Category: 2024

The visit to field gave me insight on what artists cooperate with large companies and where creative ideas of corporations come from. I also like the fact that they are uaing generative ai to make art pieces. I believe technology is a trend and it is not wise to stand against it. The fact they are using their artistic creativity together with ai to generate things previous generations could never think about is just fascinating.

This reading reminds me of a news I saw recently. An art major student in a university made a capstone that was literally cardboard stacked up together. People started judging it on the internet and the student couldn’t handle the pressure so started explaining the work. I think that is unnecessary and it breaks the art piece. I believe that a big part or an artwork’s value is it’s openness to interpretations. Different people may interpret it differently. Judging it and saying it is not art is also an interpretation, which is part of the artistic value it has. But if the creator comes in person and describes it, all the interpretations collapse into THE interpretation and it reduces it’s artistic value.

This chapter talks about understanding, acceptance and approval. Basically it’s about the relationship between your artworks and you, the artists. 

For understanding, what’s important is to accept the fact that you might not be understood. For approval and acceptance, they are usually linked in the sense that there is no bad art, but art. The form itself becomes the criteria since there is no criteria for the form.

I feel like this chapter has a lot of health methods that teach you how to build a nice relationship with your work, such as keep exploring, accepting yoru own art and not just waiting to be accepted, etc. I also think this is the most difficult to do. Even the previous chapters talk about not equating your art to you, when it comes to artworks coming from personal stuff, it is difficult. 

The two words random generator gives me are ignorant and bulb. What immediately comes to my mind after seeing these two words is a short story. Beasically, it’s illustrated by the following collage. Among all bulbs, there is one that thinks it’s different from the others. He believes his gifted uniques brings light to the whole world. For all the other bulbs, however, they know their very existence is created by mankind and thus their life is controlled. They think of their fairly short lifespan of about 750-2,000 hours and weep at the fact that they will be abandoned right after they use up all their energy. It remains unknown as to how long does it take for that ignorant single bulb to realize it’s no different than the others.

“But for most art, there is no client, and in making it you lay bare a truth you perhaps never anticipated: that by your very contact with what you love, you have exposed yourself to the world. How could you not take criticism of that work personally?”

In this generative AI uprising we’re experiencing, it’s become more clear to me than ever what the human element of art is. Human art has soul while generative AI art is soulless. Why is that? 

It is my deep belief that whatever an artist puts onto the canvas is a reflection of themselves. Of course our art is not literally a reflection of our physical appearance but one of our passions and interests. 

I like art styles with sketchy lines over clean and beautiful lines. It’s both what I gravitate towards but also what I convey when I put brush to paper because it reflects the chaotic nature of my mind. Obviously, the topic of what you’re drawing(or lack thereof) is also a big reflection of your mind. I like drawing stylish streetwear on my characters because I love streetwear myself. 

Others like to draw their characters smoking because they have a thing for cigarettes. Some others might like posing their characters very heroically because maybe they like Star Wars movies and their respective movie posters.

This ties it back to what brought up this topic in the first place. A critique on a personal work is essentially a critique on a person. Some people take critique on their work better than they take critique on their personality/interests and some others versa, but a critique on a personal work might feel like a critique on both one’s work and the person’s interests.

Another thing the book mentions I want to talk about is the topic of “acceptance versus approval” in art. 

“Acceptance means having your work counted as the real thing; approval means having people like it.”

I personally don’t share anything I work on online publicly because as much as I want to say hearing critique doesn’t affect me, it kinda does. I feel like this section is a part of the artist experience I won’t fully be able to understand quite yet. Maybe some time in the future.

After seeing these words I immediately thought about a recent social issue in China. Since we were young, as males we were educated to be nice to women and to be a gentleman, and I have no problem with that. However, in society, this somehow leads to the consensus that men are responsible for paying for everything when it comes to relationships. Another issue is that when couples get married, a majority of places still have the tradition of the man’s family giving the woman’s family a large amount of money. With this background, many women in China use relationships to gain money. This has been a social issue for quite a while now, but recently a guy’s death brought this issue to the surface.

There is this boy who boosts other people’s accounts for a living. It was a tough job and he was one of the best in this industry. However, the salary was still not high and he had worked 14 hours straight for many years. He had a “girlfriend” who he had been dating online and they met in person a few times. That girl claimed she wanted to open up a shop, and the boy was very supportive and gave her money to do that. He believed that it was his responsibility to do so, and for many reasons, he transferred over 100,000 dollars (700,000 Chinese Yuan) to the girl and lived on a 1.5-dollar delivery of every meal. But when the boy decided to marry the girl, this girl was reluctant and then wanted to break up with the boy. The boy tried hard to make it work but the girl refused very firmly. The coy couldn’t take it so he jumped off a bridge and died. The girl showed no sadness or regret and a few days after that, she started posting Tiktok vids trying to bait other men into this.

This seems like it has nothing to do with these two words, but this event was so influential the government and the police had to come to investigate. The male society wanted this to be set as a scam, but the result of the investigation was that the girl was not guilty of any sort. There was an official police investigation post on this and it was full of biased words, trying to divert the people’s attention and lead the people’s fury toward the boy’s side, where his parents and sister wanted the whole society to know about this and leading cyber violence. But it also proved that everything the boy’s sister said was true. Also, many official news websites posted videos saying that the boy’s family wrongly accused the girl, but when the public found out about the inappropriate use of words, they deleted the video and changed the title. Everything that was official was leaning towards the girl. But there were some other cases before that were found by the people, one example was a girl and a boy broke up and the girl couldn’t take it and committed suicide. The boy did nothing wrong and there were no strange transactions or such, but the court judged that the boy’s family should give the girl’s family 200,000 Chinese Yuan because of “ethical issues”. Also, the majority of recently certified judges were women. Not being sexist but I don’t believe there is no correlation. This led me to wonder, is there truly justice even in the court of law? There was direct evidence showing the girl lying to get money and it wasn’t a scam? Where would the total loss of credibility lead to?

The picture is a balance tiped to one side, and on that side is a judge’s hammer. On the other side is the crowd protesting. If that is the only thing on the drawing it would be fine, because public opinion cannot replace law when it comes to judgement of cases. However this hammer has been manipulated. Then is this justice?

Randomly Generated Words:

draw & oven

So when I saw the word draw and the word oven together, I actually interpreted the word draw as the verb for extracting an object from a container. The reason why I thought of this was because I was thinking about school festivals back in high school. They’re a pretty common event for schools to have in Taiwan and a very frequently used attraction is a raffle box (抽獎箱). 

抽, the first character in Chinese for “raffle box”, means “draw”, and the third character, 箱, means box. The direct translation of the raffle box character-for-character is “draw-prize-box.” 

The Chinese word for oven is 烤箱. The second character(箱) is the same as the third character in “raffle box” (抽獎箱). The direct translation for oven would be “bake-box.”

So from this connection, I came up with an idea for a raffle box. The idea is that I would combine the raffle box with an oven, using the heat of an oven as a challenge/anti-time wasting measure. 

A lot of people in these festivals tend to put their hand in the box and swirl it around for way too long, so the heat will make them quickly reach in and quickly take it out. (I am not liable for whoever decides to actualize this oven raffle box and accidentally burn children’s hands in a festival.) 

First, I made a design for an oven based on a Google search of an oven. I did it on Canva because I couldn’t be bothered to open Illustrator. Don’t tell my design professor.

Next, I incorporated the raffle box aspects onto the oven. I added a hole on the top of the oven and added some raffle balls on the side to help sell the idea so the viewer can tell what it is even if they can’t read the Chinese on the display. I also moved the buttons to the side of the display to fill up the negative space.

This is a small breakdown and explanation of each part.

Now that I’m writing this, what material do I make the raffle balls so they don’t start melting inside the oven? If I use plastic it’s going to melt and if I use metal it’ll be too hot to touch even with gloves on. Maybe ceramic balls? I’m not sure.

Either way, I hope everything here made sense to read and I explained the Chinese characters sufficiently.

My two words are: restaurant and artist. The most obvious choice would be to do something related to chef, since you can argue that a chef is kind of an artist working in a restaurant. But that is a bit lame. So I decided to experiment with a survey that gives you a song and restaurant type recommendation after you answer a few questions.

Survey link here: https://nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_08HvTzaNknQ482a

There is a bit of a twist to this one, mainly because I am parodying the personality quizzes that are rampant online. The twist is as below:

The results are random! No matter what you pick, the survey will randomly show you one of 4 possible answers, which include being adventurous or not, and being sociable or not when out.

The way these readings have been structured really grew on me. Especially in this Art and Fear book where the readings are divided into smaller headings. Well in todays reading we are talking about how the artist feels about others when doing his work. The three topics discussed are understanding, acceptance and approval. The first fear comes out when the artists fails to believe he would be understood by the wider audience. We as people like to be understood and the artist is not an exception in this case. As the reading says it is a basic need of people. On the other side we have acceptance and approval, whilst both words seem similar acceptance means that people accept/recognize our work while approval means that people like it. But people don’t have to like our work in order for us to do our best and continue working on what we want. For example some of our guests dizzle and dabble in experimental music, and that’s far away from what I like. That does not mean that I don’t recognize their passion and approve of their work 🙂