I feel that most discussions about whether somebody/something qualifies as an artist or art end up being pretty meaningless because people don't have a clear notion of what "artist" or "art" mean.

Most notions of those terms seem to be based on a picture of exemplars or prototypes of those kinds of things, and most determinations of whether somebody/something is an artist/art seem to be based on intuitive similarity comparisons with those exemplars/prototypes.

[EDIT: just thinking out loud, "art" seems commonly, though implicitly, seen as having defining characteristics of ineffability and high cultural status, so people's views about whether X is art often really come down to whether they think it seems sufficiently ineffable and of sufficient cultural status, though they wouldn't say that's the basis for their view]

I wrote a blog a while back where I tried to figure out what a core part of art was to see if AIs would need it: https://medium.com/@willsilversmith/will-ai-need-art-91b5619...

While it doesn't cover all of art in a philosophy of art sense, it covers what I think most people think of when they think of art. Maybe you'll find it helpful (or better yet maybe you'll teach me a lesson).

Hi, I just read your essay. I thought it was well thought out

> Arts are an ever evolving set of methods for communicating feeling from one person to another. [...] There are other ways you might use art, but this aspect of it is the most different from the other end of the spectrum like business or scientific writing where you shape ideas.

IMO, if things like novels and poems are considered art then it can be communicating truths, but truths that are difficult to communicate in explicit, theoretical terms.

> By manipulating their feelings, the artist is in essence influencing the viewer’s conception of their motivations.

This bit wasn't entirely clear to me and I thought it could be fleshed out a bit more.

> Perhaps the true use of art is to allow ourselves to explore different states of being and make better decisions.

It might fit under that but, as I said above, I think it can be used as a means to communicate truths. Eg to broaden someone's perspective on the world

Firstly, thank you for the feedback. :)

> IMO, if things like novels and poems are considered art then it can be communicating truths, but truths that are difficult to communicate in explicit, theoretical terms.

You're absolutely right. I think that things like novels and poems are located a little farther towards the center on the spectrum I mentioned than something that purely communicates feeling (like an abstract painting). I think the reason they are so successful is that they deliver one or more logically digestible messages along with a feeling. It often seems that people aren't convinced by logic, but rather by a shift in how they feel about something.

> This bit wasn't entirely clear to me and I thought it could be fleshed out a bit more.

Again, you're absolutely right. I felt that way too but I ran out of steam at the time. I think I have the energy to expand on it now. :) What I was trying to say was that your motivations shift based on how you feel, and the more powerful the feeling, the potentially larger the shift. Something is out of balance if you're feeling something very strongly. You'll be motivated to correct that imbalance, and in the process consider a different course of action.

I talked to a friend that had taken a course on AI and minds at MIT and he said he considered emotions a filter on decision space.

> It might fit under that but, as I said above, I think it can be used as a means to communicate truths. Eg to broaden someone's perspective on the world

I haven't quite figured out what a truth is yet. It's definitely a kind of message that emotionally resonates. I sort of sense that the framework I proposed could be worked to encompass them, but I haven't done enough thinking on it yet. In this article I was focusing very narrowly on the extreme case of pure feeling to distill important truths about it, but the middle ground is where most of the important stuff happens. Simple models are good for investigating complex phenomenal since you can see exactly how they work and break down.

I'd be happy to hear your ideas!

> What I was trying to say was that your motivations shift based on how you feel, and the more powerful the feeling, the potentially larger the shift

ok, I understand what you mean.

> I haven't quite figured out what a truth is yet. It's definitely a kind of message that emotionally resonates.

I believe that the universe exists independently of whatever view of it we have, and that at its foundations truth means the meaning of the information reflects how the universe is.

So in how I see it, the truth of something is orthogonal to its degree of emotional resonance.

> So in how I see it, the truth of something is orthogonal to its degree of emotional resonance.

I too agree that the universe objectively exists separately from our minds. However, there are many facts about the world, most of them banal. The ones that are useful to us or make the world feel more understandable regardless of their ultimate truth are the ones that resonate. In particular, art often expresses emotional truths about ourselves and our relationships to others. "We're all doomed." "We're all saved." These have little objective reality but can powerfully affect us at the right moment.

My view: no matter how powerfully something may resonate, this itself can not make it true.

> pretty meaningless because people don't have a clear notion of what "artist" or "art" mean

Maybe meaningless purely in terms of getting to a concrete answer, but IMO collaboratively grappling with and exploring our intuitive ideas is useful, especially when people have different starting perspectives. E.g. this entire thread.

The world is not math, we can't always build our definitions from axioms. Sometimes analogical reasoning is the most accessible way to explore a concept.

> but IMO collaboratively grappling with and exploring our intuitive ideas is useful

I fully agree.

I'd like to see more discussion about what those terms mean when "is X art/an-artist" questions come up.

I do think, though, that the meaning of those terms is often not discussed -- or perhaps, not honestly discussed, in a way that isn't simply serving people's prior judgement on the question -- at the times those questions come up.

I suspect the world (universe) IS math. We just aren't smart enough to figure it all out.

Your point still stands of course.

No. Engineers are house builders or railroad workers or car mechanics. Except they have deeper knowledge in their subject often to the point that nobody else can do sonething as well.

There is no "uniqueness" in engineering, there is only a balancing of time, money, reliability, reusability and other purely mathematical concepts. If something is unique then it is often better than alternatives or worse than alternatives. Engineering can be considered a sport much easier that an art.

Art can have seperate equivelents. Like a paintng of a beautiful landscape or a painting depicting pain. Both may have the same price but both are unique. Even two portraits of the same person will be different simply because two individuals did it or how style changes with time.

Looking at some code I see beauty, other code causes me pain.

That can arguably be attributed to experience and cleanliness.

If you walk into a garage it can be dirty, greasy and disorganized. It can also be labeled, clean and organized. Hardly considered art

Code or art?

http://www.ioccc.org/2013/birken/birken.c

Ok. Yes its asthetically pleasing. I feel comfortable looking at it. But...

its completely unreasable because all the variable names have been mangled and there is no whire space to organize the blocks. At this point it looks like a puzzle.

If you consider the algorithm an art, I disagree. Algorithms are either more efficient them their predecessors or are efficient for a niche.

The balancing of time, reliability and reuseability with the concerns of your project as well as the concerns of your staff is very much an art form because it involves a lot of social and psychological understanding balanced with an ability to communicate the decisions and reasons effectively.

If it was purely mathematical, it would all be pretty straightforward.

> concerns of your staff, social/psychological understanding

I was under the impression we were talking about engineers here. But if we are talking from an organizational standpoint, your goal is to have an efficient, lowcost team. Management is not an art just like farming is not an art. There is a right way to do things to maximize money, right way to fo things "ethically" and wrong ways to do things which lead to failure.

Your own personality will often get in the way of your job. It is pretty straightforward because the goal is ultimately efficiency and every "question" has a logical "answer".

So we can program a machine (removing our egos from the equation) to properly manage everything?

If not, there's probably still some art left in management.

I dont think ignorance is a form of art. Opportunity and discovery maybe.

Art itself isnt imperfect, every creation has value and is a mix of natures effect on the artist abd the artists own intentions. Imperfect management just leads to turnover of valuable employees, wastefulness and low morale

But that's because today's definition of engineer is narrow while it used to be more broad (e.g. Eiffel was an engineer). An artist is also a craftsman, except he uses his craft to express himself.

> there is only a balancing of time, money, reliability, reusability and other purely mathematical concepts

And therein lies the art. An experienced engineer can come up with simple, elegant solutions that balance those things. Novice engineers struggle to find a good balance and tend to over-complicate the solution.

That's not art. That's craft.

Is art not a craft?

Art and craft are different - art implies some semantic depth or statement about society.

Crafts are things like coffee mugs or portraits - they require immense skill and can only benefit from creativity, but don't really have anything to say about anything. That doesn't mean they're not good or valuable, though.

This seems to be a recurring question among us "software engineers" in particular. I don't think the people who work on, say, aircraft parts today are much bothered by it.

In the Art World though it's been a raging argument for practically the whole of modernity: who's an artist and who isn't?

Marcel Duchamp proposed that anyone who says they're an artist is an artist, because intent is what makes something art. Likewise anything made as art, is art. (This says nothing about good, bad, or other judgements of the artwork or even the artist.)

Joseph Beuys proposed that every human being is by definition an artist, because the inherent creativity in all human thought and social activity is what makes the difference. He also thought of social systems as inherently artistic -- even your boring old office. Thus the artwork (or brick wall, insurance claim, whatever) can be a more or less interesting artefact but the art itself happens elsewhere.

The Duchampian idea is pretty radical in that it removes authority to confer artist-ness. This is similar in a way to how the software revolution has removed the authority to define an engineer.

The Beuysian idea is of course much more radical, because if you accept it then the question itself becomes nonsense.

I think it's worth noting here that the Art World, as embodied by galleries and museums and professorships and all the trappings of payment and recognition, has mostly come around to Duchamp's point of view about who and what is an artist or art; but demands for itself the power to decide who is a serious artist, and who is a good one. The rich seem to be cool with this; the poor maybe less so.

(I did read TFA/watch TFvideo, and I think the point would be the same but the attention different if Mr. Gallagher had said "poet" instead of "artist.")

In college I did a double-major with of Studio Arts and Computer Science. To me engineering (particularly software engineering which is the kind I practice) is a craft, not an art. For something to qualify as art in my mind it must define and serve its own purpose.

Of course anything can be an artistic medium, a lot of the work in the demo scene or from _why I believe qualifies as art, but not the bulk of programming. I say the same thing for graphic design, or wood-working, or even photography.

It's by no means easy to draw this line. It's at the core of the concept of "selling out", and it's fraught on both sides. Many accusations of selling out are due to envy, many defenses of selling out are due to self-justification. Nevertheless, there is a core concept underneath it all that's important: art can derive a lot of meaning from being non-essential and non-utilitarian.

Never really got why people debate questions this. It boils down to asking, "what are the definitions of the words 'engineer' and 'artist'?". And being that words are hopelessly overloaded, it's impossible to answer such questions without saying "Yes, if by 'engineer' you mean....".

The question to ask oneself is, what would be observably different about the world if engineers are artists, vs. if they aren't? Are we asking whether engineers should be eligible for the Turner Prize? Whether colleges should put an engineering professor on the Arts faculty? Or if there's no particular observable difference, then why not pick any old answer that pleases you?

Is code art? Well certainly I've seen some good-looking, clever code before, but do my class names inspire the next engineer to change their lives? Probably not.

I think that's where these discussions really fall apart. Sure algorithms or equations or schematics could be very artistic. What "art" is is highly subjective, but you should never forget that art often inspires people and leads them to new places. Its not the only lens to view art, certainly, but its one I like to pull out when these discussions happen. After all, if we call everything art, then nothing is art.

By itself, I would say engineering is not art. The tools of the engineering discipline can be used to create art, though. Video games, interactive displays, generative media, etc.--as outputs rather than processes--can definitely qualify as artistic in nature.

Using engineering skills and tools for artistic purpose is one of my biggest hobbies.

- http://lasers.io

- http://jungle.horse

Please don't hammer the latter one too hard. It's Rust, but not load tested (also on a shared sever). I'm also working on an improved speech algorithm that I hope to finish this weekend. So yeah, please don't kill it or share beyond HN. (Comments and criticism welcome.)

Is a barista who adds a clever design to the foam of your coffee an artist?

For most engineers, I think the answer is "no": we focus on functionality and efficiency and while some of that may go towards the happiness of the end-user, what we build is generally not consumed directly by that end-user but rather the byproduct.

But...there are cases where you observe a mechanism or piece of code that is not only efficient but beautiful in its simplicity. Perhaps laymen don't appreciate it, but fellow engineers can.

I think that in such cases where the creator goes beyond "good enough" and makes an effort to elevate their creation to a point where peers can point to it and go "Yes! That is how to do it!", engineering can be art.

The barista is in this case since she is allowed and chooses to add a personal touch. By not adding the personal touch its also a form of expression. Either way, the personal touch will have a direct effect on the enjoyability of the coffee.

Personal touches in programming are rare and often bad. Going past "good enough" is rarely considered art as its done for code cleanliness or efficiency.

I would never hire a programmer for funny comments. I might hire a battista for her art

>Is a barista who adds a clever design to the foam of your coffee an artist?

Depends if it was done with artistic intent (can't personally name an artist which has created a work in that medium but it is a medium so it is possible) or if it was done just as a clever foam design.

Craft and art are not the same thing.

An artist is a person who presents something by putting a frame around it. Not necessarily a literal frame, either. A definition so broad as to be applicable almost anywhere. So broad that is risks being all but meaningless.

But I think we can agree that an engineer has different goals than an artist even in the broadest definition of both.

An engineer is someone who uses well understood solutions and techniques to solving problems that involve the physical world. This is distinct from science, which tries to discover new ways to solve problems or learn new things about the physical world. Often you need to use engineering to do science. So often that the scientists spend a lot of time waiting around for the engineers to move them along. (See: LHC).

Some engineers are artists, just as some members of any profession are artists. Those who are have a unique ability to use their craft to create something that goes beyond utility to touch people on an emotional level.

The vast majority of engineers, however, are definitely not artists.

"Wilson seems to have thought the engineers of this accelerator, and the scientists using it to study nature, were like—or as important as—artists."

This implies, to me, that the author seems to have an almost-classist regard for artists (however he may define the term.) We certainly need visionaries in a variety of disciplines. Encouraging visionaries is one thing that "makes [our country] worth defending." Why unnecessarily burden visionaries with pigeonholes not of their choosing? Certainly enlighten them as to their available paths, their strengths ... but please don't discourage someone from being a visionary engineer by declaring that they'll never be as 'important' as an artist.

Often art requires engineering (sculpture especially, but some computer games are essentially literary or art projects).

Should engineering require art? Maybe our built environment would be pleasanter if more of it did.

I like that idea.

As you probably know, in the art world there's a nontrivial business of fabricators. Consider a giant lamp-bear[0]. That's pretty hard to build: it has to not fall over and kill the students, it has to survive the winter, it has to be transportable from wherever you build it.

There's a whole cottage industry that just does things like that. (Not all of them large of course.)

Wouldn't it be cool if engineering projects called in a team of artists? Probably the closest anyone's come to that is having murals on public buildings.

[0]: https://www.brown.edu/about/public-art/Fischer

Groups developing systems that interface with humans bring in artists (by various titles) all the time. In the programming world these are our UI/UX designers. In aircraft, it's the person or persons deciding on how the passenger cabin should look and feel. Same for other vehicles. For buildings, it may be the architect, but more likely a team working with them.

Yes but doesn't this just bring us back to the "are engineers artists" question?

UI/UX designers are not "artists" by conventional definition, and architects are in such a special zone of "engineering-plus" that some of us end up called Software Architects.

In other words: his exceptional aesthetic sense doesn't make Jony Ive an Artist except in a let's-decide-what-an-artist-is discussion. Which this is, of course. :-)

I was responding to your question here:

  Wouldn't it be cool if engineering projects called in a team of artists?

By saying it does happen. Could it happen more, sure, but it does happen quite often, and for more than just murals.

Regarding the general debate here of engineer vs artist, I gave up on it. We have to first agree on what is meant by "art". By some definitions, engineering is very clearly art. By others, it's very clearly not.

Yea, but we have an awful lot of drab cinderblock buildings or their equivalent, that are basically eyesores the moment they're built.

of course not, we make money.

This is the most compelling argument I've read in the whole thread as to why engineers are not artists

But it was tongue-in-cheek. Of course code or software can be an art , but the term engineer is nowadays limited to the implementor rather than the entire work.

is someone disqualified if they make money?

As a person who chose a (software) engineering career over an artistic one, mostly because I was afraid of being poor, I often wonder whether I made the right choice, economically speaking.

I know a few full-time artists who make at least as much as I do. They in turn know a lot of artists who make WAY more than I do.

Sure, I chose a lower-risk path, but was the higher risk as extreme as my young self thought?

There aren't hundreds of thousands of artists making good money, but I think there are likely thousands.

> They in turn know a lot of artists who make WAY more than I do.

They all probably know the same artists though. Popularity is a bitch.

They are orthogonal. By definition art is useless. A 5km hanging bridge is a engineering wonder - link the right places on the earth it is economic engine of tremendous growth. Put it in the middle of the gobi desert - it is an art installation while still keeping the engineering wonder status.

Is writing copy for the editorial page of a newspaper art? Seems to me a lot of the language that goes into programming serves more of a functional purpose vs. an aesthetic/artistic purpose.

I liked what dasil003 brought up about the demo scene; I agree with that sentiment.

"It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending"

That italic part added by the author changed the context in a very meaningful way. Before realizing that was added by author I became more inteeested in that conversation.

Such a wise and thought provoking addition to an otherwise disappointing conversation.

> That italic part added by the author changed the context in a very meaningful way.

"Italics mine" means that the current author (in this case, Brian Gallagher) italicized a portion of the passage to emphasize it, it doesn't meant that they wrote the italicized text. That's still part of Robert Wilson's quote, he actually said that.

Oh great. In this case Im back at searching the rest of the conversation.

Thanks for the explanation.

No problem :-)

Engineering and Art are siblings on the path of knowledge.

No, of course not. Anybody who thinks this probably misunderstands craft and art.

Indeed. The purpose of craft is to create beautiful, functional things for people to use. The purpose of art is to create elite consumer goods through which the socially privileged can both advertise and justify their elite status.

And let's not forget the cultivation of colossal egos.

Really, because I feel like "craft" and "art" are highly subjective terms. How is the iterative process of creating perfect code any different from the iterative process of sculpting the perfect sculpture?

Haven't you ever looked at a code or software project and gotten that distinct feeling of awe that arises in you when you realize you are looking at something high quality, something that required real craftsmanship to make? That is art.

It most recently happened to me when I discovered Vue.js. As a diehard angular user, Vue was just so clean, so simple, so beautiful - a breath of fresh air in a warzone of competing monolithic javascript frameworks.

That's amazing craftmanship you're admiring.

Art has no function. Craft has function.

The primary function of art (it may have others, but this function is what defines it as art) is to create a response in the person experiencing it; it is not without function.

Or rather, art's primary function is expressive or communicative, while craft has other primary functions.

Can't craftsmanship have artistic flair? The result of creative emotional expression while crafting?

> Art has no function.

Can you name an art piece that has no function?

So architecture cannot be art?

No, because we get money. Also artists spawn less fundamentalism terror and mostly work with there suboconcious.