@Deleted User good stuff indeed

I wonder how much painting recreations cost in general

I know there are farms in china that make pretty reasonable fakes for reasonable prices

I guess the particularly beautiful ones are beautiful because of greater time and skill invested, and therefore are difficult even to imitate, and therefore expensive

Oh really? Weird

yeah, they have like warehouses full of people who just learn to sit and copy

they're clearly inferior works of course, but they can still be prety nice

Hm.. I'll have to think about that

I met a painter in Krakow selling street art who was very talented

I love that shit

I'm debating just buying one of his or ordering recreations of specific paintings that mean something to me

I spend a lot of time in the PNW so there are a lot of really gorgeous landscapes floating about painted by nobodies, I've taken to collecting them

(porque no los dos)

Oh that's great

Personally I'm a fan of supporting actual talented artists

Then you get something of greater value because real work went into it, rather than just the imitation of someone else's

Yeah, he seemed like a good guy

I told him I wasn't into modern art because I felt it was lazy, he agreed and said he teaches at an art school and these days students come in already thinking they are artists

big oof

They will just splash some paint on a canvas and when he asks them what it is, they say "free interpretation "

One of his colleagues just got fed up with them one day, took a chair, threw a blanket on it, and told them to paint it. None of them knew how.

He said most schools are like that these days. He knew of one single very good art school in Ukraine in the old Russian tradition that is still doing good work

I mean, there is even merit to a lot of modernist techiques as learning methods, talented modern artists tend to just be people divorced from wholly or to abstractly obsessed with the emotional side of art, but then every two bit hack thinks they can immitate them when they don't even know what it is they're immitating

I had a modernist for an art teacher once, he brought in a piece that was honestly almost aesthetically pleasing (his art tended to emulate graffiti a lot, which I enjoy the look of), and he spend an hour explaining how the piece came about, about how the canvas was something he and his niece used to paint together on, over and over, and how it formed from the remnants of their time together

then when asked what it meant, his reply was "Oh it's about the interplay of color and the repetition of shape"

Like, absolute zero recognition of any actual meaning to what was, from his own description, clearly a very personal piece

It was all just autistic obsession over a combination of thought experements that, when individually understood, actually allow you to understand a lot of aspects of great masterworks

But to him he couldn't see past the ideas into the point

Hm.. interesting

My current working definition of art is just: if I have to ask "what is it?", it's not art

I just go off anything that looks nice, with the relative merit being the technical skill apparent

Because geometric shapes, for example, can be quite beautiful even without a context, and even something like a Pollock drip painting has a lot of technique to it that isn't immediately apparent, even if it's meaningless. While I don't think those things are necessarily worth what they are in comparison to something that combines technical skill with meaning and recognizable form, there is usually something there (compared to something like ethnic art/postmodern art which typically reject even that in favor of everything from just taking a mudane object and signing it to using actual shit on child's scibblings

K

I know what you mean. Geometric patterns etc which are beautiful I consider to be art because they are recognizable as such

@Deleted User feel free to share more Cossacks lol

Wishing you all a blessed Nativity of St John the Baptist!

K Marcus

I already have on this server

I have like hundreds of Cossack paintings