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.
So now you have to get into the mind of the artist and if their fame influenced the knowledge of their art, but they didn’t achieve that fame in order to promote their art, you can ignore their art? That seems very convoluted.
A better idea is just to ignore the artist and focus on the paint on the canvas.
Why? Why ignore the process? Why does the idea of thinking critically about what the art means and not just how the art looks make you uncomfortable? You don’t have to do anything, but trying to make an equivalence between someone taking actions in their field to challenge established ideas and someone who is only known as an artist due to unrelated atrocities is ridiculous. You’re making the exact same arguments that traditional painters made against impressionism, now widely recognized as masterful artworks (Monet, Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh, etc), which were similarly making statements about what could and could not be considered art. Just as with any of those other artists, you don’t have to like Pollock’s work, or agree with the statement he was making with it, but to act like it isn’t art, or that the things we’re saying with art don’t matter, would be pretentious.
I don’t like Pollock’s art. I don’t think the statement he was making was particularly revolutionary, and I think other artists he was contemporary with accomplished the same statement far better (Rothko). However, this “just focus on the paint on the canvas” thing is silly, and artists have widely rejected it. Art should mean something. It’s why human design and intent will always be worth more than AI’s best Monet facsimile.
![[OC] Personal opinion on Jackson Pollock's drip art](https://fedia.io/media/57/a6/57a68784da258ac88cbf772d4cc1c57c31be67a0f7ddda1a203f62c49fd84eff.jpg){kind=link}
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.
So now you have to get into the mind of the artist and if their fame influenced the knowledge of their art, but they didn’t achieve that fame in order to promote their art, you can ignore their art? That seems very convoluted.
A better idea is just to ignore the artist and focus on the paint on the canvas.
Why? Why ignore the process? Why does the idea of thinking critically about what the art means and not just how the art looks make you uncomfortable? You don’t have to do anything, but trying to make an equivalence between someone taking actions in their field to challenge established ideas and someone who is only known as an artist due to unrelated atrocities is ridiculous. You’re making the exact same arguments that traditional painters made against impressionism, now widely recognized as masterful artworks (Monet, Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh, etc), which were similarly making statements about what could and could not be considered art. Just as with any of those other artists, you don’t have to like Pollock’s work, or agree with the statement he was making with it, but to act like it isn’t art, or that the things we’re saying with art don’t matter, would be pretentious.
I don’t like Pollock’s art. I don’t think the statement he was making was particularly revolutionary, and I think other artists he was contemporary with accomplished the same statement far better (Rothko). However, this “just focus on the paint on the canvas” thing is silly, and artists have widely rejected it. Art should mean something. It’s why human design and intent will always be worth more than AI’s best Monet facsimile.