I meant it in a "holy **** I would hate that job" kind of way!

I have an IT degree, in InfoSec. I'm currently studying music in university however, because it's always been my greatest passion.

I'm very weary about working for some corporation, tasked with protecting their data or networks. I ****ing hate corporations, why should I give a **** if they are owned?

Still waiting for somebody to present some code and defend its artistic merits (appreciate goofy's contribution, but lol not art).

I think it's art, pretty neat art at that :boots:

I haven't tired to compile and run it though. **** if I know what it does! What's it do goofy?

What are its artistic merits?

I think it's beautiful

I think summer evening lighting storms are beautiful. They're not art.

If you painted them they would be!

Do you think the dust bowl is art? I don't. I wrote a song about the dust bowl however, and that is art.

Do you think math is art?

I do. But maybe that is just because I am not exceptionally knowledgable about math.

- Bertrand Russell

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

Same with programming of course

I think this is interesting. Uniqueness wasn't explicitly the angle I come at it from but it is a consequence of Burgess's view that an artist is a creative person who seeks to explore the relationship between man and the external world: this implies uniqueness in the art.

There's also the problem that no two musicians will ever play the same piece identically, but to me that doesn't qualify them as artists.

(I'm glad you've focussed on the artist rather than the art form, because art is defined as anything an artist says is art. I know that's a somewhat annoying circular reference but it's one I've heard many times over the years from people with much greater experience of and involvement with the arts than me, and importantly it defends/supports the type of conceptual art that the popular reaction to is often "That's not art, I could do that").


This is one of the edge cases I mentioned earlier - apart from the jazz musicians who were clearly composers and therefore artists, I think that improvisational musicians should also be regarded as artists because there's enough of the musicians themselves in the performance to warrant it, even if the original was written by another person.



This is the problem with focussing on the medium rather than the person. Is photography art? If at one extreme it's taken by an artist, yes. If at the other it's taken by a commercial photographer for an advertisement, or is a non artist taking holidays snaps then probably not. People get hung up on the idea that if it looks nice it's art and if it doesn't it isn't. Art is about intention.

I agree about the boundaries - there aren't hard lines separating artists from artisans but it's the best we can do.

Nothing you've written here qualifies programming as art (I'm a programmer myself).

Maths has great beauty, but does that make it Art?

We could argue that everything is discovered rather than created and so nothing is art however beautiful. Or we could recognise some mathematics as the beautiful creation of artistic geniuses just as with the composers of great music.

As someone said earlier I think there's just a clear difference in the word 'art' between sentences like "X is an art" and "X is art". Programming seems to trivially fit the first, but code rarely fits the second, and it's the second kind of thing we usually look for to say that the people who do such-and-such a thing are artists.

As for examples of code as art then musicians who write code that directly produces sound, which they don't then further process would seem a fairly clear case. I believe that occurs (some of Autechre's albums fit that description, I think), but I'm not knowledgeable enough about the methods to know for sure.

Visual art that responds to sounds or movements in a space, to then project or display something is, I presume, often done using code. It would seem the code is, at least in part, the constitutive element, rather than whatever's being displayed at some particular time.

Of course not.

No, fractals aren't art.

No, computer generated music/pictures/whatever aren't art.

The bold is a key reason why math is NOT art. It does not speak to the human condition, nor is it informed by it. That's a really dumb quote. It's like saying the reference section of the library has the best literature. It's asinine.

Or we could reject false dilemmas. Glacier National Park is extremely beautiful and gave rise to spiritual feelings within me, but it's clearly not art, at least not for grumpy atheists like me.

Giving rise to those feelings Russell talked about might be one criterion you could use for something being art, but to me it's not sufficient in itself.

It occurs to me there ought to be a word in English for the kind of beauty Russell is talking about, a beauty in elegance, simplicity and correctness. It's a very common shared experience which is quite different from other forms of aesthetic pleasure and yet Russell needed a paragraph to explain what he was talking about.

"sublime"

I doubt there are any more people in this thread qualified to say if math is art than there are to say code is art, probably less.

It would be art if it was the work of man. Which comes back to whether works of man that produce products of great beauty are creative acts or acts of discovery. That's not a false dilemma as much as a fake dilemma because it doesn't really make any difference does it?

Only if it was the work of an artist. Otherwise it would probably count as a feat of engineering.

We are too fixated on the object rather than the intention.

The Atlantic appears to be trying to troll this thread...