Is this art?
 

This is art, right?

http://members.lycos.co.uk/d0nnchadh...our_blocks.jpg

admittedly, inspired by, and based off some of sadistikdreams' work in this thread: http://tfproject.org/tfp/showthread....threadid=37574

Now, what if I say that it was generated by a PHP script and is entirely random (within a range of 6 colours with 3 shades each)

Is it still art, or something else?

Script used to generate it is here: http://members.lycos.co.uk/d0nnchadh...our_blocks.php

And i'll apologise for the fact that it's on lycos and may be slow, it does make 100 small images after all. (More optimised versions may follow)

Edit: new version only makes one image, rather than 100

yes it is. People argued that Andy Warhol's art wasn't real, it was just a soup can. But art is art, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I'll agree with moonpie on this. There's some pieces of work I've seen that I wouldn't say are art.. but it is art to some people and to the artist.

Very Cool DonnChadh
:cool:

art doesn't have to be anything. It can be used to catch your eye or stir a reaction, like the guy(forgive me for forgetting)who signed his name to a toilet and displayed it in a museum. Art is creating.

Marcel Duchamp is the artist I think you're looking for :D And I believe the sculpture you're referring to is this one: http://www.sfmoma.org/collections/re...l_duchamp.html

As per the original question, yes its art. Its creative expression, through both the written code and the image it produces. Guess you get kind of a two-fer with this piece :D

Thanks for your feedback

I've just finished another version which lets you select from the six palette colours and generate an image using only those colours.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/d0nnchadh...ur_blocks2.php

I don't know. . . I would have a hard time calling a computer generated image 'Art'. I would definatly call the script itself a work of art. But since the actual images are just filtered products of some random (?) seed, there is no human imagination involved (past the initial creation of the filter (the script)). To me art is not just anything, but a creative creation created for the sake of creating, with labor and time. Now if he say wrapped a sculpture (even just a sphere) in these images or did something like that, adding creativity into them, it would unquestionably be art. On their own they are very similar to random numbers from a random number generator. Would every number be an artwork? I would say no, but the random number generator itself is.

The only real arguement that I can think of that would make the images art is that there seems to be something created in selecting which ones to display...the ones communicated... Just like each random number isnt art but If you creatively picked an amount of numbers and selected a font and positions for each of them on a canvas that would be art.

Call me crazy

Art is not something one can't really define its more like something you can feel

I dont think saying that art is undefinable makes it any more profound. I believe that there is no meaning in anything besides what meaning we give it. But we CAN give things meaning. Thats art. This means that you can define art differently than me, in fact I dont believe in any objective definitions at all.

So, if you want to call random numbers art you are perfectly free to do so. But be forwarned: then you also have to call random puddles of water art. And if you want to open those floodgates, everything is art (from rust patterns on dumpsters to empty space), which to me seems to suck the meaning right out of the art that humans DO create.

I will continue to limit art to the things created out of human conciousness (maybe a photo of a rust pattern or empty space that someone has decided to 'present' in some way).

I think it's a parody.
Mine's the original, than you recolored it.
It's the same thing that Weird Al does to songs.

I think it's an honor to be parodied.

art is what you get out of it, but I usually equate the value of art with the effort and thought put into it. For that reason I'd say the image is art because of the effort put into the script, but what exactly is the meaning of it? Thought doesn't equal effort, and vice versa. Whenever I see "art" I ask myself "what is the artist trying to say with this piece?"

Although, it wouldn't look too bad blown up to 5'x5' and hung on the wall...

I'd call it art. Art is an expression, something that creates thought. This PHP script is art, along with what it creates.

I hadn't considered it that way.

Ha, just had one of those 'what if' moments thinking about what ppl have been saying, particularly about the script as art, and ended up visualising the script in a frame hung up in some posh gallery like the Tate with all these classics around it.

Heh this could be quite a lively debate.

I think that... Halx [Not sure here] was talking about art having to have effort and thought put into it. Simply plastering an image in multicolor doesn't require that much thought or innovation. Neither do Andy Warhol's soup cans. Those didn't have any innovation in them, and in my opinion, are not art. They're just paintings of soup cans.

[Small Digression] Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it seems that what the public believes is what matters. Sure, there may an objective truth to everything, but if we don't agree that it is correct, then it doesn't matter.

Thats why there isn't an objective reality, its only what we have agreed is true.

Pick up Robert Anton Wilson's book "Reality Is What You Can Get Away With"


And my opinion is that Andy Warhauls soup cans are art strictly because he decided to 'present' them for whatever reason. Just like a still life of a banana is art. (but the can and the banana themselves aren't). I guess put simply I believe that if there is an artist, there is art. In the case of the script, DonnChadh is the artist. But there could be thousands of random images created daily by that script everyday without him even knowing about it. He makes no decision to create. So who is the artist? The script? No matter what you think about what art is, PHP scripts are not creative. They don't come up with anything new or innovative and they are not artists.

So I guess what this all comes down to is: Does Art need an Artist?