Jackson Pollock

[John_Mace]

@Novelty_Bobble

Please don’t perpetuate the myth that Kincaide was the “painter of light” that title belongs to another. How anyone would have the gall to select that for himself I don’t know. It is the equivalent of a hack playwright calling himself “The Bard”

How about Painter of Lite?

[njtt]

@silenus

I absolutely adore Jackson Pollock. Wonderful stuff that speaks to me. If I ever hit the lottery, his will be the first art I’m buying.

Different strokes and all that.

Or, in Pollock’s case, not strokes at all.

[Tamerlane]

Another Pollack fan and for the most part I’m not a fan of most modern art. My taste tends to run more generally towards hyper-detailed Renaissance era still lifes, portraits and landscapes. Rothko, for example, leaves me cold and I found the idea of Pollack’s style silly when I heard about it. I fully expected to hate them, but was another person who unexpectedly found themselves entranced when I encountered them in person.

So horses for courses. I still remain unmoved by the majority of modern art, but I no longer sneer at Rothko fans. Or even Kincaide fans on my better days ;).

[casdave]

What is it with the so-so-so superior attitude of art advocates?

The poster who states ‘its YOUR loss’ - no it isn’t, not at all and is an exemplar of the breed.I could just as readily say ‘Its YOUR waste of time’ and be equally truthful.

What makes your appreciation of your particular taste so superior to another persons appreciation of theirs?

I like to collect certain consumer goods because I think they are art. I also repair them, calibrate them and restore them. Perhaps it is because they are sold to consumers that the beauty and skill of the designers is rarely appreciated as art.

We live in a designed world, useful art is important in products every bit as much as useless ones hung on gallery walls.There seems to be a view that as long as it is completely and utterly useless and preferably exclusively expensive, it can be appreciated as art in a highbrow manner that is qualitatively very different to a well designed and original idea in a product.

I should not need to go to a gallery to see art.The rubbish frequently touted as art is irrelevant since I cannot use it. The bigger the waste of money, the more ‘emotional’ and valuable the art seems to be, yet practical art, through the medium of products benefits us all and is far more relevant. Better still, our lives are improved with well designed products, and to do this at a price that even the lowest can afford is far more of a challenge than much of the tat that passes for art these days.

Of course, when we come to products designed in a teamwork process then we rarely have the individual to glorify and laud- there is no tortured artist backstory to mythologise the mysterious process of creativity, yet cars, aircraft, computers, mobile phones, even your cutlery has to have an aesthetic appeal, and some are genuinely special, and all enclosing a designed and purposeful whole.

Think of the concept of a computer program and the user interface - it isn’t just a bunch of clicks and text boxes - the process of developing human interfaces is an art that is not appreciated.

Somehow we have built up an idea that design is ‘not really art’.

The problem is partly familiarity most us, never consider the balance and compromises that must be taken to produce consumer goods, right from the packaging to the instruction manual. It has all to be made and designed and is art in every sense of the word.

If you want art, just look around your home, your built environment, the fob for your car keys - real art is all around you, maybe you only have enough emotion to spend on impractical stuff displayed in aseptic galleries - YOUR problem, my art surrounds me and also works for me.

[pulykamell]

@casdave

What is it with the so-so-so superior attitude of art advocates?

And what is it with the “anti-modern art” people’s attitude that those of us who actually like this art and get something from it are just falling for a con? It’s just as insulting. Look, I actually think most of the responses from the pro-Pollock side are not condescending and understand it’s not for everyone. For me, someone who appreciates Pollock, it’s annoying to hear that my tastes are not sincere and some sort of faux-intellectual posturing (which is ridiculous–this guy’s work is over a half-century old and if you’re going try to pretend to be all hip and deep and shit, you’re not going to pick Pollock as the guy to rally around.) or that they’re merely the result of being told “it’s great art” therefore it’s great art.

[gwendee]

@silenus

I absolutely adore Jackson Pollock. Wonderful stuff that speaks to me. If I ever hit the lottery, his will be the first art I’m buying.

Different strokes and all that. Maybe the OP would prefer something by Thomas Kincaide?

This hardly seems sporting. There are a LOT of steps in between Pollock and Kinkade. Maybe the OP would be really moved by a Caravaggio that would leave you cold.

Before anyone decides not to like Pollock, or Rothko, or Vermeer I would urge you to see one in person. It’s a very different experience from seeing a poster, print, or jigsaw puzzle version

We simply cannot all like everything.

As far as why it’s worth millions of dollars - I think the whole auction system that drives art prices into the tens of millions is askew. I feel as if I understand why an original Pollock is at the upper end of the scale. I just don’t understand how the ends of the scale got to be so very, very far apart.

[Little_Nemo]

@Maserschmidt

If your juxtaposition of (a complaint about condescension) with (the claim that people partially enjoy Pollock because of the backstory) was intentional, I say bravo!

I felt a comment that said that somebody who doesn’t like Pollock must be a Kinkade fan was clearly condescending. It was saying that the only way you couldn’t like Pollock was if your artistic taste was absolute shit. It was like saying anyone who doesn’t like James Joyce must be a fan of Harlequin romances or anyone who doesn’t like Jean-Luc Godard must be a fan of Adam Sandler. The reality is that some people might know and appreciate high art and still think a particular individual doesn’t deserve his reputation.

Maybe we’re clueless philistines who don’t get it. Or maybe we’re the ones who are saying this particular emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

[silenus]

I didn’t say “must be.” It was merely a suggestion given to an OP who I felt was stacking his question and denigrating what he didn’t understand.

I could dig a Carravagio in the den. As long as it isn’t Medusa. That one gives me the willies.

[John_Mace]

I thought it was funny. But then, I’m a snob.

[Alka_Seltzer]

I find Pollock’s best known paintings such as no. 5 utterly uninteresting, but there are some quite good ones here.

[Colibri]

@Joey_P

I was going to post something similar.

Years ago I heard something and I like to repeat it to others. Whenever someone looks at art and says “I could have done that” I reply with “But you didn’t”.

So in reply to “Why is dripping paint on a big canvas considered art worth millions of dollars?” I’d say a good answer is “because he did it first”.

Most people could not do what Pollock did. Pollock’s paintings are much more than dripping paint on canvas. They have a high degree of sophistication and complexity that cannot be easily reproduced. True Pollacks can be differentiated from forgeries by analysis of their fractal complexity.

Pollock’s Fractals

In Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, as in nature, certain patterns are repeated again and again at various levels of magnification. Such fractals have varying degrees of complexity (or fractal dimension, called D), ranked by mathematicians on a series of scales of 0 to 3. A straight line (fig. D=1) or a flat horizon, rank at the bottom of a scale, whereas densely interwoven drips (fig. D=1.8) or tree branches rank higher up. Fractal patterns may account for some of the lasting appeal of Pollock’s work. They also enable physicist Richard Taylor to separate true Pollocks from the drip paintings created by imitators and forgers. Early last year, for instance, an art collector in Texas asked Taylor to look at an unsigned, undated canvas suspected to be by Pollock. When Taylor analyzed the painting, he found that it had no fractal dimension and thus must have been by another artist.

[mcgato]

I’m not a big art fan, but I try. The first time that I saw a Pollack at the Chicago Institute of Art, I just sat mesmerized for about 20 minutes. I didn’t know much about Pollack at the time, I did know that it was just flinging paint at the canvas, but the result was entirely unexpected. It seems like it is just noise on canvas, but I could kind of feel a theme going on in that noise.

A number of years later, I fell in love with the band Sonic Youth and their Daydream Nation album. They kind of seemed similar in that they would tend to devolve into noise, but there was always a theme within the noise.

I like a lot of Pollack paintings. If others don’t, whatever. I can’t force someone to like them. They speak to me, but the language of art is not universal. Different things speak to different people, as it should be.

[D18]

I say this in all sincerity: When it comes to dripped paint, I find Jean Paul Riopelle vastly superior.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Joey_P

So in reply to “Why is dripping paint on a big canvas considered art worth millions of dollars?” I’d say a good answer is “because he did it first”.

I don’t buy it. Just because nobody else has done something before doesn’t make it worth doing. If it does have real artistic merit then yeah, he gets props for doing something that hasn’t been done before, but the artistic merit has to be based on something more than just originality.

@Shakester

When I was a child, Pollock’s Blue Poles was controversially purchased by the Australian National Gallery in 1973, the year I turned 8. I remember, vaguely, hearing about the controversy. People were upset about it, saying things like, well, what the OP says.

Somewhere around that time, there was a big full-colour spread in a magazine that my parents bought. The gist of the article was “The gov’t has wasted two million taxpayer dollars on this garbage”, which was a pretty common sentiment at the time.

I was 8, maybe 9 at the most, and I fell in love with that picture. I thought it was beautiful. I cut the picture out of the magazine and put it on the wall over my desk, where it stayed for nearly a decade. Now, my family wasn’t what you’d call arty and no-one around me had any particular interest in paintings; this was something I discovered by myself and that I loved because it spoke to me. I stared at that picture for hours.

Since I lived in Melbourne and the painting was in Canberra (and my family was very poor) I couldn’t go and see it in real life. But I made the decision to see it in person if and when I could. I did, in my twenties, go and see it. I’ve been back to visit it several times. It’s stunning. It is gorgeous. And I am very proud that 8 or 9 year-old me could see something that many adults apparently cannot.

If you don’t get why Pollock’s art is great, it’s your loss. Those of us who do have something which brings us great pleasure. Your loss.

So, out of curiosity (and having had little exposure to Pollack’s work, and not having seen the movie), I went and tried to find an image online of this painting you praise so highly. Here it is, though I’m sure seeing that little reproduction on my computer screen doesn’t do it justice. I can see why some people would dismiss it, but I can also see why some people would find the full-size original to be worth some time spent really looking at.

And that’s true of much modern. abstract art: it’s not really my thing, but at least with some works I can see why at least some people would find them interesting, even fascinating.

@casdave

What is it with the so-so-so superior attitude of art advocates?

The poster who states ‘its YOUR loss’ - no it isn’t, not at all

Yes, it is. Anything that you could appreciate but don’t—anything that offers pleasure or inspiration or an emotional experience that you miss out on is a loss to you.

I haven’t seen anybody here with a “so-so-so superior attitude toward art.” And nobody has said anything about design being “not really art.” You seem to have a chip on your shoulder, which may have legitimate origins, and your’re not wrong about the art to be found in everyday objects; but to bring it up here, in this thread where it isn’t really relevant, makes you come across as a crank.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Tamerlane

…Rothko, for example, leaves me cold …

Me too, but I LOVE Mondrian! Go figure. My favorite abstract artist, though, is Kandinsky.

[Airman_Doors_USAF]

@tim314

I don’t know much about art, but I do find Jackson Pollock’s work to be emotionally evocative.

Whenever people criticize abstract art, I want to ask them to try it themselves and post the results. If you can’t do it just as well, then maybe there’s something to it. People like to say “my 3 year old could do that”, but I have a 3 year old, and I’ve seen her “art”, and no, she couldn’t.

This is why people criticize abstract art. I can chuck paint at a canvas and no matter what it looks like you will deny that it has any value except as a Pollock knockoff. There has been so much invested in hyping art of this sort that it now has two determining characteristics: first, that it must have some meaning (splattering paint is emotionally evocative? Right…) and second, that the schlubs out in the sticks cannot possibly hope to match that which has already been done, even though objectively there’s nothing unique or special about painting a wall blue. A three-year-old can do just as well, but too much is invested in the genre to just come out and say it.

Does a Jackson Pollock painting have value? Sure, when it’s sold to a Jackson Pollock fan. The value of abstract art is based solely on its market price.

[Inner_Stickler]

Sez who? Dripped paint is not the sole bailiwick of Pollock and not all dripped paint canvases look like Pollock paintings or else D18 wouldn’t be able to prefer Riopelle.

And the value of anything is based solely on its market price.

[John_Mace]

@Airman_Doors_USAF

This is why people criticize abstract art. I can chuck paint at a canvas and no matter what it looks like you will deny that it has any value except as a Pollock knockoff. There has been so much invested in hyping art of this sort that it now has two determining characteristics: first, that it must have some meaning (splattering paint is emotionally evocative? Right…) and second, that the schlubs out in the sticks cannot possibly hope to match that which has already been done, even though objectively there’s nothing unique or special about painting a wall blue. A three-year-old can do just as well, but too much is invested in the genre to just come out and say it.

Well, we can’t all be as savvy art critics as you.

Does a Jackson Pollock painting have value? Sure, when it’s sold to a Jackson Pollock fan. The value of abstract art is based solely on its market price.

What isn’t?

[Airman_Doors_USAF]

@Inner_Stickler

And the value of anything is based solely on its market price.

That is not so. Project Gutenberg is chock-full of value, and everything is free.

[Colibri]

@Airman_Doors_USAF

A three-year-old can do just as well, but too much is invested in the genre to just come out and say it.

This is simply rubbish. A three year old could not do a Pollock painting, and neither could you.

Read my link. Pollock paintings have a complexity than cannot easily be duplicated, although it can be mathematically analyzed. Pollack himself became better at painting Pollocks as time went on - his late paintings have higher fractal dimension than earlier ones.

You may like Pollock’s paintings or hate them. But to say that they are only appealing because of artistic snobbishness, or that “anyone could do them,” is simply ignorant.

Artists, architects, writers, and musicians may instinctively appeal to their audiences by mimicking the fractal patterns found in nature. In Pollock’s case, at least, the inspiration seems clear. He began his first series of drip paintings, with their tightly meshed surfaces, soon after he moved from Manhattan to a farmhouse on Long Island, New York, in late 1945.

Taylor is so confident of his method that he says he can date any Pollock canvas to within a year by analyzing its fractal dimension. “This is what art theoreticians call the hand of the artist,” he says, adding that it’s a more reliable measure than the traditional art world’s “more subjective analysis.”

The Pollockizer proves that generating fractal drip patterns is much harder than it looks, Taylor says. “It’s not an inevitable consequence of the process. It was the way Pollock dripped that made it fractal.” In a famous 1950 documentary by Hans Namuth, one can see Pollock circling his canvases on the floor, dripping and flinging paint in motions that seem both haphazard and perfectly controlled. He wasn’t merely imitating nature, he was adopting its mechanism: chaos dynamics.