitators. We are allowed to just say how rubbish it is, right? This artist has projected it into the world of public opinion. And while I respect his autonomous ambitions and sheer willpower, I don't believe this is an exemplar of achievement, and I struggle in good faith to see how such a perception is arrived at. FWIW I guess nobody here has skin in the game. I get to sit here like you and froth on the sidelines. I best get back to my own toils.
Well it’s art isn’t it? What’s the reason you believe I shouldn’t be liking it? When I watched the NYT flyover videos I got an instant positive gut reaction, a sort of resonance. I was skeptical at first but changed my mind.
In a transient world where people mindlessly swipe TikTok videos, focusing 50 years on something is just mind blowing.
Looks like the kind of course work architecture students do...
> positivist tilt
This seems more apt to describe your comment rejecting any purely phenomenological value of the work.
Maybe you meant a different word?
Ok. I would kind of like it, but environmental impact of that needs to be insane. I guess 50 years ago people were not that concerned about it. And then how much energy they will have to spend just removing sand. Seems like a pretty pointless job for someone.
I'd guess this is one of the least environmentally disruptive constructions in the Nevada desert. The green fields across the street look infinitely worse.
This provides some perspective to our paleoarcheology of today. Imagine we find something odd from a past civilization that we can't explain (like a large complex of concrete with rolling forms and sharp angles in the desert). The natural tendency would be to assume this was a collective thing, a place built by many for some mysterious purpose. But humans have been doing art almost as long as they have been around.
I would guess it's just as possible that we sometimes come across something from a single individual, built with the express purpose of making people think. It's kind of interesting.
I wonder how long those sharp angles will stay sharp when subjected to the elements?
That’s a lot of divots and some shapes in the desert!
I am not familiar with this artist or what this is intended to evoke, but I don’t think I’m the intended… audience?
He spent his life (50 years) making this.. I think the audience are those are willing to pay ridiculous prices for "high contemporary art".
If you don't regularly buy paintings for 100k+, I don't think this is for us :)
I love it! I don’t buy paintings. I just like the look of it. If I were in the area I’d definitely visit.
Yeah, some guy jacking off in the desert for 50 years. Good luck with that mate. Not really my cup of tea, and frankly a bit of a shame you couldn't have done something a little more productive with your 50 years, than move a bit of sand around...
This obsession on here with 'productivity' is depressing. I thought the HN crowd was beyond all that. Frankly, to suggest that this man should have given up on his dream so he could.. what? be an office drone for 50 years?... is lame.
99% of us will live un-noteworthy lives and then die. This man has built something that will be inviting thought and discussion for potentially hundreds of years.
Humans have always built monuments. Should the Hopewell peoples have not built their burial mounds because there were more productive things for them to do?
If you don't understand this piece (and I sure don't), that's fine. I just think it's a pretty callous thing to dismiss someone's life passion as "jacking off in the desert."
You use kubernetes professionally and are therefore not entitled to judge the productivity of others, ever, for the rest of your life.
You jack off machines and they don't even give you a reach-around.
>You use kubernetes professionally and are therefore not entitled to judge the productivity of others, ever, for the rest of your life.
LOL, agree with the sentiment.
I guess I am. I really like it.
I can imagine it gives a similar feeling as when exploring San Juan Teotihuacán outside Mexico City.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/414/
Why not build things, and interesting things, things that get us to talk about these things with each other? I love the energy this project creates among us.
Edit: having read the NY Times article, clearly inspired by the ancient neighbours in the south.
"This is democratic art" says creator of art project in the middle of nowhere admitting only 6 visitors per day.
From the Triple Aught Foundation website http://tripleaughtfoundation.org/:
> City will soon begin to receive visitors on September 2, 2022. Only short day trips will be possible for a maximum of six visitors, with prior reservations only, and only in favorable weather. City is on private property in rural terrain, and it has no habitable structures. Visiting without a pre-arranged visit is thus potentially dangerous, and it is strictly prohibited and is trespassing.
> Visitors will be accommodated on a first come, first serve basis, and visitations will end for the 2022 season on November 1. The price of a visit is $150/adult, $100/student...
I applaud the vision and perseverance of the artist, although it's not necessarily my cup of tea. But I dislike the exclusivity aspect often present in the art world. It's not high brow in this case so much, as it is manufactured scarcity. The artist probably thinks a crowd would destroy the feeling of isolation he wanted to achieve, but only 6 visitors at a time???
I think this is really cool. I'm tempted to pony up the $150 to go see it, but it'd have to be in winter; I live in Nevada and there's no way in hell that'd be a pleasant experience in summer. Zero shade, zero plants, just heat, for 1½ miles on foot. Even in spring/fall, I'd definitely hydrating beforehand and bringing lots of water.
My kid is going to see it this year, and they are waiting for winter for just this reason.
Experiencing art takes work in itself. If you are inclined to look at 2D photos of a 1.5 mile work of art and make your final decision about its merits, I don’t think you’ve done the work to experience it. That makes your opinion valid but uninteresting overall.
Ah yes the “work” to travel to a remote part of the country and stand amazed at the concrete erections of this is great man. The work that only few of the inclined can afford. Of course, this installation requires space, and choosing it to be “out there” affords it some additional conceptual credit, but who is this meant to impress except for a certain class of people who have the time and means to do “the work” and actually interpret its profound artistic message? Your comment seems to me to prioritize the artist’s prerogative, and with a $30 million endowment for this installation, I’d say quite a few people agree with you. But shouldn’t we also afford the beholder some respect? I’m quite skeptical of this installation, but I’d go see it if I was ever in Central Eastern Nevada, which I’m guessing, like many people, won’t be any time soon. We shouldn’t discount anyone’s opinion for having not seen it in person because who is it really speaking to in the first place?
> But shouldn’t we also afford the beholder some respect?
Yep. As I said: the opinion of the observer, in whatever capacity they have observed, is valid. But uninteresting overall. In the same way I don’t value the literary criticism of the student who only read the Cliff’s Notes.
Moreover, the “work” need not exclusively be traveling to the site itself. The work was just unveiled. Everyone here heard about it for the first time today. How much context have you taken in about this work?
Trolling future archeologists?
They'll be fine. Evidence will point out that people traveled long distances to be there, supposedly to participate in some kind of ritual. Which is all true.
Quick everyone, get rid of all the cranes and cement mixers! That'll have them scratching their heads.
I don't really get the art. But with that said I can very much appreciate that someone devoted their life to this and that it will likely live on and signal their existence long after they pass. All of us should have such a purpose and be so lucky.
It reminds me of some of the architecture in the area I grew up in. A product of an era where coal was more important than man.
Have a look at the Crawick Multiverse land art site I mentioned in another comment. It’s actually built in a reclaimed open pit coal mine.
I'm a bit confused as to how people have so much trouble "getting" this. I might even go as far to say that the whole thing is uniquely low-brow. It's like a realization of a kid thinking "what if there was a skate park, but it went for miles?", or an early-2000s amateur CGI render, or a CS:S surf map 30 years before that string of words was a twinkle in anybody's eye. Yes, 50 years and tens of millions of dollars is extreme, but there's all sorts of impractical things that are still cool in spite of how little practical sense they make.
A better analogy might be a grand garden without the flowers and with a mix of sculpture and architectural style.
>“This is a masterpiece, or close to it”
Come on guys, the artist himself has proclaimed it a masterpiece, we can end our silly squabbling and all go home now. This is decided.
He's obviously using the historical definition of "masterpiece" here inviting judgement of it - not the pop culture one, which means almost the opposite in placing it beyond casual judgement.
Oh so it's a a piece of work presented to a medieval guild as evidence of qualification for the rank of master? Unless you're saying he's using a definition of the word that literally doesn't exist in the dictionary?
I'm mostly impressed by the fact that he stuck with it for 50 years. I can't fathom having a concrete(pun intended) concept that survives 50 years of new information and experiences.
I call this record art. It's nice and I don't mind the naked concrete but if this was made in a smaller scale over a shorter period of time I can't imagine it would make such a splash.
It can be amazing what one person can do.
Especially focusing over a period of decades.
That's an art in itself.
Looks almost like it was built by one person's idea who then did all the work except that which physically required a helping hand.
Some of these things fit into a shoebox, some of them don't.
Finally, I was thinking just how much I would like something IRL that reminded me of The Witness.
That's one of the best maps in beamng.drive
Some fairly negative comments here. I think it looks fantastic. I'd love to roam the site, imagining that I just stepped through a farcaster portal into some alien civilization. I can't recall seeing anything that would be able to provide the same sort of experience at scale like this.
For me it's not fantastical at all, it's an utterly spot-on take on our actual real life experience of urban life in America: giant parking lots, freeways, corporate parks, long walks through airport terminals and other liminal spaces designed at car-scale. But taken out of context so we're forced to reckon with it's weirdness, oppressiveness, scale, how starkly it juxtaposes against the natural world, how it will all last far beyond our own lifetimes and make us feel like lemmings in a giant maze devised by deities, and so on.
I think the way it looks like some kind of landing bay on Mars speaks just as much to how our sci-fi stories were influenced by our urban architecture as it does the reverse.
This is my favorite take. For me, desert landscapes prove fascinating. The unnatural geometric forms set against the mountains and desert and blue sky sounds utterly unreal.
Everyone here going off about how they don’t “get” this—well, neither do I. I just think it would be cool to experience. It’s ultimately as pointless as love or music.
Hope someone spends an afternoon to building this in Unreal Engine. I know art world gets indulgent, but this project always seemed very extra. Looks like fun counterstrike map though.
You can drive around it (or walk it) in beamng.drive already. It's basically a small subset of "grid map v2".
And he’s got a 30M endowment to maintain the thing. Smh
30M? I love art as much as the next guy but that is just a straight up waste of money.
Would it be better spent paying Stanford grads to make an app that can get you food in 25 minutes instead of 30?
You could support a shitload of artists with 30 million dollars.
While I agree there's a lot of value in wider distribution of arts funding, I suspect the people giving $30mm to this are also giving immeasurably more to other artists than the VCs funding the next cycle of food delivery startups are. More likely the rest of their portfolio is full of straight-up negative value stuff like more payday loan companies.
Yes. By any moral framework.
What if in order to get city dwellers (who were already able to get food, albeit having to wait 5 more minutes for it) food the app makes unreasonable demands on delivery workers (who probably won’t be employees but “associates” instead) to the point that it becomes a high-risk job, except it’s not a job so they’re on their own when they have an accident, and if they don’t, they barely make ends meet anyway? Honestly, my moral framework prefers the art.
What moral framework prioritizes loss making food delivery apps over art?
just like Art... money is subjective.
Now it's Turrell's turn to finish Roden Crater.
I’m sick of pretending I don’t “get” art: https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppvwby/im-sick-of-pretending...
I get this art, and I STILL don’t like it.
I thjnk there is a sort of societal sickness where we’ve stopped making things that are beautiful and glorify humanity and instead make things which are bland and ugly and depressing.
And sure some post modernist can say “ha that’s what the artist is saying!” Yeah I know. I just think he’s saying it in a boring, ugly way.
The reality of this type of art is that it’s really easy to make. Most of the “skill” required to do stuff like this is the networking required to find somebody who will pay for it.
> The reality of this type of art is that it’s really easy to make. Most of the “skill” required to do stuff like this is the networking required to find somebody who will pay for it.
I disagree with this. Especially the "really easy to make" part. Is this easy from a technical perspective? Yeah I'd probably say so but I wouldn't think to make this or express an idea in this way. Critics of this art might say that's because I have better taste than the artist here but point is, even if something is "easy," execution is all that matters and I'm not confident most people who say it's easy could execute on it.
I concur. Even amongst buddies, colleagues, acquaintances, yada yada, those who insinuate that something is easy to do are often times insulated from the process/ grind, have little to no experience in the work, and/or are in positions of influence and power where they feel entitled to others doing it for them.
Same individuals, when put to the task to do the thing they claim is easy, either refuse constructive criticism from people with more experience and make something pretty bad in quality with many details overlooked and left unaddressed, or give up and come up with excuses.
Makes me think that even crappy movies that are easy to eviscerate, are still pretty dang difficult to make. This isn't to say crappy movies deserve coddling and undue praise when it fails at what it sets out to do, but focusing on the notion that just because something doesn't resonate with you as a consumer of the work of art, and because it appears simple, that somehow, you as the person who rejected it are just as, if not more capable, to make something slightly better, is 99 times out of 100 rooted in a delusional pride. I've def done this as well, and ate plenty of humble pie along the way (just to level the playing field, so to speak).
For many engineers who don't "get" art, I'll try to give an explanation that parallels something many programmers will be familiar with.
Of course, there is a lot of pretentiousness in the art world, but often when you see a painting or artist who is revered in some way, and you wonder "Wut? This is incredibly simple and boring." it's often because the artist was the first person to really look at the world in that way. Probably my favorite example of that is Agnes Martin, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Martin. I look at her work and think "She's famous for drawing graph paper??" but I think the Wikipedia article does a good job explaining how her work was such a departure from what came before. Similarly, Heizer is famous for the scale and site-specific nature of his works, where sculpture and landscape blend.
This may not be a perfect analogy, but PagerDuty has a market cap of about 2.25 billion dollars (and it was recently twice that). I've used PagerDuty extensively, and I've thought "The is basically a calendar system with alerting policies. How can this be worth so much money?" But the fact is that PagerDuty was one of the first applications of its type that solved an important (if mundane) business problem it a straightforward way. It may not be "genius" in the way Einstein is genius, but it was one of the first to address this problem it a way that users really liked.
I think Wordle is similar - it's not some genius accomplishment, but it does so many things in just the right way (the once-a-day nature, the way sharing works, the jiggling of the letters, the fact that most games just take a couple minutes but every now and then one will leave me stumped for a long time, etc.) is why it became a phenomenon when there have been "word jumble" games for ages.
So my point is that if you see some piece of art that you don't "get", at least first try to understand the context and history of what went into making a piece. Even if you still don't get it after that, it can leave you with some appreciation of why that particular work is more renowned than others.
> often because the artist was the first person to really look at the world in that way.
Rarely was that person "the first". Discovery issues are huge. So huge, I would bet that more artists who are revered had better PR and knocked off a peer than were the originator.
Case in point, you go to Wordle. As you point out, it wasn't the first to think of any of the features it had or the basic gameplay. It was a combination of excellent execution, luck, etc. It's an excellent finished product! But it's not novel.
You went hard between "art is important because its novel" and "execution of the nonnovel Wordle is what matters" without recognizing those are the exact opposite point.
> You went hard between "art is important because its novel" and "execution of the nonnovel Wordle is what matters" without recognizing those are the exact opposite point.
Apologies, you've misunderstood my point. Of course all art builds in n what came before, but when I talk about something being unique and novel, I don't mean nothing ever in it was thought of before, I mean it had just all the elements in all the right combinations, usually with just a dash of novelty.
Again, Dropbox is such a great example of this. Of course there were tons of "file sharing/backup" services before Dropbox, but what was unique about Dropbox was how it packaged it up in a dead-simple "folder on my Desktop" manner.
Heizer didn't invent site-specific sculpture, but he has certainly done it on a scale and timeframe that was unprecedented.
I actually really like brutalist-style angular concrete, so I think this piece is pretty neat. My only complaint with brutalism in actual buildings is that the entrance is generally hidden.
It's OK for different people to have different taste in art.
Is this brutalist though? Concrete elements are brutalist in the context of buildings because they're the exposed functional component of the building. This is just geometric shapes made out of concrete. I like brutalism but I think this is some mediocre postmodern deconstruction. Like when an established artist presents a blank canvas as art and the intelligentsia act like it's brilliant.
Tadao Ando's Church of the Light completely changed my perception of concrete.
https://www.archute.com/church-of-the-light/
It's interesting that you are contrasting "things that are beautiful", and then as the main criticism "it's really easy to make".
In the next few years we are going to have this debate over and over again (AI-art). Does art need to be hard to make to be called art? If I create something really beautiful but it only took me a few seconds to make, is it still art? Would your appreciation of an art piece change if you knew the author didn't spend as much time as you thought on it, why? It's still the same piece.
If a future civilization discovers a lost painting, they can't tell how many hours went into it. Art should stand on its own, the difficulty in creating the final piece is a metadata that is biasing our judgement. "Beautiful" and "hard to create" are orthogonal dimensions.
I think that's a pretty interesting conversation, I see two sub-questions:
1) Is our intuition that art requires effort some remnant of the labor theory of value applied to art?
2) Is it simply that as something requires less effort to make it redefines the baseline for what is considered beautiful, and thus to create something that stands out requires more effort than what's commonly available to everyone?
There is an underlying acceptance in the Art World that all you need to have to become an artist is not really talent. It's a network.
Sure, if "artist" is merely a career and not an aspirational achievement in finding creative ways to reveal truth.
It's where the concept of equity for all leads. When no one is inherently worse or better than anyone else, it becomes mere bigotry to pass any kind of judgment.
That is exactly the thesis of a recent book [0], summarized, more or less, as: "When there is no objective method to rate performance, then the social network becomes the measure of performance."
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Formula-Universal-Laws-Success/dp/031...
Do they teach this in art school?
Well good for you, congrats on being better than this art. Personally, I think its fucking awesome and I'd love to see this in person.
Right? I absolutely love it. And not even on an expert level. I actually just like it at the first order of liking it.
I really enjoy the aesthetics of these sort of desolate landscapes with isolated constructs in them. Just appeals to me.
> I’m sick of pretending I don’t “get” art: https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppvwby/im-sick-of-pretending...
Are the pictures on that article broken for everyone else too or just me? I'm sort of curious about the art the author is ranting about.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201108125833/https://www.vice....
The pictures are broken — I also wish I could see them. You can Google the artist to get a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about though.
The Vice site auto-plays video, and defeats Safari "Reader Mode".
This type of thinking is the first step to change.
When this spreads, ugly art won’t be edgy or cool anymore, and we’ll look back on this 150-year period like we look at 80’s hairstyles today (“what were they thinking!?”)
A future civilization will uncover this and come up with all sorts of grand stories about how it was likely used. Nobody will consider “what if this was some esoteric art installation that serves no purpose?”
> I thjnk there is a sort of societal sickness where we’ve stopped making things that are beautiful
... when artists had to compete with the perfection of camera and escaped in an orthogonal direction.
Lol. Yes the "sickness" is the printing press et al
How can you say you don’t like it if an important component of appreciating this piece is physically walking through and exploring it, which is presumably completely different from viewing a couple low res shots on your cellphone/computer?
> ...making things that are beautiful and glorify humanity...
Oh really? In an ugly and cruel world where humans are terrible to each other, you demand a lie and to glorify the undeserving? Perhaps you think the point of art is to make you feel good? I think what you are looking for is entertainment, there is plenty of that.
You are partially right that what is celebrated as art reflects on (wealthy) society but it is also an expression of perception of reality by the artist which resnoates with those who appreciate it. Perhaps not everyone finds fake portrayals of beauty appealing but many find enjoyment in the beauty of truth as they see it in their reality?
Did you read the part where I said “yes I get it”, because yes, I get it.
I just think it’s really lazy.
For land art, how is it lazy? It takes significant time and resources to construct the artifacts and develop the desert land.
I think this beautiful and glorifies humanity.
I want to visit it, and I expect when I do I'll consider it one of the top aesthetic experiences of my lifetime.
That's a matter of taste, though, and taste obviously varies.
I think it’s beautiful though. Not it some bullshit “explained” way, I just find it pretty, it feels good.
Maybe you are looking in the wrong places?
Figurative painting — pretty much the definition of glorifying humanity - has made a HUGE comeback over the past decade or so, to the point where we art nerds make jokes about it.
There is still a lot of “difficult” art out there, and plenty of IMO anti-humanist work, but the breadth of styles that are taken seriously is greater than it ever was in history.
You don’t have to like everything. There’s plenty out there you probably would like.
> The reality of this type of art is that it’s really easy to make
This is such a shallow statement. Was it difficult to hit the keys which make up your lines of code?
You're too much a reductionist to appreciate this.
I'm with you. I never studied art, but if enjoying it (or "getting" it) requires you to brainwash yourself with 5 years of art college then fuck it.
Ever watched "The Shock Of The New"? Amazing BBC 8 part series from 1980 with art critic Robert Hughes. He gives a great history and interpretation of modern art.
Years later, before he died, he made a follow up piece where he interviewed an art collector, and it cemented my armchair theory that modern art's rejection of beauty and mastery unwittingly allowed charlatans and billionaires to subvert it, in much the same way that popular music has been hijacked by businessmen.
that’s still a skill I don’t have, do you? this stupid thing is going to outlive us, and maybe anything we’ll ever do
> make things which are bland and ugly and depressing
How you feel about art is a reflection of you, not society. If you think this art is "bland and ugly and depressing" then maybe you should examine yourself as to why you feel that way. Plenty of people find concrete art interesting, attractive, and stimulating.
Do those people attend world of concrete every year do you suppose?
Or is it boring when blue collar workers make this stuff, and only high art when an “artist” hires them to do it?
I suppose we could test that. Why don't you give us a couple of examples of where blue collar workers have made this stuff without an artist directing them?
These are just literally giant triangles of concrete, and city curbs holding in gravel. So an example would be: any freeway overpass in the city of Albuquerque, Las Vegas, or Phoenix.
I've only been to the last two and there are certain structures there that begin to evoke the feeling but they don't get there because of their lack of isolation.
I tried to paint you a picture using Dall E of what I mean. The isolation means a lot and the raw structure being present without all of the accompanying stuff really just evokes a feeling.
https://imgur.com/a/xXIcp5V
The desolate isolation of the first picture with the gray concrete of the second, made in simple geometric forms really does it for me. But those pictures don't quite do it because of all the other stuff (the painted curb, the sign, the other materials). I have to imagine the combination because I'm not good enough at prompt engineering yet. And I really wanted a far away shot that really emphasized the isolation.
The prompt I used was something like "daytime photo of an isolated unpainted concrete bus stop in a desert from far away".
I think that many objects that I think you'd describe as built by blue collar workers come close to starting to evoke this feeling. For instance the isolated bus stop thing I was trying to draw there. But this is just like those but with those components of the aesthetics that I appreciate multiplied by a large number.
You can only prove you don't like something by doing better.
Does it give you pause at all that this is, historically, a common way of thinking among authoritarians and fascists?
That’s because this is not art. Contemporary / modern “art” in general is pure crap, and is absolutely NOT art. It’s formed of a circle jerk of people who pretend like their work has a meaning or that they understand each other’s work. Art reflects the life view of the artist, and we can clearly see that this reflects nothing. All people involved know that it’s BS but they’re all afraid to be the odd one out or are directly profiting from people’s stupidity. It always comes down to pretentious elitist assholes who think they’re too intellectual to work for a living.
I assume there are now a half dozen people working in the desert every day to maintain this thing, given that a lot of it seems to be loose material?
So dull and dusty. When entropy wins, where will they put the food trucks and porta potties? New spot for Burning Man?
Wondering how it handles monsoonal flash-flooding ...
I tried to visit the website on mobile, but the content disappears as soon as I scroll, and only the header and footer remain
One of the people paying for it said:
> “Over the years I would sometimes compare Michael Heizer’s City project to some of the most important ancient monuments and cities,” Govan said in a statement. “But now I only compare it to itself.”
We can argue the merits of the art itself, but I think we can agree that the self-congratulation is nauseating.
https://archive.ph/stHER
2500 years in the future, archeologists will wonder if it was meant to be a follow-up to the Nazca lines...
It is oddly pleasing to look at.
There is something special about flawless results of considerable time investment and discipline.
I get a similar feeling from looking at mistake-free notes taken in neat handwriting with precise illustrations.
The kid in me just wants to run around and over those shapes though.
I think it’s cool, but if they’re actually only allowing 6 people a day and charging $150, it’s stupid. let people visit as they wish, if someone’s dedicated enough to get out there, they should be able to see the piece.
I personally think complex engineering projects are some of the highest elevation of art.
Getting 30,000 people together to create self landing rockets that will take humanity to Mars is the type of inspirational art that I admire.
Can someone with eye for art enlighten me on whats so good about this? Feels like a skateboard park in the dessert.
One of the reasons 'City' is notable, is because it is just so big.
The first time I heard about was in a video "Monumentality" [1], which explores why humans throughout history have tried to make monuments; big things, skyscrapers, pyramids etc.
Michael Heizer will die one day, as will we all. But by its nature of being a huge complex made of rocks and dirt, 'City' will continue to stand for thousands of years probably.
[1]https://youtu.be/bwGKqiOyIAM&t=46m43s
it's a largely flat construction in the desert. it might "stand" for thousands of years, but it'll be covered in sand or other blown debris to the point where it's unrecognizable in ten without constant maintenance. the article quotes $1.3mm annual budget, and i'd guess most of that goes to sweeping.
the average mid-rise building in a real city is much more of a lasting monument than this is.
I don’t know. For me personally if I were building something like this for 50 years, I’d be thinking about its fate in 1000 years. Someone will dig this up long after it’s forgotten, and that person/group will experience this art anew, in a completely different way people experience it today. Perhaps that’s part of the intention?
We see how much delight people take in speculating about Nazca lines. As an artist creating a work like this, I might intend to cause that speculative delight for future generations. Maybe in 1000 years people will flock from around the world to see it because of how mysterious it is.
Look up Roden Crater by Turell, which is a similarly insane project, but maybe easier “to get”.
These artists are both obsessed with shape, size and light. The art is partly environmental. It is exploring how the desert light (harsh bright white at noon, dark violet/orange at sunset) affects the simple shapes.
It's an art tourist attraction. It's inaccessible, so it's good conversation/blog post fodder afterwards.
Made-for-Instamatic
Some guy enjoyed building it for several decades. I think that's good!
Totally. But, what's with everyone in the article being so grandiose about it.
I never felt like I just "didn't get art" until reading the quotes in this article.
Is that not enough? This guy had some vision and then spent 50 years figuring out how to make it work and how to look after it after his death.
There’s a thread about running Diablo in a browser that has positive remarks. But if you think about that a bit it’s also ridiculous.
When I’m around certain artsy friends, I sometimes feel like the kid from “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.
There is a lot of art whose major criteria is “does it make the uninitiated feel that way”. Anything that makes you want to say “My kid could do this!” probably falls into this category, and it is probably attached to an absurdly large price tag that makes you start wondering how much of its value is simply as a tax dodge for some obscenely rich person.
"My kid could do this!" "Your kid did do this, Mrs. Twombly."
99% of them hate that you just like it or not. Sometimes the analysis is pointless. Stick to your guns. In the best possible sense and with no intended patronising notes: "you do you"
Articles are mostly promo pieces. The artist’s press team sends some quotes they want writers to use, and they tweak the wording.
Same with launch articles about any other content—movies, games, whatever.
I think it is something you can only really experience in place. The scale, the desolation and the absence of anything commercial while being in a human-built landscape I think would be an unusual experience.
have you ever experienced positive feelings after visiting a landscape ? this artist is able to synthesize these feelings. And it's not trivial, it requires large scale logistics
Most golf course architects are able to do this in much less time than 50 years.
You mean if they have a plan ? Or you mean any golf course architect can create a landscape that touches the soul ? because obviously golf landscapes don't provoke emotions
Clearly you haven't played a nice golf course. Or if you have, you haven't stopped to appreciate it the same way you would landscape art. If you did you would think otherwise. Some of the nicest golf courses in the world provoke far more emotion than you would imagine. Look at some photos of bandon dunes; those holes were designed by master artists.
You trying to tell me this "touches the soul": https://imgur.com/a/GahY00u
But this doesn't? Where every tree, every mound and turn of the landscape was an intentional alteration of the landscape serving the purposes of both provoking emotions and enabling the game of golf : https://imgur.com/a/E2jwz2x
Sorry but you would have to be delusional to think that. There is a reason people come from all over the world to enjoy bandon dunes. Michael Heizer spent 50 years making a junkyard and you fell for it.
Finally a quote:
“Most of their projects were on beautiful rolling parcels of land, and the geometric shapes which they created contrasted with the rolling topography...This yin and yang would draw the golfers’ attention to the target and create a very interesting or thrilling space to hit to. Raynor’s Fishers Island is a very good example of using geometric shapes to draw one’s attention to the target, while highlighting the beautiful surrounds. The shapes of the targets, putting surfaces, are very similar but the grading of the surrounds and the surfaces themselves varies from hole to hole. The grading conforms to the site and space and the lines draw one’s eye in a very subtle way to the powerful landscape surrounds.
Golfers enjoy beautiful natural surrounds but also are very stimulated when their target is well defined. Geometric features create these types of situation. This is why I believe most golfers respond favorably to this. Pete Dye used hard and straight lines on several of his designs. While some felt that at times he went too far and did not harmoniously blend his design with nature, his targets were well defined and created stimulation and thought.”
Sound somewhat familiar?
On the contrary, golf course greenery in the desert should provoke rage.
On the contrary contrary, some of the best most thought-provoking course designs are in the desert. Check out red rock golf trail. But yes, it probably invokes rage as well :).
If you're trying to tell me that this somehow "invokes emotion": https://imgur.com/a/GahY00u
But this does not "invoke emotion", where every tree, every piece of grass and turn of the landscape was intentional: https://imgur.com/a/3EY3A99
I'd say bologna.
the ground is not paved , definitely not good for skating.
you could maybe do an offroad skateboard though
Scale is important. Artists used to try and represent things, the invention of perspective was mind blowing, Skill up to hyperrealism stage. But the camera did away with a lot of that endeavour and artists began trying to explore emotion, sensation, paint for paint's sake, the ACT of painting and mark making itself. Jackson Pollock is a great example of a road marker along the way. The act of the brush, the removal of 'the artist', the canvas size growing. In 1970 the year this was started Robert Smithson created 'spiral jetty' - artists making statements more grandiose and more timeless. In some ways there's similarities with the more ancient works like the Nazca lines, but I think this work is best described by the term Magnus Opus in the article - The greatest single work of an artist, writer, or composer. It's an endeavour, a feat, and literally great in scale.
Honestly, why is this even considered art?
One reason: it serves no other function.
I can't help but picture it once it's been abandoned. Cracks, graffiti, tire tracks, garbage.
Looks to me like when you break of the map in video game and find developer testing areas
Any coincidence it's strangely close to Area 51? Just sayin...
Reminds me of the Multiple Protective Shelter site, in real life.
I wonder what future archaeologists will think of this structure in the middle of the desert. Maybe they'll think it was ritual or religious, much like how we think of Stonehenge today.
Did you lose your mind, future archaeologists might be neural networks capable of going back in time or light-fast investigation unless some extinction happens and back to the basics, or you refer to alternative geometric and conceptual future universes /s ^^
Only 167 miles away from me. Maybe I'll visit someday.
https://goo.gl/maps/uMdNT9wwPm3o2zYD9
I like art. I don't like this work, but that should be ok. It should be ok to not like stuff.
I've spent a fair bit of time in art galleries. I enjoy it. I don't enjoy the art snobbery though. I don't know why people gaze endlessly into paintings and try to discern the meaning or whatever. It's not that deep.
I don't understand the hype around the Mona Lisa. I don't understand why people stand in line for hours and then crowd around this one — in my opinion — bland painting to snap that shot and check it off their list that they've seen that one piece. The Centre Pompidou is just down the road and it's full of way more interesting stuff!
My father is an artist, and any time his work is featured in a gallery he is asked to describe the meaning, the inspiration, the message, and countless other pretentious questions intended to draw in a totally unnecessary air of sophistication. His response is the same every time.
"I don't know. I see shit and I paint it."
I'm massively into wine. Similarly, I find wine snobbery frustrating. I have enjoyed the world's best wines. From Ukraine, from Georgia, from Moldova, Italy, France… But the people who clutch their pearls when you pair a dry red with your grilled salmon? Fuck those people especially.
What's beautiful about art, and wine, and music, is that there's an entire universe of it. There's something for everybody. And it's definitely ok to not like some of it.
> But the people who clutch their pearls when you pair a dry red with your grilled salmon
I feel there are far more people complaining about wine snobbery than there are actual wine snobs
In my experience, depends on the crowd. There are certainly groups who are just as ridiculous as the cliche.
But probably most importantly, restaurants aren't really among them anymore, with the shift to more casual service and cocktail-first even at upscale.
The reaction is always bigger than the original action. The physics of culture.
I sometimes wonder if we're hard wired to overreact to heterodoxy. Like maybe that's how early humans managed to have social groups larger than a dozen. Chaos ensues if everyone's running off in different directions.
> ... more people complaining about wine snobbery than there are actual wine snobs
That may be so, but nevertheless, I dread going to dinner at fine restaurants with some of my friends because I've had to pick up a $1200 tab due to their over the top wine selections. Furthermore, I enjoy wine, but I rarely drink more than one glass.
If you're paying for something you're not consuming, you have no one to blame but yourself.
It’s a bit more complicated. Normally with our friends we split the bill in half 50/50 no matter what we order. These friends though always pick wine much more expensive than we would.
I like my friends, but they are wine snobs.
This is what I'm talking about? You don't say "I don't think I should pay for something i didn't consume", it's your fault. No?
It’s a bit more complicated. Normally with our friends we split the bill in half 50/50 no matter what we order. These friends though always pick wine much more expensive than we would.
There are also more people complaining about billionaires than there are actual billionaires.
Bingo. One way memes propagate is for one faction to claim that the other faction is saying crazy things. People love getting outraged.
Ugh, there isn't anything adversarial about memes - and to say otherwise is to accidentally admit a lot more than you likely intended. They propagate for the same reason that stereotypes do: they're useful.
I don't like the turn this thread took, but weighing in here narrowly with something hopefully interesting...
The memes themselves needn't be "adversaries" for it to be to the benefit of one of them to inspire rage against the other. "X makes people angry at people holding Y" can help X spread because people like talking about things they're mad about, and the presence of Y actually makes that more effective; the memes themselves are, to a degree, symbiotic within the broader society even as they maybe do bad things to the people in that society.
For one particular perspective on this, I enjoyed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc - relevant stuff starts around 3 minutes in.
"admit"? What am I admitting?
That your adversarial framing, at the very least, is aligned with some pretty humorless technocrats who find themselves so thoroughly savaged by ridiculing laughter that they're openly fantasizing about going nuclear with the censorship.
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/networks/radicalisation-aw...
It isn't difficult to guess at what other defining characteristics you posses once that is established.
I have no idea what you're talking about, but sounds quite dull. Technocrats? You sound like a lunatic.
A dull lunatic... that insult isn't even internally coherent. Better tell those wackos at the European Consortium for Political Research that "technocrat" is forbidden Alex Jones mouth noise.
https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-european-commission-is-no-longer...
If "technocrat" means expertise driven, I'll take that, please. Better than taking the input of people like you.
Why are all your comments about Europe though? You sound like you've been radicalized. Get off YouTube and stop watching Alex Jones, I'm saying this for you own mental health.
> I don't understand the hype around the Mona Lisa.
Because the Mona Lisa is not just a piece of art, but a piece of history that had a wide ranging influence on art, and it was painted by one of the greatest artists who ever lived, who was also a polymath and excelled in engineering and science. There are also some unsolved mysteries around it. If all you see when looking at the Mona Lisa is flourishes of paint, then maybe you need to consider wider contexts.
Art is valuable because it engages humanity, emotionally, socially, intellectually, and there's no doubt that the Mona Lisa has created a lot of debate and study. Maybe you don't like it by itself, but you should still appreciate the wider context.
A powerful engagement and influence was left by MySpace, but it's not put up in protective glass for ticketed visitors to take snapshots of. I appreciate the nuance of its impact on the world, but... we've moved on.
> A powerful engagement and influence was left by MySpace, but it's not put up in protective glass for ticketed visitors to take snapshots of
Maybe we should have. I'm sure a MySpace archive would have significant anthropological value a century from now. I don't really find this argument convincing to be honest.
I mean, you're basically arguing that we should tear down Ancient Greek and Roman buildings, tear down the Eiffel tower, and so on, "because we've moved on".
No one suggested destroying the Mona Lisa or other artifacts. The comment was regarding the hype surrounding the Mona Lisa hundreds of years later.
When I went I didn’t wait hours just to see the Mona Lisa. I waited hours to get into the Louvre to see everything. Mona Lisa wasn’t hard to see.
Mona Lisa only got famous because it was stolen and then recovered. Before that nobody cared
On of the reasons we like art, is that it gives humans a window to transcendence.
Admittingly, not all art forms will have this effect on everyone but a specific painting, or sculpture or a melody might suddenly give you a tiny glimpse of this. Perhaps it was the way the colors melded together, or the symmetry in the picture or an obnoxious pattern that garbed your imagination; this is why people travel thousands of miles across the world to visit galleries, touristic sights and music events.
Ever noticed how your wall looks completely dry and uninteresting until you hang a painting or a beautiful image on it? Try removing music, images, paintings and movies from your existence and see if you can bear it for more than a few seconds.
Without art, life is mundane because art is the outpouring of human imagination.
> The Centre Pompidou is just down the road and it's full of way more interesting stuff!
So much this. Don't go to Paris without visiting the Pompidou. Allocate a day because it's huge. But it's also uncrowded so you can wander peacefully and get up close to some amazing art.
I like the impressionists so Musée d'Orsay is another great choice.
Art is that deep, and moreso in some areas than others. Star Wars and centuries of faith based paintings have rich meaning imbued into the end product. All the star wars clones that dropped the meaningful parts didn't succeed.
There's a whole class of landscape and still life paintings which have mundane subjects that express geometry in deep, layered technique. The clues in how it was constructed and are there if you look for them. The appreciation of which can change a painting you thought was 10% interesting on first glance into 110% interesting with a deeper insight.
I agree though, painting what you see is a great way to suceed now.
> It's like putting salt on food for the first time of your life, it's another level of deliciousness.
Baby humans dislike salt. Most young children dislike salt. The "deliciousness" is mostly an acquired taste, though there may be some physiological-need-driven component to it under unusual circumstances.
Isn’t this because children don’t taste bitter the same way adults do? Most of what salt does for us is reduce the perception of bitter, iirc (for taste, obviously it does other things).
That would suggest it is physiological , not acquired.
The guidance to prefer white wine with fish isn't a hard and fast rule, but a general suggestion if you don't know enough to make a more considered choice. Grilled salmon in particular has a richness and smokiness that pairs very well with certain reds.
Mona Lisa isn't particularly significant in the history of art. It is now a very important piece of pop culture.
It's about status. It motivates a good portion of the population. When they gaze into that painting, they appear more intelligent, more discerning, more uniquely human. Not casting judgment on them, because we all do it in different ways.
> people who clutch their pearls when you pair a dry red with your grilled salmon? Fuck those people especially.
Bang on! I also hate the people who lecture on how to hold a wine glass.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...
> The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts Across the Globe
> In a sneaky study, Brochet dyed a white wine red and gave it to 54 oenology (wine science) students. The supposedly expert panel overwhelmingly described the beverage like they would a red wine. They were completely fooled.
There’s a reason a wine glass has a stem, after all.
But more seriously, the main reason people don’t hold a glass by the stem is because they are used to receiving too heavy a pour, and it becomes unstable to hold by the stem.
Also most wine (at least in homes, bars, and casual parties) is served far too cold today anyway.
That one is especially funny because (like a lot of stuff) the practical sprawled out into the weird and pretentious.
Hand makes heat, so heat close to liquid will change the temperature a tiny bit, maybe. You can hold it accordingly, but also, probably doesn't matter if you're drinking relatively quickly.
I prefer my wine in a mug.
What is the stigma about pairing dry red wine with salmon?
Small picture is that white wines are supposed to pair up better with fish, and chicken while red wines go with red meats.
The big picture is that this is a shibboleth[1]. Humans, or some humans, seems to delight in finding ways to define the in-group and the out-group. Signs marking you as an outsider can be anything. Where i have grown up wearing the wrong kind of shoelaces in your boots meant that you are not a “real” rocker but a wannabe. Listening to the “wrong” bands, or listening to the right bands “wrong” can be a similar signifyer. Or wearing socks with your sandal, or asking for ketchup in a high end italian pizza place, or eating pineappe on your pizza. They all signal that you don’t belong to some group because you don’t behave according to some arbitrary norms the group made up for this very purpose.
1: funnily the word itself acts as one. There is of course the biblical story where soldiers where able to tell undercover enemies apart from the general population based on how they pronounced the word shibolleth. But also the fact that someone knows this story can signify that someone is “cultured”, or at least classically read or whatever. (Or as is the case with me had the pleasure of integrating with the authentication system of the same name.)
> But also the fact that someone knows this story can signify that someone is “cultured”, or at least classically read or whatever.
Or in my case, watched “West Wing”. :)
They all signal that you don’t belong to some group because you don’t behave according to some arbitrary norms the group made up for this very purpose.
Indeed, and we all do it. vi-vs-emacs or tabs-vs-spaces (or bsd-vs-linux, apple-vs-microsoft) aren't any less arbitrary than the other groups you mentioned.
Typically white wine is paired with fish, which is very lean and delicate of flavor. (Caveat: salmon, swordfish, tuna, etc. are somewhat oddballs due to their unique flavor profiles)
Some would say a dry red wine with grilled salmon is like highlighting with a black sharpie. But, as parent said, if those are flavors you like... it's your tongue you're trying to please, mate!
Same reason I gave people zero pushback at ice in wine at weddings. It's 90+ F (32+ C) outside! Do what makes you most happy.
> What is the stigma about pairing dry red wine with salmon?
Two flavours can coexist, they can complement, or they can conflict. Generally speaking, red wine conflicts with fish dishes (exceptions to every rule of course). It's a whole thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_and_food_pairing
Bigger heavy reds that were very popular in the not distant past compete with rather than complementing the flavor of the fish. But, do you and have a big chewy red with you fish if you like that.
White meat - white wine, red meat - red wine… says the rule
Ohh you wouldn't understand... /s
> I don't like this work
Have you been out to Nevada to see this work?
I call the phenomenon you describe "aaaaaaahht." It's all about status posturing and has nothing to do with the art or enjoyment of it.
Fine wine is just booze for rich people.
I call it "art with a capital F"
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We ban accounts that do that. Please especially don't cross into personal attack.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments repeatedly. That's not ok. Would you please review the rules and stick to them from now on so we don't have to ban you?
>So: why should we--why should anyone--care about your half-arsed opinion?
I don't think you effectively critiqued yakshaving by repeating what he said about the commentating art community. Their opinions are worth no more than his, my, or your half-arsed opinions. You haven't defended them when he's speaking against pretentiousness.
Art is art, and it doesn't need an adhoc recital of catch phrases and in-words performed by those gathered around. In saying "You just don't understand", you gilt no dirt.
There's no need for a bait and switch. Yakshaving didn't criticise the art, he criticised the chatter, which is just a gussied up version of "I like the colour" and "The way it creaks in the breeze gives me the heebie-jeebies".
Its like a party after a hanging, and regardless of whether it is a painting, or an outlaw, there's something uncomfortable and unnatural about people gathering around to nod their heads in satisfaction.
Where does this strawman of art commentating come from? Loud people at parties?
Have you ever read a good book on art theory or art history? By whom? Have you ever, as an artist, sat around with someone in the same practice and wanted to talk about the meat of what it is you're doing? 'I like the colour' is a fine thing to say, but anyone who is even slightly curious will follow it up with I wonder why? or I wonder if there are any colors I don't like or any of a million other questions. Letting it sit at 'I like the colour' is kind of lame.
Or maybe all discussion of art is 'a gussied up version of "I like the colour";' in that case, then all software engineering is making colored lights blink in patterns--see how useless it is to ignore complexity?
There's a lot of "you don't understand" in this response.
Does this imply that all art has some objective meaning, or value, and some people fail to recognize that while others are consistently able to appreciate it?
I'd say that enjoying art is subjective, and if you don't find value in a certain piece (or even in a certain genre) that's not a failing of the observer to "understand" properly.
I also don't find concrete structures in the desert visually appealing, nor do they enrich me in some way. Perhaps in person they would.
Thank you for more eloquently writing the reply I wanted to write.
Even the backlash against art that strays from mere visual sugar isn’t new in our history. This criticism is so stale that it already ran a cycle in the 30s and ended with destroyed art, imprisonments, and the return of neoclassical art under state supervision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_exhibition
Does being this rude normally work well for you in society?
> What you've written, though, is a very, very lazy critique of art appreciation.
No it isn't, because I haven't written a critique at all. I shared a fairly simple opinion broadly in response to some people's reactions of some other people's negative reactions to this work.
> You make a real juvenile start just calling it "snobbery,"
The ad hominem here is inappropriate.
> I'm sure Centre Pompidou is objectively "way more interesting" than the Louvre, why does the Louvre even exist? Thanks for clearing that up.
Objectively? How have you read a position of objectivity into my comment? This is a discussion about art, which is inherently subjective.
> What, did you go to Paris once and have a bad time?
I love Paris. I haven't the slightest clue where you got this idea.
> So: why should we--why should anyone--care about your half-arsed opinion? ... and why should I respond?
Good question. Why did you respond?
> therefore people who do understand that thing are, what, somehow insulting you?
No. I have neither said nor implied that. You should try interpreting other people's comments more charitably in future.
> Just shut up. Let people appreciate things and shut up.
These words — and most of your words that precede them — are entirely inappropriate for this forum.
If you would like to attack me personally, I'd be happy to share my personal phone number with you and you can say all of this to my face.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. Please especially avoid the tedious tit-for-tat flamewar thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I haven't written a critique at all. I shared a fairly simple opinion
You shared a negative opinion, and did so in writing. Perhaps you wouldn't call it a critique because you didn't use sound reasoning, but I would call that defense critique snobbery: you still dismissed other people's pastimes by invalidating their experience ("it's not that deep").
I suppose I'm deeply into music snobbery. I enjoy analyzing good pieces of music, and even use high-falootin' words like tritone, dominant, resolution or syncopation. And I enjoy sharing such an analysis with peers, it happens quite often that they see structures or patterns that I haven't noticed yet. Because for me, understanding the structure behind a good piece of art heightens my enjoyment.
The accurate use of technical terms wasn’t really what I had in mind when I used the word snobbery.
I would ask if throwing out unfounded opinions normally works well for you in society, but I suspect it probably does. For the record, I reserve rude comments for the internet.
I don't want to have a phone call with you about your boring, detrimental attitudes towards art and other people's appreciation of it. I go out of my way to inject myself into discussions exactly like this one because, as I said, I repeatedly see engineering-brained people (who have a lot of sway) going out of their way to deride Other People's Good Time, and I want you to stop doing it.
Let people enjoy things, it doesn't hurt you. Leave them alone.
An art exhibit containing mounds of dirt in the middle of the Nevada desert with a $30M endowment to keep people out...
They did check for bodies, yeah?
I think it’s pretty stunning tbh
I think it's unbelievably ugly and pointless tbh
looks like a movie set, wonder if itll be used that way in the coming years
Can we have a VR version pls
Looks like a place I'd like ride my dirt bike and that's all I can appreciate about it.
Great for Skateboarding!
If scaled down by a factor of 10 and be entirely made out of concrete.
This would fit perfectly as a tony hawk proskater level.
I'm surprised noone has written "Death Stranding" in the comments yet.
Death Stranding.
Heh, I love it. Funny how subjective art is. Going to try to go see it.
One of the most pointless wastes of money I’ve ever seen. I consider myself an artist and understand it’s value, but a 30M fund for what, some blocks of concrete in a desert??? That money could go to far more useful applications, and instead it’s dedicated to a monument to hubris. ‘Magnum opus’ my ass.
More pointless than this ongoing $126M bus lane project in SF?
https://sfbayca.com/2021/01/21/__trashed-3/
Everyone agrees the new design will be unsafe for bicyclists, and slow down taxi service.
It's replacing a decade-old bus lane that was previously used as a poster child for overpriced SF construction projects. I can't find an article about the previous boondoggle bus lane, but remember it costing at least $10M's, but only covering one city block.
One could (and many do) burn 30M rather quickly building and trying to scale up some completely pointless app or service.
Disagree. You could say that about any monument but really over the long term that’s what builds culture and meaning.
Culture is created therefore by literal dirt on the bottom of my shoe. By the very nature of being. Well, that's great. But eventually the word loses all meaning. It becomes a filler for "this thing exists at least ephemerally in the world we inhabit... how... monumental."
If anything is art, then all judgement is moot. It's pointless for any of us to even engage. Agree. Agree. Disagree. Blah. I may as well throw my mooty mud into the mix of debate. To me, there is not a singular emotion this piece evokes other than a self-indulgent egotistic lump of cement articulated with, (reviews await), likely, essays of arbitrarily cloying fascination. It's fine as a thing that exists. Whatever. But it is equally a sinkhole of value.
Monuments need to be visible to normal people in order to have any cultural value. If the Tour Eiffel or Statue of Liberty were in a secluded forest, they wouldn't have had any real impact on culture.
Fact is, up until recently, monuments were dismantled and their materials used for other purposes both by subsequent rulers and by the population at large. If this art installation were to become the basis of an actual settlement in 100 years I'd say the money wasn't wasted. Unfortunatly we have so much unjustified reverence towards art that doing so would probably be forbidden and these structures will simply rot and disintegrate
Agreed. I love art that challenges our perceptions of reality, society, even that which questions urbanism as a form of aesthetic pursuit. But this is just absolutely poo. A self-indulgent stain of hubris.
I have to say, it looks pretty boring and underwhelming to me.
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How can you evaluate an experiential project after looking at a handful of 640x480 pictures?
I evaluate lots of things by looking at pictures of them. Turns out to be pretty accurate in most cases.
Do you also look at pictures from a musical performance and decide that the band is out of tune?
Pictures probably don’t do it justice. Things like that may need to be experienced live.
You mean experience boredom in real life? There is absolutely nothing to see there.
I think you mean "I don't like this art"
If you intend on commenting to replace any positive critique with "I like this art" as well then carry on.
I'm genuinely unsure. The photos are alienating. Usually, I don't like that kind of art, but sometimes its interesting and being in something massive, created, somebody else's vision, is occasionally great. Nazca. Different. I saw Richard Serrra's work in Bilbao, it was amazing. Andy Goldsworthy did giant pieces in the forests of the UK and also tiny ones. Art in nature can be fantastic, there are metal figures set into the Nullarbor plain thousands of kilometres from anyone by Anthony Gormley I'd love to see.
Frank Lloyd wrights place in Phoenix AZ would have been monumental if he could have afforded it.
Arcosanti? Christo and the curtain across the valley?
What's not to love? What does it mean? I have no idea.
For some, there is a lot to see. I’d definitely visit it if I were in the area. I think it looks super interesting.
Agreed. What a monumental waste of money to create something that's ultimately boring as hell.
it will do far less damage to society than facebook and tiktok
Does that make it any less wasteful and boring?
It’s hilarious to see people bitch about huge amounts of money being given away to create useless crap on a VC site.
It’s probably a subconscious critique of suburban sprawl. Highways, strip malls, no trees - industrial.
Some of the sentiments on this thread: It’s shit, definitely not Art. It’s decent, what is art anyway. I like it. Modern Artists are elitists.
My take. It’s shit. It’s art. It’s some rich dude and his buds finding meaning so good for them. It’s bland. And it fails to challenge society at large in any meaningful way unless you count not being able to get there to see it easily as an artistic merit. Meh.. Proof of artistic merit or get the frick out!
ELI5 please
Who is this guy and why do we care that he built some concrete in a desert...? Teenagers in Minecraft make more interesting things every day, lol...
What a waste. He could have made it livable and relatively self-sustaining.
Instead of "hey look at this" it could have been "hey look at this and real people live here and maintain it".
> The foundation has built a $30 million endowment to care for City. Moving forward, it will be under the custodianship of a coalition of major U.S. institutions: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, Arkansas), Glenstone Museum (Potomac, Maryland), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, California), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).
Do you donate all your money to building sustainable homes?
Do you donate all your money to large format art projects in the desert?
I used to dream of being an artist, thinking it was an intrinsically noble endeavour. But after a lot of hard work and soul-searching of my own motivations, I eventually reframed my artistic pursuit as a means of solving the problems of 'how to get praise, attention, money and leave a legacy'. These are not bad things to want, but I felt like there were better and less self-indulgent ways of getting there than producing art.
A mega-sculpture in Nevada sounds extremely indulgent, and whilst the project seems to have solved many problems for the artist, I can't help but think that the $30 million endowment could have solved a lot more pressing problems elsewhere.
> I can't help but think that the $30 million endowment could have solved a lot more pressing problems elsewhere
If you consider the construction used primarily on-site materials, it appears the money largely went into laborer's hands. It's not like the region is teeming with employment opportunities for those folks, and they surely didn't just set fire to their compensation. My guess is it fed and housed a bunch of area families, not a total waste - but sure, the labor could have built something more useful.
Now the area is a national monument and will draw tourism, creating jobs and growing the economy in a desert.
> The foundation has built a $30 million endowment to care for City.
The money is in an endowment for a charity to maintain the project, not for the costs of building it. Yes the money will pay for peoples' jobs, and yes it will bring tourism. But honestly, is this what the world really needs?
I know that this is an unpopular view, but such projects do seem hubristic when we are walking into a climate crisis. Particularly when it is built in a desert!
If I were the artist I would not be able to see $30 million go towards a charity for preserving my work, when the money could instead be put towards a charity that worked to ensure there is actually a longterm future for humankind (and therefore people to see and enjoy art for generations to come).
If you are capable of executing something this big, I think you are capable of aiming higher and going for a bigger positive impact on the world. So what I see is a lack of vision, not something awe-inspiring.
> City will soon begin to receive visitors on September 2, 2022. Only short day trips will be possible for a maximum of six visitors, with prior reservations only, and only in favorable weather. City is on private property in rural terrain, and it has no habitable structures. Visiting without a pre-arranged visit is thus potentially dangerous, and it is strictly prohibited and is trespassing.
http://tripleaughtfoundation.org/