[HN Gopher] Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 324 points
       Date   : 2024-08-05 15:33 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dfarq.homeip.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dfarq.homeip.net)
        
       | cellularmitosis wrote:
       | > and a signed floppy disk containing eight images that Andy
       | Warhol created that day. He said he's had them on display in his
       | home for about 39 years.
       | 
       | Shout out to the longevity of floppy disks as a storage medium. I
       | was quite disappointed when I discovered many of my writable CD's
       | started failing at the 15 to 20 year mark.
        
         | aidenn0 wrote:
         | 15-20 is about the lifetime of a floppy as well (and less than
         | that for some of the cheaper mass-produced floppies like what
         | AOL shipped for free).
        
           | wkat4242 wrote:
           | I've had really great experiences with recovering 3,5"
           | floppies from 40 years ago. Not so much with 5 1/4". Despite
           | the ultra low density of 360kB on that huge surface.
        
             | dasil003 wrote:
             | I wonder if it's due to contact with the soft shell
        
           | _the_inflator wrote:
           | Mine work now for almost 40 years. And don't forget: floppy
           | disks have mechanical attrition.
           | 
           | The floppy disk lifetime was, as always, an estimate. My 5
           | 1/4 disks for C64 seem to be the way more robust product
           | compared with the 3 1/2 for Amiga and later PC. Maybe
           | information density plays a role here.
           | 
           | CDs have the reflection layer problem, not the information
           | loss per se. That's the main difference between disks and
           | CDs.
        
         | jandrese wrote:
         | I stumbled across a DVD-RW last weekend and popped it in a
         | drive to see if the files were still readable. I had read that
         | for a -RW drive you shouldn't expect more than a few years,
         | maybe a decade before it decays so I was not hopeful. However,
         | the disc was fully readable and the checksums all came back
         | clean even though it was burned in 2003.
        
         | TacticalCoder wrote:
         | > Shout out to the longevity of floppy disks as a storage
         | medium.
         | 
         | Last I checked (Covid) about 2/3rd of my 5"1/4 Commodore 64
         | floppy disks were still working (they had to be about 35 y/o
         | when I tried in 2020). But the ones working won't last much
         | longer.
        
         | ahazred8ta wrote:
         | Commercially available write-once M-DISCs are rated for almost
         | 1000 years.
        
           | gambiting wrote:
           | Allegedly the quad layer BDXLs should have the same longevity
           | as they are made using the exact same technology. Shame Sony
           | just announced they are going to shut down the only remaining
           | factory in the world making those, I've ordered some from
           | Japan but I imagine they will shoot up in price once the
           | official stocks deplete.
        
             | zitterbewegung wrote:
             | Size of the Mdisc is 100GB be 128gb for Sony so honestly M
             | discs aren't that worse.
        
           | thih9 wrote:
           | They are significantly more expensive too.
        
           | justsomehnguy wrote:
           | Let me travel back in time and...
        
         | uncivilized wrote:
         | The article states that they were on display in his home but
         | does not mention if they're still working.
         | 
         | The images in the posted article are from other sources.
        
         | zitterbewegung wrote:
         | Off the shelf optical substrate just degrades and lazerdiscs
         | suffer from this greatly . There is the m disc series that has
         | a more advanced substrate but I believe magnetic tape is the
         | only backup method that can last very long (other than printing
         | it out in paper).
        
         | scrame wrote:
         | seriously? in college my floppies wouldn't make it across the
         | quad.
        
         | JoBrad wrote:
         | My experience with floppy disks is that they don't last very
         | long.
        
           | leptons wrote:
           | Is 35 years "very long"? Because we just retrieved data from
           | about 50 old Commodore 64 5 1/4" floppy disks after 35 years.
           | They all read perfectly on an old Commodore 1541 floppy
           | drive.
        
       | tetris11 wrote:
       | I live in the hope that I'll always be tech-literate, even into
       | my retirement, but I'm beginning to suspect that no matter how
       | generalist I try to be with my skillset, the mind will specialize
       | as it gets older in few particular ways and no matter how skilled
       | I am in field A B or C, it just will not translate to field X Y
       | or Z.
        
         | roughly wrote:
         | The LLMs have been this moment for me - the toolkit, usage
         | patterns, and strengths and weaknesses are so different from
         | what I'm used to that I have a really hard time trusting my
         | instincts or judgements on when to use them and where. They're
         | the first piece of technology that's so far outside my
         | experience set that I need to onboard a fully different
         | paradigm to understand them as a tool.
        
           | MaKey wrote:
           | I wouldn't worry too much. I'm not using any LLMs for my work
           | and don't feel that I'm falling behind in any way.
        
             | munchler wrote:
             | This is exactly what people who are falling behind would
             | say. They're often the last ones who are aware of the
             | situation. (Just food for thought - not saying you are
             | actually falling behind.)
        
               | MaKey wrote:
               | I guess you're correct. Still, I think that LLMs are
               | overhyped and have yet to see any real life productivity
               | gains because of them.
        
               | d13 wrote:
               | They have easily improved my coding productivity by 40%
        
               | MaKey wrote:
               | What programming language are you using and in which ways
               | are LLMs helping you? How do you deal with subtle
               | mistakes?
        
           | Sharlin wrote:
           | To be fair, currently it looks like most people's "instinct"
           | about LLMs is "let's just blindly trust what this thing says
           | because it sounds authoritative". I'm waiting for someone to
           | coin the term "AI natives", a generation which, it'll
           | eventually turn out, will be just as "native" as Gen Z are
           | "digital natives".
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | I enjoy Warhol's silkscreen prints. You can pick one up on Ebay
       | for about $100 or so and it is pretty rare for a piece by such a
       | prominent artists to be affordable but that's what Warhol's
       | market was.
       | 
       | With that process you can also get spot colors that are not in
       | the CYMK space, for instance last week I struggled with printing
       | an image of Rudbeckia flowers until I understood that the RGB
       | version of that yellow (at the edge of saturation so probably not
       | as saturated as the real thing) doesn't exist in CYMK which means
       | if you don't modify the color to be in gamut the printer will do
       | it for you -- probably not the way you want.
       | 
       | With spot color (say Pantone) I could get some ink mixed up that
       | would color match the flower even better -- it was before Pantone
       | but Warhol's spot colors were often like that. And of course his
       | work with the Amiga is much in the style he's famous for.
        
         | duxup wrote:
         | >You can pick one up on Ebay
         | 
         | Are they, legit?
         | 
         | I used to collect coins before the days of the internet and
         | decided to pull out my collection and thought about getting
         | back into it. It's just scam / fakes everywhere on Ebay.
        
           | bennyg wrote:
           | Typically these prices are for unlimited print runs as
           | opposed to a run of a 100 or less (which command more money
           | obviously, due to supply). I have a Haring print in my home
           | that was about the same price (I think around $250 in total
           | for print and frame) that's signed by the artist.
        
             | autogn0me wrote:
             | Unlikely to be authentic for 250$ for sure no provenance
        
               | ericjmorey wrote:
               | What does authenticity mean in this context?
        
               | ahoka wrote:
               | "signed by the artist"
               | 
               | What do you think it means in this context?
        
             | tofu8 wrote:
             | It's most likely a fake. Signed prints by Haring and Warhol
             | for for a lot more -- you can get an idea for how much by
             | looking at Sotheby's/Christie's past results.
        
           | dfxm12 wrote:
           | Certain artists have methods to authenticate their work. In
           | general, I wouldn't trust ebay. Fakes abound, coins, art, any
           | high value collectables. Consider this interesting story from
           | earlier this year: https://nypost.com/2024/02/21/us-
           | news/brian-walshe-sentenced...
           | 
           | If you want original art, especially from an artist as
           | popular as Warhol, it's best to go through galleries or art
           | auctions. You don't have to be in NY or LA, Paris or London,
           | etc. You probably have some places in driving distance. Most
           | ship, too. These places have actual reputations on the line
           | and can't hide behind ebay or just open up shop with a
           | different name.
        
             | PaulHoule wrote:
             | I've made some CMYK (e.g. inkjet) prints that were inspired
             | by Warhol and anime fan art. I took a class in silkscreen
             | printing and I'm probably going to be taking one in block
             | printing soon. If I was going to get better at
             | silkscreening an obvious idea is to do something more or
             | less Warhol-inspired.
             | 
             | My understanding is that there is an interesting universe
             | of fakes, for instance Warhol would make some screens and
             | send them off to get printed, he would authorize, say, 100
             | prints and sign and number those, but the printers would
             | hold on to the screens and make more that weren't signed.
        
       | t43562 wrote:
       | Interesting how if anyone else created pictures like these we
       | wouldn't really care.
        
         | PaulHoule wrote:
         | Actually the first thing I'd think was they were ripping off
         | Andy Warhol.
        
           | t43562 wrote:
           | In science many people have simultaneously discovered similar
           | aspects of a problem - or someone discovered something and
           | were ignored until someone else rediscovered it independently
           | later. e.g. who invented the computer? or who discovered that
           | cleanliness was essential in hospitals? Surely art is
           | similar?
        
             | PaulHoule wrote:
             | There's also the way a successful artist can legitimize a
             | whole area, see
             | 
             | https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/dada/marcel-duchamp-
             | an...
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Lichtenstein
             | 
             | for people like Warhol who expanded the range of "art" vs
             | "not art".
        
           | snarfy wrote:
           | Like how Warhol took a stock dpaint image recreation of Birth
           | of Venus and copy/pasted a third eye on it? Who ripped off
           | who here?
        
           | robxorb wrote:
           | The first thing I'd think was someone without any skill was
           | randomly clicking around some early bitmap paint software.
        
         | whateveracct wrote:
         | Yeah it is interesting how art is not a contextless buffer of
         | pixels. I think that's actually the main thing that's
         | interesting about art throughout history.
        
         | 77pt77 wrote:
         | In society what is done is almost irrelevant.
         | 
         | The really relevant information is who did it.
         | 
         | More so when the law is concerned.
         | 
         | Actions are only crimes if the "wrong" people perpetrate them.
         | 
         | For the right people, "crimes" are nothing but expressions of
         | their right to power. For the wrong people, "crimes" are
         | conclusive proof of sociopathy.
         | 
         | Art is no different.
        
         | ericmcer wrote:
         | He was already famous.
         | 
         | It isn't interesting it is almost step 1 in marketing. Tie your
         | product to some celebrity or influencer to get exposure and
         | credibility.
        
       | binary132 wrote:
       | Reminds me of some kind of proto-vaporwave art
        
       | breadwinner wrote:
       | Warhol is one of those artists that leaves the layperson
       | scratching their head... how did this guy's work get recognized
       | as high falutin art?
       | 
       | For example, see Warhol's soup can:
       | https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79809
        
         | 77pt77 wrote:
         | If Jackson Pollock is any example, probably a CIA psyop.
         | 
         | At this point nothing surprises me anymore.
         | 
         | https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
        
           | actionfromafar wrote:
           | I have no clue if Pollock was a CIA psyop or not, but were it
           | so, it wouldn't detract from the paintings. They are
           | inventive and pushed boundaries.
        
             | sleepybrett wrote:
             | The PROMOTION of artists like Pollock might have been a CIA
             | psyop, but I don't think the artists themselves were
             | working for the CIA.
        
           | axus wrote:
           | That was very astute of the CIA. Trolling "the enemy" to
           | provoke an overreaction and make them look bad.
           | 
           | It could happen in modern times too, promote harmless social
           | ideas that leaders of China and Russia overreact to while the
           | West passively tolerates.
        
           | romwell wrote:
           | Then Kandinsky (and other Suprematists) were what, Russian
           | Tsar's psyop?
           | 
           | Because surely you can't beat a literal _black square_ [1] in
           | the "come on, you call _this_ art?! " category.
           | 
           | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square
        
         | conception wrote:
         | That actually is one of the points of pop art. Why should a
         | soup can be a piece of art? Why does our culture hold
         | advertisements and products to such a high degree?
         | 
         | One of the keys to opening the world of modern art to me was
         | that modern art isn't about what you see so such as what it
         | makes you feel or think about or discuss. It's a starting
         | point, not an ending.
        
         | dansitu wrote:
         | Andy Warhol arguably invented the cultural landscape we inhabit
         | today, but fifty years before the iPhone: reality as
         | entertainment, consumers as content creators, influencer
         | marketing, and DIY viral fame. He's a fascinating pioneer and
         | his impact on today's tech industry is hard to understate. It's
         | well worth learning about his work, which goes far beyond the
         | pop art prints.
        
           | codetrotter wrote:
           | > consumers as content creators, influencer marketing, and
           | DIY viral fame.
           | 
           | Indeed. His famous quote comes to mind:
           | 
           | "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15
           | minutes."
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_minutes_of_fame
        
         | ericmcer wrote:
         | Have you seen the artists who are celebrated today?
         | 
         | I stayed for the credits of a movie the other day and they
         | listed all the musicians at the end. ~80% song attributions
         | were formatted like: `Song written by "unknown person".
         | Performed by "Famous musical act"`. Maybe Warhol was like a
         | proto version of being famous despite special talent, but it is
         | almost all we get nowadays. I wonder if huge companies like
         | Disney know that by distributing power (some people write,
         | others perform, others do marketing, etc.) they can ensure they
         | have final power and any artist can be replaced easily.
        
           | tuna74 wrote:
           | In music it has been the standard for hundreds of years that
           | the composer of the music is not the one performing it.
           | 
           | And actors don't write or direct or shoot movies either.
        
             | ericmcer wrote:
             | Totally different. When someone performs a piece by
             | Beethoven everyone knows they are performing his work. Very
             | few Beyonce/Taylor Swift/Nsync/whatever fans could name the
             | people who actually write the songs. Classical composers
             | were total rock stars of their period, they were well known
             | and the face of their music.
             | 
             | Modern pop musicians have almost all of their work written
             | by people who are intentionally kept in the shadows.
             | 
             | Being a composer is not a public facing profession anymore.
        
               | tuna74 wrote:
               | People mostly don't care about the composers/producers of
               | modern pop music. But if you want to find out it is
               | really easy on all music platforms (Spotify, Youtube
               | music etc).
               | 
               | Being a performer and a composer is a very different
               | skill set and a very different business model.
               | 
               | Also, it is very difficult to compare the amount of fame
               | of someone in 1800 vs someone in 2020. I am not so sure
               | being a composer was ever a "public facing profession".
        
         | micromacrofoot wrote:
         | Warhol's true skill was arguably self-promotion, there aren't a
         | lot of people who think he was particularly skilled as a
         | classical artist -- but he developed a look, talked to all the
         | right people, and made a brand of himself in a time where it
         | was a lot more rare to do so.
         | 
         | This stuff is also fairly pedestrian to our eyes now _because_
         | of Warhol 's influence, he was doing this in the 60s, decades
         | before anyone could say "looks like a photoshop filter"
        
           | roughly wrote:
           | Warhol's art was self-promotion, explicitly -
           | commercialization and personal branding was the act.
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | The answer is right there in the page:
         | 
         | > [...] subvert the idea of painting as a medium of invention
         | and originality.
         | 
         | This was a _new thought_.
        
         | roughly wrote:
         | I think this is an example of what I'd call the "Blade Runner"
         | effect: if you show Blade Runner to someone who's never seen it
         | before, they're going to think it looks vaguely derivative,
         | because they live in a post-Blade Runner world, in which
         | everything looks like Blade Runner.
         | 
         | Warhol's really the ur-version of this. We're all in Warhol's
         | world, now.
        
           | FelipeCortez wrote:
           | what you're describing as the "Blade Runner effect" is on
           | TVTropes as "Once Original, Now Common". formerly "Seinfeld
           | Is Unfunny"
        
             | ahoka wrote:
             | Same reason classic perfume masterpieces smell like cheap
             | shampoo.
        
           | fluoridation wrote:
           | Except his art doesn't look unoriginal. It looks, well,
           | lacking in artistic merit.
        
             | romwell wrote:
             | What _is_ artistic merit?
             | 
             | You look at something, and it makes you feel a certain way,
             | think a certain way, say to yourself - wow, I've never seen
             | anything like this before - isn't this a big part of
             | _artistic merit_?
             | 
             | That's the part that vanishes once the art influences the
             | world enough that it becomes _commonplace_.
             | 
             | You can say the same about the work of Russian
             | Constructivists[1] and Suprematists. What's artistic about
             | fonts that look like Helvetica? What's artistic a literal
             | _Black Square_?[2]
             | 
             | Or, you can ask, what's _artistic_ about this building[3] -
             | it looks just about like any other modern building, the
             | standard box-with-glass look with a cylindrical wall thrown
             | in to break up the shape.
             | 
             | I'll leave the answers to the reader to ponder on.
             | 
             | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art)
             | 
             | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square
             | 
             | [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuev_Workers%27_Club#/med
             | ia/Fi...
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | >You look at something, and it makes you feel a certain
               | way, think a certain way, say to yourself - wow, I've
               | never seen anything like this before - isn't this a big
               | part of artistic merit?
               | 
               | No. That's how much you like something. A mountain can
               | provoke emotions in you, and it has zero artistic merit.
               | 
               | >What is artistic merit?
               | 
               | Simply put (or at least this is how I use the term), it's
               | the measure of how difficult it is to recreate an
               | artistic work, or something very similar to it,
               | especially without having seen it before. For example, a
               | pattern of 3x3 tiles made by choosing one of two possible
               | colors for each one has very little artistic merit,
               | because the medium imposes so many restrictions that it's
               | inevitable that someone else will recreate it by
               | accident. Likewise if you take a digitized image and you
               | postprocess it with wacky colors again and again (or as
               | in TFA you play with a bucket fill) until what it shows
               | is barely recognizable, it will almost invariably tend
               | towards a certain aesthetic simply by the nature of how
               | the filters work. That's not you putting your personal
               | touch into your work, that's the program doing what it
               | does. If someone else started from the same digitized
               | images and used the same software, would they be able to
               | make something similar to what you made just by accident?
               | Then what you made has little artistic merit.
        
               | riddley wrote:
               | Difficult for whom? Jazz musicians can easily play most
               | Rock songs. Does that mean that they (the songs) lack
               | artistic merit?
               | 
               | There's a million examples like this.
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | You're talking about execution, while I'm talking about
               | creation (composition). It is easier to, say, copy
               | _Guernica_ than to paint it having never seen it before.
               | Easier in the sense that way, way more people can do the
               | former than the latter.
        
               | romwell wrote:
               | You're moving the goalposts from difficulty to _recreate_
               | (your choice of words), i.e. copy, to difficulty of
               | creating something _without having seen it before_ (i.e.,
               | telepathy).
               | 
               | By this definition, this comment of mine is peak artistic
               | merit. Nobody could've created it _without seeing it
               | here_ -- except me, just now!
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | >You're moving the goalposts
               | 
               | No, I'm not. Re-read what I wrote:
               | 
               | >how difficult it is to recreate an artistic work, or
               | something very similar to it, especially without having
               | seen it before
               | 
               | You don't need to be telepathic to recreate something
               | someone else has made if the creative space for a given
               | medium contains a small number of "interesting"
               | solutions. One time when I was a teenager playing around
               | in QuickBASIC I independently rediscovered H trees. Did I
               | read the mind of the person who first discovered them, or
               | is it that the space of symmetric binary trees where each
               | branch is a constant ratio of its ancestor small enough
               | that I was bound to find them?
               | 
               | If you think nobody is trying to pass off something so
               | abstract (I would say, with so few bits) as art, consider
               | this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_(artist)
               | 
               | >By this definition, this comment of mine is peak
               | artistic merit. Nobody could've created it without seeing
               | it here -- except me, just now!
               | 
               | Well, I would say so. I don't know how to argue that it's
               | not. Do you?
        
               | codingdave wrote:
               | You seem to be conflating craftmanship and artistic
               | merit. They are not the same thing. While it is perfectly
               | valid to care only about craftsmanship, and many people
               | do feel that way, that isn't a universal opinion. It is
               | also an opinion that makes it difficult to have a
               | meaningful conversation about many modern artists for
               | whom craftsmanship simply wasn't the point of their work.
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | I don't agree that I'm conflating the two. Actually, some
               | of the things I've seen that had the most artistic merit
               | were awful things made by truly incompetent people who
               | didn't care they were incompetent. They still had
               | artistic merit because unless you're actually bad, it
               | takes special effort to make something really terrible. I
               | guess you could say that artistic merit increases when
               | you move away from the sludge of mediocrity, while
               | craftsmanship exists only in one direction.
               | 
               | >It is also an opinion that makes it difficult to have a
               | meaningful conversation about many modern artists for
               | whom craftsmanship simply wasn't the point of their work.
               | 
               | Do you mean that it makes it difficult, or do you mean
               | that those artists don't come out looking good? Because
               | I'm fine with the latter.
        
               | criddell wrote:
               | You would really enjoy an art history course. A lot of
               | them start with prehistoric work (like cave drawings) and
               | progress through all the major periods and movements.
               | 
               | I think you might change your definition to at least
               | include some context of period and artist.
        
               | romwell wrote:
               | _> Simply put (or at least this is how I use the term),
               | it's the measure of how difficult it is to recreate an
               | artistic work, or something very similar to it,
               | especially without having seen it before_
               | 
               | So, there's no art since photography was invented.
               | 
               | Or, the perfect art is the white noise on the TV (exactly
               | recreating noise is outright impossible).
               | 
               |  _> the medium imposes so many restrictions that it's
               | inevitable that someone else will recreate it by
               | accident_
               | 
               | And yet, there has not been a _Black Square_ before
               | Kandinsky.
               | 
               | Nor a painting featuring Campbell soup cans before Warhol
               | (and if you see one, you'll immediately think Warhol).
               | 
               | Weird, isn't it?
        
               | breadwinner wrote:
               | > _I 've never seen anything like this before_
               | 
               | That sounds more like innovation than art. There's no art
               | in the black square or in the soup can. No matter what
               | your artistic tastes, you will never stop to admire a
               | black square, and that's how you know it is not art. The
               | same for the soup can. If you won't stop to admire it
               | then it is not art. The black square and the soup can
               | became "art" only because of _hype_ and _marketing_. Art
               | dealers hype up and promote non-art as art in order to
               | make money.
        
               | romwell wrote:
               | _> There's no art in the black square or in the soup can_
               | 
               | That's a new hot take... For 1915.
               | 
               | My friend, do yourself a favor and take an art history
               | class.
               | 
               | You'll both get to more art and understand it better in
               | the process of doing so.
        
             | breadwinner wrote:
             | Agree... I think it is art dealers that turn things that
             | most people wouldn't consider to be art into high-priced
             | art.
             | 
             | Art dealers can influence the perception of what is
             | considered valuable or important in the art world. Through
             | marketing, exhibitions, and networking, they can elevate
             | the status of certain artworks, thereby increasing their
             | market value.
        
             | roughly wrote:
             | An awful lot of art, and especially modern art, has its
             | meaning and merit in the context of when and why it was
             | created - there's a reason people talk about art as a
             | conversation, because very often what you're seeing in a
             | piece or a movement is a response to other pieces or other
             | movements, or are expressed specifically with constraints
             | ("what can we show with just one color? what can we show
             | without form? how can we use these new materials
             | expressively?"). A great many people seem to confuse
             | artistic merit with technical difficulty and specifically
             | with realism or complexity, at which point we peaked at
             | Vermeer and it's all been downhill from there.
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | Personally, I'm not interested in that conversation, any
               | more than I'm interested in suddenly lurking in a random
               | subreddit. It's a community I'm not a part of and which
               | doesn't interest me. If you took a dump on a canvas and
               | hung it on a gallery to make fun of a guy who said no one
               | would ever do that, well I'm glad you had fun and all,
               | but it's still shit on a wall.
               | 
               | I won't deny that in some cases works can be interested
               | because of their context, but generally speaking, to me,
               | a piece has to stand on its own regardless of who made it
               | or when or how. Mozart's scat letters don't become good
               | by virtue of having been written by him (although they do
               | become funnier).
        
               | roughly wrote:
               | I'm not asking you to care, I'm asking you to recognize
               | you don't understand what you're looking at. You can say
               | "I don't find the work compelling", but to say it lacks
               | artistic merit is just silly.
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | But it's not silly, though. You're asking me to either
               | judge the work on the same grounds as you do, or to
               | abstain from opining if I can't, but I have no reason to
               | do that. I can confidently say "You painted a can of soup
               | on a white background. You didn't try. Your work has
               | little artistic merit." I don't see any reason why I
               | shouldn't say that.
        
               | roughly wrote:
               | > I can confidently say
               | 
               | The confidence is the problem.
               | 
               | You don't understand what you're looking at, you don't
               | understand what the artist was doing, you don't
               | understand why they were doing it, you don't understand
               | the constraints they were or were not operating under and
               | why they may or may not have picked those constraints.
               | It's like looking at a Picasso and saying "well that's
               | the shittiest bull I've ever seen." What you're doing is
               | like watching a boxing match and saying "it's very lazy
               | that these people aren't using their legs" or "I don't
               | understand why that person won, they didn't even knock
               | the other person out!". There's a thing that's happening
               | here that you've not bothered to learn enough about to
               | understand whether or not the participant is
               | accomplishing their goals, because you haven't bothered
               | to learn what their goals are or what accomplishing them
               | would look like.
               | 
               | Again, it's totally fine to say "I don't like this," or
               | "I don't understand this" (although I'm getting the sense
               | I'm unlikely to hear _that_ from you), but to say "this
               | lacks artistic merit" - you absolutely do not have the
               | knowledge, background, or apparent interest in the topic
               | to have any idea whether or not that statement is true.
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | You're trying to convince me to be less confident in my
               | assertions by confidently telling me what I do or don't
               | understand, and what I need to understand in order to
               | reach conclusions.
               | 
               | >What you're doing is like watching a boxing match and
               | saying "it's very lazy that these people aren't using
               | their legs" or "I don't understand why that person won,
               | they didn't even knock the other person out!". There's a
               | thing that's happening here that you've not bothered to
               | learn enough about to understand whether or not the
               | participant is accomplishing their goals
               | 
               | But, you see, art is not a game. There are no rules. If
               | you paint me a portrait of myself with your feet and you
               | make me look like my mother, I'm not going to be
               | impressed that you managed to paint my mother with your
               | feet. I'm to ask you why you didn't use your hands, you
               | dolt! If you handicap yourself to the point you make
               | something bad, then it's only fair the results are judged
               | on their own merits, isn't it? If you wanted to use your
               | feet to entertain yourself then any criticism you receive
               | for it shouldn't matter, because the activity fulfilled
               | its purpose to you, the same way boxers don't care about
               | the criticism they receive from people who think they
               | should also use their legs.
               | 
               | I don't care about their goals. Their goals are for
               | themselves. I don't need to know them to judge the
               | quality of the result.
               | 
               | >"I don't understand this" (although I'm getting the
               | sense I'm unlikely to hear _that_ from you)
               | 
               | I'm honest enough to say I don't get the point of the
               | soup can. That doesn't stop me from saying it's low-
               | effort. I see better art on Twitter every day, even
               | though most of it probably has less of a message.
        
               | tetha wrote:
               | This is such an infuriatingly dismissive and abrasive
               | answer, even with not being part of that community. All
               | metal is just trivial guitar play and angry shouts right?
               | Paintings are just the correct application of colors and
               | other materials.
               | 
               | - edit - And yes, I have talked to artists about
               | absolutely trivial paintings. During that I learned how..
               | nontrivial putting poop on canvas may be - /edit -
               | 
               | Sometimes it's better to accept you're not part of a
               | conversation and to either shut up, or ask a very
               | confused "But why?"
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | Good, I'm glad you find it infuriating. It likewise
               | annoys me when I see people praise low-effort garbage, so
               | I see it as only fair.
               | 
               | >And yes, I have talked to artists about absolutely
               | trivial paintings. During that I learned how.. nontrivial
               | putting poop on canvas may be
               | 
               | And I've talked to artists who have told me they agreed
               | with me, and that they think pseudo-artistic shitposts
               | devalue the work they put into their own pieces.
        
       | dec0dedab0de wrote:
       | Last year I was really into non-ebay auctions. Basically
       | traditional auctions that were also online.
       | 
       | I got super excited when I saw a Commodore 64 was coming up soon,
       | until I noticed the starting price was around $100,000. It was
       | actually for a collection of unreleased digital art from Andy
       | Warhol, and they were throwing in the computer for free.
       | Apparently there is a lot of it that they still haven't sorted
       | through.
       | 
       | I don't know anything about art, I was just bummed it wasn't a
       | cheap retro computer.
        
         | lnxg33k1 wrote:
         | Yeah I have a couple of commodores in my storage left there for
         | 25 years, probably even more, I can't even be bothered to make
         | time to go there to throw them away
        
           | OnlyMortal wrote:
           | You might check capacitors and it's possible the power supply
           | is bad.
        
             | EvanAnderson wrote:
             | If they're Commodore 64's you definitely don't want the use
             | the stock power supplies. Their voltages can drift and can
             | destroy otherwise working hardware.
        
           | leptons wrote:
           | Please don't throw them away. Someone will be more than happy
           | to take them off your hands. They are like gold to some
           | people. If you're in the Los Angeles area I'd pay you to "go
           | there" to let me take them off your hands.
        
       | omneity wrote:
       | Really cool find, but what does "original digital copy" mean in
       | this context?
       | 
       | Would a duplicated file count still? Would a screenshot (for
       | argument's sake) not count?
        
         | kfarr wrote:
         | For arguments sake, could it mean the arrangement of specific
         | atoms on the first storage medium for the digital file?
         | Therefore a duplicated copy or screenshot would not count?
        
         | philistine wrote:
         | It means that we previously had crude photographs of screens
         | taken during the event. Those are the pictures you see in the
         | article. You can even see the pixel arrangement of the CRT
         | display in the pictures.
         | 
         | What has been found are the original Amiga files saved on a
         | disk. They haven't been released to the public, or might never
         | be depending on who buys them from the guy. He should just
         | release them.
        
       | fluoridation wrote:
       | Isn't this sort of thing people would follow with the joke
       | "someone just discovered filters in photoshop"? I'm reminded of
       | AVGN's review of Plumbers don't Wear Ties.
        
         | KerrAvon wrote:
         | Only if people are ignorant of the historical context. These
         | images predate Photoshop by 5+ years.
        
           | fluoridation wrote:
           | I'm aware, but it's at the same level of quality. I don't see
           | what's so special about the results of some guy fooling
           | around with his computer's paint program.
        
       | ranger_danger wrote:
       | > a series of images was recovered from disks
       | 
       | Does anyone know how exactly it was recovered? Or if raw dumps of
       | the disks are available?
        
       | empressplay wrote:
       | See also this issue of Amiga World magazine (January 1986), with
       | higher quality prints
       | 
       | https://archive.org/details/amiga-world-1986-01/mode/2up
        
         | philistine wrote:
         | Even in this print magazine, they only have photographs of a
         | CRT display. I'm looking forward to seeing the original saved
         | files on the disk someday.
        
       | dangan wrote:
       | This guy missed the joke. Warhol is holding the mouse the same
       | way a painter would hold a paintbrush:
       | https://artofericwayne.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/vincen...
        
       | virgulino wrote:
       | "The World Premiere of the Amiga (1985, Andy Warhol, Debbie
       | Harry): Possibly wanting to one-up the Apple Macintosh launch in
       | 1984, the Amiga 1000 debuted at a black-tie event held at the
       | Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City on
       | July 23rd, 1985. (...)"
       | 
       | Warhol paints Debbie on stage:
       | 
       | https://youtu.be/_QST1ZAJ29o?t=719
        
         | philistine wrote:
         | Keep in mind that the footage of the computer starting at 13:03
         | has now been revealed from this article to be from an earlier
         | rehearsal. Now I understand why there's this cheesy fly in
         | effect!
        
       | miles wrote:
       | Neat to see a post here from Dave Farquhar's blog. His
       | _Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia_ ,
       | published by O'Reilly at the turn of the century, was an early
       | inspiration: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1565926773
        
       | swayvil wrote:
       | Andy got mental about art. That is, thinking was an important
       | step for him, in his process. He went far down that road.
       | 
       | Some artists don't do the mental thing so much. More of a
       | conversation between just the hand and the beauty sense. Maybe a
       | little mental, maybe no mental at all.
       | 
       | The non-mental approach is more fulfilling, imo. A better high
       | and a better product. What beauty I can create in 5 minutes
       | scribbling takes a year to almost-do the same in code.
       | 
       | (ok, the mental approach is pretty much just a big tease. It
       | never really delivers. Lots of "neat" and "interesting" but it
       | never really actually delivers the big punch. Sorry if that's
       | harsh.)
       | 
       | All respect to Andy tho. And it's nice to know that he shared
       | that particular path with us. I wonder if he ever dabbled in
       | code.
        
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