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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man

In some sense it's grading on a curve, but it's clear that substantial effort and technical expertise (for the tools available at the time) went into these prehistoric sculptures.

Renaissance works have been filtered and preserved based on quality. Prehistoric art probably went through a much more random series of events and what is left is probably not the pinnacle of the contemporaneous state of art but some random person's makings. But I have no qualifications to say either way, but it seems logical.

There was more than just a little improvement in the Renaissance state of the art, though. Perspective drawing, for the most extreme example, is probably the innovation that gives a painting enough verisimilitude in my eyes for me to really focus on what the painter was trying to depict without being distracted by the obvious flaw of distortions in the depiction.

As an aside, perspective also is a nice counterexample to the "image AIs were just trained on our work, that makes it plagiarism!" theory I see floating around. AI might be producing copyright-infringing works, but learning from other artists' works isn't proof of that. That's just how art works, which is why principles like one-point perspective went undiscovered for millennia only to then see universal uptake within a generation. Renaissance artists didn't all just suddenly get smarter at once (consider the delay before two-point perspective was discovered...), they were all learning from each other's works.

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