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i am SO glad you noticed that the diamond shape lacked the depth a cartesian plane has, and made a square based on that amazing work

thought this was going to be about classifying art styles, but it went way, way deeper even manadged to hit my linguistics hyperfixation, damn

I really like this! I would also argue that all art is also symbolic, much like how you say all art is also abstract. As an example, even very formal pieces like the Mona Lisa have symbolic meaning within the context in which they were made (likely a portrait of a wealthy woman, the commission of which was an indicator of wealth and importance), and the context in which we view them now (one of the most famous pieces of art in the world, likely the first thing a lot of people think of when asked to come up with literally any famous artwork.) This graph works great for classifying art pieces without the context they're in, which I think works just fine for the purpose of evaluating just the visual language of a piece, but it's interesting to me how quickly the symbolism leaks in as soon as you consider the context of the piece. Another example is Jeff Koons' balloon animal pieces, which you place nearly as far from the symbolism end of the axis as can be, but while Koons probably meant that piece to be saying nothing in particular, it does say something in its wider context: it's kitsch art, it's commentary by way of using expensive and heavy materials to make a representation of an object that is in reality cheap and easy to destroy, and it's something asserting itself as Art that wouldn't necessarily usually be considered Art. That's the symbolism of it in the same way that Beat the Whites' symbolism has to do with its Bolshevik context, although in the latter case the symbolism is inside the work itself. Actually, now that I've typed that all out, I guess you can read the graph as that symbolism isn't ABSENT on the abstract end of the graph, but the symbolism itself is abstracted--it requires more of the viewer to find and interpret it. Similar to how appreciating purely nonrepresentational abstract art requires the viewer to bring themselves to the work to engage with it, a piece with abstracted symbolism (where the symbolism comes from the piece's context rather than the work itself) requires the viewer to have more context for the work in order to appreciate what it actually symbolizes. Great video! Made me think, obviously.

For anyone interested in the overlap of graphic design and philosophy I highly recommend the series of comic book introductions to philosophers you can find most of them on archive

your redesign of modern metaphysics looks like a programming book to me. it has a weird nostalgic feeling that makes me think about being in the computer books section of Borders Books back in the early 2000s. interesting video. no clue why i'm here, but here i am.

Love! Videos about book covers.

very interesting video

Awesome video and great recommendations! I hold book covers in the same regard as a movie poster, an image that best conveys the essence of the book/movie in an iconographic way. Phenomenology of the Human Spirit’s minimalist yellow cover and Hobbes Leviathan’s red cover is what I envision as a philosophy book. For novels, the black penguin classics are my go to. For Greek philosophers I specifically seek out Oxford world classics. I never agreed with the idea of “don’t judge a book by its cover”, a cover is a part of the reading experience.

I had to check the thumbnail again because I have 2 philosophy textbooks with the exact same cover, but neither are the ones in the video lol

Loved that Scott McCloud Look

great video, thank you!

15:19 The underlining is actually perfectly consistent; one line for the author and one line for the title.

nice

That the Freud Reader has a throbbing red phallic shape with the word GAY right on the front is just...so good

01:56 That's a very elaborate book cover to to show as an example of a 'plain; book cover. The hand scoring and detailing definitely indicate that there was an artistic vision for book covers like this. Don't mean to come across as rude but it is a nit I wanted to pick.

Fascinating. At first I thought it was too focused on painting, but by the end I see that it can cover not only visual art but other forms such as music. Thanks for this exploration!

could you please add timestamps

the order should be reversed I guess? 2:47

I think pollock’s art is more iconic than you give it credit for. A large part of his painting style was in the way that it represented the literal motions he performed above the canvas, which in my mind divorces it from pure abstraction in a sense of representing his physical motions iconically

Have you sent this to Scott McCloud? I wonder what he thinks.

This needs to be published in an academic journal

I really amazing, thank you for sharing this great content! subbed! :)

Secondly, while I like Scott McCloud's works, he struggles with going from what a comic does and what a movie does. He focuses very closely on the boundary between comic book frames. The move from one boundary to the next however powerful such graphics tend to be are just that flipping the page of the comic. So we are bound to 'pages' and printing historical traditions and habits to explain what we see. Once off the page what connects the comic pages? Mostly words though there are almost wordless comics out there. Even more, wordless, are photo books. The most wordless might have page numbers, or just photo prints. So why do words lift off the paper of photo books? What is that detachment all about? There is always a whole of consciousness brought to even the least wordy of such projects. Or said another way we know consciousness has limits such as illusions or psychosis, etc., what is going on that we mainly know the world scene as a whole? So pages that break up a whole like books how does that compare to vast databanks of digital maps. A global satellite map is one big whole. We use in a fragmentary sense yes, but what does the whole mean? I mean use the logic to address the ambiguity of what is present in surrealist art?

I think you create a problem with understanding art by using the logic to explain various labels of artistic strategies. The problem with logic as a foundational understanding of thinking about art therefore where styles might emerge is how logic misses the concept of a whole. So if we look at art and reality we replicate what seeing animals do. How do we do art and say birds that can imitate language not perform symbolism? Their brains do process visual information like us. Instead you substitute the logic as a stand in for 'language' and meaning. So you grab labels from artistic theorizing because writing systems allow such manipulations. But this neglects the 'whole' of consciousness. In some sense phenomenology purports to address consciousness but roots itself in writing systems. Whereas consciousness in some sense looks like a photograph. Yet by 19th century standards that realism lost grounds to first Cezanne, then abstraction via Picasso and Braque. So realism has some sort of combinatory element we sense and talk about as the whole to which Picasso and Braque often allude to. And your observations fragment and disassemble pictures into a logical order by your various graphs. So how would you account for AI imagery or the claims of Artificial General Intelligence? They represent neural network connectivity such as processing the whole of a text database like Wikipedia which no human a can read. Or the early Stanford experiments with big picture databases that combine descriptions of the pictures with like conventional magazine captions? These 'wholes' are missing from your conceptual schema.

Your art style is really cute

Wow, this is literally what I give a shit about. I wrote at least two essays about realism and art style. I care about this because, in the past decade, there has been a disturbing rise in the idea that - not humans, skill and intent - but technology alone, and photoreal mimesis alone, compose visual artworks and give them value. I call this the reductive Myth of Technological Realism. It was already bad in sloppywood (hollywood), partly with pixar who displaced the majority of animation in movies, then later stuff like their lion king trashfire, which has very little grout*, and games, they were already going down the photogrammetrized drain with UE5 starting around 2017. In 2021, the technology part of the myth only got worse with AI slop, where it's assumed that, not only does technology solely drive realism, it also solely drives surrealism, and anything else. Which is fucking bullshit. ----------------------- *or glue, is what I call elements in realist artworks that don't identically correspond with fact, only serve to make-seem, and to support depictions/uses of fact. This is what I think people actually give a shit about in realist artworks. Not isolated techniques, not technology, not effort, not money. Nobody thinks the detailed visual reality of their own skin, or the tree outside, is a beautiful realist artwork. It's just whatever. So, there must be something else, and grout is that. When someone says, "RDR2 is pretty because it's so realistic", they mean, ``` RDR2 is pretty, precisely because of everything about it that isn't factual. Arthur Morgan never lived. Skin doesn't look semi-rubbery. The Wild West period wasn't a narratively-simple wholesome big chungus tale. This geography wasn't small. Travel wasn't instantaneous. People don't respawn. Death isn't fun. ```. I also believe this holds for photography, which historically was accused as non-art. See also, gestalt psychology. I haven't read art history or art philosophy, maybe there exists a better word or concept for this. ----------------------- The rest of the comment is about the video. I think the description is too jargonic. 5:40 it is indeed propaganda. 9:50 semiotics is awesome. 12:30 I use realistic and stylized and I fucking hate it. There are only styles. Realism is a style. Mike Mignola has a style, and so does Eiichiro Oda. And the word real is itself bullshit. It makes no distinction between fiction and fact, both of which are real. 17:00 "more real than real". I'm not sure what this means. 18:00 you say phenomenological, that's just philosophical to me. 20:08-20:22 exactly! 23:05 that rolls right off the tongue. 23:50 these are getting worse to understand and remember. 25:07 an example of the graph being used. So, pixel art would be somewhere on the bottom right. 30:20 this is interesting. I wondered where "hyperreal" (misnomer) would be. But photography is here. There's a difference between a hyperreal painting or sculpture of a face, and a photography of a face. 31:20 it would be cool if you offered these 4 and 8 verticed charts with images somewhere. 32:57 I love collage art. 34:20 I'd have to hear more explanations and examples to understand these categories in the areas. I didn't understand their explanation. You do make yourself seem smart, and it's easy to give unquestioning praise, but yea. I enjoyed the video.

this is less coherent than you think it is, mostly due to the connotations associated with labels you use throughout the entire video, especially when it comes to inter-disciplinary associations. slow down and make your point as if you were trying to explain it to children if you are saying something you really wish to communicate, otherwise it makes it hard to take you seriously when you flippantly breeze through applications of your theory which to an outsider can seem not very thoroughly conceptualized (once again especially with interdisciplinary concepts)

This was so well done. This guy is a great teacher. I have a color-shape association with each musical note, but I developed this more intensely as I started studying art and color-theory, and later, sacred geometry. // I sort of ran-off into music, but I realized that my optical illusion that I was doing for many years prior do reflect my story and my music work; so, I started this channel here (Optical Illusions Untold). Thanks so much for your work Mr. Ryan Nein!

Lexemic/Non-Lexemic and Linear/Lateral? th-cam.com/video/FyTlzvnNCQ8/w-d-xo.html

So much deeper research can come from this point, there are different mediums, like games adding dimensions in techniques, there are real distributions of works on the axis and the ones in the middle. Also the question on the orthogonality of axis, i would bet square represent that works on one diagonal have distribution in one subspace more then in other , so real space would be more complex, i can advise you watching scagnostics term. So much thoughts , that is more the genious to flattern multidimensional questional space so accurately on surface.

@22:07 Hello from Vietnam! The drawing you used at this timestamp is by a Vietnamese art student-such a fun trivia for me, haha. I really appreciate how thoughtfully and systematically you organized this knowledge in such a compressed timeframe.

awesome

Great work! I love how this turned out! What do you think are the weakest parts of your version? I found the explanation at 16:15 of the representation plane to be a little flimsy, or maybe I didn't understand. I don't see how a work can be symbolic - and more and more idealistic just by being symbolic - when confronted with the "ideal" framed in 31:18. Maybe it's a terminology problem because "ideal" and "negation" are somehow conflicting between having and not having meaning. And Rothko is very tricky... Or maybe not... Writing and thinking at this point... Again, this is a very useful for me! Thank you for sharing

Awesome video, but I think there is a very good reason to not have language on this chart. As this graph is supposed to represent visual styles. Fundamentally, in phonetic written language the alphabets/words are encoding information conveyed by sound. The only written languages you can place on this graph are logographic, individual characters of which would fall along the Symbolic to Iconic line. Moreover, representing things in such a space make sense if you can continuously transition along any of the axes. There will necessarily be a sharp demarcation between alphabets and icons, i.e. there is no smooth transformation that connects the word FACE to the icon: 😊.

impressive and extremely dense ! normal people get a phd and junior lecturer chair for that

I was hoping this would be a coding video homie lol

8:33 Fun fact: the heart mark actually comes from the shape of Silphium seedpods, which were used as an ancient form of birth control used during the Greek and Roman Empire. Unfortunately, Silphium is the earliest extinction in recorded history.

This is secretly a video about Digibro's Neurotyping. I would know, given the Neurotypeline.

Holy shit, dude.. what an incredible video 🤯 This may have snuck in at the last possible second to top my list of favourite videos all year!! Just astoundingly dense with rich info, intuitive examples, and genuinely novel insights. This could have EASILY been a whole academic paper, even a PhD thesis! (But I'm glad that it wasn't or I never would have seen it 😅😅) I will definitely be sharing with many and rewatching several times, thank you for this masterpiece 🙏🙏 (P.S. as a *musical* artist myself, the big question I was left with was "what if this framework were applied to AUDIO instead of visuals?"... I think it would turn out be incredibly illustrative of the deep links between music and speech which are often neglected. And it may also then open up the affordance for some kind of 3 dimensional structure linking the sound and sight matrices together??? Perhaps along some axis of which you could then re-integrate the visual-symbolic representations of sound like sheet music and writing (the latter of which seems to have somewhat dropped off of your version?) Anyway, just some thoughts that this sparked for me lol. Tysm again!!)

what's the point of categorizing art styles?

This video made me want to make art, really interesting stuff.

8:20 I understand the example and don't think it's very bad, but I'd say that the male icon isn't as different as the roman cross symbol for Christianity or even the Mars' shield symbol, regarding it's meaning as male. This is definitely a representation of a human, but the male is more a projection that depends of one knowing that this is an opposite of the female representation. It still requires some specific knowledge to fully understand as specifically male, and not a person.

You are (or He is) incorrect that the Suprematism image has no representation. It clearly shows an unambiguous judge's seat (brown), prosecutor's table (gray-blue), defendant's stand (gray) and an overhead hanging light in the art deco style (green), representing the hard light of truth. The black drop shape is swift justice. The orange roundel is the area that is not to be approached. The red box is the defendant. The small pale orange line is the public defender. The long yellow line is the prosecutor representing the law. The strong orange wedge is the prosecutor making the case to the judge. The two black lines represent protection of the judge by the guard (bailiff) and the law. The red wedge is the prosecutor's case, the black wedge is the judge's gaze into the defendant's heart, and the orange wedge is the defender's case, which is stronger than the prosecutor's case in this image. As to "Beat the Whites with the red wedge", this shows clear battle formations. The gray wedges are the white army and the red wedges and bars are the Soviet army in battle formation breaking through. The black wedge is the dead who sacrifice themselves, suggesting few casualties. Symbolism is a language that you have to be trained to observe.

uh wow

I'm not sure I understand how the Chinese character for prisoner is more idiographic than the Chinese character for person

What would a desktop icon be, would it be a symbol? Or is there a third level of abstraction where the desktop icon represents the symbol and so it's an icon of the symbol?

this is a legit dissertation, are you published or something?

Wow. This is incredibly well put together. You should seriously consider turning this into a formal paper and submitting it to any of the important semiotics, arts, or aesthetics magazines out there. If you whish, you could even build a doctoral thesis around this. I think your improvement uppon McCloud's initial proposal needs to get to more people. I can immagine this beign a huge help for those who struggle to understand or approach art beyond the comfortable and relatively sterile narratives of "canonical dogma vs modern garbage".

This was a lovely video. And also gives me a great ideas for discussing Aphantasia!

Thank you for making this, amazing video