This process is really important for developing and maintaining the technical skills of working in traditional media, because if you are not able to establish cultural and observational reference points you lose the ability to "see" as you work. Like, after you have been working on something for several hours everything sorta looks correct and wrong at the same time, and if you don't have something to ground it you'll drift in ways you don't want to.

It is also a really important set of skills for learning, because you can go to an art museum and look at works that inspire you and figure out (or make an educated guess at) the technical processes that their author used to make them, and then you can apply your learnings to making something new. You don't go to the museum to find things to copy without understanding.

@aeva I look at this and it screams "money laundering"

@pupxel lol. it looks like there's texture on the surface that's not coming through in the photo or in the lighting, but idk what that's from.

@aeva there's 2 instances of this happening I know of,
1) someone taking a canvas and painting it white
2) someone was paid to make art but instead of making art, framed empty canvases titled "take the money and run"

@pupxel i mean conceptual art is Like That and there's a reason everybody hates them but that's still tradition. the idea is simple: anything can be elevated to art if you elevate it by putting it in a museum and it makes enough people angry. a urinal can be art. a blank canvas can be art. crime can be art. the problem with conceptual art though is it isn't repeatable. a second urinal is not art, nor is a second blank canvas.

@aeva @pupxel when you mention a urinal, are you referring to fountain by Duchamp?

@maddiefuzz @pupxel yes

@maddiefuzz @pupxel now, if we want to be pedantic, it's not so much that there's a there-can-only-be one rule here, as it happens I know of at least one other urinal that is also art off the top of my head and I am sure there are many more, it's in the kohler art museum in sheboygan, but if you take a plain urinal and present it to a gallery what you are doing is attempting to call forth another instance of Fountain into this world

@maddiefuzz @pupxel Fountain is transcendent, because the work of art is not the urinal. iirc the urinal was conveniently lost or destroyed, but Fountain cannot be destroyed because the true work of art is purely conceptual. it has infected the public consciousness (or at least the academic consciousness) and it will live forever. it is possibly one of the most durable pieces of art ever created

@aeva @maddiefuzz @pupxel it greatly amuses me that Fountain continues to this day to generate people who are pissed off at modern art because it is more than a century old now.

@0x2ba22e11 @maddiefuzz @pupxel every time someone gets mad about modern art Fountain gets even more powerful

@aeva @0x2ba22e11 @maddiefuzz gestures to https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2014-11-14/why-pay-15-million-for-a-white-canvas

@pupxel @0x2ba22e11 @maddiefuzz now I want to paint a massive detailed oil painting with a pallet consisting of "white" and "off white" such that if you see it at a glance you go "ugh another blank canvas painting" but if you stay for a moment you're rewarded by something amazing hiding in plain sight unless you have vision problems in which case you'll probably not be rewarded but that's why there's text on the wall next to everything