FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
"To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget (a good example from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no recall for the insults and slights directed at him and who could not forgive, simply because he – forgot.)
I would say that Game recognizes Game. Or does Neitzche "forget" the Last Men or the Tarantulas, in your view? Certainly he doesn't seem to mind making his own appeals to Justice, does he? Or am I reading him wrong?
I don't deny that there's a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering in the "high art" world; but, I don't think anything in my post committed me to denying that either.
I wouldn't think you'd deny it. I guess I'm trying to communicate why I think the problem is systemic, rather than anecdotal. It's one thing for there to be "a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering". Humans will inevitably human. But what the art world has done, what they are going to keep doing, is anti-human, and I will happily spend the rest of my life working to dismay them.
What do you think NASA has been doing since the shuttle was discontinued? I promise you, it wasn’t feminist glaciology.
This account is not encouraging, and coincides with other highly-plausible critiques of NASA culture and procedures. "Feminist glaciology" isn't a perfect description, but "paying people to spin their wheels and produce nothing useful ever while actively abusing those who try to do better" seems like an analogue too close for comfort.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Why should anyone else's reaction be more meaningful than mine? They're just saying "Yum!" with more words.
...And to be clear, I'm at least provisionally willing to give a "Yum!" for this specific work, and my reasons for doing so appear to align with yours: technical details of the process. On the other hand, it seems you share my skepticism of the work in the broader context outside the technical.
"That claim is unfalsifiable, compared to having failed" seems like a reasonable statement, and one that I'm not sure you're even disagreeing with.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
in case you're wondering, this is what it looks like to roll a nat-1 on your knowledge check.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I think Angelus Novus is "kitsch".
As an artist, I would disagree. I could spend a week studying the painting, by which I mean attempting to redraw it accurately, drawing variations on it, etc, and I am confident I would be a better artist at the end of that week, and art I made drawing on the lessons I learned from it would be better drawings than what I would have produced before.
The linework is very definitely not naivestic scribble. You can do really neat things with the techniques he's using there, whether you agree that he's done neat things with them or not.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Because the alternative is to simply think, as you already said, that your opponents are your "enemies for life" and there's nothing to be done about it. Then the discussion is truly just reduced to nothing but political power struggles.
I think it's pretty clearly a good thing to have non-zero "enemies for life". I don't think you can have a functioning morality or conception of justice without this component of moral reasoning, and I think life without functioning morality or a conception of justice is not a good life.
I watched an employee of the state at a prestigious educational institution provide affirmation and encourage mutual validation to a series of young artists that their shit art was deep and meaningful because their output flattered their collective biases, and then watched her lead that same group collectively tearing down the one artist whose shit art did not flatter their collective biases. What conclusions would you draw from that experience?
Sounds a bit... postmodern, doesn't it?
To solve post-modernism, you have to take it seriously. Once you solve it, you have nothing more to fear from it.
I think everyone should extend that same level of charity to everyone.
I disagree specifically with the term everyone. I think it is possible to conclude from available evidence that some people are in fact just grifting, and that when you find enough grifters in sufficient concentration within a larger sociopolitical cluster, that cluster is reasonably described as a grift. For the art world, I think this recognition is immediately necessary; I perceive the art world has been deeply fucked up for a very long time. What I value about art can, I think, survive without it, and I think we would all be significantly better off if it did.
On the other hand, I also recognize that some and even many reactions to stimuli are genuine. I've experienced them myself. I can attempt to bridge the gap for people who don't perceive the resonance.
Either way, I find the discussion absolutely fascinating.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
This art was deemed evil largely independently of its content or intention, but because of who did it and the fact it was in styles other than the approved realist style. I don't think this was a coherent concept, and the elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad was all kinds of fucked up.
On the one hand, I do not consider Nazis to be intellectual authorities. On the other hand, I'm informed that Hitler drank water.
I am moderately confident that art can't be bad simply because of who made it, but note that "who made it" and "what they made" correlate very, very strongly. I find it difficult to separate Russian or Chinese "soviet realist" art from my knowledge of the regimes that produced it. I also observe that a whole lot of people don't like "Triumph of the Will" or "Birth of a Nation", not because these works are badly made, but because of who made them and why. I would agree that mere identity is a very poor place to start one's critique of an art piece, and generally says more about the critic than the piece.
I'm skeptical that even the Nazis didn't care about the intention of the art and only who made it; can you point to some examples of art the Nazis considered "degenerate" that was obviously intended for and effectively executed on glorification of the Nazi state, but which was rejected due to the identity or chosen style of the maker?
I don't think this was a coherent concept, and the elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad was all kinds of fucked up.
I am not confident that "degenerate art" involves an elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad. I think one could claim aesthetically pleasing art as morally bad, and thus "degenerate". "aesthetically pleasing" is a very broad category; I would imagine that there are a lot of people who do or easily could view detailed depictions of their perceived enemies being tortured to death as "aesthetically pleasing."
That just doesn't apply (at all) to Klee, and a new term needs to be found for art with a clearly pernicious effects as with some of your examples. The Nazis have claimed "degenerate art".
I observe that Communists do not appear to "claim" concepts or terms the way you argue Nazis "claim" "Degenerate Art", so I don't really buy this idea that terms ought to be considered polluted in this way in a general sense. Perhaps we should consider it a term of art, and that we are in apparent agreement that who made a piece of art isn't a good place to start critiquing it from. We need a term for "bad art", this one seems reasonably straightforward and understandable. On the other hand, I'm not super attached to the word either; "anti-social" or "corrosive" seem reasonable synonyms.
In any case, if art can be "degenerate", that does not imply that all art labeled "degenerate" is accurately labeled; humans can be mistaken or lie, and I think we would agree that the Nazis did plenty of both. The Nazis labelling Klee's art "degenerate" does not make it so, but it doesn't make it not so either. I've written elsewhere in the thread describing the non-marginal value I'm able to glean from Klee's work; on the other hand, I think there's a pretty strong argument that the art world as a sociopolitical cluster has been strongly net-degenerate/anti-social/corrosive for at least the century, and as a prominent builder of that sociopolitical cluster, one can reasonably assess Klee for his contributions to that trend.
It seems to me that a lot of defenses of Klee are going to involve arguments that appear to me, at this point, to be special pleading. I think we are well past the point where naked appeals to diversity of thought and free expression can be maintained; values-incoherence is too obviously a serious problem, and values-policing is too endemic for these old arguments to hold up.
I mean, prove me wrong, but to my eyes, Angelus Novus's defense is what it says, but what it says isn't in the actual artwork.
One of my earliest memories is of walking through an airport, and seeing the cover art of a book: one of the volumes of Mike Mignola's Ffafhard and the Grey Mouser. Cliches for the experience abound; I would say Amagari-Fault-style "this hole was made for me" comes close. It was the first time I experienced art as art, and the impression was indelible. It was several years later when I found a couple volumes of Hellboy in a book store, and devoured them, and couldn't get over the artwork. Mignola's my favorite artist, always has been and always will be.
Angelus Novus (and Klee's other work) is a huge part of where Mignola's art came from. The influence is obvious and unmistakable in how the lines work. The dick-fingers and dick-toes and Dungeon-Soup-Barbarian facial expression are obstacles, but there is significant power in the lines themselves, power that I could personally describe in objective terms at some length. Klee is not my favorite artist and never will be, but I will argue that he's not an example of an artist who only exists in the artist's statement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Oh man, you drop this when I'm too busy for in-depth digging?
Some previous discussion here, for those interested.
(Primaprimaprima, you are not the "you" in the following.)
Lots of good comments in the thread too, but one of the impressions I'm getting is that the term "art" is fatally overloaded, to the point that people are turning obvious truths into mutual contradictions due simply to focus on different aspects of the process.
"There is good art and bad art."
"Art is inherently subjective, anything can be good art."
If you tell me there are art experts, you are telling me there is a standard. If there is a standard, I am entitled both to judge works by that standard and to judge the standard itself, and you don't get to retreat to abstraction if my judgement is other than you prefer. It seems obvious to me that a huge part of the conflict this conversation generates is due to influential people playing both sides of this divide to their immediate personal advantage.
"Art is important and powerful."
"Degenerate art does not exist."
...I don't think these two claims can be reconciled. "With great power comes great responsibility."
"Art is universal, appealing to core features of the human brain and raw neuro-kinematics."
"Art is all about social context."
If the former, than art that doesn't spark me is bad art from my perspective, and art that doesn't spark a lot of people is bad art from a lot of people's perspective, disagreements start looking like social conflict. If the latter, not all communication is good communication, not all social contexts should be encouraged or preserved, and again we converge on social conflict. And again, you don't get to create hierarchy and then argue that contrary opinions about hierarchy are invalid; "Angelus Novus is good" is conflict just as much as "Angelus Novus is bad".
...It seems to me that our current consensus understanding of "Art" is fatally poisoned. Judging by your summary of Scott's articles, it seems to me that Scott recognizes this and is trying to describe the problem.
An honest dialogue should begin with the recognition that people can have idiosyncratic or even "elitist" tastes that aren't just based on bullshit political signaling.
Why should it start there? Bullshit political signaling seems obviously endemic. I believe I have personally observed it second-hand in an academic context, and it was one of the most embittering experiences I've ever had, generating an immediate "these people are my enemies for life, and I will never forgive them" response. Why would taste outweigh the social game in our estimation of the field, given that it seems obvious that the field has been deliberately engineered to ensure that social games outweigh taste in every possible context? Something doesn't need to be the only factor to be the overwhelmingly dominant factor.
Tellingly, he does include "Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You" as one of his markers of artistic quality, but suggests that it may be "emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making." But, the authentic work of art opens up the possibility of transforming what you experience as delightful in the first place, what you experience as a "valid point" in the first place. Conceptual groundwork of this nature calls for phenomenological experiences that are multilayered and complex rather than merely "pleasant"; it calls for engagement with the world and other people.
Art shapes people, but some shapes are good and some are bad, and some ways of shaping are good and some are bad. Summitting Everest appears to be a shaping experience. Alpha Centauri's "Nerve Stapling" is also a shaping experience. I prefer one to the other, and I do not recognize diversity on this point as healthy or something to be encouraged. Neither does it seem to me that the art world actually believes in diversity being valuable in and of itself. They have, do and will police shapes and shaping methods ruthlessly to achieve their conception of the Good. It's just that their conception of the Good is obviously incompatible with mine, and their strategy for achieving it appears to involve a lot of lying and non-consensual blood-sucking.
In short, I think there's a lot of value in attempting to cleave "Art" at its many joints. A conversation of Art-as-human-universal is obviously going to go very differently than one of The-art-world-as-we-know-it. I can personally defend Angelus Novus in the former context; I'm pretty sure I won't in the latter.
Amusingly, I spent some time studying Angelus Novus in our last discussion, and so had a mental picture of the piece when arriving in this one. I checked the piece again, and the immediate impression was significantly worse that I remembered.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
If it is fiction, fiction can still make true statements about the nature of reality:
"Professor Zalzabraz the Neptunian said: 'water is made of one hydrogen and two oxygen atoms.'"
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
It seems to me that more people than ever are exploring non ET explanations.
More people than ever can be wrong. Popularity does not measure truth.
The point of all of this is that there is a very long list of observations that do not comport to known phenomenon.
Observations are often flawed in a variety of ways.
It sounds like you are bit hostile to the idea that there is something going on here that doesn’t fit neatly into our current understanding of how nature works. Why is that?
I can't speak for him, but I've observed that UFOology is a Shepherd Tone, always approaching, never arriving. At this point, I am confident that it never will arrive, and am confident enough to want to stake my position clearly. None of this is going to cash out in significant changes to consensus reality. There will be no new tech, no new avenues of research, nothing productive, just an endless series of what-ifs.
degenerate art isn't really a thing.
Child porn. Snuff films, like "funky town". The cartoons of A Wyatt Mann. If these media had broad and growing audiences and were publicly celebrated by influential people, would you take that as a sign of broad social improvement?
Suppose the following statement is true: A major driver of the BLM movement was "art" that caused Blues to vastly overestimate the number of unarmed black men killed by police, thus spurring a social movement that attacked policing as a concept, leading to acute changes in how policing was conducted. The immediate result was a massive crime wave that killed many thousands of additional black people. If this be the case, would you agree that such art was bad for society?
Are you familiar with the youtube channels where people stream themselves scratching off lotto tickets and winning big? If you discovered that a young family member was a huge fan of such videos, and was also making a habit of dumping their free cash into lotto tickets, would you suppose there was a cause-and-effect relationship there? Would you consider this development good, bad, or neutral?
Do you recognize that art can be bad for society, that art can have a bad or immoral message or effect on the viewer? If not, why not? If so, what is your term for such art, and how is it fundamentally different from "degenerate"?
Art is powerful; this seems undeniable. If art is powerful, why would you presume that it is only powerful in good ways, and not in bad ones? Is that how you observe power working in any other context, ever?
I guarantee there is a universe where you say they allowed to accelerate. One in which a mob of people attack your car and it’s either blast thru or die.
You guys know that the pedestrian who died, died by because he crashed into a vehicle which then struck her, not because he actually hit her with his car, right? And that in order to crash into that vehicle, he had to steer between a sizable crowd on either side of his vehicle?
Also, at some point I'd love to hear from someone who knows better what the grounds were for removing his defense attorney and assigning him a new one, apparently of the court's choosing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Could you provide the definition of "abolish the family" which neither the Soviet Union nor Maoist China tried or planned?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
"Exactly what do you think a compromise with sin is?"
The method by which we enjoy what prosperity remains despite absolute values-incoherence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
cultural genocide, forced assimilation and reeducation, an attempt to stamp out trans as an identity. I think it's hard to argue that this isn't happening, given that a majority of conservatives on and off this forum would openly advocate for it. There's just a root disagreement about whether it's actually a bad thing or not.
Would it be useful to compare this to the Christian Genocide, for which I am confident an equivalent and much more strongly-evidenced argument could be made? I have examples of Christians who show themselves in public being beaten by uniformed thugs while the police look the other way in Blue territory. Does that sort of thing happen to Trans people in Red territory?
Would the above argument be one you likewise see both sides of?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
You don't need to save me or anyone else, we don't want you to. Just live your own life. Other people being gay does not affect you.
This argument is a good one right up until people start blaming me for the negative consequences of your personal choices.
It seems to me that Liberalism is going away and is unlikely to return for the forseeable future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Bezos went on to elaborate that the Fortune 2 company could not operate AmazonSmile without some way to kick out the extremist organizations and that SPLC was, effectively, the only reasonable option. He asked Congress for other suggested data providers. None were offered. (No, really, he did that.)
Let us pause to acknowledge that Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, considers these two four-letter organizations as peers. One of them is created by statute, operates within constitutional and administrative-law constraints, and answers to Congress, the courts, and ultimately the people of the United States of America. It could jail Bezos, personally, for willful non-compliance. And the other is …some people in Montgomery with a very specific interest, whose decisions are subject to review by no court, and whose only power appears to be moral suasion.
Bezos was equally and entirely committed to satisfying both.
If we assume that the situation is as the author describes it, do you consider this an acceptable state of affairs?
Nothing, obviously. Blue Tribe takes a week to hit consensus on who "owns" the list, and Bob's your uncle. Not to mention that anyone who claims that the SPLC itself will in fact be got here is out over their skis. Obviously, they have broken the law and so they should be prosecuted and convicted. But that's not actually how things work, is it? Procedural outcomes are not deterministic, but rather are manipulated.
A more relevant question is whether the political system he describes is one we should be upholding and maintaining. To a first approximation, it seems to me that everything works this way, and the novel development is that things are happening fast enough that the nature of the system is weakly perceptible. Obviously, the SPLC and every other organization that cooperated with them in their regulatory push should be nuked to ash. Equally obviously, that almost certainly isn't going to happen, and if it did it would not solve the actual problem, which is that Blues fundamentally do not believe that rules constrain their desires or behavior, and do not recognize a need to share society or its mechanisms with those who disagree with them. It's neutral vs conservative all the way down.
To the extent I personally have policy preferences, I prefer the orderly administration of law. Any law we would not be willing to enforce against a sympathetic lawbreaker, a friend, or an ally is a bad law. Until a bad law is changed, it is the law. I reject a legal realism, or legal cynicism, that says that power is the only law.
The Declaration of Independence and D.C. billboards agree: No one is above the rules. We have no kings in this country.
Okay, but power is observably the only law, and anyone who doesn't recognize it at this point is either a fool or a liar. Many people observably are above the rules, and exist in this pleasant state for long periods of time. We do have kings in this country, have and very likely will. Now what?
Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.
Does Max Schaler claim to personally suffer from "Ressentiment"? Speaking generally, does anyone using the term "Ressentiment" use it to describe their own thoughts and feelings, or is this a label generally understood to be used on the thoughts and feelings of others?
Are new words exclusively intended to describe why other people are bad useful? I would argue that they usually are not.
Ressentiment persists and perseveres, it was stated, because of an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values.
impotency = lack of power, correct? So he's saying people want to realize their positive values, but can't, and so their chronic frustration curdles into "Ressentiment"?
You say the right is far more impotent than the left, but this seems straightforwardly wrong to me, because the question isn't how much power a person or group has, it's how much power they have relative to their valued end-state. If your values demand shrimp welfare or the abolition of poverty or a classless utopia giving rise to incorruptible humans who will not know greed or envy or malice, you are going to be living with "an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values", no? And in fact, can we not see abundant examples of how such frustrated values lead to "rash, at times fanatical claims of truth generated by the impotency this feeling comes from."
But what does the special word and its attendant pseudo-medicalization add to the discussion?
My understanding of the narrative was that God doesn't want the Israelites to think that it's their strength that gives them victory. There's a bunch of stories where this point is made explicitly; the entire conquest of Canaan is full of such incidents, but Gideon's army being whittled down to a fraction of its original size (and, depending on interpretation, actively selected for the worst soldiers available) is entirely about this. "The battle belongs to the Lord," and it doesn't matter how large an army Israel can muster, it's God who decides if they're going to win or lose.
It's easy for a Protestant, especially an evangelical or someone descended from the Radical Reformation, to read this and say, "Aha! Idolatry! Rome!" For that matter one might be tempted to link it to the Temple in Jerusalem, perhaps echoing Jesus' criticisms of the Temple hierarchy. (Or one might take it in a more anti-semitic direction, but I see no need to encourage people like that.)
The interpretation that seems obvious to me is that Tolkien wrote his fantasy as though it were the ancient history of our world, and being a Christian, he wrote it to be spiritually compatible with the Christian understanding of the spiritual history of our world. The Numenoreans don't build temples because in the early chronology of the Bible, God very explicitly doesn't want a temple, and they don't have churches or hierarchical religion because there's no Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) basis for it at that point in the chronology. Sure, you can make something up, but then if you're actually describing it to the reader, you're implicitly saying "this form of worship/church/Temple/institution that I made up out of whole cloth is totally theologically valid." Tolkien can't roll his own temple or church because he doesn't perceive himself to have the authority to describe such an institution and say, by authorial fiat, that this is a proper form of worship that God finds pleasing; doing that sort of thing is generally perceived to be deeply unchristian by Christians. None of this applies to paganism; it's fine to describe all sorts of fantastical methods of being wrong about God, because from a Christian perspective there's an infinity of false theologies but only one true one.
But in the midst of the land was a mountain tall and steep, and it was named the Meneltarma, the Pillar of Heaven, and upon it was a high place that was hallowed to Eru Ilúvatar, and it was open and unroofed, and no other temple or fane was there in the land of the Númenóreans.
Here, he's directly copying biblical descriptions of religious practice in era that ends with Abraham and the Patriarchs, which is roughly where these stories would presumably happen. Simple altars in a high place are an apparently-acceptable method of communion with God prior to the Abrahamic Covenant, so it's what he uses as well. The obvious corollaries for the temples of Morgoth and Sauron are Dagon and Baal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I am not fine with this, and I do not think that Aboriginal people are so congenitally incompetent that they cannot find some role, even a very humble role, in a modern economy.
Could you sketch out what a plan for an improved state of affairs looks like, then?
@gattsuru
@muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
@Primaprimaprima
Sure. It's the strong linework, and specifically what I guess might be called Economy/Confluence of line.
Strong Linework Are you familiar with Blind Contour drawing? Take a piece of paper and a pencil, pick something you want to draw, look directly at it, and while keeping your eyes fixed on it, start drawing the outlines ("contours") of your subject without looking at your paper or pencil. This will result in a really bad drawing but surprisingly good linework, because it focuses all your attention on the exact nature of the contours, going from eye > line without the usual perceptual filters that kick in when you go eye > memory > line. With no spatial points of reference, the lines get all scrambled on top of each other, but with a bit of practice the individual lines themselves get smooth, strong, confident, and the skill gained carries over to non-blind contour drawing.
I want to stress that "smooth, strong confident" aren't just arbitrary labels being deployed for glazing purposes. Compare this drawing to this drawing; to my eye the former drawing is much, much more interesting than the latter, despite the latter being far more detailed/rendered. Look at that former drawing, and try to figure out how many actual lines there are. Is that just one line?
This, incidentally, is why a lot of "fine art" linework, including angelus novus, look "childlike". When kids first grab a pencil, they have very strong linework, but no form at all. As they learn, usually they chase form, and lose the linework strength in the struggle to get control of where the lines go, and you end up with something like the daredevil drawing above, where the lines are all sorta-kinda in the right place but overall they just feel blah. To get good, they need strong lines and good control. Fine artists who focus on very simple, very strong lines with less emphasis on being in the right place feel very childlike. think of it as a game to get the most impression out of the least amount of lines. It's a game you can play yourself, and it's both a lot of fun and does a good job teaching art technique.
Here's another example, and another; you don't need a lot of lines/rendering, you need the right lines in the right places, and less can be much, much more. Any snapshot of reality includes infinite detail; one of the basic things art can be is to boil that infinity down to the minimum number of details needed to capture as much of the original image as possible, ideally triggering the viewer's own imagination to fill in the rest better than any artist ever could.
Economy/Confluence of Line
Okay, so less can be more. How much less, and how much more? Consider this stained glass piece. See how the characters' contours break them up into a relatively small number of simple shapes? Note especially how countours flow into each other; the contour lines framing the right edge of the priest's beard continue to frame the edges of his hand. there's a line running up Mary's back, up and over her head along the back of her shawl, and then down to her arm. There's another line that starts with her jaw, down her neck, and then down the whole front of her body, demarcating her cloak. Real contour lines can line up like this, but usually don't... but simplifying a bit, nudge them a bit, and you get this really pleasing confluence where one shape flows into the next. Our eyes naturally follow contour lines, and so when the contours flow into each other, the eye naturally flows around and around with them, and picks up much more of a cohesive impression of the whole of the image, rather than only focusing on one part.
Take this idea and push it a bit, and you get the art style of the animated film The Secret of Kells, where the whole point is to imitate stained glass in the character designs.
As mentioned, Mike Mignola is one of my favorite artists. If you look at his sketches, you'll see his characters often have this weird, lumpy nature, but they still feel weirdly evocative, expressive, alive. His style leans hard on economy/confluence of line. The shapes are simple, but still organic, details are strongly subordinate to the basic forms: on the Inger von Klempt sketch, note how none of the detail on her shoulder breaks the shoulder's contour, how the contour of her far arm bridges breast to hip and thigh. Note the minimal linework used to render the faces and hands. The lines aren't cleanly straight, and they're not cleanly curved; there's lots of little kinks and wiggles in them, and yet the total effect is significantly more pleasing to me than other artists dedicating themselves to the style but with more precision and detail. I think it's because the cruder linework gives an impression of detail without compromising the actual simplicity, giving the best of both worlds.
My favorite example is the cover illustration from Mignola's Art of Hellboy book. Zoom in on hellboy's face, and study the shading. Note the sort of checkerboard pattern between the shadowed blacks and the lit reds? See how that checkerboard is built out of confluence of line, and how few lines there are to build up a strong, contrasting expressive face? See how the contours flow into each other? It's amazing to me how he does so much with so little.
Now back to Angelus Novus. The painting looks like a terrible mess on first impression, but dig in and you'll see that that the whole thing is built out of strong linework and economy/confluence of line. Actually trace the lines and try to figure out how and in what order they were drawn, and you'll get a sense that the whole mess is actually built out of very simple components and rules compounding on each other. He's trading more strength for less precision than Mignola, and he's using a lot more abstraction. Some of his other pieces are more restrained and precise, some more abstract, but this idea seems like a major part of his style.
And it IS a style, and quite an effective technique. Mignola shows what one can do with it if they latch on to it and never let go; The difference between Klee and Mignola being, it seems to me, that Klee was obsessed with developing and exploring new techniques, and Mignola is obsessed with using the best of those techniques to express his ideas. Think of it like the symbiosis between science and engineering.
I don't actually like Angelus Novus much as a painting; like I said, it's a mess. I definitely don't think it's beautiful, quite the opposite in fact. The expression reminds me of the Dungeon Soup barbarian. The fingers and toes look like dicks. The overall effect is not great, IMO. But the technique it's built out of can do some absolutely amazing things, and the people who've done amazing those amazing things got it either from this painting or from similarly-goofy paintings. Even if I don't appreciate it much, it's undeniable that others did appreciate it greatly, and used it to make things that I do appreciate greatly, so I'm pretty confident there's something of actual substance there, even if I can't really grok it.
Finally, I think a lot of this discussion works a lot better if you shear away all the connotations of "Fine Art" as this grand pinnacle capstone of civilization that typifies "True Culture". This dude figured out a neat way to go about constructing a drawing. Other people built on it and made lots of neat drawings. That's how I tend to look at it; I understand that Academics would generally foam at the mouth at the idea of thinking Klee is okay but Mignola is the real shit. I'm even a bit leery of that conclusion myself, given that Mignola seems to depend on Klee. But at the end of the day, I only care about Klee at all because I love Mignola, and the Academy has too little influence on me to make me ashamed of that fact.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
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