After many experiments, the most realistic was painting a thick line and then erasing tiny randomly sized rectangles out of it.

https://gilleain.blogspot.com/2008/11/chalky.html

Numbers set grey scale.

Letters set colors (b=blue, r=red, y=yellow, etc).

Mouse click sets random color.

Spacebar or double-click resets canvas.

I didn't discover this, comment stolen from previous discussion (thank you Cactus2018!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24284711

https://aaqeastend.com/contents/aaq-portfolio-jackson-polloc...

And we often see two of the same topics thriving on the HN front page.

Pollock used a lot of connected ink splotches, Steadman's 'inkling' stuff is usually large white-space separated splotches, an effect that is impossible with this tool.

also Steadman moved away from that eventually, whereas Pollock leaned into it until death.

Moreover Pollocks' art was the splotches, whereas it was usually an accoutrement for Steadman around a different -- usually framed -- perspective.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nmzppQU-lqA

So now, I hope every here tries to make their own Pollock art.

https://www.moma.org/artists/4675-jackson-pollock

This reminds me of something that happened to me in the early 90s. I went to a local computer show (where local distributors would show new hardware) with a friend who's an artist. There was a booth with a color Mac, probably an LC or something like that, running Mac Paint. People were doodling on it, playing around with the spray can and the text tool, and it looked like random stuff thrown on a canvas. Not having a computer at home, my friend was curious, and queued to play with it.

When my friend got a turn on the Mac, first time on a Mac using Mac Paint, he made a drawing that genuinely looked like a piece of art. If there had been a printer nearby, I could have printed it out and put it on my wall, and nobody would have thought that this was a somebody's first time using Mac Paint.

Art is a genuine skill, and you will see the difference between an artist and a random person regardless of the canvas they use.

I guess this also reminds me of the introduction of the Amiga, with Warhol using the paint can to fill in sections of a photo of Debbie Harry. Technically, this is something everybody can do, but Warhol knew which colors to pick, which sections to color, and which choices to make to create something that actually looks great.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hart_Benton_(painter)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/nyregion/a-review-of-men-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269430

Jackson Pollock - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37876645 - Oct 2023 (2 comments)

Jacksonpollock.org (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269430 - Aug 2020 (151 comments)

Jackson Pollock's "art" is of low quality. Am I sneering? Yes. Sadly it seems art is like coinage: the good is pushed out by the bad.

Cool website though. Really serves to prove how much of a nonentity Pollock was: anyone can make the same "art".

"Please don't sneer"

and

"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

The critique of if Pollock should be canonized as "a great artist" is and should be a different discussion. As far as I know, he wasn't out there trying to get his works in museums. Dismissing something he clearly cared about and had passion for as a complete waste of his life is insane to me. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, he was decidedly capable of other works that were more representational, but decided that he wanted to express himself in this way. This wasn't some hack with no other skills who got lucky.

very onbrand with how this debate has gone so far!

I’m glad

"By 1989 Bacon was the most expensive living artist after one of his triptychs sold at Sotheby's for over US$6 million."

And:

"He died of a heart attack on 28 April 1992, aged 82. He bequeathed his estate (then valued at £11 million) to his heir and sole legatee John Edwards."

Sounds quite lucrative to me.

I like it that there's no hint, it just rewards exploration and experimentation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwxzDHniEw

0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487092

The double-click to clear is too sensitive for me. I keep accidentally clearing when I try to go fast.

https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/

Here is the Artist's home page, btw:

https://manetas.com/timeline.com/en/

"You should also try Mondrian and Me."

I did, and it's as you would expect:

https://mondrianandme.com/

More fun than panda dataframes, at least at this hour.

I'm content to say Rothko isn't for me, but I'll reserve judgment on Pollock until I can spend more time in those galleries.

So... I'll think on that.

What gets old is the hubris of the tech world thinking that an artist’s intention and methods boil down to a superficial ‘style’— devoid of granular stroke-by-stroke intention, context, or meaning which you can apply to any arbitrary subject or setting to effectively create new works by that artist.

There is one born every minute.

FWIW the CIA does not run Hacker News. (that I know of)

Firefox on Linux.

The CIA believed that abstract expressionism, with its unbound and individualistic style, could be associated with American freedoms, so they secretly funded the "Congress for Cultural Freedom", an anti-communist advocacy group that promoted American arts and culture, including abstract expressionism, through international art shows and publications.

Art or writings that touched on US racism (Pollock was contemporaneous with numerous lynchings) and imperialism (Guatemala, Iran, Greece, Korea) were, of course, passed over.

Ever since I learned this, I have lost all emotional appreciation for his works. While before they seemed free, now they seem cheap.

But I don’t see how that should make you appreciate jazz music itself any more or less.

Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204 - June 2023 (332 comments)

https://www.openculture.com/2023/10/how-the-cia-secretly-use...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10462602

I don't understand this. Because he got paid for it, the work is cheap? Do you think he would've made different works if the CIA hadn't funded his art shows? I struggle to imagine what a Pollock "about" racism would look like, and how the CIA would notice that it's about racism.

I mean you do you, I don't mean to tell you you can't dislike someone's art. I just really don't get it :D

To some extent succeeding at art is by definition succeeding in those circles, whether through politics, a chance patron or gallery owner fixating on you, raw unignorable talent, etc. A related definition is succeeding by sheer popularity and fame, like a Banksy, though he's succeeded in both ways. I don't think this insight undermines the art world wholesale, though it definitely suggests (correctly) that luck plays role, that not all great artists succeed, and that not all successful artists are great. Most games in life are like this.

(Not that abstract painting really describes what made Pollock famous, action painting is obviously it.)

No, I meant like Pollock in terms of being completely non-representational.

Going and seeing something like “the fountain” (Duchamp) is surely accompanied by many people remarking “I could have made that” and it could be true, but they didn’t. And that’s the difference.

To some degree that accessibility makes some of these things even more interesting.

I brought up a Dadaism piece on purpose. In fascism, one tool of the leaders was to declare some art pure and acceptable and some as “not art.” Dadaism was a rebuke of the idea: that authority can or cannot tell us what art is and isn’t.

Dadaism is intentionally absurdist. And it’s that quality that many would use to discredit it, is the very thing that makes it so powerful (to some).

Not saying that pollock is playing with absurdism, but saying that sometimes the things that make something “not art” or “not interesting” to one person are the things that elevate it to another.

Not sure if that’s what you were asking, but that’s a riff I was inspired to share.

I tend to think it's post hoc reasoning by bored art critics and Pareidolia.

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