I find it powerful too and it raises the question of whether it reflects an artist in decay or an artist at his peak.

How would we know the difference?

I don't see a conflict in an artist being the near the end of his biological life, and also a peak in descriptive artistic powers.

I don't think parent was saying there's a conflict. I think they were saying it's hard to tell the difference between the two possibilities.

The one from June 28, 1972 (your first link) almost made me gasp out loud, it has so much force. Unbelievable he was still digging so deep at age 90.

if you had never heard of picasso before and just passed this same image, maybe as graffiti on the street, would it have had a similar impact on you?

I ask because I've seen a lot of art when traveling with friends and nothing other than sculptures has ever come even remotely close to impressing me as far as traditional art goes. So I'm curious if it's mostly celebrity status or something else I'm just missing.

Rembrandt’s self portrait in London

David in Florence

There have been some others I really liked, having been to about 5 really top museums, but I remember those ones as being like “whoa”

I’ve never really understood why Picasso is considered as good as he is

> I’ve never really understood why Picasso is considered as good as he is

Picasso (with Georges Braque) literally invented, pioneered, and perfected a new artistic style, cubism. It's like saying "I've never really understood why Isaac Newton is considered as good as he is."

> It's like saying "I've never really understood why Isaac Newton is considered as good as he is."

I think there's something to be appreciated in Picasso, but that's a bad example. Physics has Newton, Einstein, maybe Galileo, and then no one who can match those 3. Art easily has dozens of people who can match Picasso. Just because he invented something new doesn't mean the work he did extends throughout the entire discipline, like Newton does. Picasso is not that important.

It would be better to compare to, say, Wilt Chamberlain in basketball or something. Or if you want to reach to physics, say Neils Bohr or James Clerk Maxwell. But then I think Bohr might even be reaching too far. Schrodinger?

I know: Hugh Everett is the Picasso of physics. He gave us an interesting and different way to see the world (many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics). He was no doubt brilliant, and many modern physicists continue to lean on his ideas regularly. But, of course, tons of physics would exist without him.

I have a hard time taking this comment seriously. How am I supposed to equate a drawing any graduate art-school student could reproduce with foundational discoveries in mathematics that have changed the world in ways that quite literally were only imagined in fictional stories before the production of technology that was created on the back of mathematics.

Give me a picasso painting and a year and I guarantee you I could reproduce something indistinguishable to 99% of people. If I gave anybody a year to learn and make mathematical discoveries even 1/100th as impactful as Newton, it's likely no one would come close.

Of course you could reproduce such a painting easily enough. I can also reproduce F = ma ... look, I just did!

Invent an entirely new and impactful style of painting, that hasn't been seen before, from dust. Just like Newton invented a whole new "style" of mathematics.

I still think Picasso is less important but you haven't even begun to draw the correct analogy here.

>How am I supposed to equate a drawing any graduate art-school student could reproduce with foundational discoveries in mathematics

Pretty sure that's GP's point. Nowadays, any graduate physics student can solve calculus problems. The amazing part is the creation of new ways to see and describe the world.

A year of training would have anyone reproducing picassos art with likely high accuracy. A year of training in calculus is effectively what you have with juniors in high school. To be honest, saying it would take most people a year to reproduce picassos artwork feels very generous. His artwork is not particularly skillful.

his point is that the skill does not lie in the manual process of making the art, but in the process of _creating_ the art. copying something (even with a high degree of precision) is less difficult than imagining the thing in the first place.

It's not same thing. I used be amazed by many of these works because I would try to think if I would have drawn that and why and how. It took me a while that lot of these works have no reasoning and rational or even internal representation or mystery whatsoever. Many of these works even stem directly due to mental health conditions.

While working in AI research, we have known that many of the similar works gets generated when you accidently wire networks differently or if network has short of schizophrenia and works on a region and then sort of randomly but still somehow similar way does something else on other region. There is no rhym or reason except that our brains gets surprised by patterns that it hadn't expected.

I feel people who appreciate this art and put down others for not seeing things are in same category as wine testers. As one of the commentor said, if you didn't knew if this was from Picaso, your level of appreciation would be much less.

Just to clarify:

You think that Picasso’s style was nothing more than mental illness?

You think Picasso used no “reasoning”, and there is no “mystery” involved, because it was not intentional/skillful?

And you think everyone who likes it is just a snob?

You can call it whatever you want. But as an art it fails to amaze or inspire me in same way as Van Gogh or Michelangelo do.

Anyone with basic knowledge of history of Physics or Maths can tell why Newton is considered good, I don't see same happening with Picasso.

They say skill without creativity is craftsmanship and creativity without skill is modern art. I wonder what creativity without skill would be in science...

Psychology?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that art and science aren't really comparable like this. If science us a synonym for precision, you need skill to do things precisely and logically. As for modern art, I wouldn't mind having a few Picassos ;)

> if you had never heard of picasso before and just passed this same image, maybe as graffiti on the street, would it have had a similar impact on you?

Probably not as big, but I think it would have some kind of impact. I've certainly seen "street" art that impressed me greatly, as compared with simple scrawling of initials or similar.

I don't think you can really divorce art from its creator and your knowledge of the history behind it, unless you have no previous knowledge of the artist at all.

In this case, yes, the context around it, his age etc. definitely colored my experience of it.

I think it’s mostly that as far as can tell.

Even more obvious with modern art. There was literally a blank canvas on display at the SF MOMA. Some others a child could do better. There was cool stuff too, but a lot of bullshit imo.

The context makes it powerful. If I did not know it was done by an (acclaimed) artist near the end of their life, it would not be as powerful to me.

Agreed. The fingernail nostrils, what looks like "09: or 90 reversed on the bridge of the nose, the eyeball-ish ear canal...

whats the difference between these and me scribbling random mish mash of curves?

Hard to say until we've seen the results of your scribbling! A There are a lot of people who say "I could do that!" but curiously few who actually do it.

As I someone who has studied art a little, try it! Appreciation for work of this kind comes quickly when you try and emulate it.

Of course trying to perfectly emulate another human at painting is going to be virtually impossible. You could try and emulate my 5-year-old's art, but I could then demonstrate with a team of forensic analysts that you've failed to exactly emulate some of the nuances that my 5-year-old displays in his art. Will you then appreciate the kind of work my 5-year-old produces when you realize how difficult it is to perfectly emulate him?

> trying to perfectly emulate another human at painting is going to be virtually impossible

No one is saying "draw a copy of something that already exists with near-pixel-perfect accuracy". When the parent comment said "emulate", they meant "create something of your own in a similar art style/genre".

I can bet you that if you try to "scribble a random mish mash of curves", it won't look and feel anywhere as great as that Picasso painting, and it will be extremely difficult to get anywhere even close to his level. And even if you show both yours and Picasso's paintings side-by-side to a person who has never seen a Picasso's painting before (and who doesn't even know who Picasso is), they will always pick the Picasso's painting as more artistically impressive.

It's not about copying or perfect emulation. It will – probably – be very difficult for you to paint something that looks like it was made by Picasso to yourself. There is no need to involve any experts in this, you can be the judge of your own painting.

art, like writing, is all about the ideas, not the literal, physical object (or lack thereof in some cases), and as such, that's either a fool's errand or an intentional deceit. while some (post-modern) art has woven the medium into the message, the medium takes a backseat to expression (of ideas) for art in general. to "emulate" the art of any so-called master, you'd need to have powerful ideas that are begging to be expressed, not masterful painting prowess (as an example). your challenge wouldn't bring about appreciation of art so much as an appreciation of the lack of technical skill, which is not art, but simply painting. many people are skillful painters, and yet are not artists, and vice versa.

this is also why art generally follows fashion rather than being truly avant-garde--artists need to pander to the wealthy/powerful (the church for many centuries, for example) to make a living, so trying to "emulate" popular art would first require a pandering/fashionable perspective, which is hard for an outsider to truly achieve without first becoming an (art) insider.

The fact that I know I can't emulate his early work informs me that I also couldn't emulate his later work, but it is hard to understand why.

Here's a more accessible analogy: Here is Jacques Pepin making an omelet in 2 ways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s10etP1p2bU

You can see every motion, every measure, the size of the flame, there are no cuts.

But if you actually go ahead and try to make this it turns out to be INCREDIBLY difficult to get it right.

Not every random mish mash or scribble is as random as a layperson will at first think.

The other analogy is look at the original post. Picasso COULD have painted like he did at 15 or 18 or 20 - which I assume you would agree you couldn't scribble yourself. But he CHOSE to paint in the style you are criticizing. You should default to assuming that there is more skill to it than you can see.

So are you arguing that it's impossible for skilled artists to make bad art? You're saying a master chef never makes meals that objectively taste bad, even if they are experimenting with completely new flavors and techniques? I think some people in this thread have raised Picasso to Godhood status. In my reckoning, Picasso was a skilled artist in an ocean of other skilled artists so he was desperate to do something different to try and stand out from the crowd. So he started experimenting with new "flavors and techniques". Assuming he is human, we can safely assume some of his experimental creations fell flat and objectively turned out bad. To deny this is to uphold Picasso as a God who is incapable of producing anything but perfection.

> So are you arguing that it's impossible for skilled artists to make bad art?

not in the case of Picasso.

> a master chef never makes meals that objectively taste bad, even if they are experimenting with completely new flavors and techniques?

not when they are preparing it for clients.

The point is that very skilled people are consistent

Their output is always gonna be beyond average.

> some of his experimental creations fell flat and objectively turned out bad

perhaps.

but there's no proof of it.

in fact there's proof that he's always been at Picasso's level.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? It's not what this site is for.

Well, these photos evoke “some” reactions in people. Do your portraits evoke any reactions? The purpose of art is to express thoughts, in some dimension. And then viewer can make their own interpretations

Would they evoke these same reactions if the people weren't aware that they were looking at picassos?

Modern Art is a cultural placebo for the vast majority of admirers. If it has the right signature or is hanging in a museum people will dig for rationalizations of their faux appreciation.

I'm eager (honestly) to see your "mish mash of curves" works.

There'll never gonna be "too much" good art.

You have Picasso as a reference. Picasso was working off-book.

I think you need few master pieces first. Once you are established as a great artist then afterwards whatever you scribble becomes piece of art.

You are not Picasso.