return to table of content

Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found

breadwinner
53 replies
1d2h

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

roughly
36 replies
1d

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.

fluoridation
33 replies
1d

Except his art doesn't look unoriginal. It looks, well, lacking in artistic merit.

romwell
20 replies
23h28m

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#/media/Fi...

fluoridation
13 replies
22h45m

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
7 replies
22h29m

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
6 replies
22h21m

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
5 replies
20h16m

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
4 replies
19h53m

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?

romwell
3 replies
13h27m

I would say that your definition of artistic merit disagrees with what people in the art world use (both artists and people who appreciate art), and is way more aligned with the criteria the patent office and the copyright law use.

That's to say, your definition of artistic is very close to "patentable or copyrightable" (originality and novelty are required, emotional response isn't).

So you're not talking about art at all. What's important to you is not what makes art art.

The question to ask with art is a simple one: when people saw it, did it make them feel or think differently are the moment? And did it make them feel differently from the way other art pieces did?

You can't understand art without understanding the audience, because art is made for the audience — even if the audience is the artist themselves. You can't examine art in itself, just like you can't examine a mechanical tool in itself, without asking why it was made, what it was made for, and whether it was good in doing that.

You can't look at a saw and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms objects it's applied to (and what materials the saw was meant for). You need to tell a wood saw apart from a hack saw, and you need to know whether it actually could cut wood well to talk about the saw's merits.

A wood saw isn't bad if it doesn't cut metal. And if it cut a million trees down, it is a good saw beyond doubt.

You can't look at art and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms people it's shown to (and what audience the art was meant for). You need to tell early 20th century suprematist art apart from art made today, and you need to know whether it actually could make people in early 20th century feel and think differently in response to it to talk about the art's merits.

An early 20th century suprematist artwork (like the Black Square) isn't bad if it doesn't cut it in today's artistic landscape. And if it changed the way a million artists thought and felt about art itself (which it did), it is good art beyond doubt.

The recommendation others had of taking an art history class is a solid one. It really widened my perspective when I took it, and I think it'll do the same for you.

PS: the same criteria apply to mathematics, which is art with a particular audience in mind.

Anyone can prove the Pythagorean theorem, and many have rediscovered it. It would be asinine to say it has no mathematical merit, or that Pythagoras wasn't a great mathematician.

Same goes for many other results. Calculus is common knowledge — and even in its time in was independently developed by both Leibniz and Newton.

The fact that any freshman knows to compute an antiderivative to find the area under the curve doesn't take away from magnificence of Leibniz and Newton doing the same.

But you'd have no idea what's so important about Calculus if that was all you knew about it - which, sadly, is how it's taught, and which is why people have no appreciation of neither mathematics, nor art.

Only learning about Calculus in a wider historical and mathematical context would enable you to do that.

You'd need to know how mathematics was before calculus, what compelled people to develop it, how it affected mathematicians, what kind of mathematics came into existence because of it, and ultimately, how it changed the world.

You need to know about which problems the scientific society was facing at the time, what question was Calculus an answer to, what the objections were at the time (and there were many - it was seen as heresy! Infinitesimals were whacky!), and why it was accepted in spite of them.

And once you do, you will see the simple integral sign differently than just a fancy way to write the letter S (which, by the way, it is: S for "sum", d for "difference", and the integral is, literally, a sum of differences multiplied by varying weights).

Same goes for art.

fluoridation
2 replies
7h7m

That's a lot of definitive statements for something as poorly defined as "art".

The question to ask with art is a simple one: when people saw it, did it make them feel or think differently are the moment? And did it make them feel differently from the way other art pieces did?

Why? Why is that the question to ask? Why must be considered in this specific way, rather than any other?

You can't understand art without understanding the audience, because art is made for the audience

So something that's made to be made rather than to be seen is not art, even in the case that if someone did see it they would think it's art?

You can't examine art in itself, just like you can't examine a mechanical tool in itself, without asking why it was made, what it was made for, and whether it was good in doing that.

No. No, no, no. There's no justification for this besides that you say so. Why can't I look at the thing in isolation and decide for myself what it's good for? What do I care what the person who made the wood saw thought he was making? If for my purposes it's a good screwdriver and I use it like that, is it wrong because I'm not properly interpreting the message the manufacturer embedded into the tool?

You can't look at art and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms people it's shown to (and what audience the art was meant for). You need to tell early 20th century suprematist art apart from art made today, and you need to know whether it actually could make people in early 20th century feel and think differently in response to it to talk about the art's merits.

Again, why? Exactly what prevents me from doing that? What, I'm barging into a club? Well, sorry, but I didn't see any signs on the door. I just saw a bunch of people gushing over trash and thought I'd speak my mind. If you don't like that I don't like what you like because I don't care about the things you care about then that's too bad.

the same criteria apply to mathematics, which is art with a particular audience in mind. Anyone can prove the Pythagorean theorem, and many have rediscovered it. It would be asinine to say it has no mathematical merit, or that Pythagoras wasn't a great mathematician.

Interesting line of reasoning. Mathematics is art, therefore mathematical merit is artistic merit. Artistic merit by my definition is about originality, therefore mathematical merit (being artistic) is about originality. I hope I don't need to say I don't agree with either the soundness of the reasoning nor with the conclusion.

I don't agree that mathematics is art with no qualifiers whatsoever. Mathematics is, very reductively, primarily concerned with the search for true statements, not with the search for beautiful statements, nor with self-expression or cultural transmission.

But you'd have no idea what's so important about Calculus if that was all you knew about it - which, sadly, is how it's taught, and which is why people have no appreciation of neither mathematics, nor art.

Calculus is useful, regardless of its history. The reason people don't appreciate mathematics is because a) they think mathematics is manually calculating things (because that's what they're taught to do), which sours them to the idea, and b) they're forced to learn things they think has nothing to do with their daily lives, not because they don't learn about the history. And if we're honest, they're right. Very few people will ever need to know calculus at any point in their lives (outside of school), and fewer still will need to calculate things by hand.

You'd need to know how mathematics was before calculus, what compelled people to develop it, how it affected mathematicians, what kind of mathematics came into existence because of it, and ultimately, how it changed the world.

That's one way to appreciate it, I'm not denying that. But you're arguing that it's the way to appreciate art, and that if I don't do that I'm missing the point.

thatsnotreally
1 replies
6h1m

Your approach to art is a beautiful combination of a toddler and a grumpy old man. It's immature, ignorant and stubborn in its refusal to actually listen to what others are saying. You have made so many straw-men that it's difficult to consider your posts as being neither well-intentioned nor inviting a meaningful discussion.

One thing is to say 'I don't get it, this is not for me'. Another is to lie down on the museum's floor and start kicking and screaming in a tantrum about the lack of artistic merit of something like the Black Square without a glimmer of open mind and the tiniest will to at least attempt to understand it before dismissing it.

fluoridation
0 replies
4h58m

And all you're doing is complaining that someone doesn't like what you like, and trying to invalidate their opinion through ad hominem. Sorry, but I don't need to engage with the thing the same way you do to form and voice an opinion on it. That's just the way it is.

romwell
1 replies
20h21m

>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?

fluoridation
0 replies
19h29m

So, there's no art since photography was invented.

I don't know what you mean. I don't think photography lacks artistic merit intrinsically, if that's what you're getting at, although it's often more difficult to make art out of photography when you don't control the subject.

Or, the perfect art is the white noise on the TV (exactly recreating noise is outright impossible).

White noise contains information, but no meaning, and was not made by a human, therefore it's not art and has no artistic merit.

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?

I've re-read this paragraph like twenty times and I'm still not sure what to make of it. You do understand that you're looking back at history, right? From our vantage point, it's not up to chance who made those paintings. Kandinsky and Warhol did. There's no universe where someone else painted them instead and we're still having this conversation, because then that someone else did, and not Kandinsky and Warhol, and so you'd still argue that that someone painted them. I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make. It's obvious that whoever painted a painting, painted it; tautologies are indeed tautologies.

codingdave
1 replies
22h21m

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
0 replies
22h7m

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
0 replies
22h14m

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.

breadwinner
5 replies
20h59m

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
4 replies
20h26m

>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
3 replies
19h12m

Let's translate the black square to the world of music: Press the C key on your piano and hold it down for a full minute then release. This is the "music" released by someone who later became renowned for this music. The music experts call it an amazing work of art. You disagree, and you're told to take a music history class if you want to understand why that one-note music is an amazing work of art. Ridiculous, isn't it?

To me your black square is a 1-minute C note, and your soup can is "Mary had a little lamb".

roughly
2 replies
18h37m

I’m guessing you’ve got opinions about 4’33”, too.

fluoridation
1 replies
18h28m

I sure hope you're not going to argue that it has the same artistic merit as literally any song of the same duration with at least one note.

romwell
0 replies
13h26m

>I sure hope you're not going to argue that it has the same artistic merit as literally any song of the same duration with at least one note.

No, the argument is that it has comparable artistic merit to the Black Square.

roughly
10 replies
22h39m

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
9 replies
22h26m

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
4 replies
22h18m

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
3 replies
21h49m

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
2 replies
21h25m

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
1 replies
21h0m

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.

thaanpaa
0 replies
4h20m

You're constantly missing the point. Artistic merit has nothing to do with your feelings about a particular work or how it was made. That is your personal preference or opinion, whatever. People decide on artistic merit organically as a collective.

tetha
3 replies
22h12m

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
2 replies
22h0m

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.

ChainOfFools
1 replies
18h34m

I too confused art with craft for quite a long time. it's another framing of the difference between being interested in why versus being interested in how.

fluoridation
0 replies
17h35m

As I said on a different sibling comment, I don't agree that I'm confusing the two. That said, I do think craft is an integral part of art.

breadwinner
0 replies
22h58m

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.

FelipeCortez
1 replies
1d

what you're describing as the "Blade Runner effect" is on TVTropes as "Once Original, Now Common". formerly "Seinfeld Is Unfunny"

ahoka
0 replies
1d

Same reason classic perfume masterpieces smell like cheap shampoo.

ericmcer
4 replies
1d1h

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
3 replies
1d1h

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
2 replies
22h28m

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
0 replies
22h2m

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".

lomase
0 replies
8h26m

It is, just not in the mainstream part of the music industry.

actionfromafar
1 replies
1d1h

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
0 replies
1d1h

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.

romwell
0 replies
23h24m

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

axus
0 replies
23h45m

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.

micromacrofoot
1 replies
1d1h

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
0 replies
1d

Warhol’s art was self-promotion, explicitly - commercialization and personal branding was the act.

dansitu
1 replies
1d1h

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
0 replies
22h49m

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

echelon
0 replies
1d1h

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.

conception
0 replies
1d2h

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.

cellularmitosis
37 replies
1d2h

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.

ahazred8ta
11 replies
1d

Commercially available write-once M-DISCs are rated for almost 1000 years.

Fr0styMatt88
4 replies
18h57m

I remember everyone saying that CDs were rated for 100 years but disc rot seemed to kill that idea.

jim-jim-jim
2 replies
15h32m

This was my rationale for switching over to vinyl around 2007. Its audio fidelity is worse but its failure state is more acceptable to me.

account42
1 replies
8h10m

For anything digital, having reduntant backups and error correcting codes makes much more sense than worrying too much about the medium. The theoretical longevity of your vinyl won't matter if your house burns down or if you accidentally throw out the dusty box they are packed in.

That said, if you just like the sound of vinyl and feeling of handling them then good for you and I'm not trying to rain on your parade.

jim-jim-jim
0 replies
5h14m

I already said that I don't particularly like the sound, and hard drives, CDs, and records alike can all be lost in a house fire. Of those three media, one fails less arbitrarily and catastrophically.

DaoVeles
0 replies
18h27m

It is fascinating seeing in the retro games space just how quickly some are dying. The Gamecube/Ps2/Xbox era is starting to fall to it and I have even seen a handful of Xbox 360/Ps3 games with this issue. Many collectors now request photo's of the discs being back lit to check the integrity before purchasing.

And yet there are also a lot of audio CD's from the 80's that are holding on. A big part of it would be the manufacturing quality and how in the name of efficiency and lower prices, some corner may have been cut.

gambiting
2 replies
1d

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
0 replies
22h40m

Size of the Mdisc is 100GB be 128gb for Sony so honestly M discs aren’t that worse.

Nition
0 replies
15h35m

I remember our CD drive struggling to even read brand new PC Gamer demo CDs back in the late 90s. Whereas commercial game discs worked fine.

thih9
0 replies
22h55m

They are significantly more expensive too.

prmoustache
0 replies
8h33m

The lifetime of a medium is of no use for the general user if the lifetime of a drive is smaller and the industry stop making new compatible ones or historians in the future never have the budget and/or tools to custom build new drives.

justsomehnguy
0 replies
21h22m

Let me travel back in time and...

aidenn0
8 replies
1d2h

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
3 replies
1d2h

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
2 replies
1d

I wonder if it's due to contact with the soft shell

account42
1 replies
8h6m

I guess it also depends on the drives and 3,5" drives have seen continued improvement for much longer.

wkat4242
0 replies
7h56m

True.

For the 3,5" drives I simply used a USB version which are available aplenty.

For the 5 1/4" I needed to use a Greaseweazle ( https://sordan.ie/product/1527/newest-greaseweazle-v41-usb-f... ) as there are no USB versions available. The drive I have is a good quality HD drive though (1,2MB) so it should be able to read 360kB disks with no issue.

_the_inflator
3 replies
1d1h

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.

snvzz
2 replies
17h32m

for 3.5", DD have proven much more durable than HD.

And notably HD were terrible at being used as DD, as is generally the case with Amiga floppies.

aidenn0
0 replies
37m

That makes sense; my copy of Star Trek: The Rebel Universe (DD) still works, while few of my circa 1990 Sierra floppies (HD) work.

_the_inflator
0 replies
11h18m

Yep, I refrained from using them. Also too expensive.

With the advent of Amiga hard disk I didn’t need that much disks anymore. I bought mine - 50mb! - at the World of Commodore 1991 I think.

jandrese
5 replies
1d1h

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.

jagged-chisel
4 replies
19h32m

And you immediately made a copy, right?

Right?

alt227
2 replies
10h44m

Two rights dont make a wrong

defrost
1 replies
10h37m

They do make a U-turn.

shmeeed
0 replies
8h17m

Please only try this in countries with left-hand traffic.

jandrese
0 replies
59m

It wasn't any kind of important data. It was a copy of some stuff I had made to bring to a meeting 20 years ago that's still readily available. If the data was important I wouldn't have left it on degrading optical media that I didn't trust.

Also, the whole point of DVD-RWs was to replace stuff like floppies or Zip disks when you are sneakernetting things around. The same way you use uSD or thumb drives these days. They were never meant for long term archiving, if you were doing that you would use DVD-R or DVD+Rs instead.

JoBrad
3 replies
20h27m

My experience with floppy disks is that they don’t last very long.

leptons
2 replies
20h3m

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.

lallysingh
0 replies
18h50m

It depends a lot on situations. I've heard that there's a fungus in the Southern US that slowly eats some floppy disks (or grows on them, I donno). Also there's a luck component with nearby magnetic sources.

TacticalCoder
0 replies
18h21m

Lucky you: as I posted a few hours ago... Only about 2/3rd of mine still worked but then they've been stored, for some, in bad conditions. For example some were in an underground garage with lots of cars passage and, after decades, gunk builds up everywhere in the garage.

TacticalCoder
1 replies
1d

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.

account42
0 replies
8h15m

Yeah, GP got lucky. At least CDs you can store in an airtight enclosure with moisture removed to help them last longer. For floppies it's enough to come close to a strong magnetic field to mess them up.

zitterbewegung
0 replies
22h42m

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).

uncivilized
0 replies
23h56m

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.

scrame
0 replies
21h10m

seriously? in college my floppies wouldn't make it across the quad.

DaoVeles
0 replies
18h13m

I was writing a book a few years ago that I have long since shelved, all about the longevity of information. The base premise was a mental experiment, what if we don't succeed in over coming some key fundamental issues of society and we end up in a long term energy decline position. How long would it take to go back into a dark age and just how much would we have preserved.

Basically about the life time of SSD's (20 years) , CD's (10-40 years) , Floppy disc/magnetic tapes (5-50 years), vinyl records (30-120 years), books (high/low acid paper)(50-500 years), clay tablets (centuries/millennia) and eventually spoken word (tens/hundreds of millennia). Seeing as how much of the internet has gone dark both through lack of economic incentive or accidental erasure - it was not the most cheery conclusion. About how the more efficient we get with information storage, the more brittle it becomes. But also the longer information can last, the more it is liable to be changed with time. Think like the game of telephone.

The big lesson take away I made from it all was that, it isn't so much the medium but the information. If it is useful or cherished, it will live far beyond its original medium. Knowledge of hygiene will live a lot longer than season 3 of Survivor on DVD. Video games are cherished and many are living way beyond their original medium. We will loose 99.99% of all data produced over the last few decades but that it mostly stuff that nobody had any need or desire to keep - and that is totally fine. It is basically a natural filter for quality, and while we may be concerned about what we may loose, ultimately a quality statement will be made. Information about the taxation system of 1956 will not last as long as the I Ching which has already gone millennia.

tetris11
14 replies
1d2h

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
13 replies
1d

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
10 replies
23h32m

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
9 replies
22h37m

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
8 replies
21h45m

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
6 replies
21h7m

They have easily improved my coding productivity by 40%

MaKey
5 replies
19h45m

What programming language are you using and in which ways are LLMs helping you? How do you deal with subtle mistakes?

roughly
2 replies
18h39m

My personal experience has been that the “smarter autocomplete” in the IDE is the bulk of the value add for me. It handles a lot of the really rote stuff - “create a struct that matches this data structure”, “add an accessor for this property”, “make another unit test with a slight variation on this” and saves me an enormous amount of time typing.

I’ve had basically no luck getting code from the chat-style interfaces, though. The bugs often aren’t even subtle, and it’ll either argue with me that there’s not a bug or apologize and produce exactly the same code again.

Jensson
1 replies
15h0m

saves me an enormous amount of time typing

But typing is like less than 1% of the time spent programming, it doesn't take many seconds to type the things you mentioned and it takes significantly longer to figure out you want to make them.

jacobyoder
0 replies
6h36m

In the moment, having to type anything more than half a line is still a distraction, as you can still make typos, or start watching as the starts to highlight issues as you type (which may or may not be real issues). Reducing distractions in the moment still can help keep flow going for some people.

icelancer
1 replies
10h57m

Python, not that it really matters.

We had to develop something internally regarding genlock and a ring buffer that Python wasn't going to work, so an engineer at our company picked up C++. Mind you, he's never written a line of C++ in his life and has close to no experience with C-style languages at all.

Within 2 days he had completed the prototype to synchronize multiple latency sensitive gear with leading/falling edge methods in C++. (On top of his other work.)

3 days prior to it he'd written no C++.

When asked how he did it, he said: "Claude is the best translator out there."

As for subtle mistakes, you still need to know how to code. Compilers make plenty of subtle inaccuracies and we still use them for most applications, don't we?

MaKey
0 replies
9h10m

That's interesting! I wouldn't feel comfortable using a non memory safe programming language without any experience in it though. Claude could introduce memory handling bugs and I might not be able to spot them.

jacobyoder
0 replies
6h40m

Perhaps it's too obvious, but if you're not using them, you wouldn't see any real life productivity gains, would you?

Sharlin
0 replies
21h52m

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".

Jensson
0 replies
15h20m

I have a really hard time trusting my instincts or judgements on when to use them and where

Its easy, do you want to find something but you forgot the name and have a hard time with Google? Ask an LLM, they will likely find the name you need to find it on Google. This goes for both things you have forgotten and new concepts that you never knew the name for but you think there exists something.

The other main use case is translations between languages, LLMs are by far the best translators today.

For other things LLM doesn't really help, except help turn out crap you have to spend so much time checking that it doesn't really make you more productive unless your job is to create crap.

Or that isn't fair, if you need to write a letter with some emotions that you have a hard time with due to your fleshy nature not wanting to fake emotions, you can ask the computer to fake those emotions for you. Computers are great at faking emotions now. Think corporate emails etc where you have to use a tone that doesn't at all match your state etc.

ogou
14 replies
8h55m

The lost Amiga art is never shown, in this article or any of the linked sources. The 9 images on that "lost" disk aren't actually displayed. The disk itself is the valuable object, kind of like Picasso signing a napkin. But, even the disk isn't shown. None of these articles say whether anybody tried reading the disk.

bni
13 replies
8h36m

Probably the files will be hoarded.

Previous discovered files from old floppies by AW, and also ones by Keith Haring was sold as "NFT". That had the positive side effect for me to be able to extract exact copies (although not original files).

See here: https://www.amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?t=2594

skrebbel
6 replies
7h49m

original files

What's the difference between an original file and an exact copy?

superrad
1 replies
7h41m

I think they mean the original amiga files, not the nft image which obviously right click save is the same as buying it .

bni
0 replies
7h15m

yes thanks, that's what I meant

Bluecobra
1 replies
4h57m

Real vintage computing aficionados prefer a KryoFlux disk image, it's magnetic flux transitions produce a warmer image and hits the high photoreceptor notes in your retina.

blacksqr
0 replies
45m

KryoFlux digital technology will never match the quality of images on vinyl.

bni
0 replies
7h17m

An original file would be the same file byte for byte in the original obsolete image format for example ILBM/IFF.

An exact copy would be a lossless PNG (for example) of the image, that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference by looking at it when it's displayed on a screen from the original.

Ylpertnodi
0 replies
7h43m

Theft. But, ianal.

criddell
5 replies
4h44m

I wonder if they could be shared? Who owns the copyright? It would be the Warhol estate, no?

This person can sell the disks but I don’t think they are selling rights to the work on the disk. I think it might be similar to me selling you my DVD of Star Wars.

blacksqr
4 replies
3h58m

The Debbie Harry image at least, since Warhol displayed it in public without a copyright notice, is in the public domain.

tambourine_man
3 replies
2h40m

Is that how it works?

EvanAnderson
1 replies
1h50m

It would be interesting to know, actually. Prior to 1989 copyright notices were required on works in the US, but historically no fine art that I'm aware of has had copyright notices. (I'm on my phone and have limited enthusiasm for searching in this UI...)

blacksqr
0 replies
1h25m

It's well-established that, before 1989, anything copyrightable required a copyright notice when first presented to the public or it immediately and irrevocably went into the public domain.

A classic case is a Picasso sculpture purchased by the city of Chicago in 1967. Prior to installation of the sculpture, city officials presented a model to the public. A copyright notice was put on a placard nearby, but not on the model. A lawsuit established that since there was no notice on the model, the design was in the public domain, and people could make postcards and posters of the sculpture freely, much to the city's dismay.

So yes, much of the fine art produced in the USA before 1989 is in the public domain.

blacksqr
0 replies
53m

Yes, that's how it worked before 1989. In that year the law was changed so that creators now obtain copyright automatically without any requirements for notice or registration.

If the linked article is accurate and Warhol gave a disk containing the images to an engineer without a copyright notice on the disk or in the disk's contents, and without any explicit restrictions on redistribution, those images are in the public domain as well.

dec0dedab0de
14 replies
1d2h

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
13 replies
1d

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

camus_absurd
4 replies
11h31m

I can’t even be bothered to make time to go there to throw them away

This made me physically cringe with sadness. I’d love to even find one and people are just tossing them.

lnxg33k1
3 replies
6h37m

I'm sure if you had one you wouldn't even connect it to the power, it has a command line, some GUI and prince of persia, which you can play now even on modern PCs with emulators, it has really no use, rather than, I don't know

LightBug1
1 replies
6h11m

You'd be surprised. Why do people drive classic cars?

Man, I'd love to, once, run a program from a cassette again just for the nostalgic hell of it!

vintermann
0 replies
1h16m

It was pretty fun that we could actually run games from ~40 year old tape. It impressed my son. It also impressed me actually, because I remember how often those things broke...

OnlyMortal
3 replies
22h49m

You might check capacitors and it’s possible the power supply is bad.

EvanAnderson
1 replies
21h23m

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.

DaoVeles
0 replies
18h33m

Every serious retro collector has become an expert on power supplies and capacitors. It is very cool to see and I'm glad it is the power supply and not the more delicate components, at least so far.

snvzz
0 replies
7h44m

The Commodore C64 supplies must not be used. As they age, they will spike their voltage and destroy the C64.

Today every such PSU is aged, and every such PSU is simply a C64 destroyer.

TacticalCoder
2 replies
18h25m

Although C64 and Amiga are not rare by any means (although the Amiga, if you're in the US, wasn't that much of a success in the US compared to the UK/EU), they're highly thought after items. There's no reason to throw them away: just message a forum/board and say "free Commodore in XXX, must come pick them" and some shall gladly give them a second life.

snvzz
1 replies
17h29m

Or take a look at ebay. Filter by already sold.

Even in non-working or untested condition, they fetch quite a bit of money.

vintermann
0 replies
1h22m

Well, they fetch some money. Still not more than the sticker price when they were new, generally, definitively not more than the inflation-adjusted price!

leptons
0 replies
19h36m

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.

PaulHoule
11 replies
1d2h

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
10 replies
1d2h

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
7 replies
1d2h

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.

tofu8
3 replies
1d1h

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.

bennyg
1 replies
14h59m

Again those are typically for limited runs - for unlimited runs they're surprisingly inexpensive.

dfxm12
0 replies
4h14m

I'd be surprised to learn about an unlimited run of a print that is signed by an artist like Warhol or Haring. The lithographs in your sibling comment are in the price range you're talking about, but have a printed signature.

autogn0me
2 replies
1d1h

Unlikely to be authentic for 250$ for sure no provenance

ericjmorey
1 replies
1d1h

What does authenticity mean in this context?

ahoka
0 replies
1d

“signed by the artist”

What do you think it means in this context?

dfxm12
1 replies
1d1h

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
0 replies
22h23m

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
8 replies
1d2h

Interesting how if anyone else created pictures like these we wouldn't really care.

PaulHoule
4 replies
1d2h

Actually the first thing I'd think was they were ripping off Andy Warhol.

t43562
1 replies
1d2h

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?

snarfy
0 replies
1d2h

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
0 replies
1d2h

The first thing I'd think was someone without any skill was randomly clicking around some early bitmap paint software.

whateveracct
0 replies
1d2h

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.

ericmcer
0 replies
1d1h

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.

77pt77
0 replies
1d2h

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.

omneity
4 replies
1d1h

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?

philistine
2 replies
22h0m

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.

cryptonym
1 replies
10h14m

If this file is only a low-res low-color bitmap, one could probably re-create it from a good photo of CRT.

bni
0 replies
10h3m

I have been working on exactly that here: https://github.com/bni/awdh

Never completed it. But now it looks like there is a better photo reference all of a sudden, need to look into it again!

kfarr
0 replies
1d

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?

fluoridation
4 replies
1d1h

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
3 replies
1d

Only if people are ignorant of the historical context. These images predate Photoshop by 5+ years.

fluoridation
2 replies
1d

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.

sureIy
1 replies
10h5m

He’s not some guy, he’s an artist. Different. /s/s

Same goes for those all-white or all-red paintings. You could do it, but you didn’t and you don’t.

fluoridation
0 replies
6h49m

I didn't do it because it's a shitty idea. You see, I have this thing called "shame". I would feel ashamed to attach my name to something that I know is bad.

virgulino
3 replies
22h18m

"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
1 replies
22h7m

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!

tiborsaas
0 replies
7h37m

Thanks for sharing this, it's a really neat addition to the Commodore story.

philistine
0 replies
21h59m

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.

greenhearth
1 replies
2h53m

This is interesting and very cool news but the writer ruins it with some weird self-aggrandizing and a baffling comparison of himself to Warhol.

"The digital images Andy Warhol created are rudimentary by today’s standards, and in some ways, perhaps less ambitious then some of the thumbnails I create for my blog posts. But this was 39 years ago, and I have much better tools than he did."

Is this trolling? lol

mvkel
0 replies
2h50m

Wow. It's like he doesn't know what art is. Not really.

crb
1 replies
19h15m

It wasn't lost. The guy who sat next to Warhol as he created it, has had it for the entirety of the intervening time. (That's some "provenance".)

The thing that Debbie Harry said she had one of two of was a /print/ of the images.

There's some more context here: https://pagesix.com/2024/07/29/lifestyle/long-lost-andy-warh...

abanana
0 replies
5h14m

A caption from that article: "Warhol also made a digital Botticelli for the Commodore". So many articles over the last few years have implied he made that Venus picture in its entirety. It was created by Avril Harrison, among many other images she created for EA's marketing, for the program that became Deluxe Paint. The image they always show is Avril's image after somebody (perhaps Warhol, perhaps it was somebody demoing it to him) used the brush tool to simply copy one eye and paste it in the middle.

thaanpaa
0 replies
4h32m

The lost artwork was discovered almost exactly ten years ago, in 2014. Are there any new developments on this front? If the article contained anything new, I missed it.

swayvil
0 replies
20h54m

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.

ranger_danger
0 replies
1d1h

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?

mvkel
0 replies
2h51m

Now this is an NFT

miles
0 replies
21h37m

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

ezekiel68
0 replies
12h2m

God, this makes me so happy. I well remember that self-portrait on the cover of Amiga Magazine back in ~1986. I was so excited about the platform, the technology, and the possibilities.

deorder
0 replies
11h44m

From what I remember he used Deluxe Paint and the color cycle feature to change the color palette around.

binary132
0 replies
1d2h

Reminds me of some kind of proto-vaporwave art

JS-Sound
0 replies
8h20m

He deliberately chose colors that contrasted with each other.

Describes his style very well, Keith Harings' too. Not my liking.