alt Hacker News> maybe I just don't get art at all.
I don't think you don't get art at all. It is just that you don't get art in full. I should note, that no one gets what art really is, if you want to learn how tricky the question is, you should probably ask some trained person about it, like a philosopher of art. They can talk about it for dozens of hours without stopping to breathe.
But there is one property of art that is undeniable: when the art becomes understandable, when you can write rules for distinguishing a good art from a bad one, the art stops being art. It becomes a commodity instead, no one really interested in it anymore.
Lately art is got this rule, so now art is trying to not follow any rules at all. Except the rule of not following rules. It is pretty funny to watch the artists, the lengths they are ready to go just to follow the rule of not following rules.
But there is something else, if you just break rules it doesn't mean that you are creating art. I think there is one more necessary (but not sufficient) property of art: it should stick into memory. Your stones in a metal cage have this property, you remember them, you ask questions about them. It is not sufficient to claim that they are art, but I think it is close enough.
> The implementation gives us this random music we can play in our browsers but people mention they care more about the concept than the music.
Yeah, the music is not very exciting by itself, what is exciting it was created by trains. And HN attracts the people who are not going to be content with this knowledge without knowing exactly how trains could do it.
> So why go to all the trouble to make the final polished version of your idea?
Because the act of creation is fun maybe? And there are people who understands it and can see a piece of art and feel what the artist felt in the act of the creation? It is not so fun to create if you are not going to share your creation with others. I don't know why.
> Yeah, I probably don't get art as others do. I just don't see a difference between "imagine a 100-ton stone handing from a rod" and "look at this actual 100-ton stone hanging from a rod".
Well, there is a difference. To hang 100-ton stone from a rod one needs to overcome a lot of hurdles. They will need money and some bureaucratic approval, because the stone could fall and kill someone. When I imagine a 100-ton stone hanging from a rod I feel nothing. But when I see it, I can't stop laughing. Someone had gone through a lot of troubles to hang the stone, and to do that they managed to convince others that it is very important to hang the stone.
> if you want to learn how tricky the question is, you should probably ask some trained person about it, like a philosopher of art. They can talk about it for dozens of hours without stopping to breathe.
This is tangential to the discussion, but I've always wondered why "philosophy of art" it's not "psychology of art" instead. Philosophy generally deals with things science can't deal with (yet) like ethics, metaphysics, qualia. And art is just about how humans (and probably other intelligent animals) perceive something meant to evoke emotions and thought. It's something science can deal with now, whether it's a "hard" science like neuroscience or a "softer" one like psychology and sociology. From Wikipedia I get:
> Philosophers debate whether aesthetic properties have objective existence or depend on the subjective experiences of observers
So in this case it's actually a type of philosophy, but it seems so useless to talk about something like this. Obviously what's aesthetically pleasing to some will not to aesthetically pleasing to someone else. And anything at all can be aesthetically pleasing. I'm sure many people find a piece of cow shit aesthetically pleasing. Many people dislike flowers and paintings. Things that are aesthetically pleasing to almost everyone are aesthetically pleasing because they share something that can be explained by studying our brains (like whether symmetry is generally perceived as prettier than asymmetry). Do any philosophers really think an aesthetic property, if it somehow has any objective existence, is any different than anything else that we treat as abstract but would have objective existence if we philosophized about it long enough (like mathematical structures or language)?
It's like some was bored enough to create this field when the interesting philosophies were already taken. And it's similar to those "philosophies" that talk about honor or duty and similar things that are so far removed from reality and can't possibly be connected to any ground truth about the world and need to be talked about in sociology circles, instead. Like, we don't have and can't possibly have a "philosophy" of HN comments. We can discuss so many interesting aspects of the comments here, but none of that would be philosophy, it would be closer to science.
> I think there is one more necessary (but not sufficient) property of art: it should stick into memory. Your stones in a metal cage have this property, you remember them, you ask questions about them. It is not sufficient to claim that they are art, but I think it is close enough.
I remember then because they were in a public park and I thought:
> The city and the government subsidizes this useless stuff instead of fixing the sidewalks. The amount of work to make these statues could've gone into something actually useful.
If that art was made by people with their own money and put in a private place and I somehow managed to see them, I'd just think "welp, those people don't know what to do with their money, but who cares". And I'd forget about them pretty quickly. So maybe the point of the useless sculptures was to annoy me that the government spends public money inadequately. I doubt that was the intention of the artists and they somehow tricked the government into letting them put the statues in a public place because the government subsidizes shitty (IMO) artists all the time and most of those artists actually think their art is good.
And just to clarify, the sculptures are really, really shitty. Literally a badly welded wire care with some crushed rocks above a bigger rock that was barely chiseled, if at all. Something a 5 year old could do if they had the strength to move the rocks or were allowed to use welding equipment. You have Michelangelo's David where you can admire the Michelangelo's skills, the time and care he took to sculpt it... and then you have a bunch of rocks in a cage. It's like comparing the Mona Lisa to a piece of paper someone took a shit on (which I'm sure has been put up in galleries at some point).
> When I imagine a 100-ton stone hanging from a rod I feel nothing. But when I see it, I can't stop laughing. Someone had gone through a lot of troubles to hang the stone, and to do that they managed to convince others that it is very important to hang the stone.
Definitely, although I'd be annoyed at the wasted resources, especially if they're public money.
> It is pretty funny to watch the artists, the lengths they are ready to go just to follow the rule of not following rules.
Like some kinds of fashion where you try to be unique and express your individualism but you end up looking the same as everyone else.