As a note to everyone new to Manifold, "Other" is a mechanic for markets with varying possible answers. If you have shares on "Other", they get automatically split whenever new options are added
1. Because the list is not closed, we've had already the School review which was promoted from honorable mention to finalist for example. So we would always need to have the Other option if we wanted to include all options eventually
2. Because this mirrors the contest dynamics. I think the intention of posting one review a week instead of dumping them all at once is to give readers time to think, discuss and reflect on each candidate. Adding all known finalists and directing traders where to read them ahead of time undercuts this intention
3. On a related note I think this way makes each finalist its own event, and illuminates some market dynamics: we can see which contestant makes most impact as it enters the ring and so on
i ask because i think it would be kind of interesting to have all the reviews out and for people who read ahead to be able to place bets beforehand, and then see how any entry shifts in the rankings as it actually gets posted and reacted to, but i can see the intention in doing it your way as well.
(though... sorry... think 1 isn't a real issue? since you can just list all the honorable mentions and finalists in the market, and you can still keep the "other" category too if you want an option for true wildcards.)
I feel like I need to read this again, as though the thesis was more than just “these patterns are imperfect”. There is a lot of food for thought here, of which some might not want to put on their plate.
Always fascinating to see a look into design rules that I never realized were there. Complex mosaic work is especially easy to tune out the details and take in only the big picture.
Perhaps nowhere exemplifies "America’s obsession with simulacra and counterfeit reality" more than the various themed environments of Disney World. In the creation of EPCOT Center, the Morocco pavilion was the only one with artistic coordination from the representative country. Allegedly King Hassan II sent artistic envoys to design the mosaics and buildings.
I now feel prepped with the absolute surface-level-est of retentions to show up and critique those patterns. (But really, I will harbor a much deeper appreciation for the creation behind them)
Unfortunately, management of the Morocco pavilion reverted to Disney corporate sometime during the pandemic. A recent renovation of the outdoor plaza area retiled the previous mosaics with a pattern that resembles nothing so much as the nearby bathroom floor in World Showplace.
Usually, I think the Disney parks are a really well-crafted version of what they are. As someone who lived in East Hollywood and Los Feliz for six years, I loved just walking around the California Adventure park and appreciating all the nods to distinctive individual Art Deco buildings that were contemporaries of Disney's original studio.
But it's been a while since I've been to EPCOT, and the goal there is a bit more difficult.
This essay reminded me of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, who visited the Alhambra in 1922 and again in 1936. “The rhythm and rhyme” of that Moorish art “resprouted” splendidly into Escher’s work in "the regular division of the plane", now commonly called tessellation.
Thousands of words and skipped over a couple of obvious points: 1) Islamic designs, unlike most western design, is based on a hexagonal grid, with 60 degree intersections. This is because 2) All of these geometric patterns are the result of using a compass to replicate each module. As anyone who has used a compass knows, it's easy to draw a circle and then divide its circumference into 6 equal segments.
Point 1) at least is definitely an untrue overgeneralisation. The pentagonal, decagonal and octagonal symmetries, for example, quite obviously can't have a 60 degree grid underlying them.
I am not suggesting this is directly relevant to today's review, but I recall hearing something when touring one of the nationality rooms at the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh. There was a flaw in the ceiling decorations. Our guide told us this was intentional: the people of this country (I forget which) had a belief that perfection belonged to god, so artists & artisans always left an intentional flaw in their work.
I asked chatgpt about Islamic art. Chatgpt said this is a popular belief about Islamic art (intentional mistakes included to show humility before god), especially prominent in the Sufi tradition, but there is no specific theological injunction. Interestingly, "In Islamic geometric patterns, artists sometimes intentionally introduce slight variations in otherwise highly ordered designs" and "In Persian carpets, it's often said that weavers leave a 'mistake' called a gabbeh or Persian flaw—though scholars debate whether these flaws were truly intentional or just romanticized stories."
I think the correct way to put this criticism is the same way as one should rephrase "no one cares what it says on Wikipedia". The more constructive way to put either of these is "use ChatGPT and Wikipedia as your first entry into the topic for sure, but then double-check that there is in fact a source backing it up".
It’s a common myth, but usually a justification ex post. I have heard it used about everything, including an Orthodox choir of monks in which one of them did not sing in tune. But obviously you can listen to many Orthodox choirs that sing perfectly, see many many perfect designs, and the theological justification for doing something right is much more intuitive than this explanation.
I have never found an actual source for this belief (as in something that an artist said of his work), so I would be very grateful if you found one. It would sound unbelievably pretentious, though: “I could do as well as the Creator himself, but I chose not to”…
Excellent review! Mathematics, art critique, and cultural critique blended together. I loved the incorporation of Eco's essay (which is also a fantastic essay for those who haven't read it), and the incorporation of the author's own work. This is my favorite review so far this year.
I'm pretty sure that the Portuguese word "azulejo" for these tiles comes from the Arabic word "zellij" mentioned in the text! (I think the similarity to the Spanish word "azul" is mostly coincidence.)
I'm glad you touched on modern architecture at the end, because as I read this I started thinking of the opening of The Fountainhead. I'm not an architectural historian, so I don't know how accurate it is, but the claim is that a lot of classical architectural elements were copied for aesthetic reasons from older traditions where they served a functional purpose. This results in a certain lack of authenticity which only gets worse as classical elements continue to be cut and pasted without much understanding or regard for their origins. It gave me a new appreciation for modern architecture, even if I sometimes find it less appealing at first glance.
It seems that there is something similar going on in your examples, with people copying certain designs into spaces that they don't really belong, either in response to popular demand or lack of understanding on the part of the artist. The result may be superficially appealing on the surface, but once you know what to look for, you find incongruities that nag at you and can't be unseen.
The last few paragraphs reminded me of the problem we have in the recreational steamboating community: a lot of steam launches were built on traditional fishing boat bulls (these being, by definition, best suited to small craft in the local waters), but while we have plenty of period drawings of engines and boilers, there are almost no detailed drawings of these boats.
Why would anybody bother making a detailed lines plan of a boat which could be built by local craftsmen in any seaside village? The people with the education and tools to make these drawings were busy working on much larger or more avant-garde projects; by the time the boats in question were old enough to be interesting, most of them had rotted away.
It's similar to how, to my knowledge, the only extant drawings of WWI-era USRA standard steam locomotive designs exist in the hands of a private collector; as diesels came out, railroads scrapped the steam locomotives, and seem to have mostly trashed the drawings too. Who cares about "preserving" something that, until recently, was ubiquitous? By the time anybody thought to try and save some copies, most were gone.
It seems like the author is saying the same is true of architecture: the people with the education and tools to actually do the work on a large scale are uninterested in "common" designs. Why bother? They've seen them 10,000 times, they're all well-documented, any idiot can draw something symmetrical, golden ratio, blah blah blah. Never mind that, empirically, we can't build these things anymore--academically, they're stale to the sorts of people who care enough about the subject to do it for a living.
I was taught in my teens that in Islamic art, it's traditional for the artist to always introduce at least one deliberate flaw, in recognition that only Allah is perfect. I don't know if this is always rigorously followed; personally, I found the idea quite silly when I was introduced to it, because my take was that if only Allah is perfect, then the artists shouldn't have to introduced flaws into their work *on purpose* for their work to reflect that.
I feel like the review suffers though for failing to explore historical or cultural information which might contextualize the observations.
Why is that silly? For a master of a craft, it is trivial to reproduce patterns and smooth lines. Hell, it could be done with mechanical aids even back.
I feel like you’re missing something valuable. Namely, The exact cultural awareness you criticize the author for missing. The act is devotional and cultural.
I'm not saying it's not, but it can be devotional and cultural without being well thought out. My outlook was, if only Allah is perfect, then you don't have to try to make a piece of artwork imperfect. In a way, trying to introduce imperfections on purpose actually strikes me as disrespectful, like saying "if I tried to, I could make my work come out absolutely perfect, but I won't, because that would be muscling in on God's territory." Surely it'd be more respectful to God to acknowledge that he could do better, even if they're doing their best?
Geometric shapes and lines can be perfectly formed. This is a small art vs the universal.
art is a human designed form. Just as we can have a perfectly typed sentence, no grammatical errors or typos. Yes, these are imperfect mediums but within them perfect is possible. Medium eventually take an ossified form.
Introducing a known error is a nod that nothing, even ossified mediums are perfect.
I get the idea. Understanding it, I still find it silly. I've discussed this with someone who grew up Muslim (and was Muslim at the time, although he left the religion about a year later,) and when I explained my perspective on it, he agreed that when you frame it like that, it does seem kind of silly. I could go into more length on why I see it this way, but I don't think there's much point in doing that if you're going to assume that any point of disagreement must be rooted in my not understanding it.
Let’s start here. Can a human draw a perfect square? 90 degree angles and straight lines? Now consider the viewer is human and can it be close enough to fool them? Geometric shapes are a construct. I’m willing to be convinced; being told your opinion is off doesn’t mean the person is closed minded, it means they see a flaw you don’t. So… dive down to the level of geometric drawing (my question above) then build up.
I see your point, but here are a few possible counterpoints.
The imperfections are symbolic act of humility.
They're a way of acknowledging that perfection isn't only unachievable but something that should be even striven for in the first place.
They're intended for the audience, not the artist. That is, they're an instructional tool meant to teach the viewer that things made by human hands always have flaws, even if they aren't easily perceived.
I want to see this expanded. What if you use Penrose tilings? What if instead of tiling a plane, you tile a sphere or hyperbolic geometry? I'm also wondering how hard it is to make a program that can randomly generate tilings. I skimmed a lot of this, so sorry if you already answered some of that.
The last few paragraphs of this piece remind me of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Despite the title, the book is really about art, and one of his theses is that artists usually get to a point in their work where they want to send a message, but the message could be about something in the world (e.g., "poverty"), or it could be about art itself.
Did you solicit comment from the Metropolitan Museum or the artisans responsible for the works in this room? I realize it's not your central point but it does kinda feel like you are dunking on them in a way that they should be entitled to comment and notice.
A very fine review, but ... a review of Geometric patterns - seriously? All about form, none about content ... Bertolt Brecht had this fable: FORM AND FABRIC
Mr. K. was looking at a painting that gave some objects a very idiosyncratic shape. He said: "Some artists, when they look at the world, are like many philosophers. In the pursuit of form, the material gets lost. I once worked for a gardener. He handed me a pair of secateurs and told me to prune a laurel tree. The tree was in a pot and was lent out for festivities, so it had to be in the shape of a ball. I immediately began to cut off the wild shoots, but no matter how hard I tried to achieve the spherical shape, I couldn't do it for a long time. Once I had cut off too much on one side, once on the other. When it finally became a ball, it was very small. The gardener said disappointed: 'Well, that's the ball, but where's the laurel?"
Good review, but art is just boring. I would've liked it more if it started with the Syria anecdote and devolved into other topics. But that's just to say I wanted it to not be an art review
I think there's something that is missing from this review that surprised me, which is the motivation behind the process. The review takes the perspective of the modern artist seeking aesthetic for its own sake, which is fair enough, as I assume that's the author's own viewpoint. But if we are interested in why the tradition seems to be broken in the modern day to increasingly greater degrees, I think it's worth reconsidering why the tradition exists in the first place.
For the Islamic artist, the process itself glorifies God by exploring the emergent harmonies of mathematics. The line that is telling here is the note that the design emerges 'like magic' from a relatively simple set of principles. I.e., it is a sign of a God who reveals Himself through the beauty of His creation, and the highest order of that creation (this being the Platonic influence creeping in) exists not in the material, natural world but instead in the abstract world of ideas and form. Through the process, the artist instantiates the beauty of mathematics into the natural world, thus creating a window through which the divine light might captivate observers. The more you study it, the more apparent this becomes. It is the regularity and systematicity itself that is the key here, not the mere fact of being beautiful -- the fact that the regularity and systematicity can reliably reproduce beauty is the thing that seems oddly divine.
So, where does this leave us with regard to the modern tradition, and with regard to the Eco essay? I think it's clear that the underlying motivation is no longer animating the process, at least as applied in the Met room, and instead it is mere craft. The artisans are most likely Muslims, to be sure, but to what extent are they concerned with this original motivating force versus the desire to simply uphold an ancient tradition and create pretty objects that testify to the glory of their people and their history? The willingness to disregard the fundamental principles of the art seems to indicate the latter, to me. A piece of craftsmanship is good when it is perceived as beautiful and meets the needs of the customer. A piece of sacred art *cannot* be good if it undermines the very thing that is meant to be divine.
What distinguishes great art from craft is that great art is not simply an attempt to create a beautiful object, it is an argument about *what is beautiful*. It says look, here is the wellspring of beauty, and if you are attentive, and if you care, you too can see what I see, you too can learn why I loved this thing more than all the other things.
Going back to our arguments about the modern architects from this lens, the idea that a layperson finds X thing beautiful is not particularly interesting to them if they are trying to be artists rather than craftsmen. The question is what their building says about the nature of beauty (and this is why the class signaling argument is both wrong and correct at the same time -- it's not profane signaling, but it is a form of aesthetic signaling that is making an argument that the austere and the simple can be beautiful)
This is a fascinating point, although once we open this topic I can’t help but ask, if this conjecture of “art to craftsmanship” is true, when and how did this transition happen? Were the medieval craftsmen just more erudite in theology? Did come from different social strata than their modern counterparts? Was there a break in the passing down of traditions or did the knowledge just get gradually lost without a scripture holding it together? Etc etc. All just to say that I have no idea *who* created the medieval patterns and *who* was in charge of making sure the underlying theological implications were sound. To establish that probably requires a more historical/sociological investigation of the pattern-making process, not just the patterns themselves.
You're asking great questions and ones I'm unfortunately not capable of answering, as to some extent I am extrapolating from things I know about Catholic art which (obviously) cannot be perfectly mapped onto this. That said, I would suspect that it's a combination of two things. First, in the medieval era, skilled artisans were a very elevated class. In a world where nearly everyone is involved in food production, the people who *aren't* involved in food production are all part of a relatively elite segment of the population, even if the true elites are of course much more exalted than the artisans.
But also, even if they themselves weren't more learned in theology, their patrons (and whoever the patrons had overseeing the project in their stead) certainly would've been more learned in theology than the patrons are today. A door leading to a madrasa must, of course, satisfy Islamic scholars who teach at the madrasa.
Indeed my instincts are also that, for designers to all agree to adhere to a set of not immediately discernible rules (at least not easily discernible without first being told about them), there must be a class of critics judging and enforcing those rules, often consisting of both the designers/craftsmen themselves and patrons/connoisseurs. This is the pattern behind almost every artistic form that has been distilled and perfected so quite reasonable to venture a guess that that also applies here.
One other relevant point is that iconic depictions are frowned on in many Islamic traditions (though there are clearly some, particularly in South Asia, that do depict nature and even humans).
>As a final thought, I wonder if this experience is generalizable. The debate over the virtue or vice of modern architecture has been going on for years on ACX, and one of the baffling knots that Scott has tried to untangle is: what is going on with architects? Why are their tastes so different from the laypeople?
As victim, I found it fascinating how many architecture students who loved classical aesthetics become thoroughly brainwashed into modern aesthetics at architecture school. In no small response to fact that architects generally has to work with the dominant building systems of the era, which is steel + concrete + prefabricated cladding. One learns to love and celebrate modernity through Stockholm syndrome. Many architecture students delude / post rationalize modernism aesthetics to a degree, in no small response to fact that they had to work with it out of economic necessity. There's boutique firms and programs who can still build traditional / vernacular buildings at exorbitant prices, but they're luxury products, the kind necessarily not viable for mass consumption.
Like many things, "culture" is a second level manifestation of economic and industrial realities. Old housing typologies and building methods are not viable in the age of modern building materials and technology. Same commodification + value engineering forces behind everything we manufacture as process matures. It doesn't help that because building are still (relatively) durable objects, changes in the building industry are extremely conservative once new materials are locked in.
Ornamentation that genpop loves to wank over may come back once it can be done cheaply at scale, labour for such things are cost prohibitive unless you have a pool of underclass or willing to wait decades. It's why modern architecture focus on structural details, the kind of component assembling with very little "craft" but still expresses craftsmanship and a builders expertise. It's also much easier to draft... both by hand and CAD/computers. The 100 year switch over to unified blueprints that has to be copied and distributed in increasingly fast turn over rates for expedited construction incentivized away from intricate detail work. Bezier curves are hard, it gets filtered out by designers/producers who don't want to do hard things. So you get strange angles instead, because it's easy to rotate in software... and software snapping is satisfying.
You say this all as if it's negative, but I think it's exactly the positive point that the review is putting forward. Each tradition of art has its own creative process, and when you understand it and work within it (rather than against it), it creates its own beauty. When the materials and process change, so does the decorative style. It's not that you get "brainwashed" into liking modernist aesthetics - it's that you see why modernist aesthetics make sense for modern materials and methods, and you still appreciate the traditional aesthetics, but only when done with the traditional materials and methods, and not when slapped on as a superficial decoration.
Really good! I was already seeing most of it as a response to a lot of Scott's recent posts on modern art and architecture, so it was good to see it brought out explicitly at the end.
I think there's a general issue with any skilled tradition, whether it's an art or a craft or a science or a humanity. The practitioners develop a deep sense of what matters and what is valuable in the tradition, but they also explore the space of what is possible with the current methods, and find it to be exhausted, and seek out novelty. The masses may sometimes appreciate the productions (particularly when they become familiar) but doesn't experience the exhaustion, and doesn't see the motivation for the new movements. If the practitioners have no outside feedback, they can go off in a spiral in directions that really don't matter to anyone else. But if their primary feedback is from the masses, then they never develop the sophisticated understanding of what is valuable in the tradition - they just aim for a superficial interest.
What seems to be essential is an interlocking culture of many such traditions, each interacting with the ones adjacent to it, keeping each other grounded in something of external meaning, but supportive of experimental new directions, and particularly the ones that do have something to contribute to other specialists, and thus indirectly to everyone else.
You sometimes get excesses, like dada and postmodernism and string theory, but they usually get pulled back by their neighbors.
The only criticism I had is that I don't think I ever see "literati" in the singular - I felt like it had to be "literatus", but that seemed even wronger.
Very Impressive.
As always, I'm here with the manifold market for who the contest winner will be. This one seems like a strong contender!
https://manifold.markets/BayesianTom/who-will-win-acxs-everythingexceptb
As a note to everyone new to Manifold, "Other" is a mechanic for markets with varying possible answers. If you have shares on "Other", they get automatically split whenever new options are added
curious why you've decided to do it this way when Scott has already posted the list of finalists?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-387
1. Because the list is not closed, we've had already the School review which was promoted from honorable mention to finalist for example. So we would always need to have the Other option if we wanted to include all options eventually
2. Because this mirrors the contest dynamics. I think the intention of posting one review a week instead of dumping them all at once is to give readers time to think, discuss and reflect on each candidate. Adding all known finalists and directing traders where to read them ahead of time undercuts this intention
3. On a related note I think this way makes each finalist its own event, and illuminates some market dynamics: we can see which contestant makes most impact as it enters the ring and so on
cool, thanks for explaining.
i ask because i think it would be kind of interesting to have all the reviews out and for people who read ahead to be able to place bets beforehand, and then see how any entry shifts in the rankings as it actually gets posted and reacted to, but i can see the intention in doing it your way as well.
(though... sorry... think 1 isn't a real issue? since you can just list all the honorable mentions and finalists in the market, and you can still keep the "other" category too if you want an option for true wildcards.)
I feel like I need to read this again, as though the thesis was more than just “these patterns are imperfect”. There is a lot of food for thought here, of which some might not want to put on their plate.
Always fascinating to see a look into design rules that I never realized were there. Complex mosaic work is especially easy to tune out the details and take in only the big picture.
Perhaps nowhere exemplifies "America’s obsession with simulacra and counterfeit reality" more than the various themed environments of Disney World. In the creation of EPCOT Center, the Morocco pavilion was the only one with artistic coordination from the representative country. Allegedly King Hassan II sent artistic envoys to design the mosaics and buildings.
I now feel prepped with the absolute surface-level-est of retentions to show up and critique those patterns. (But really, I will harbor a much deeper appreciation for the creation behind them)
Thanks for the post!
Unfortunately, management of the Morocco pavilion reverted to Disney corporate sometime during the pandemic. A recent renovation of the outdoor plaza area retiled the previous mosaics with a pattern that resembles nothing so much as the nearby bathroom floor in World Showplace.
The original King Hassan II-approved mosaic, photographed in 2016: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GOoihoOa8AACGMo.jpg
The tragic new look: https://media.wdwnt.com/2024/05/wdw-epcot-morocco-tiles-IMG_3176.jpg
Oh no! They went to Home Depot!
How stupid it is when people cannot renovate without destroying things, cutting down trees, etc.
it’s weird to me that people who are in theory, talented, have no talent for designing within constraints.
Wow, that is tragic!
Usually, I think the Disney parks are a really well-crafted version of what they are. As someone who lived in East Hollywood and Los Feliz for six years, I loved just walking around the California Adventure park and appreciating all the nods to distinctive individual Art Deco buildings that were contemporaries of Disney's original studio.
But it's been a while since I've been to EPCOT, and the goal there is a bit more difficult.
This essay reminded me of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, who visited the Alhambra in 1922 and again in 1936. “The rhythm and rhyme” of that Moorish art “resprouted” splendidly into Escher’s work in "the regular division of the plane", now commonly called tessellation.
Thousands of words and skipped over a couple of obvious points: 1) Islamic designs, unlike most western design, is based on a hexagonal grid, with 60 degree intersections. This is because 2) All of these geometric patterns are the result of using a compass to replicate each module. As anyone who has used a compass knows, it's easy to draw a circle and then divide its circumference into 6 equal segments.
Point 1) at least is definitely an untrue overgeneralisation. The pentagonal, decagonal and octagonal symmetries, for example, quite obviously can't have a 60 degree grid underlying them.
I am not suggesting this is directly relevant to today's review, but I recall hearing something when touring one of the nationality rooms at the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh. There was a flaw in the ceiling decorations. Our guide told us this was intentional: the people of this country (I forget which) had a belief that perfection belonged to god, so artists & artisans always left an intentional flaw in their work.
I asked chatgpt about Islamic art. Chatgpt said this is a popular belief about Islamic art (intentional mistakes included to show humility before god), especially prominent in the Sufi tradition, but there is no specific theological injunction. Interestingly, "In Islamic geometric patterns, artists sometimes intentionally introduce slight variations in otherwise highly ordered designs" and "In Persian carpets, it's often said that weavers leave a 'mistake' called a gabbeh or Persian flaw—though scholars debate whether these flaws were truly intentional or just romanticized stories."
Nobody cares about what ChatGPT said. If we were, we would just go and use the product. Get your mind out of the gutter.
This does not seem kind to me. Could you state your thesis more generally, so I can decide if it's necessary or true?
I think the correct way to put this criticism is the same way as one should rephrase "no one cares what it says on Wikipedia". The more constructive way to put either of these is "use ChatGPT and Wikipedia as your first entry into the topic for sure, but then double-check that there is in fact a source backing it up".
It’s a common myth, but usually a justification ex post. I have heard it used about everything, including an Orthodox choir of monks in which one of them did not sing in tune. But obviously you can listen to many Orthodox choirs that sing perfectly, see many many perfect designs, and the theological justification for doing something right is much more intuitive than this explanation.
I have never found an actual source for this belief (as in something that an artist said of his work), so I would be very grateful if you found one. It would sound unbelievably pretentious, though: “I could do as well as the Creator himself, but I chose not to”…
Excellent review! Mathematics, art critique, and cultural critique blended together. I loved the incorporation of Eco's essay (which is also a fantastic essay for those who haven't read it), and the incorporation of the author's own work. This is my favorite review so far this year.
I enjoyed this very much, maybe I can get a round of Azul going again this weekend.
I'm pretty sure that the Portuguese word "azulejo" for these tiles comes from the Arabic word "zellij" mentioned in the text! (I think the similarity to the Spanish word "azul" is mostly coincidence.)
https://www.britannica.com/art/azulejo
I'm glad you touched on modern architecture at the end, because as I read this I started thinking of the opening of The Fountainhead. I'm not an architectural historian, so I don't know how accurate it is, but the claim is that a lot of classical architectural elements were copied for aesthetic reasons from older traditions where they served a functional purpose. This results in a certain lack of authenticity which only gets worse as classical elements continue to be cut and pasted without much understanding or regard for their origins. It gave me a new appreciation for modern architecture, even if I sometimes find it less appealing at first glance.
It seems that there is something similar going on in your examples, with people copying certain designs into spaces that they don't really belong, either in response to popular demand or lack of understanding on the part of the artist. The result may be superficially appealing on the surface, but once you know what to look for, you find incongruities that nag at you and can't be unseen.
A fun and simple Islamic tile generator: https://tilemaker.qfi.org/
That was pretty fun! http://tilemaker.qfi.org/gallery?id=25769
The last few paragraphs reminded me of the problem we have in the recreational steamboating community: a lot of steam launches were built on traditional fishing boat bulls (these being, by definition, best suited to small craft in the local waters), but while we have plenty of period drawings of engines and boilers, there are almost no detailed drawings of these boats.
Why would anybody bother making a detailed lines plan of a boat which could be built by local craftsmen in any seaside village? The people with the education and tools to make these drawings were busy working on much larger or more avant-garde projects; by the time the boats in question were old enough to be interesting, most of them had rotted away.
It's similar to how, to my knowledge, the only extant drawings of WWI-era USRA standard steam locomotive designs exist in the hands of a private collector; as diesels came out, railroads scrapped the steam locomotives, and seem to have mostly trashed the drawings too. Who cares about "preserving" something that, until recently, was ubiquitous? By the time anybody thought to try and save some copies, most were gone.
It seems like the author is saying the same is true of architecture: the people with the education and tools to actually do the work on a large scale are uninterested in "common" designs. Why bother? They've seen them 10,000 times, they're all well-documented, any idiot can draw something symmetrical, golden ratio, blah blah blah. Never mind that, empirically, we can't build these things anymore--academically, they're stale to the sorts of people who care enough about the subject to do it for a living.
I was taught in my teens that in Islamic art, it's traditional for the artist to always introduce at least one deliberate flaw, in recognition that only Allah is perfect. I don't know if this is always rigorously followed; personally, I found the idea quite silly when I was introduced to it, because my take was that if only Allah is perfect, then the artists shouldn't have to introduced flaws into their work *on purpose* for their work to reflect that.
I feel like the review suffers though for failing to explore historical or cultural information which might contextualize the observations.
Why is that silly? For a master of a craft, it is trivial to reproduce patterns and smooth lines. Hell, it could be done with mechanical aids even back.
I feel like you’re missing something valuable. Namely, The exact cultural awareness you criticize the author for missing. The act is devotional and cultural.
I'm not saying it's not, but it can be devotional and cultural without being well thought out. My outlook was, if only Allah is perfect, then you don't have to try to make a piece of artwork imperfect. In a way, trying to introduce imperfections on purpose actually strikes me as disrespectful, like saying "if I tried to, I could make my work come out absolutely perfect, but I won't, because that would be muscling in on God's territory." Surely it'd be more respectful to God to acknowledge that he could do better, even if they're doing their best?
Geometric shapes and lines can be perfectly formed. This is a small art vs the universal.
art is a human designed form. Just as we can have a perfectly typed sentence, no grammatical errors or typos. Yes, these are imperfect mediums but within them perfect is possible. Medium eventually take an ossified form.
Introducing a known error is a nod that nothing, even ossified mediums are perfect.
If you don’t get that, keep calling people silly.
I get the idea. Understanding it, I still find it silly. I've discussed this with someone who grew up Muslim (and was Muslim at the time, although he left the religion about a year later,) and when I explained my perspective on it, he agreed that when you frame it like that, it does seem kind of silly. I could go into more length on why I see it this way, but I don't think there's much point in doing that if you're going to assume that any point of disagreement must be rooted in my not understanding it.
Legit try me.
Let’s start here. Can a human draw a perfect square? 90 degree angles and straight lines? Now consider the viewer is human and can it be close enough to fool them? Geometric shapes are a construct. I’m willing to be convinced; being told your opinion is off doesn’t mean the person is closed minded, it means they see a flaw you don’t. So… dive down to the level of geometric drawing (my question above) then build up.
I see your point, but here are a few possible counterpoints.
The imperfections are symbolic act of humility.
They're a way of acknowledging that perfection isn't only unachievable but something that should be even striven for in the first place.
They're intended for the audience, not the artist. That is, they're an instructional tool meant to teach the viewer that things made by human hands always have flaws, even if they aren't easily perceived.
I want to see this expanded. What if you use Penrose tilings? What if instead of tiling a plane, you tile a sphere or hyperbolic geometry? I'm also wondering how hard it is to make a program that can randomly generate tilings. I skimmed a lot of this, so sorry if you already answered some of that.
"So, I asked ChatGPT to make a Moroccan Court...."
The last few paragraphs of this piece remind me of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Despite the title, the book is really about art, and one of his theses is that artists usually get to a point in their work where they want to send a message, but the message could be about something in the world (e.g., "poverty"), or it could be about art itself.
Did you solicit comment from the Metropolitan Museum or the artisans responsible for the works in this room? I realize it's not your central point but it does kinda feel like you are dunking on them in a way that they should be entitled to comment and notice.
A very fine review, but ... a review of Geometric patterns - seriously? All about form, none about content ... Bertolt Brecht had this fable: FORM AND FABRIC
Mr. K. was looking at a painting that gave some objects a very idiosyncratic shape. He said: "Some artists, when they look at the world, are like many philosophers. In the pursuit of form, the material gets lost. I once worked for a gardener. He handed me a pair of secateurs and told me to prune a laurel tree. The tree was in a pot and was lent out for festivities, so it had to be in the shape of a ball. I immediately began to cut off the wild shoots, but no matter how hard I tried to achieve the spherical shape, I couldn't do it for a long time. Once I had cut off too much on one side, once on the other. When it finally became a ball, it was very small. The gardener said disappointed: 'Well, that's the ball, but where's the laurel?"
Good review, but art is just boring. I would've liked it more if it started with the Syria anecdote and devolved into other topics. But that's just to say I wanted it to not be an art review
I think there's something that is missing from this review that surprised me, which is the motivation behind the process. The review takes the perspective of the modern artist seeking aesthetic for its own sake, which is fair enough, as I assume that's the author's own viewpoint. But if we are interested in why the tradition seems to be broken in the modern day to increasingly greater degrees, I think it's worth reconsidering why the tradition exists in the first place.
For the Islamic artist, the process itself glorifies God by exploring the emergent harmonies of mathematics. The line that is telling here is the note that the design emerges 'like magic' from a relatively simple set of principles. I.e., it is a sign of a God who reveals Himself through the beauty of His creation, and the highest order of that creation (this being the Platonic influence creeping in) exists not in the material, natural world but instead in the abstract world of ideas and form. Through the process, the artist instantiates the beauty of mathematics into the natural world, thus creating a window through which the divine light might captivate observers. The more you study it, the more apparent this becomes. It is the regularity and systematicity itself that is the key here, not the mere fact of being beautiful -- the fact that the regularity and systematicity can reliably reproduce beauty is the thing that seems oddly divine.
So, where does this leave us with regard to the modern tradition, and with regard to the Eco essay? I think it's clear that the underlying motivation is no longer animating the process, at least as applied in the Met room, and instead it is mere craft. The artisans are most likely Muslims, to be sure, but to what extent are they concerned with this original motivating force versus the desire to simply uphold an ancient tradition and create pretty objects that testify to the glory of their people and their history? The willingness to disregard the fundamental principles of the art seems to indicate the latter, to me. A piece of craftsmanship is good when it is perceived as beautiful and meets the needs of the customer. A piece of sacred art *cannot* be good if it undermines the very thing that is meant to be divine.
What distinguishes great art from craft is that great art is not simply an attempt to create a beautiful object, it is an argument about *what is beautiful*. It says look, here is the wellspring of beauty, and if you are attentive, and if you care, you too can see what I see, you too can learn why I loved this thing more than all the other things.
Going back to our arguments about the modern architects from this lens, the idea that a layperson finds X thing beautiful is not particularly interesting to them if they are trying to be artists rather than craftsmen. The question is what their building says about the nature of beauty (and this is why the class signaling argument is both wrong and correct at the same time -- it's not profane signaling, but it is a form of aesthetic signaling that is making an argument that the austere and the simple can be beautiful)
This is a fascinating point, although once we open this topic I can’t help but ask, if this conjecture of “art to craftsmanship” is true, when and how did this transition happen? Were the medieval craftsmen just more erudite in theology? Did come from different social strata than their modern counterparts? Was there a break in the passing down of traditions or did the knowledge just get gradually lost without a scripture holding it together? Etc etc. All just to say that I have no idea *who* created the medieval patterns and *who* was in charge of making sure the underlying theological implications were sound. To establish that probably requires a more historical/sociological investigation of the pattern-making process, not just the patterns themselves.
You're asking great questions and ones I'm unfortunately not capable of answering, as to some extent I am extrapolating from things I know about Catholic art which (obviously) cannot be perfectly mapped onto this. That said, I would suspect that it's a combination of two things. First, in the medieval era, skilled artisans were a very elevated class. In a world where nearly everyone is involved in food production, the people who *aren't* involved in food production are all part of a relatively elite segment of the population, even if the true elites are of course much more exalted than the artisans.
But also, even if they themselves weren't more learned in theology, their patrons (and whoever the patrons had overseeing the project in their stead) certainly would've been more learned in theology than the patrons are today. A door leading to a madrasa must, of course, satisfy Islamic scholars who teach at the madrasa.
Indeed my instincts are also that, for designers to all agree to adhere to a set of not immediately discernible rules (at least not easily discernible without first being told about them), there must be a class of critics judging and enforcing those rules, often consisting of both the designers/craftsmen themselves and patrons/connoisseurs. This is the pattern behind almost every artistic form that has been distilled and perfected so quite reasonable to venture a guess that that also applies here.
One other relevant point is that iconic depictions are frowned on in many Islamic traditions (though there are clearly some, particularly in South Asia, that do depict nature and even humans).
>As a final thought, I wonder if this experience is generalizable. The debate over the virtue or vice of modern architecture has been going on for years on ACX, and one of the baffling knots that Scott has tried to untangle is: what is going on with architects? Why are their tastes so different from the laypeople?
As victim, I found it fascinating how many architecture students who loved classical aesthetics become thoroughly brainwashed into modern aesthetics at architecture school. In no small response to fact that architects generally has to work with the dominant building systems of the era, which is steel + concrete + prefabricated cladding. One learns to love and celebrate modernity through Stockholm syndrome. Many architecture students delude / post rationalize modernism aesthetics to a degree, in no small response to fact that they had to work with it out of economic necessity. There's boutique firms and programs who can still build traditional / vernacular buildings at exorbitant prices, but they're luxury products, the kind necessarily not viable for mass consumption.
Like many things, "culture" is a second level manifestation of economic and industrial realities. Old housing typologies and building methods are not viable in the age of modern building materials and technology. Same commodification + value engineering forces behind everything we manufacture as process matures. It doesn't help that because building are still (relatively) durable objects, changes in the building industry are extremely conservative once new materials are locked in.
Ornamentation that genpop loves to wank over may come back once it can be done cheaply at scale, labour for such things are cost prohibitive unless you have a pool of underclass or willing to wait decades. It's why modern architecture focus on structural details, the kind of component assembling with very little "craft" but still expresses craftsmanship and a builders expertise. It's also much easier to draft... both by hand and CAD/computers. The 100 year switch over to unified blueprints that has to be copied and distributed in increasingly fast turn over rates for expedited construction incentivized away from intricate detail work. Bezier curves are hard, it gets filtered out by designers/producers who don't want to do hard things. So you get strange angles instead, because it's easy to rotate in software... and software snapping is satisfying.
You say this all as if it's negative, but I think it's exactly the positive point that the review is putting forward. Each tradition of art has its own creative process, and when you understand it and work within it (rather than against it), it creates its own beauty. When the materials and process change, so does the decorative style. It's not that you get "brainwashed" into liking modernist aesthetics - it's that you see why modernist aesthetics make sense for modern materials and methods, and you still appreciate the traditional aesthetics, but only when done with the traditional materials and methods, and not when slapped on as a superficial decoration.
Really good! I was already seeing most of it as a response to a lot of Scott's recent posts on modern art and architecture, so it was good to see it brought out explicitly at the end.
I think there's a general issue with any skilled tradition, whether it's an art or a craft or a science or a humanity. The practitioners develop a deep sense of what matters and what is valuable in the tradition, but they also explore the space of what is possible with the current methods, and find it to be exhausted, and seek out novelty. The masses may sometimes appreciate the productions (particularly when they become familiar) but doesn't experience the exhaustion, and doesn't see the motivation for the new movements. If the practitioners have no outside feedback, they can go off in a spiral in directions that really don't matter to anyone else. But if their primary feedback is from the masses, then they never develop the sophisticated understanding of what is valuable in the tradition - they just aim for a superficial interest.
What seems to be essential is an interlocking culture of many such traditions, each interacting with the ones adjacent to it, keeping each other grounded in something of external meaning, but supportive of experimental new directions, and particularly the ones that do have something to contribute to other specialists, and thus indirectly to everyone else.
You sometimes get excesses, like dada and postmodernism and string theory, but they usually get pulled back by their neighbors.
The only criticism I had is that I don't think I ever see "literati" in the singular - I felt like it had to be "literatus", but that seemed even wronger.