"The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed." (easy refutation - go to sistine chapel, look up).
"What made oil paint so exciting, when it first became popular in the fifteenth century, was that you could actually make the finished work from the prototype."
This is not how people painted with oil until the 19th century. It was a very expensive medium requiring careful preparatory work, sketches, and so on.
"Most painters start with a blurry sketch and gradually refine it." - completely unsupported.
"Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual medium" - yes, carving marble is much easier.
"When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted." - again, this is how oil paint was used much later. At the time it was painted in thin, transparent layers that did not allow the kind of reworking you learned four hundred years later in art class.
And now we have 'Cézanne can't draw" to add to the list.
Many of your other statements about art fall more in the 'not even wrong' category - fatuous generalizations based on your own tastes, but presented as deep insights about the world.
So it is a little disingenuous of you to keep asking for people to point to specific places where you are wrong. The wrong is diffusely and uniformly distributed.
1. easy refutation - go to sistine chapel, look up
You're claiming that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is better (not just as good, but better) than everything Leonardo and Bellini ever painted. The number of art historians who'd agree with that statement is zero.
2. This is not how people painted with oil until the 19th century.
Your counterclaim is likewise completely unsupported. But anyone who wants to settle the matter can choose any "how to paint" type book published in the 20th century, and they'll see that was considered the default technique.
4. carving marble is much easier
Carving marble requires more specialized training, but the kind of difficulty I was talking about was how critically viewers judge the result. They are tough on sculpture too, but I think they are as tough on line drawing. The less there is, the more closely it's examined.
5. At the time it was painted in thin, transparent layers that did not allow the kind of reworking
3 - Yes, that's how painting is taught now, to the kind of people who read 'how to paint' books.
4 - Nice weaseling.
5 - Notice how those carefully fixed errors show fully-drawn hands, feet, etc., rather than a cloud of "rough drafts" like you would see in a painting done in the modern style? Another nice demonstration of the point that oil painting was not a fluid, iterative medium in its first few hundred years.
6. Try one of the numerous image links in the thread.
As for 1, Aaron Swartz sent us both this quote the first time you and I had this argument, and I'm surprised you've forgotten it. It's from Graham Larkin, curator of the National Gallery of Canada, whom he asked to adjudicate your claim:
""By even the most conservative standards (which your buddy seem to be applying), you'd need to go at least a few decades further, into the High Renaissance. Julius II's didn't even start commissioning Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Vatican Stanze (School of Athens &c) didn't start until 1508. These works don't exactly represent a decline, except by Preraphealite standards which would judge them as over-sophisitcated and lacking in primitive simplicity.
(That's IT: your friend's a Preraphaelite! Well history is not on his or her side; such Victorian predilections are a mere blip in the history of Western aesthetics.) The generation after the giant Raphael (and the giant Durer in the North) is a much better candidate for cultural and artistic decline--a story complicated by Michaelangelo's
inconvenient longevity. Historians have often pointed to the 1527 Sack of Rome as a downturn in artistic ferment, or at least in the unparalleled ascendancy of Italy. I would add that Western painting of around 1500 can scarcely be separated from the other visual arts, including the still-young (to the West) technology of print, brought to incredible levels of sophistication by Durer and others in
precisely the post-1500 decades. One wonders whether your friend meant "1500" or "like, 1500.""
Of course, Dr. Larkin gets one thing wrong. You're not a pre-Raphaelite, you're just a big ole weenis.
From what I can tell, Mr. Graham, at best, might be wrong about a handful of (evidently fuzzy) facts about painting. I do not see the logical bridge from that to his status as "big ole weenis." That's disappointingly puerile.
I would expect that you're correct, given your stint as a professional painter, something Mr. Graham cannot lay claim to. And it doesn't really matter.
The "Hackers and Painters" essay is not about painting, nor the strict similarities between "hacking" and painting. It is about the fact that "hackers" do both design and development. This is different from the conventional notion of product development existing separate from engineering. The painting analogy is merely a (successful) vehicle for communicating this distinction.
I think this is obvious, and I assume you know it. The bitterness in your riposte, especially the invocation of sexual neener-neenerism, perplexes a bit. Perhaps as a painter you take offense to the imperfect use of painting as an analogy. This seems excessive. "Tomate un geniol."
Some of this speaks to PG's "Writing to Discover" (http://paulgraham.com/discover.html) observations. When he says, "The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed" then my impression is that he's just stating his opinion. But because he doesn't bother to preface it with, "Well this is just my opinion, but..." then it sounds like everything that he says is, as you say, "generalizations based on [his] own tastes, but presented as deep insights about the world".
So because all of his statements aren't prefaced with "sometimes it seems to me" or "I wonder if" or "Maybe it's the case that", then it comes across like he's speaking as if everything he says is absolute truth, whereas a lot of it is simply his musings about the world.
I totally understand why this rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Personally I prefer his current writing style, where he doesn't qualify everything he says with, "in my experience" or "among the artists I've known personally" or whatever.
With that being said, I can't comment on your factual corrections about the history of oil painting.
"The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed."
Art has progressed so much in the last 500 years that this comparison is utterly absurd. Francis Bacon comes to mind as a painter whose works simply cannot be compared to earlier pieces.
I am always amazed when people fall in love with an artist I consider a talentless hack.
PS: In the tradition of things you can't say. Science killed philosophy as a meaningful activity. And the camera killed painting as meaningful activity. They have become the refuge of talented youths and over-educated idiots.
First point: Just to clarify, you're calling Bacon a talentless hack? Bacon, the master of nightmarish imagery?
Second point: Define meaningful. Philosophy, science, photography, painting, all are essentially ways of passing time before death, if we want to use the cosmic scale; on the personal level each activity has different meanings to different people. I'm not a big philosopher, but I enjoy that much more than science. Science bores me.
Where is it written that philosophy can't evolve based on scientific findings? And what makes you think painting's not useful? Perhaps portraits aren't as meaningful, but even there, designing a web site for a musician I commissioned a painting of him rather than a photo. With paintings you can specify colors ahead of time and make something that fits for the design. So there's an example of an archaic medium being used for modern purposes.
I don't like very much your us-versus-them mentality here. I don't like your suggestion that there's such a thing as too much education. My policy is, to each their own. I'll continue to be fascinated by those over-educated idiots I call my friends, and you can continue to do whatever you choose with your own time.
I expect some refinement of an artist's craft over time. Just look at his faces. As a point of comparison my sister is a long way from mastery but he presents a reasonable progression for a HS student.
Bacon had some interesting ideas, but he lacked the skills to really explore them. IMO, that is forgivable for a dabbler or young person, but it's just not acceptable for a serious artist.
Second when looking for truth, philosophy is a dead end. You can still use a horse and buggy to get around New York but there is a reason it's become far less popular over time. Painting as a means to convey meaning from an artist to his audience has been similarly demoted because there are better ways to capture what you have seen. Leaving panting with abstract ideas better conveyed though words and meaningless garbage.
>Second when looking for truth, philosophy is a dead end.
If you're really looking for truth, then you need at least a little bit of philosophy to tell you what you're looking for. (I don't know about you, but I wasn't born with any very good ideas about what truth is, or why I should want to look for it.)
In my experience, people who claim not to have any use for philosophy usually have philosophical opinions cobbled together from whatever ideas happened to be in vogue ~50 years ago (those that have now permeated into the general culture). Ironically, the whole idea that science has "killed" philosophy is an offshoot of the philosophical school of logical positivism from the first half of the 20th century.
The realization that philosophy is a dead end is vary common and vary old.
Thomas Aquinas spent much of his life using the bible to make a hole host of philosophic treaties based on the infallibility of the bible. Then he realized that his entire work up to that point was "a house built on sand" and that for example trying to prove the existence of god basses on biblical teachings was pointless. He died in 1274.
He is not all that well known for making that realization, but if you actually read his work it becomes obvious that in his latter work he understood christian philosophy was simply a game he was vary good at. You can study fad's and paint a superficial picture of the development of philosophy but looking at what was published and what was popular does not in any way tell you when an idea was first conceived.
PS: I was 3 years old when I asked my mother why people believe in God. Not "is there a god" but why do people delude themselves. As a christian she defended faith, but I had already decided it was BS. So I assume a significant number of people throughout history quietly called the popular fictions of the day BS, and went about their lives. Suggesting that we needed philosophy to separate some truth from fiction seems pretentious when there is an ancient tradition of "losing the faith".
>The realization that philosophy is a dead end is vary common and vary old.
Well yes, that point of view is very old, but then so is the opposite point of view. I thought your point was more substantial than this, i.e. that modern science somehow invalidated philosophy. This point of view is obviously at least no older than modern science.
I'm not sure what your point is re Aquinas. He was a brilliant philosopher who is still very much worth reading (even if his prose is a bit tedious), so he doesn't seem like a good example of why philosophy is pointless. You certainly don't have to believe in the infallibility of the bible to get something out of his work.
If by modern science you mean Gregor Johann Mendel and Isaac Newton then yea it's only a few hundred years old. But, Archimedes also believed in testing his ideas when possible so "modern science" is probably not the best term.
Anyway, finding someone who in his youth wrote elegant treaties on the definition of justice says nothing about his latter beliefs and due to our limited lifespan from a historical standpoint they take place at about the same era. I said / wrote many stupid things as I child that I no longer agree with. All it takes is the realization that your assumptions are often wrong to realize that Philosophy is a dead end. However, once you understand that there is little more to be said on the topic unless you concoct a system that lets you ignore that fact. So you might go from "proving the existence of god' to saying it’s a question of faith.
PS: "I think therefore I am" is not necessarily true for a puppet reading someone else’s lines or a part of a far large hole. So, "Do I think?" is about as far as philosophy can take you.
>If by modern science you mean Gregor Johann Mendel and Isaac Newton then yea it's only a few hundred years old. But, Archimedes also believed in testing his ideas when possible so "modern science" is probably not the best term.
What's your point? The idea of science as something separate from philosophy which could actually replace philosophy altogether is basically a 20th century one, and is certainly no more than a few hundred years old. (Science just wasn't impressive enough before then for it to be a reasonable point of view.)
>All it takes is the realization that your assumptions are often wrong to realize that Philosophy is a dead end.
I don't see how that follows. The vulnerability of initial assumptions is a problem for any form of inquiry, science included, but it isn't a fatal problem. Much of philosophy is precisely about questioning assumptions.
>PS: "I think therefore I am" is not necessarily true for a puppet reading someone else’s lines
I have no idea what you mean by this, but it doesn't seem to address Descartes' argument. (He was obviously not suggesting that anyone who merely says "I think therefore I am" must necessarily exist.)
>or a part of a far large hole
whole?
>So, "Do I think?" is about as far as philosophy can take you.
This is manifestly nonsense. Unless you are seriously claiming that there has been no progress in logic, political philosophy, moral philosophy, the philoosphy of science, etc. etc. in the past few thousand years. At the very least, the range of possible views, and the best arguments for and against these views, are much better known and understood than they were before. And in some areas (e.g. logic, and those aspects of the philosophy of science pertaining to it) there has been progress in a much more definite sense.
Unless you are seriously claiming that there has been no progress in logic, political philosophy, moral philosophy, the philoosphy of science, etc. etc. in the past few thousand years. Excluding logic I would agree with that statement.
If you disagree then [citation needed].
Philosophy is the study or creation of theories about basic things such as the nature of existence, knowledge, and thought, or about how people should live. To be clear Philosophy does not encompass math and it does not require testing of those theories.
PS: Skepticism is a philosophical attitude that questions the possibility of obtaining any sort of knowledge. It was first articulated by Pyrrho, who believed that everything could be doubted except appearances. (ca. 360 BC - ca. 270 BC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrho
I think you are confused about where the burden of proof lies here. You are asserting the worthlessness of the entire cannon of Western philosophy (and quite possibly other branches of philosophy too). This is an incredible assertion.
By the way, why do you "exclude logic"? Logic has always been a central element of philosophy, at least since Aristotle.
>To be clear Philosophy does not encompass math and it does not require testing of those theories.
Philosophy certainly includes some areas of math (for example, mathematical logic derives partly from work by philosophers). As for whether or not philosophical ideas "need to be tested", that is such a vague locution that it's difficult to respond. But certainly philosophical ideas are supposed to be subject to scrutiny (e.g. compared to alternative points of view, shown to be consistent, etc. etc.)
PS. Thanks for telling me what skepticism is. By the way, if you are interested in testability, you might want to read the ample literature on this notion in the philosophy of science.
This is an incredible assertion. And yet you can't site a single example of progress.
Thanks for telling me what skepticism is. no I showed an example of "modern" skepticism that is over 2,000 years old. Think about this ~2,300 years ago people were having the same basic argument as we are having today I can think of no other field which has stagnated to that degree.
Regarding skepticism, I didn't say that skepticism was a new idea, I said that the idea that science can replace philosophy is a new idea. The kind of skepticism you're talking about is actually incompatible with modern science, so it can hardly be taken as an example of a scientific world view. After all, one pretty clear example of recent progress in philosophy is the demonstration that scientific theories are not reducible to statements about actual and hypothetical experiences or "appearences" (i.e., the failure of logical positivism).
"By suspending judgment, by confining oneself to phenomena or objects as they appear, and by asserting nothing definite as to how they really are, one can escape the perplexities of life and attain an imperturbable peace of mind."
It's the "confining oneself to phenomena or objects as they appear" where the break from philosophy occurs.
From the scientific standpoint you ignore the concept of life after death and other "perplexities of life" because it's not knowable. A true scientist builds models on what phenomena he sees and lays no clams one what he can't. Now you might question how that works with a paleontologist, but confining oneself to phenomena means a he thinks it's reasonable to look for patterns based on what your eyes tell you because they are not deceiving you even if they are not a window to deep truth. A paleontologist does not argue with the fact god could have created the world ten seconds ago, rather he argues "excluding unknowable things" this is the patterns I see. But, a philosopher sees no lines of inquiry outside of his purview and still attacks the unknowable questions such as life after death or the invisible god who does nothing.
PS: A better example from that time would be how a water clock behaves after you leave the room, if it displayed the correct time when you get back may have gotten up and danced about the room before you got back and hidden that from you but if that's the case it's an unknowable truth best ignored for visible phenomena.
Cezanne had at least six years of classical drawing instruction, where you begin by drawing various geometric forms, move on to making sketches of plaster statuary, and then finally draw from the model. It's a highly technical form of training akin to doing scales all day long on a musical instrument. I'm sure there's a folder in some archive in Aix full of extremely boring and careful studies he did at the time. I've linked the one example I could easily find online above.
Saying Cézanne couldn't draw is a glorious form of missing the point, like saying Stravinsky couldn't hold a tune.
There are perhaps other qualities in Cezanne's paintings, but PG is far from being the only person who considers Cezanne's drawing skills quite deficient.
Can you give an example of something I said that you think is false?
It's always helpful in discussions here on HN to have the courage to say something like that. Kudos for that. Thanks to those who have replied with specific answers. That puts lots of food for thought into the thread.
