I looked up Picasso's Guernica now out of curiosity. I don't understand what's so great about this artwork. Or why it would represent any of the things you mention. It just looks like deranged pencilwork. It also comes across as aggressively pretentious.
What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount?
It was basically all part of the point: I don't appreciate the position taken in the blogpost in the OP, as it is willfully dishonest (its author not only admits, but even flaunts this).
This is why I remarked that I'm following in its spirit. All the points you list out are issues I also have in general with discourse like the blogpost, and with derivative discourse spawned by it. I was expecting people to react badly, specifically in order to demonstrate why. Even felt a bit bad about italicizing artwork, and felt it was a bit on the nose in hindsight. Wouldn't quite call it a flamebait, but in a sense I guess it was one.
In the end though, I got some reasonable discussion out of it, a bit to my surprise. Still kind of processing whether this was an exception to my conjectured rule, or how else I should wrestle with it. I ended up restoring a bit of "faith in humanity" for myself, rather than confirming my resignations.
This isn't to say I don't believe or didn't mean what I said though, to be clear. I just presented it in a way I consider malicious (the way the blogpost is written). You seem to consider so too and have reacted now in kind - although it doesn't read like along this same idea. But then maybe I'm just falling for my own trap at this point.
When you use AI, you might now prompt "in the style of Picasso".
> What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount?
Because Guernica was made by a human who was passionate about something, and poured that passion into his work. Even if you don't "get it", I hope you can at least acknowledge that truth.
To put another way, on one hand we have:
1. Deranged pencilwork created by someone who created it with purpose, to express a feeling he had about something.
2. Deranged pencilwork created by a probabilistic algorithm, that doesn't mean anything to anyone.
Even if we look at it in these sorts of terms, #1 is still orders of magnitude "better" to me.
Your life will be richer if you learn to take more things in, and to appreciate them. And it may require actual learning! And practice!
You can't argue about taste.
I think this is a fantastic question. Full disclosure, Guernica is one of my personal favorites and I initially felt pretty poorly about this particular string of words. But the implied question, "So what?", is literally what separates art from x. I don't think that there's a direct answer to this, but I'll do my best to articulate my feelings towards it.
When I was much younger and first learning how to play guitar, I heard that Eric Clapton was a guitarist that a lot of other guitarists looked up to. I decided to listen to his works and initially dismissed them. To my ears he sounded like a worse, more basic, more derivative version than the artists I was listening to at the time and I wondered how he could even be in the same conversations as other, more modern artists. It was later that I realized I had the arrow of causality wrong. He wasn't revered because he was the best or had taken the artform to the furthest reaches or would be successful today. He was revered because he exposed so many people to a new way of expressing themselves that they likely wouldn't have known about otherwise and certainly wouldn't have invented themselves.
This analogy applies directly to Picasso, I think. You mention you felt the piece was "aggressively pretentious". Where do you think that pretense comes from? There is a whole history to the deconstruction of art in the visual medium and a whole backlash to that deconstruction and a whole response to that and that's your cultural inheritance when you view pieces like this. You don't have to even be aware of this to know that it's affecting how you feel about the piece. I think one facet of "so what?" is that this piece has existed for long enough to generate discussion about its own worth and value and at the very least is spawning literally this post.
The fact that one could find the work with one word and have a discussion about it is also pretty incredible. I don't think a model generated output is that widely known. I do think that sort of cultural reach is a facet of "so what".
There are more answers to "so what?", but to answer your question directly, "what makes it any better", I think an argument could be made that it's not. "Better" when applied to art doesn't have any particular meaning in my mind. What makes it more culturally relevant, more widely known, more widely loved, more important, and more gratifying to study each have dozens of answers, and I think that's more interesting.
Along with being against any form of animal cruelty.
They were also pretty obsessed with spiritualistic quackery.
Are we giving each other fun facts or what? Surely one does not need to go all the way to the nazis to find a Picasso hater? Or are you just following the footsteps of the blogpost author too?
"Nazis ate food ... ugh to food!"
