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Analyzed from 1419 words in the discussion.

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#more#art#artists#problem#why#where#task#artist#here#still

Discussion (22 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

uxhacker•about 5 hours ago
I was always told that the difference between art and design is that the artist creates the problem, and the designers solve them.

I thought it followed the Socrates tradition in that the true philosopher is the one asking the questions, and it is the role of the student to answer them.

I wish I remembered who I am quoting here

colechristensen•about 4 hours ago
I wish ancient Greek techne τέχνη hadn't gone through the split that left "art" on one side and "technology" (or work?) on the other.

The split of art vs. design you're talking about or one of the many ways to divide the act of creation into a classical/romantic divide or one of the many other ways to describe it should be considered harmful.

And I'm not trying to split hairs here but wishing the dichotomy you're talking about didn't exist and encouraging folks not to frame the world that way.

woolion•about 1 hour ago
To echo your point, there is no "art" at all without "technology"; from cave paintings, paint tubes, to digital tablets...
uxhacker•about 4 hours ago
Where is the harm? You can be in both worlds at the same time.

If we think of Leonardo da Vinci he created both art that created problems, and inventions that solved problems. But these world where very separate.

colechristensen•about 3 hours ago
Your mental models of the world are reflected in how you interact with it.

If you have an idea that there's a split between "creating beautiful stuff" and "creating useful stuff" then your world turns into one where something is only one or the other where someone creating only does one or the other.

These days it's thought of unique or special if something is both and the fact this isn't standard is influenced by the mental model of them being separate.

gh0stcat•about 2 hours ago
I'm struggling to understand what they define "problem finding" to be in this context, did anyone come away with a more concrete definition?
reg_dunlop•about 2 hours ago
No.

Here's one interpretation though, for the discourse:

When given a task, some artists focused less on the objective and more on the process of observation. Observation of what, would be a logical next question. And I have to imagine and indulge in some projection here and guess that any of the artists may have been looking for more of a challenge, or more meaning. How to select some combination of objects, relative to the constraints of the circumstances for the task, paired with the skills they possess to produce the task at hand.

Given the proper acumen and a relatively subordinate task, I imagine some would tend towards Parkinson's law.

So following this, maybe problem finding could be seen as: how is this beautiful/aesthetically pleasing, or what do I really want to compose to fulfill this demand? What innate qualities do these things have which express some quality? Or maybe: how can I waste an hour of this man's time?

YMMV

squidsoup•44 minutes ago
> And I have to imagine and indulge in some projection here and guess that any of the artists may have been looking for more of a challenge, or more meaning

I think one reason it may be so difficult to express this concretely, is that artists are often looking for an ineffable quality.

crabbone•26 minutes ago
In my days in art academy, the running joke was that

    If you were accepted into the painting faculty, you were an artist,
    If you were accepted into graphics faculty, you were color-blind,
    If you were accepted into sculpture, you were blind,
    If you were accepted into art history, you couldn't be taught to draw.
While a little cruel... (I was in the graphics), the general idea was to say that art theory, art history, and especially psychology studies around art are absolute rubbish. These people seem to get into their line of work because they failed as artists (and don't understand / can't produce art).

Likewise, in this article, the approach to defining creative thinking is... so simplistic, and the test is so irrelevant...

Just to try to give you some background as to why a student could choose one approach or the other: if a student wasn't told why they need to draw a still life, they probably didn't care much for the outcome either. Artists rarely know why they prefer one composition over the other, especially in academic studies like... still life. To an artist, the selection of objects for a still life is really arbitrary, their arrangement is arbitrary -- it makes no difference. To make an interesting still life, one would have to find something that would interest other artists in it. Like, for example, how one can show different textures of the objects of the same nominal color using color? Or... would a technique that models volume through the thickness / intensity of contours work on mostly round objects? And so on.

Later, the article is trying to assess the artist's accomplishments in ways artists would frown upon. The number of exhibitions? The sales in prestigious galleries? Yeah... as a student I spent some time working in the lab of Kadishman (the guy who draws the same sheep over and over, and then sells it for insane $$). The "master" doesn't even draw the sheep anymore. It's all Shinkar / Bezalel students who do it :D And, honestly, the sheep is one of the biggest frauds I've personally witnessed in this profession (there are, of course, things like the diamond skull from Damien Hirst, which are more expensive because of the materials used, but I didn't have a chance to behold the miracle with my own eyes).

arlobish•about 5 hours ago
Am I right in saying the conclusion of the experiment was: people who spend more time thinking about a problem before acting tend to find it more engaging and were therefore more successful?

I wonder if the quality of the art suffered within the context of the experiment because of the time constraint, even if in the long run those people tended to create better art.

NonHyloMorph•about 4 hours ago
No. People who are confronted with a task that don't search for a solution but for a priblem within it are more creative. The consequence was that some barely produced solutions within the time constraint. Those were more succesfull as artists, the article states, while a quite a few of the other folks dropped out of art. Consequentially I'd like to add: They found the solution to the problem of living as an artist in quitting art - quite reasonably
rainingmonkey•about 2 hours ago
This is the conclusion of the article (and presumably the researchers) but I don't think it necessarily follows.

It seems to me equally plausible that one group were more interested in the craft of an accurate depiction, while the other was more interested in the arrangement of a pleasing aesthetic - both could be considered "solutions" to the given task.

7402•about 2 hours ago
That experiment might simply divide artists into those who understand bullshit assignments and can adapt to that context, and those who don't and can't.

There are plenty of artists who can do well on SATs, and can fill out bureaucratic forms, and complete one-hour timed tests. They might well take a lot of time to think and explore when they are making their own art on their own schedule.

But I know artists who just can't function well under artificial constraints and can't adapt well to someone else telling them how to create art.

everyone•about 1 hour ago
I program and project manage games, I am certainly a problem solver on the team, and I definitely view the artists as problem creators. They will make everything harder for everyone else, but it's cus they are just 100% focused on the art, they want the art to be as good as possible and to realize their vision, so having them on the team means a lot more work in general but a far better looking game.
lkm0•about 5 hours ago
This whole thing strikes me as coming from the wrong direction. Tying artistic and financial success, trying to apply some cargo cult "problem" engineering mentality to art. I feel like these articles illustrate quite well why the academic plastic arts have become so irrelevant today that we could say they are not part of human culture at large, in the sense that they have vanishing influence on public discourse.
smokel•about 4 hours ago
Interestingly, most of scientific research is also not part of the public discourse.
lkm0•about 4 hours ago
Yes, that's a failing of science. Reading the early volumes of Nature from the 19th century shows how much more of an open dialogue it was back then: https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes

Though education was much more limited, so take "open" with a grain of salt.

fao_•about 3 hours ago
I think the difficulty is we know vastly more, and have experimented with vastly more since the 19th century, that the majority of university learning these days, and the inherent challenge within that learning, is "how do we condense 200+ years of investigation, experimentation, and knowledge building into only a handful of years of learning?"

For a lot of sciences, we are very lucky that it is still possible. But the reason why scientists do not allow such an open dialogue with laypeople is because the majority of answers are going to boil down to either "that question doesn't make any sense, and i would have to spend the entire rest of the session teaching you why" or "we already did these experiments a bunch of times in the last hundred years, and found out the result, but the result is tricky because of so and so mitigating factors, and for me to explain these results and how to even interpret them in the first place (e.g. explaining how it was measured, explaining the theory behind why we chose that method to measure it, explaining what the numbers we get mean, etc.) would take the entire rest of the session"

And then of course, there's the frequent crackpots. Pretty much anyone within a science discipline who is even decently well known, especially if they're in physics, gets multiple emails a day from crackpots about how their theories are going to "totally blow a hole in the established knowledge", and at some point you hit a point where you're stuck between "spending 4 hours drafting a response to someone who has not bothered to put in the time to learn physics, and wouldn't listen to you anyway because they think they know it all", and "getting actual work done in your field". The scientists I know do take time out of their day to answer actual questions from inquisitive folk, but the difficulty is that thanks to the addition of ChatGPT, those questions are getting more and more cramped out by the crackpots armed with a hallucinating dictionary.

everyone•about 1 hour ago
I mean it's so advanced and esoteric.. we've been "digging" for centuries, the journey to the current coal face where new work is being done is so long you need a phd just to reach it.