https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performing_arts

Of course dance is an art form, created by the choreographer.

No, my understanding of "pythonic" is that you are following language norms for style. Would have very little to do with elegant or efficient code.

Apparently you didn't read this:


Or perhaps aesthetics?

That's a low-brow interpretation of the word 'artist' that I'd expect from wiki.

You really think that magicians (trick performers) are artists? lol

https://www.britannica.com/art/acting
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/acting
http://drama.uconn.edu/programs/acting/
https://www.nyfa.edu/acting-school/

I'll be here all day folks!

(not really, I'm just acting)

No, style like Strunk and White's Element's of Style, the preferred syntax for common python idioms.

When a monkey typing for an infinite amount of time produced a great novel, would it be art?


Is bad art art? For example, a normal toddler's drawing.

Monkeys have finite life spans, and thus cannot type for an infinite amount of time.


You answered your own question within your question. Yes, bad art is art. It's bad art. (good or bad being entirely subjective)

*If* a monkey could and were to type for an infinite amount of time, it would produce great novels. Would they be art?



Now we are getting somewhere.


btw, I honestly don't know what answer I gave within my question. Do you mean because I asked about bad "art", so it has to be art by definition? In that case substitute whatever medium -- drawing, for example -- is a bad drawing art?



I'm thinking any reasonable definition of art is going to necessarily be too loose to definitively answer most of these questions, including whether programming is art (or can be art).

Does a dancer interpret a set of dance instructions? Don't they just execute them? It's a poor analogy for acting.

A toddler's drawing may be bad but it's still an act of procreation so it is art.

I'll again state that my opinion is that what is or isn't art probably ultimately comes down to individual interpretation, and subjectivity.

If you're suggesting that dancers have even less input over the final work of art than musicians or actors, I agree. That doesn't make the latter artists, though.

The visual artists I know and grew up with all disagree with you (apart from a few edge cases, perhaps).

I think I agree with that as an opinion. In my un-art-educated opinion, I feel pretty much any activity could theoretically be elevated to an art form. But I'm not intimately familiar with the interplay of definitions of art, beauty, elegance, expertise, appreciation (eye of the beholder), etc.

I'll go you one better. *If* I had access to an infinite-time monkey and a method to locate the great novels and passed them off as mine, became a mainstay of the Western canon and then died fifty years later, would the novels be art then? Would they be art if no-one knew, and stop being art if they somehow found out? Or would the very fact of my having done that make it art?


Bad art is art, a toddler's drawing could be art, but needn't be.

Nice. I'm not going to even ask about the case where this is all a simulation.

I think the various subsets of art, such as visual arts, and recording arts, can probably be very generally defined, or can probably have very generally defining characteristics, but I think you can always find cases which do not conform to these definitions.

For instance, the recording arts, such as instrument tracking, arranging, sequencing, mixing, mastering, etc. are not visual arts, such as photography, calligraphy, painting, etc. But you can find examples which defy the definitions.

For instance, this Aphex Twin song. It's an example of recording art, because it has sequencing, arranging, mixing, etc. But it also contains visual art within it, which one wouldn't know by simply listening to it. If you gave someone some headphones, had them listen to the song, and asked them "is this visual art?" probably everyone that you did this with would say no. However, when the spectrogram is viewed, you can see a face at the 5:30 mark .




So that's why I think it's incredibly difficult to try to have very clear cut definitions and distinctions of what is not only art, but also the various subsets of art.

Jalfrezi - seems like your idea of an artist is something like the (or a) necessary person involved in the creation of a specific piece of art. So the composer is an artist because it seems incoherent to imagine different people composing the same piece of music or different groups writing and directing the same film. However the player or actor isn't an artist because clearly different people can play or dance that piece of art. Is that fair?

It seems a decent enough distinction if you think our differentiation of artworks is mostly sensitive to the qualities that make them art and not something else, perhaps more commercial considerations to do with copyright for example. Jazz would certainly be interesting, just because I imagine there'd be dissent even amongst jazz fans as to whether different versions of very widely interpreted standards were, in fact, the 'same song' in the artistically relevant sense. Improvisation would, I take it, be just instant composition.

Reminds me of a position that always confused but challenged me that photography can never actually be art, because it's a causally determined presentation of reality. The reality the photograph chooses to present might be art, but not the photographic aspect as there's no interpretive choice. It's certainly not the same view, and it seems wrong that photography doesn't involve interpretation, but it appears to aim at the same distinction between the specifically artistic move and other acts surrounding it which merely allow the artwork to be experienced by some people at some specific time.

My instinct would be that it's difficult to maintain these sorts of boundaries and thus continue to stably distinguish artists from artisans, but being a fuzzy concept doesn't mean it isn't the one we have.

I'm old school. I refer to myself as a (Steven Levy) hacker. Hacking is most definitely an art form, AINEC. There's a distinction between getting shiz done and doing so aesthetically. Just like there is a distinction between hack ad copy and literature.

In a very real way, hacking is one of the deepest of artistic pursuits. A hacker isn't restrained to their chosen media. They can create their own media as they go... in order to create what art they want. Consider... art can be done with brushes & canvas, but what if you could create new kinds of brushes, and new kinds of canvases? That's meta-art which is an art in and of itself. That meta-dynamic is the heart of hacking, and it's what makes it an art, again AINEC.

Very well said, and 2600 hertz to you!

Yeah, I'm not a programmer and completely disagree. My job is coming up with math that is eventually turned into code by other people. The worst part of my job is seeing some crappy subroutine that I wrote in the algorithm design phase thats copied from python into C and used a thousand times in live code. Like I only wrote it like that because I didn't have time to write it properly. There is only a handful of coders I'll give subroutines anymore and they are the people who will bother to learn what the program is meant to do and not just copy it over as a black box. And alot of these guys have Phds in CS from MIT, Harvard etc. Its definitely an art.

Sounds like a cool job!

Nah, it kinda sucks tbh. I mean, if it was a 40 hour a week gig it would be the best job ever but it is closer to 80 than 40. Really thinking about taking an interview at Google for way less pay and prob a worse job than I turned down after grad school.