Picasso’s Guernica (Gigapixel)

Guernica is one of the few that did. Perhaps because it's massive compared to other well known paintings.

So, I just want to say, I second your recommendation for seeing it in person.

A few weeks ago I was vacationing in the Basque country, and realized Guernica (the town) was a mere half hour drive away. So we went. Although none of the town in any way reminds you of the depictions of the painting (save for some memorials), I kept feeling the same eerie dread even as I walked through a perfectly normal, pleasant sleepy town.

That early, before the tour groups have made it that far into the museum, you can actually get the entire space to yourself for >30 minutes and it's never left me not weeping.

I was similarly stunned by one of the Anselm Kiefers at the Bilbao Guggenheim. Some paintings can only be appreciated in person.

This theory couldn't be tested until late 1930's, when everyone was trying variations on the "technique", adding things like explosives, incendiary, gas... and escalating the amount of bombs needed to cause the mythical collapse. I think the record was 5 million tons of bombs over Vietnam (170 kg of bombs per capita), still the collapse didn't happen.

Guernica was in many ways something both the british and republicans made stand out for propaganda.

There have been far worse things in the spanish civil wars.

For example Cabra was bombed in a day of market with the intention of killing and without being any kind of strategic strategic objective, way further than Guernica from other objectives and with more dead civilians actually.

It is just less well known bc of who did it.

It had already started way before, right when armed forces started using planes, in WW1. (I was thinking even earlier, in Libya during the Italo-Turkish war of 1911, but I haven't found confirmation in a quick search)

Mine owners hired planes to bomb striking miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921

The combination of those in proper size context to the astounding thing on that wall was... I dunno, very hard to bear? Chills and goosebumps. Just being in the presence of such genius. [Edited to add: I forgot! Many of the studies are clearly over complicated and colorful. And then you turn to see what was the final result. IMHO It's the same with genius software, in a different medium. Prose too, but maybe that's more contentious.]

There is no digital screen representation that can remotely approximate the psychic impact physical proximity to genius creates. I've felt this with many other greats as well.

I've sat alone in 3 different Rothko rooms. Damn. It's all I can say. You have to do it yourself. Tip: pan your eyes slowly while sitting in different corners.

"Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us" - Picasso

Tongue-in-cheek aside, I do think I agree with you in that (1) art, as perceived by us human meatbags, is art because of the human element of it (if not in creation, then in perception), and that (2) AI absent explicit steering trends towards a rather bland medium.

But there’s art in everything from the blurry, out of focus, disposable film cameras, to a 5-year-old’s crayon scribble scrabbles, to the neon glitter themes we used to copy-paste over our geocities and xanga pages, and as frustrating as it is to our own sensibilities, an AI prompt “draw a pink elephant” isn’t all that different.

Beyond aesthetic judgements of good/bad or intentional stance re: communication with others, there is such a thing as "process art" which could also be described as communication with oneself, or as kind of being locked into conversation with the medium, or with the universe. People will get distracted here and want to fight about whether Pollack is good, but I think that's missing the point. It just happens to be a very direct way of engaging with the dialectic tension of order / chaos that's incompressible, irreducible, and completely without substitute.. and that's just one of many dialectics you could explore.

Another self-communicative aspect of art is about exploring the limits and mastery of technique, where the details and result per se don't matter much. You can see this with a bunch of dorks building useless programming languages and doing amazing stuff with them, or see it with a smith at a forge. Someone will say this is about being a technician or a craftsman, but I'd say no, those activities typically have a practical purpose. Especially if you're doing this for the joy of it without even caring whether you're actively learning something you can apply elsewhere, then it's probably art.

Keep the hope up! I created OpenZoom in my early 20s, then interned at Seadragon, and almost 20 years later, I still want to make it a reality.

Let me know if you have ideas for use cases / applications!

Easy hosting: https://zoomhub.net

Collections: https://zoomhub.net/showcase/photography/nasa

Comparison viewer: https://zoomhub-compare-viewer-demo.netlify.app/collections/...

> The varnish applied in 1962 served as a layer to protect the polychrome and the red paint could be removed without damaging the original.

> At the present time, macrophotographs show reddish micro-residues, almost imperceptible to the naked eye. In some cases, this has entered the fissures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Shafrazi#Shafrazi_and_Gue...

That shift also reflected the era he lived in - one where visual arts played a central role in the cultural conversation - making him a true part of the zeitgeist that is hard to imagine now when visual art feels less central and more inward-looking.

A lot of what feels cliche now started with him, it only feels commonplace now as his influence was so massive.

Imagine being born in 1850 when everyone got around on horseback and paintings were realistic portrayals of people, landscapes, religious figures in muted tones. Impressionism (Van Gogh etc) arrives and is considered radical, then in 1907 you see _Les Demoiselles d'Avignon_ with its bright colors and abstract depiction of cavorting prostitutes. It would certainly provoke a reaction. The 20th Century had arrived.

The reason why he is influential and not forgotten is that he took painting in an entirely new direction and was able to convey emotion and philosophical ideas (like in Guernica, for example) in a completely different way than what was typical at the time. In a lot of his work he strips things down and distorts them on purpose to show multiple perspectives, which isn't something that realism usually tries to do.

Well, quasi-fractured I suppose: all the regionalism has lead to an also-strong federalist countermovemnt! See if you notice anything weird about the map of Spain's high-speed rail routes, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Spain#/medi...

(BTW, Spain has the second best HSR network in the world, just after China. Congrats, Spain!)