[OC] Personal opinion on Jackson Pollock's drip art

Give Pollock crap all you want, but the guy popularized one of the most fun painting techniques ever, regardless of how you feel about his stuff.

Seriously, splatter painting is really fun to do even if there's no real reason to it, and if anything, who says art has to have a reason behind it? Just straight-up having a play around throwing paint on something (in fact, there are entire places dedicated to that exact thing cropping up over the last few years) is as valid as drawing a scene out with an actual story behind it.

Can't tell which people hate more, the art, the artist, or the admirers of the work.

I just like the way it looks.

That's cool. Don't let any douche like me talk you out of that. 🙂

Regardless of how people feel about Pollock's work, there was art before expressionism and art after. He and others undeniably changed the conversation about art forever.

Sir, I laughed and upvoted. I am unable to share as my wife is a visual arts grad and I want to be able to get laid in the future.

I understand.

Say what you want about this meme, but it sure as shit sparked a debate.

Still better than AI art.

I don't like AI slop. But this kind of "art" is not much better. This is human slop.
- Low effort bullshit to impress art "connoisseurs" (people with money)
  When the end goal is (in)fame and money, we can't argue with the results

Those art pieces are literally poison to a young aspiring artist's mind. It condemns them to a life in poverty, chasing dreams of becoming high profile abstract-postmodernist-whatever artist selling shits in jars, instead of focusing on making what the world really needs the most:

You either die dignified and impoverished, unrecognized in your own lifetime, or you live long enough to afford a custom alpaca fursuit.
- A fursuit of an alpaca, or made with alpaca fur? Or both?
Well, I'll let you know that big dragon mommy milkers are superior

My favorite thing about art is that if you look at it and you hate it, that's still a completely valid take

Art museums became way more fun once I realized that

I am going to MOMAs all over to laugh at the stupid shit some artists pull off. Laughed my ass off at the taped banana. I am not even interested in what the artist thinks or means. I am entertained, that is what I expect of art.
Like in London, there was this big-ass room dedicated to a giant chair and I giant table, you could walk under. Heated, in the middle of a freezing winter. Like, the homeless were freezing out on the streets, and here we are as a society, heating a room for a chair and a table nobody could use. Just take in the absurdity, and you have to laugh at this shit to compensate and stay sane.
- taped banana
  It was called "Comedian" and it was a fantastic piece of art.
This is very true for me. Same for a lot of history museums, which are full of historic arts and crafts.
Like, some native art is just old craft, not actually good art to me, but some ancient cultures had a wild perspective and the art matches.

I like it. Generally, when abstract and contemporary art is well executed, I find it to be thought provoking and exciting to experience. One of my personal favourite paintings is Asger Jorn's "Stalingrad".

It is entirely useless to look at that painting on a tiny screen on a search engine because it looks like shit online.

However, in real life, you enter the room where it is hanging and it is HUGE. Whites and blacks and blues ans yellows and reds in a turbulent mix on the canvas and if you sit down on the bench and soak it in, you start to feel the emotions Jorn was trying to evoke in the viewer. War is hell. War in the deep of Russian winters is worse than hell. It is blind, cold, desperate chaos and you're supposed to fight in this inferno while being able to tell friend from foe, but they all look the same, their blood looks the same in the snow and dirt beneath them.

I'm always exhausted when I look at that painting, but I do it every single time I'm at the Asger Jorn museum.

There definitely is shitty abstract and contemporary art out there. I have seen my fair share of bullshit pieces, but it is sad to me how some people entirely close themselves off to this aspect of art just because it is different. But, at the end of the day it is a taste thing, and that is okay.

Counter offer: that's all expectation bias.
You read
War is hell. War in the deep of Russian winters is worse than hell. It is blind, cold, desperate chaos and you're supposed to fight in this inferno while being able to tell friend from foe, but they all look the same, their blood looks the same in the snow and dirt beneath them.
then you conjure up the feeling with some art museum self-gaslighting. Maybe the art is the prompt?
Modern dance and modern art (including free form poetry etc) that try to leave rules/form/structure behind are, to me, rorschach content with accompanying flavor text that makes them smell faintly of the artists' farts. This is to other forms of art what whiteclaws are to flavor.
I quite strongly doubt that any abstract or contemporary art in isolation gives any specific, repeatable feeling to anybody outside of maybe "chaos". Its fine if you like it (I don't obviously) but I think adding specific feelings that you wouldn't get without the title is oversell and over-hype. It's like establishing the canon for a book or story using the fanfiction for that story or just the authors opinion: if you didn't actually write it in the main work, it doesn't count (I see you J.K. Rowling, Brandon Sanderson, etc). Put the story IN THE STORY.
But then, this is all just one man's polemic.
- That's a fair point of view, but that is literally the point of art. Not just abstract and contemporary art. The more context you have with a piece of art, the more it will make you feel and think about what it is trying to communicate.
  Try and look up the painting Stańczyk by Jan Matejko.
  In isolation, you'd look at that painting and see a sad jester in a chair. You may feel something, but it won't be very deep.
  When the context is added for that painting, it starts taking on a completely and much more complex meaning. The most basic takeaway with context is "while the politicians, kings and nobelmen are partying, only the jester is understanding the severity of the country's predicament."
  But if you take the time and start diving into the meaning of the comet outside the window, the cultural and historical significance of the court jester Stańczyk to Poland's history and culture, the letter on the table, the fact that Matejko used his own face as a reference for the jester, dive into Matejko's own life and his views, interests and concerns you will get a much greater and much more nuanced interpretation of what you're looking at. It will basically educate you on something you most likely know nothing about.
  That is what art does.
  Asger Jorn's Stalingrad is the same for me.
  It is so miss the point of art to think that you should be able to just glance at it briefly and get anything out of it.
  Art is also not supposed to be pleasant or pretty. It is supposed to move people. There is tons of art out there that bores me to tears or that I think is bullshit, but others may connect with it where I couldn't and that is worth something.
  Are there bulshitters and bulshit art out there? Absolutely. One of my favourite horror satirea Velvet Buzzsaw very much takes the piss out of the art scene and the silly snobs in it.
  But I think it is a mistake to think that having context for an art piece is somehow cheating when all art ever made has a title and an intent and context by default.
- Also forgot to mention that one of my all time favourite contemporary art pieces was a long table in a small room with let's say 50 identical white vases lined up on either side. Next to the vases, on the table lay a bunch of cheap permanent markers. Out of the 50 identical white vases stood maybe 10 white vases with gold leaf patterns on them.
  All the vases were scribbled over with drawings and words except the vases with the gold leafs on them.
  I picked up a marker myself and drew on some of the plain vases, but it took me a bit of courage to start drawing on one of the gold leaf vases. At least one other person had drawn on one of the gold leaf vases but only on the white parts. I found myself instinctively doing the same.
  It made me think about a lot of things. What we put value to, why, even when we are given the go-ahead, most of us still hesitate to destroy something that we perceive to be valuable even if the only difference between it and the other pieces is cheap gold patterns on the side.
  Furthermore, nowhere did it say that you weren't allowed to smash the vases, but nobody had done it. You could probably do whatever you wanted to do to these vases, ans yet people only allowed themselves to do the safest form of vandalism.
  I thought about the other people who had written and drawn on the vases. I felt their presence and the thoughts they had gone through when interacting with this piece. I thought about the artist and their intentions with it. The fact that I interacted with their piece made it very clear that all the thoughts they had put into their piece was realized in me as part of the installation.
  I have no idea what the made of that piece was. Not a clue. But it still affected me because of how well it was executed and I understood the message(s) the artist intented. Maybe not all of them, but the main point, I got.
  Contemporary art can be so amazing if one opens themselves up to it.
- Speaking here as an art noob who generally knows nothing of what the pieces are supposed to mean or what their societal context was when they were made and what forces they were pushing against etc:
  When my arty partner drags me into art museums with huge abstract modern art pieces with just big splotches of heavily textured color (I’m thinking in particular of one giant piece filling a wall with jagged black heaps of paint) they do in fact make me feel feelings.
  In my case, as in OP’s case, they were really bad feelings. I would prefer not to feel really bad and I don’t like that art. But I certainly couldn’t call it ineffective fart-huffing!

Yeah, yeah op. You have no idea of the what's and why's or any context for why plenty of modern art looks like it does and why it is important in art history. You know what you like. And you like what you understand. And if you don't understand it, you feel intellectually lesser and have a knee jerk reaction to protect yourself - by taking a meme format that says you have all the smarts and people that understand it are below yourself.

You can keep doing that, or you can get curious and ask the what's and the why's and see if you can appreciate things from it that aren't immediately obvious. That is how people grow.

This is only tangentially related, but it astonishes me (it doesn't) how often people defending AI art wield Pollock as a weapon out of jealousy for his relative success and not because they actually like him. Same with the toilet. And the banana.
[edit] I think I might have meant to respond to a different comment of yours, but ah well.
- I always find it funny when somebody mentions The Fountain as an example of this stupid "modern art" (as in contemporary) and I get to tell them that it is from 1917. Like dude, if you missed out on the last hundred years of what art is, maybe you should humble down on your opinions.
  People don't have to like everything, but I find it frustrating how people think their uninformed opinion is as valid as someone that knows and understands what it is, why it is what it is, and how it is important in a historical context.
  There are plenty of topics I know very little about. I may have ideas and opinions about things, but I would never imagine myself being superior to people who are actually knowledgeable of the field.
- I upvoted the OP message. And I upvoted yours too, because both of you are so right.
  The OP message you responded is a person in the middle of the curve bell that things they are at the end of the curve, while they are in the middle.
- You know when everybody on both Lemny and Reddit are up in arms that American mainstream culture celebrate anti-intellectualism?
  This here is a prime example.
Third year art major?
- I have a MA in Fine Arts many many years ago actually, so I'd consider I have some actual weight in the field and not only shallow opinions confused as equal to knowledge and facts.
  But I should know better than to vent because every time this sort of post is a living illustration of the Dunning–Kruger effect on a bandwagon.
Tbf lots of stuff in that style, including some of his, is trash.
Edit: and if context is beauty: a lot of people making it didn't understand, and it was overpromoted by the fucking cia to contrast the literal style pushed by the ussr. So it's literally an anti-communist plot by yhe cia. Show me some other 'anti communist' things.
- Yep. If you look into history there are plenty of examples of political powers promoting arts of all tradition for their own purposes.
  But you know who were on the fronts of practically banning modern art in the first place? Check out Entartete Kunst, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art. So does that make all traditional and figurative art problematic now?
  And you know what other art was "not understood" by it's creators until later? Oh, boy. Fucking most of it, because a lot of art is expression and exploration, and theory is the understanding after, despite academics and theorists in fine arts have been trying to center the entire scene around themselves rather than the artists for the better part of the 1900s until today.
Guy got paid by the CIA, stole the whole idea, but rich people buy it, must be art!!
Bet you explain Matisse the same way.
You're equating an appreciation of significance with an appreciation of aesthetics.
- What if I told you that art is much more than aesthetics. Clearly this is news to both OP and yourself.

I'd much rather the CIA spent their money on this.

Pollock is popular because of this exact thing. He "challenged" the idea of art as the Dada movement had done. You can absolutely hate it but like Warhol it made conversations and questions about process and astetics. By making a meme about it you have in fact thought about what art is and aesthetics you prefer. A Pollock painting made you do that.

People saying he do not select colors or use technique is just false. He would use a pulley system for large scale canvases and spread the colors quite purposefully. Remember this is the time of "happenings" like applying body paint and rolling on canvases, cutting up the canvas and applying newsprint, burning things, etc.

I don't even like Pollock but not to recognize him in museums within a moment of abstract expression would be a disservice. I've had plenty of students say. "I could paint that!". But there are two points they always misunderstand. 1. Pollock was an established painter who drastically changed styles. Many artists show that they can paint or draw in the traditional style but choose to push what is even art. Some people at this time said the "process" was art not the painting hanging in the museum. 2. Everyone who tries to replicate a Pollock typically just uses some random paints with some bushes and just sort of flings it around. If you actually look at a Pollock in person up close. Yes you can see unevenness is created from not having full control of the paint on the brush but thought seems to go into exactly where the paint will land so that you have even coverage or at angles with different brushes. They is motion in how the paint drips. I can say that many of them I've seen are very much not "random" as you would think it would be.

Again I don't care for the work as there are plenty of other abstract expressions to choose from like Hans Hofmann, Helen Frankenthaler who used Pollock as an influence.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-a-weapon-of-the-cia
- I feel like this really needs to be asked: So?
  There were ulterior motives. Okay. And?
Some people at this time said the "process" was art not the painting hanging in the museum.
I would assume that most people who criticize modern forms of art are criticizing the painting hanging in the museum. The more someone likes modern art, the more likely they are to learn about the artist and the process. The less someone likes modern art, the less they're going to learn about that, so the more the focus will just be on the painting itself.
By making a meme about it you have in fact thought about what art is and aesthetics you prefer. A Pollock painting made you do that.
That's "Pollock the influencer". Influencing has always been part of art, I'm sure. Would Dali's paintings have been as influential if Dali hadn't also been a moustache artist? Probably not. However, I think you invite chaos if you consider things other than the painting hanging in the museum.
Why? Because if "you thought about their art" is a major criterion, then Hitler is an important artist. Look how often people have made memes about Hitler and his art. If you go by how often the artist's art is posted, Hitler's probably a more important artist than Picasso.
- First thanks to everyone engaging! Having a great time with some real cool people here.
  |"However, I think you invite chaos if you consider things other than the painting hanging in the museum."
  Not true. A huge amount of art is the preservation of an artifact from something previous and not about the "thing" hanging on the wall. Also "conceptual art" is just that the art is the "concept" not result. Ice, kinetic sculptures, happenings, change over time. You can see different art at different points in time. They invite you to consider what it was before and after. Sand mandalas are created in art spaces and then destroyed. When is it "art"? When they pore the sand into shapes or sweep it up? The answer can be "all" because it happened and "none" because it doesn't exist or even when I think it looks like art.
  |"Why? Because if "you thought about their art" is a major criterion, then Hitler is an important artist. Look how often people have made memes about Hitler and his art. If you go by how often the artist's art is posted, Hitler's probably a more important artist than Picasso."
  Maybe I'm not explaining well here. Have you ever seen a movie you sort of disliked but you couldn't stop thinking about it? It sort of continues to impact your thoughts, I'm talking a month later you are thinking about it and still debating if it was good or bad or keep remembering the way it made you feel. That is what I mean. Maybe that was the point of the movie/art. Haneke is my favorite filmaker who creates almost movies that "haunt" you. I would say Hilters paintings didn't engaged us. They didn't expand our understanding of art through his paintings. He is famous for being the fascist Nazi leader but his paintings are a result of his fame as a figure. Jim Carrey's art will likely never be in famous museums, most likely never push or be part of an important art movement, etc. but It gets lots of press because a famous person is making paintings. I'm speaking more of the impact of the art not awareness it exists.
  Dali would absolutely be famous as an artist. His brush work is comparable to that to the old masters. His ideas , compositions, colors are incredible. He was a figurehead in the surrealist movement. Maybe not the pop icon without the branding of the mustache and "look". but that came later.
- Hitler didn't kill millions of people to make you think about his art. Pollock intentionally wanted to create art that makes people think about what counts as art. His methods certainly worked.
This definitely gave me a new perspective. Thank you. I disagree with some things and the finished product is what is seen by most and "does not do anything for me" / I don't feel anything, which I value the most. You are more versed on the technical side of art than I am for sure. I hope people see this as a light hearted meme and nothing deeper, how I intended it.
Edit: Also, the fact that a vast amount of people dislike it, no matter how versed they are in art, still means something IMO, as on the subjective side everyone's opinion is equally valid.
- I'm sorry, where are you getting your data for your assertion that "the vast majority of people dislike [Pollock's art]"? Your own meme indicates that people with that opinion are in the minority and that half the people with that opinion wouldn't even know what they're talking about. Obviously the meme isn't a real bell curve, but still.
  I'll be honest, it sounds like you made that up based on not much at all. If that were the case, I'm sure I'd have heard many others express a dislike for Pollock, which I don't think I ever have, besides you.
  If we're sharing unpopular art opinions, though, I hate Zawadzki and Beksinski (really just dystopian surrealism in general, it tries a little too hard to be spooky/dark/edgy imo and usually has that overly polished digital art look to it). Reminds me of something I'd see on Deviantart or something.
- Absolutely. It's funny for sure. Your preference which I share is totally valid as any art critics. One more thing I forgot is the scale of these. Seeing in a book is one thing but like the Raft of the Medusa or Mona Lisa (very tiny) scale produces a very different idea and reaction in person. People often don't consider how things actually were/should be seen. Pollock could be considered a bit of a "troll" of the time I find it amazing he still gets a reaction good or bad. In a post post moden art world Warhol has just sort of been accepted as art across the board. Pollock, Rothko and Duchamp still making people question why they are in a museum.
Some people at this time said the "process" was art not the painting hanging in the museum
To expand a bit on the idea that the process itself is as important, or more important, than the resulting work standing in isolation, there are a bunch of examples of people really enjoying the "behind the scenes" or "how it's made" aspects of art.
I happen to love OK Go's single-take music videos in large part because they are absurdly complex projects requiring precise planning and tight execution. And you can see that the resulting work (a music video) is aesthetically pleasing, and can simultaneously be impressed at the methods used in actually filming that one take, from their early low budget stuff like Here We Go Again, or stuff like the zero gravity Upside Down and Inside Out, or even this year's releases with technological assistance from programmed phone screens or robot arms holding mirrors.
Another example I like is James Cook making paintings out of typed pages in a typewriter.
There's a lot of stuff with sculpture and painting that have these aspects where the methods used to make it are inherently interesting, and explain some of the features in the art itself.
- To expand a bit on the idea that the process itself is as important, or more important, than the resulting work standing in isolation
  This leads to my take on photorealistic art: basically photography has made fully realistic drawn and painted art obsolete. Even "unreal" things that look real but aren't based on actual places or things can be achieved by photoshopping pictures together in a fraction of the time it takes, to make something look even close to a photographic accuracy drawing or painting by hand. If you see a picture of photorealistic art somewhere you'll just think it's a photograph or photoshopped, unless someone explicitly tells you it's painted. The visual representation of photorealistic art has stopped being meaningful as it used to be, and the works need the context of the hard labour to be appreciated as what they are.
  As a disclaimer though, photography and digital editing can be art in themselves, I'm not making point about that. It's just fascinating how the value of hand drawn photorealistic stuff has almost fully shifted from the visual representation of reality to the actual process of producing it
- needing/getting and this too shall pass are perfect examples of this imo. i'm not really into ok go as a band, but the amount of pure work and skill on display is insane. the process is indeed the art.
What about Helen Frankenthaler and others doing "pouring" before Pollock, and that Pollock was a mediocre traditional painter, plus I guess the CIA money helped.
I understand the whole idea of transcending stuff, but just doing something "different" isn't IMO obligatory noteworthy.
The Dada movement challenged not just standards but art itself, interesting and necessary, but is it art? One can argue.
The impressionists started it all, but then it spiraled out to just do something not have been done yet, which is good and important, but IMO it does absolutely not mean it's some kind of new art form. But of course that's just my opinion.

If you can find it, Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay for Esquire called “Jack the Dripper” which was reprinted in his essay collection Fates Worse than Death. He argues that Pollock was a) absolutely able to produce quality traditional art and b) accessing his sub- and unconscious mind when making drip paintings in a way that anyone interested in the human mind should be fascinated by.

Pollock hits harder in person tbh.

Prints and photos don't really work; it ends up looking flat and empty. But in person, there's more "depth" in both a literal and figurative sense. You can see more of the intent put into the methodology.

Mind you, I agree with the idea that he's over hyped. He wasn't exactly breaking new ground, and there's plenty of other artists that explored abstract painting with more satisfying and effective results.

But I don't think it's accurate to call it shit either. As much as people love to say it, no a kindergartener couldn't do it. Even high schoolers have trouble making something that looks similar enough to carry the same visual effect. Some art students at a collegiate level can't.

Turns out you do have to have some degree of development in your techniques at the very least to get the same results, no matter how much raw talent you have.

Now, don't ask me if I really like his stuff. I mean, I'm going to say it anyway, but still. My take on his body of work is that he fully explored the "drip" technique way before he quit doing it, and likely could have stopped after the first one because the only real differences between them amount to nothing more than the difference between most hotel and doctors' office wall hangings. You see one, you've seen them all.

Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that he got something more than money out of the process. I make bland and basic art myself, and IDGAF about the results as much as the enjoyment of making. Every art student I've ever known gets super into the process of creating and that's a wonderful thing; dissecting what they're doing as they do it.

But that value isn't something that carries on beyond the process itself.

Its paint splatters. Which the artist has no control over.
Only if it is deliberate can you claim it has depth. Otherwise it is nothing more than a happy accident that it looks to have depth.
- Well, you absolutely have control over splatters once you understand the way they happen. A liquid at a given viscosity moving at a given speed will have predictable, but minutely variable, outcomes.
  In other words, every raindrop hits in a predictable way, and the only reason you can't predict exactly how the resulting splash will look is a lack of ability to make the same predictions on a molecular level. But, if you could see and hold in the human brain, the outcome is absolutely predictable even at that level; we just can't pull it off without outside assistance.
  Look at airbrushing. It's tightly controlled spatter. You're using air to make the drops so small that we can predict and control the outcome so that it can be used to give a range of end products. But if you get in really tight to what's going on, it's high speed splattering.
  I would also disagree that a happy accident can't have depth visually. But I think you likely misread how I was emphasizing, so it isn't really useful to say more than that.
  However, Judge for yourself if he was bullshiting about his degree of intent in his efforts. It isn't like there aren't other interviews and information about what he did, on both technical and analytical levels. Him saying he has intent doesn't mean he's speaking truth, nor would it being truth change whether or not one agrees with his intent, or how successful one feels he was in achieving it.
  But he at least came up with an explanation of intent, and his movements when working are controlled enough to indicate he at least thought he was working with intent, and isn't that the same thing as intent on a practical level?
Saw one in a museum last week. Still looked like shit.

Not trying to be a dick, if you enjoy his art that's great 👍

I was similar until I saw him actually painting. There is something about the process that makes me love it. It's weird to me too that I feel that way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Uj_HAAvbk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrVE-WQBcYQ&list=RDCrVE-WQBcYQ&start_radio=1
- Appreciation of art is always 100% subjective (except technique). So your opinion is just as valid.
- He did say one thing that made me think a lot about art in general:
  "technique is just a means of arriving at a statement" - Jackson Pollock
- The process is the point
Wait - you're respecting other people's tastest that don't coincide with yours on the internet? Is that legal? /j
- No, I was kidding, hahahaha. /s
I do. My enjoyment is not diminished by how many people like it.

At least it's not made by AI.

Very polite of you to make that comment. I, however, am willing to be a dick.

Pollock was a drunk and a hack, Kandinsky is the abstract artist we should be celebrating as a household name.

Also I'm p sure I read that Pollock killed a dude while drunk driving and got away with it but I don't care enough about him one way or another to verify that before posting it on lemmy dot com.

Agree completely. I think Pollock was just really good at bullshitting people and once you are a big name you can pretty much make whatever you want and people will add value because of your name.
- He was a commercial artist through and through, that is for certain. His pieces have that je ne sais bullshit feel that comes from people producing art as product, not art.
Can’t tell if you are on the Neanderthal man spectrum or Jedi knight spectrum of bell curve.
- Me? Probably Neanderthal. 😅
Kandinsky is the abstract artist we should be celebrating
Had to look this up, and wow yeah, that is some very striking, abstract art from someone who has definitely refined their craft and worked hard to do so. Very cool imagery.
I'm a simple man, I see "Kandinsky", I upvote.
Don't forget my man Rothko!

Tax dodges for the rich don't need to look good, they just need hype.

Sure, but if I were to do that, I'd at least buy something nice.
- Why pay more when banana taped to wall do?
Not just tax dodges. Also money laundering. ;)
Edit: I'm not slamming Pollock. He's cool with me.
Looked for this comment before saying the same thing. This is just what emerged at that time as a wonderfully convenient tax avoidance scheme, however organically. Art gatekeepers are tax dodgers’ useful idiots.
It may be aesthetic. It may be beautiful. But applauding while traitors converge upon some artist and their work is a mistake. They will always use this shit to rob society blind.
Luckily the time for highly centralized art opinion is somewhat over with the internet. It is much harder now to ‘force’ opinion to be that so-and-so is just divine and worth ten billion dollars for any art they create.

I think Pollock paintings are fine. I’ve seen his paintings in an art gallery at least once.

Compared to most other modern art in the same gallery, Pollock was actually visually pleasing to look at. He knew which colors work well together, which is uhm great.

i thought it was shit until i saw some of his paintings in person, and they’re awesome….
they suck when tiny and on a screen

I am going to sleep now. I'll be back tommorow if there still is a discussion. Good night everyone. 😪🐑🐑🐑

I thought the same about abstract art until I saw that one painting in the movie Ex Machina. For some reason in that context it just evoked feelings of dread more than almost any other scene in the movie. And it's an almost static shot just staring at this one abstract painting. It was really interesting and totally changed my mind on abstract art.

I love abstract art. I hope this isn't giving people a wrong impression. There should be something that makes me go "oh that's a cool idea" or an aesthetically pleasing composition.
Edit: He didn't even use complementary colors. It's just random splatters.
I like this digital art by borrachas1 for example:
I feel the same way about Nude Descending a Staircase. Normally cubism or turn of the century modern art doesn’t do it for me, but for some reason I can just…stare at that painting. It’s oddly fascinating in a way I can’t fully describe. I want to get a print of it for my house.

Didn't the CIA covertly drive up his price by secretly overpaying for his paintings?

Yes, they financed lots of art in the fifties/sixties to:
A) Show the west had better culture/art than the Soviet Union
B) Infiltrate those pesky leftists
That's why we have Pollack and other crap "artists". Pollack didn't even invent the whole "pouring" thing, some lady in an esatblock country did IIRC.
Never heard of that, but I love an actual (with evidence) conspiracy theory. Spare me any conspiracy hypotheses tho, please.
- https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36240/did-cia-fund-abstract-artists-to-take-attention-from-social-realism
  This exchange has quite a few sources in it.