It is interesting that you brought up that piece of art. I believe Grosser is making a statement about many things, including derivative and decorative art. The work Scott Blake is making here is all of that and more. The Chuck Close Filter is derivative, decorative and exploitive.

Scott Blake created an optical mixing filter. Nothing more.  In fact, he didn’t even create that. The algorithm for that filter was created by a student at MIT over 10 years ago.

Scott Blake needs to give it up and go away.

I think Close’s legal argument for a lawsuit was purely based on copyright, and protecting his name, but I hope he goes further and tries to establish trade dress (a form of trademark which protected Eames from knock-offs) so that his family can protect him from Blake’s nonsense in a 100 years.

Close’s tile painting appear as the furthest thing from pixels if you see them in a gallery as opposed to a book or on a computer monitor, and comparing Blake’s output is indeed trivializing.

It frustrates me that for as little as he seems to understand Close’s work he still is trying to hide behind the rhetoric that he is an “artist,” which is frankly the only leg he has to stand on. If this was some soft drink company that created a free “Chuck Close Yourself App” as a promotion they would be rightfully criticized.

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A filter is not art in itself, what you do with that filter is the art. A computer is a tool as well, a very powerful tool, but a tool nonetheless.

I and millions of others disagree with this in principle if not in fact.  I have never heard anyone make any kind of argument — let alone a convincing one — why software should not be considered a valid artistic medium.

Computers are tools, but tools can be art.   If sculpture is an art (it is uncontroversially an art) then obviously one can make a sculpture that is a work of art and is also a computer (or hammer or band saw or any other kind of tool).

Can you actually explain why you think a filter cannot be art? Saying “it is a tool” does not help because tools can clearly be art. But that is your only argument so far.

Any plug-in using this style should not only bear Close’s name, the money should flow to him.

How about the estate of Salvador Dali instead since he was doing painted pixel art years before Close?

Or how about Monet?  If I had to pick an artist who made the biggest contribution to pixel-based art it would probably be Monet.

Are you starting to see the trouble with “copyright” and “trademark” when it comes to style?

Naah, I think I prefer the world where anyone I disagree with on IP matters is a smelly, ugly, immoral thief.  If I acknowledged the humanity of people with whom I disagree then I’d probably have to reconsider my own views, moderate them — perhaps even have to admit that I had been wrong or *gasp* apologize to someone whose opinion I had dismissed simply because it disagreed with mine.

Thinking about moral issues instead of leaping to snap judgments, cooperating and compromising with folks whose values differ from mine…that sounds like an awful lot of hard work.  It’s way easier just to call people “cheats” or “thieves” or “monsters” when they disagree with me on moral issues.

However, Scott Blake is not making something of his own through the
style/appearance of Close’s work.

This gets into the debate about whether algorithms and data structures can be works of art in their own right.  I’ve heard absolutely no arguments as to why they shouldn’t be.  Furthermore, since the algorithms and data structures don’t themselves look like Chuck Close’s work one has to strain a little to even call Blake’s work “derivative”.  “Inspired by”, sure, but as we know from the movies “inspired by true events” that doesn’t mean very much.

He needs to realize that he is sampling too much. Naming it after the artist you are sampling doesn’t make it better.

Again, he’s not sampling at all.  The original works are 2-dimensional graphical works.  Blake’s work is a completely abstract patch of computer code.  What Blake has done is different in kind to what Close did. 

Naming it after the artist doesn’t make it better, but unless you believe words are magic it doesn’t make it any worse either.

And in this case, the idea is “impressionism done poorly” so who even cares?

I think Cory’s being used on this one.

What an obnoxious and condescending attitude. When someone you think is cool has an opinion you disagree with that person is “being used.” It can’t possibly be a legitimate difference of opinion, because if that were the case you wouldn’t feel justified in being so self-righteous about it.

Can we consider the machine art, or only the paint-on-canvas objects that it produces? He puts the robot on exhibition, not just the resulting paintings.

The genius of Close was that he and his assistants made photorealistic paintings during the late 20th century heyday of centralized mass media. In good postmodernist form, it called attention to the importance of craft/style and process over ideal and product. His paralysis and prosopagnosia add pathos to the project, but they don’t change the historically situated point of it.

Blake’s work is the next step. He calls attention to the naivete of early pomo “returns to form.” That is, is doesn’t matter how realistically or stylishly you paint in your little squares: these days, a computer will do it for you. So where does that leave artists? What is the point of developing a special style when a plug-in can emulate it for anyone who wants to try it on?

I have no sympathy for Close. He and his formalist cohorts (e.g. Warhol, Hirst) knew what they were getting into when they chose to comment on contemporary aesthetic ecology rather than something more transcendent. On the upside, it made them fantastically rich (for artists), because everyone is increasingly involved in the recursive media milieu. On the downside, it’s a crowded and mutable area of inquiry that kills its darlings as a matter of course.

But congratulations on all of your press coverage by riding his fame/name.