this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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Pollock hits harder in person tbh.
Prints and photos don't really work; it ends up looking flat and empty. But in person, there's more "depth" in both a literal and figurative sense. You can see more of the intent put into the methodology.
Mind you, I agree with the idea that he's over hyped. He wasn't exactly breaking new ground, and there's plenty of other artists that explored abstract painting with more satisfying and effective results.
But I don't think it's accurate to call it shit either. As much as people love to say it, no a kindergartener couldn't do it. Even high schoolers have trouble making something that looks similar enough to carry the same visual effect. Some art students at a collegiate level can't.
Turns out you do have to have some degree of development in your techniques at the very least to get the same results, no matter how much raw talent you have.
Now, don't ask me if I really like his stuff. I mean, I'm going to say it anyway, but still. My take on his body of work is that he fully explored the "drip" technique way before he quit doing it, and likely could have stopped after the first one because the only real differences between them amount to nothing more than the difference between most hotel and doctors' office wall hangings. You see one, you've seen them all.
Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that he got something more than money out of the process. I make bland and basic art myself, and IDGAF about the results as much as the enjoyment of making. Every art student I've ever known gets super into the process of creating and that's a wonderful thing; dissecting what they're doing as they do it.
But that value isn't something that carries on beyond the process itself.
Saw one in a museum last week. Still looked like shit.
Its paint splatters. Which the artist has no control over.
Only if it is deliberate can you claim it has depth. Otherwise it is nothing more than a happy accident that it looks to have depth.
Well, you absolutely have control over splatters once you understand the way they happen. A liquid at a given viscosity moving at a given speed will have predictable, but minutely variable, outcomes.
In other words, every raindrop hits in a predictable way, and the only reason you can't predict exactly how the resulting splash will look is a lack of ability to make the same predictions on a molecular level. But, if you could see and hold in the human brain, the outcome is absolutely predictable even at that level; we just can't pull it off without outside assistance.
Look at airbrushing. It's tightly controlled spatter. You're using air to make the drops so small that we can predict and control the outcome so that it can be used to give a range of end products. But if you get in really tight to what's going on, it's high speed splattering.
I would also disagree that a happy accident can't have depth visually. But I think you likely misread how I was emphasizing, so it isn't really useful to say more than that.
However, Judge for yourself if he was bullshiting about his degree of intent in his efforts. It isn't like there aren't other interviews and information about what he did, on both technical and analytical levels. Him saying he has intent doesn't mean he's speaking truth, nor would it being truth change whether or not one agrees with his intent, or how successful one feels he was in achieving it.
But he at least came up with an explanation of intent, and his movements when working are controlled enough to indicate he at least thought he was working with intent, and isn't that the same thing as intent on a practical level?