this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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I do believe it is quite disrespectful to reduce Pollock's work of art as mere throwing paint of a canvas, here's an interesting article on the subject https://www.thelondonlist.com/culture/jackson-pollock
Nah, I'm sorry, but the history of how Pollock got to where he was, just splashing paint on a canvas, doesn't have any impact on the merit of that art. It was precisely "throwing paint on a canvas".
(https://www.thelondonlist.com/culture/jackson-pollock)
No intention at all. Your article is agreeing 100% with the person you replied to.
And you determined this by nitpicking a single quote out of a 1000+ words article?
Are you saying that quoting the artist themself on their process is nitpicking? I read that article. That quote was the most salient. It proves the very simple point the previous commenter was making. I'm sorry if you can't accept that. You are the one choosing to be offended by something even the artist himself agrees with.
Yeah because there is tons of other statements from Pollock on their process soooo idk
Let's leave it at that.
It was the article you chose to post to refute the previous commenter. Good job, I guess.
Yeah thanks for the kind interaction.
Same to you, buddy. Maybe don't accuse people of "nitpicking" the most important quote from an article if you can't take them telling you "good job".
It has nothing to do with respect. It has to do with physics.
The paint from Pollock flew threw the air prior to landing on the canvas. Because of this, there were aspects of the painting that were generated by random chance due to the chaotic nature of fluid dynamics.
The point was made to counter the notion that every aspect of art needs be intentional for it to be considered art. Pollock undoubtedly produced great works of art AND ALSO those works of art included elements that were random and not intended.
And yet in what seems like a mere act of throwing paint at a canvas is there not intentionality in the way one's body moves, balances itself, arcs and bends and stops, in the colors used, in the amount of paint chosen? If you're arguing that Pollock's actions are subjected to the rules of physics, so do every action ever? Caravaggio carving incisioni on a canvas does not defy the laws of physics and still cannot be reduced to just "it was resistance, adhesion, friction, elasticity..."
You're right, there's a range of intentionality that exists in different media.
Throwing paint creates patterns that's more random than applying it directly to canvas with a brush. Drawing a line with a pencil is less random than a chisel strike.
It would be very silly for a person to argue that the amount of randomness in the art is what disqualifies it. That's the only point that I'm making.
If a person uses generative fill in their process they're not suddenly producing not Art. They're simply using a tool with more randomness. Like a painter picking the brush up and flicking it to create "happy little accidents" that are incorporated into the work.
It seems silly to decide some arbitrary percentage where a tool, like diffusion, transforms something from art to not art.
It'd be like saying Pollock produced art from where he stood, but if he stood 50ft away then it wouldn't be art because the work on the canvas is made of much more random elements and much less intention.
I've used generative fill functions before, like Resynthesize in GIMP. If I don't like the result, I try again. I'll try again and again until the result is one I like, varying the parameters. I'm selecting the result even if I didn't create it.
Honestly, that kind of what photographers do. There's very little creation involved in taking a photo.[^1] The photographer is selecting a camera, lens, focus distance, subject, and point of view. Then pushing a button. Maybe 10 times from 10 different angles. And then they select the one that came out the best.
Sure, there's post processing, cropping, adjusting. But the pixel values came from the camera. (Or the crystals of silver halide.) They weren't moved into place by the photographer. Some of the world's best photographs are from the photographer simply being in the right place and pushing the button at the right time.
But we certainly call it art!
Yet there's something different about that process than picking up bits of a medium and putting them into place to create a composition, whether it be paint, or graphite, or bits of material in collage, or clay. Or cutting away just enough stone to produce a sculpture.
If someone sits in their room and types prompts into a program for 10 hours, selecting the best ones, recombining them, redoing parts of them with new prompts and new ideas until they decide that the piece has meaning. Who were we to say it's not art?
[^1]: Excluding arranged still lifes or photos where the photographer directed a person to pose in specific ways.
I see what you mean, it's definitely hard to draw the line and estimate how far an artist's input can be removed form the final piece, before considering it not being a product of art itself. Photography when it just started in the 19th century was disregarded for some time.
The same thing happened when digital photography became cheap enough to be affordable to hobbyists.
Film photographers looked down on people using digital tools because they were just software tools that took all of the skill away because you could just fix your problems in Photoshop. It was the same kind of elitist gatekeeping that we're seeing here. Some people are using new tools to make art and established artists are gatekeeping the term 'art' by attacking the tools.
'AI' doesn't make art. That's the core strawman in these discussions. People make art and it is art, regardless of what tools they use.