I'm an comic book artist but I graduated into social communication and I felt the need to say that I really appreciate the integration of semiotics into the overall analysis. This is a video to watch over and over again and keep for future reference.
I deeply recommend you read "Understanding Comics". Snobbery stops many art teachers from seriously imagining this is relevant to their lessons, and yet it is extremely useful to catch fundamental concepts.
It might be that given art is inherently subjective there's a fear of trying to impose any kind of system on it, not to mention a disinterest from artists given systemization is a scientific concept.
@@ender7278well even within science there is no inherent method itself, science is a dynamic form of inquiry and discussion, the method will change based on what is discussed and studied. In art as you mentioned, the subjectiveness is it's basis, to systematize art into a mechanical production is to inherently miss the point of why it's created. I made a comment about this myself, but I do find videos and approaches like this interesting, I just approach them warily because it really makes art not fun to make
@@gregthesalad495 I think it is a trend in visual art these days to branch out beyond a single approach. A body of work can contain multiple approaches but still all maintain an artists intent. Many are held back by feeling they must adhere to a "consistent" body of work. In reality, consistency stretches far beyond the surface appearance / categorization of a work of art. For instance, one can both create formally realistic or representational work that refers to and reenforces other works by the same artist that are not. These types of categorizations are handy for allowing art creator and appreciator understand the territory they are in. They can be used as a map if you will. But the map can never actually be the territory it represents.
In my younger years I attempted to tackle "definition of game" and wandered somewhat in this direction of looking for a formalism. I had read McCloud as a kid and was probably influenced by it. These days, I've internalized information theory and digital encoding as my starting point for structure. There's a fundamental relationship between "I can represent data as sequences of symbols" and McLuhan's "the medium is the message"; once established, symbolic language can build on top of itself to express original meanings. This development enabled language, literacy, telegraphy, and then modern computing and telecommunications. Transmission of words and pictures and animations and interactive experiences. The "knowledge hierarchy" resulting from practical use of symbol can be layered without bound and branch in infinite directions, and therefore is n-dimensional in what it can express. From this perspective, most art is based around coherent knowledge tailored to the audience's context: adding specific terms over that is a notation for which contexts are in use, but the project of nomenclature is forever going to be running behind the actual state of the art, for the same reason that music theory's attempts to turn musical structure into legible language struggles to keep up with musical innovations. Simultaneously, much of the knowledge of picture-making is tacit: attempt a master study, and you learn something about how they see that doesn't appear in a book or a lecture: the wave of generative AI has created a vast project to assign labels to styles that had none. Our view of art is a fractal zoom: the boundaries cannot be linearized, but rather, become more detailed as you zoom in further and develop more awareness of what is distinctive. In my own practice I utilize Venn diagrams to identify what contexts I am aiming to explore within a work, since the result will be within the overlap of each. The initial distinction of realistic/stylized remains relevant to me because it attaches meaning near to correspondent knowledge, and developments that break with correspondence are perceivable more readily than those at higher layers(as in English, vs French, vs German - to a baby, they are all "talking").
This video feels like an academic text. I like it a lot, even if I had to pull out all all my dormant semiotics/aesthetics knowledge from art school, and still didn't quite get it. Worth a re-watch.
This is the best video tackling art styles and representation I've ever watched. You perfectly summarised what usually takes an intoductory class to visual theory in over half an hour, the production is super clean and your examples are great. I was genuinely surprised to see that you don't already have at least 100k subs, hope my subscription helps you get there. Looking forward to more videos!
Amazing video, very interesting analysis. This applies especially well to my line of work as an animation artist since I have to work with a wide range of drawing styles everyday. This is very helpful. Also, side note, at 22:04, the black and white still life painting you used was my painting that I did when I was in college in Vietnam, probably around 2007, 2008 or something. I did it with Chinese ink. It's a really funny and delightful surprise to see it appear here in a random video that youtube recommended to me today, so thank you!
Amazingly good video! As an artist who also has a Masters in linguistics, my only critique is that the way you use the term language, in this video, should be referring to writing systems. Speech also represents reality sumbolically and can be a medium in art. But even more than that, historically languages are seen by linguists as primarily spoken (or signed with hands for deaf communities). And writing systems have historically always tried to represent speech on some level (though the internet is the biggest change in that trend, bc digitally mediated text behaves more like speech historically has). But even if you view writing as an equal but distinct modality of language as speech, it shouldn't just be called language or be mistaken for the primary or fundamental form of language. With all natural language at least, speech exists almost inevitably among any community of humans, with or without a writing system and any writing system, when added, is typically based on the speech thar predates it (though it can influence speech in a reverse effect). Most languages, even today (we're talking thousands of isolated minority languages not the major ones used in global trade or as official languages of nation states) don't have a writing system, and writing systems vary wildly in form and how they represent speech in image form. You could completely change the writing system without changing the speech it encodes. You could create an iconic writing system to represent English. You can use the international phonetic alphabet to write out any language on earth (that's what it is designed for). In contrast, all spoken language follows the same broad fundamental laws of language despite tremendous diversity. In particular, they all use sounds as "arbitrary" (i.e. non-iconic) symbols. Bc of this, Languages that use an iconic writing system still use non-iconic sounds in the actual language. I'm mostly explaining all this for the sake of education, and bc it adds more nuance to your chart - I think it works well enough to incorporate spoken language as an artistic medium effectively and is a good tool!
The diamond was an excellent improvement, but the extension into a square made it even more powerful. Great work, and certainly future reference material
Never an original thought! I was thinking of a triangle (or maybe a gradient?) for artstyle between realist(representing features)--stylistic(accentuating features to convey concepts/ideas)--simplistic (representing concepts/ideas). Maybe I should get some Scott McCloud books. Subbed and will be coming back soon!
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 video is absolute cinema! From the way you expand on an already good model, to the simple explanation of such difficult concepts, to the effort to put each example art piece to the model. It's like witnessing the chaotic visual art world comes together, each art style has a connection to each other and together form a beautiful unifying whole.
i like how art books/youtube authors resemble ancient philosophers that yapped with no clear or reasonable ground, eventually ending up arguing and rambling about very obscure and confused words or notions, not seeing the core of the thing that would actually solve something
@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.
This is a great video, I just have one comment I hope will be constructive. 15:33 "Primitive art starts out as being iconic. Cave paintings are iconic representations of objects..." - I see some potential problems in this assertion. First, cave painting is a medium, not a style. Many cave paintings were made by people who were culturally/geographically disconnected from each other, and some were even made by beings who were separate species from us (Neanderthals). Many examples of very ancient art are not at all representational, but are markings like spirals, zig-zags, circles, etc., and many of these coexist on the same cave walls as the representational forms of animals. Also, how do any of us know for sure what is iconic? We look at a drawing of a person whose arm ends with a long thin line and assume it represents a spear; that's a fair assumption, but how do we test that? We have no way of knowing that that marking isn't symbolic.
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!
I'd love to hear a follow up to this, or just your thoughts, on how this relates to photgraphy. How much of Serano's Piss Christ is formal? Maplethorpe's Cock and Gun? Where do these fall on specifically the formal axis when the medium as a whole implies the existence of a definitive object to be photographed?
Photography, like sculpture, tends to be formal because it inherently involves accurately capturing light values. Photographs can be used as design elements which makes them more iconic and they can be edited to remove realistic lighting. I think the pieces you mentioned could either be placed in the sub-real or the hyper-real depending on how you interpret them. I think shock value might be symbolic in nature because it requires a cultural sense of shame and pride.
A must learning guide for performing artists .........Wow what a visual text book this video is........Hatsoff....For your contribution of this study to art students
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!
Congratulations! Excellent, illuminating work. Suggestion #1: Make a poster! If it had mini-reproductions of the works you give as examples and an explanation of the structure and logic of the axes/quadrants, I'd buy it in the blink of an eye. Suggestion #2: A third (z-)axis?... (Could that be a way to "smooth out" the phenomenological curlicue at 24:02? Dunno... Can't wrap my brain around it.) Thank you for this piece!!
This reminds me of a video by Elie Ramussen where she expands on the player alignment type in games. It's called The Player Type Alignment Tessaract. It's a really good watch and has a similar topic and prensentation to this video. Also i subbed❤.
if youre interested in the nature of representation/depiction, i really recommend "mimesis as make-believe" by walton. even if you don't buy its central thesis, its full of weird novel insights about how we relate to art
What you are defining are single dimensions and then combining them to create various hyperdimensional spaces. Many people think hyperdimensions (more than 3 dimensions) is some mystical esoteric concept, but this video is essentially an example of how we process things hyperdimensionally all the time. This is also a good example of how machine learning works. Essentially mapping out the relationship between tokens to create a hyperdimensional model of a dataset that can be explored through inference (calculating what exists between points)
I understand the computer science analogy, but what makes the graph hyperdimensional rather than two-dimensional? I don't fully get how the graph reflects higher dimensions other than being non-spaciotemporal.
Well, not the graph specifically, but you listed close to a dozen different dichotomies: Linear Lateral Formal Abstract Symbol Icon Order Chaos Lexemic Non-Lexemic Old New Representational Non-Representational Complex Simple Objective Subjective Specific Universal Each one of those are a single dimension, and if you hold more than 3-4 at a time, it's a hyperdimensional space. At least, that's how I think of it.
@@AB-wf8ek I also thought of that, but the trick here that he talks about art _styles_ not art _pieces_ . So groups, not units. So you can't really position the group of abstract paintings at the graph of complexity, because every unit of this group has a different value. Now the problem is that he himself constructed and assigned those groups, and then says, that these groups won't fit in other characteristics, by which the groups are formed. To put units collectively on other dimensions, you need to create new groups, corresponding to the values we estimate. So imo, first step should be the definition of every possible characteristic, prominent in every art piece, and so we eliminate invalid ones (like stylization, that doesn't suit abstract art) and add new valid dimensions (every art piece can be estimated by it's complexity) to the multidimensional graph. Still, imo the criteria he presented in the video are the most objectively estimable from what I can think of rn. I was writing that on fly so don't know if my point changed during the comment :D Hope you find something interesting here.
It depends what you mean by "dimension". Geometric dimension refers to the dimensionality of a "physical" space (how many numbers do I need to specify location?), while "abstract dimension" or "degrees of freedom" refers to the dimensionality of an abstracted "state space" (how many numbers do I need to describe all objects of this type?) Say I have a ball and I want to describe it. It has a position defined by a location in our 3D space, so it's a "3D object". However, if I am programming a simulation, I might need to know both its position (3 numbers) and orientation / rotation (2 numbers). That's 5 degrees of freedom for a "3D object". Throw in colour, texture maps, material properties, etc. and suddenly you can have a state space with billions of degrees of freedom all to describe "a 3D object". The same thing happens in machine learning algorithms. They're "multidimensional" in the sense that they have many degrees of freedom, but not (necessarily) multidimensional in a geometric sense. Many, such as the language models becoming so famous now, don't even relate to geometric objects. When people say "it's hard to conceive of higher-dimensional objects", I doubt they mean to say that they're confused by anything requiring more than 3 numbers to comprehend. They are using "dimension" in a geometric sense, and indicating the challenge in attempting to comprehend multi-dimensional geometry. Something that our minds are indeed ill-equipped for given that we have evolved in a 3 (spatial) dimensional universe and can only see 2D images + some limited depth information. Our minds can conceive of higher dimensional geometry in an abstract, "degrees of freedom" sense, and perhaps even a little bit of intuitive understanding can be gained via analogy to 3D geometry, but it is unlikely that a human mind could ever interpret 4+ dimensions as naturally as we do 3D. Thus I'd consider it a bit reductive to say "ah but you think multi-dimensionally all the time!" - being able to comprehend a shopping basket containing 4 different items doesn't make me any more capable of visualising a 4D rotation, just as understanding a shopping basket with 3 different items isn't enough to pass a normal geometry test!
@@kikivoorburg I'm talking about dimension in the most abstract form. Anything that can be expressed as existing on a single diametric line that you can assign a value between is a dimension. In the video they're defining individual dimensions, and then combining them in different ways in order to create multidimensional spaces. So even though we may have a hard time visualizing hyperdimensional geometry, we in fact navigate hyperdimensional spaces all the time.
01:56 Плоскость изображения и язык 02:54 Различие между визуальным искусством и языком 03:46 Проблемы существующей схемы 05:44 Улучшение схемы Маклеода 07:40 Иконический и символический язык 08:32 Примеры символов и икон • Крест и знак буддизма - примеры символов и икон. • Крест символизирует христианство, а знак буддизма - дхарму и восьмеричный путь. 09:26 Семиотика и язык • Означаемое - это то, что превращается в знак, а означающее - символический знак, кодирующий значение. • Восприятие движется вверх по графику, а понимание - вниз. • Алфавитные языки, такие как английский, находятся в верхней части символической области, так как буквы заменяют фонетические звуки. 10:22 Пиктографический и идеографический языки • Пиктограммы передают смысл визуально, как китайский иероглиф, обозначающий человека. • Идеограммы находятся между буквенным и пиктографическим языками, как китайский иероглиф, обозначающий заключенного. • Графический дизайн использует горизонтальную часть графика для стилизации символов. 11:16 Форма и содержание в искусстве • Горизонтальное движение соответствует изменению формы произведения искусства. • Вертикальное измерение соответствует содержанию произведения, которое меняется от абстрактного к символическому. • Обе оси, содержание и форма, необходимы для полного понимания визуального искусства. 12:16 Язык искусства и его неоднозначность • Реалистичный и стилизованный язык не всегда точен для описания абстрактного и символического искусства. • Знаковое искусство не всегда простое, а абстрактное и символическое искусство может быть сложным. • Порядок и хаос, линейность и латеральность мышления также не всегда соответствуют различию между формальным и знаковым искусством. 14:11 Лексическое и нелексическое искусство • Лексическое искусство использует дискретные единицы значения, закодированные в языке. • Символическое искусство является наиболее лексическим, так как использует визуальные символические единицы. • Абстрактное искусство не представляет никакого значения и является нелексическим. 15:09 История искусства и репрезентативность • Первобытное искусство - это символизм, затем появляется символическое искусство, связанное с религиозными системами. • Формальное искусство использует светотень и перспективу, а абстрактное искусство нарушает правила формального искусства. • Абстрактное искусство - самая нерепрезентативная категория, так как не пытается изобразить мир. 16:58 Объективное и субъективное восприятие • Объективное и субъективное относятся к относительным истинным значениям утверждений. • Объективный означает относящийся к объектам, а субъективный - относящийся к субъектам. • Изобразительное искусство изображает объекты, но эти объекты не существуют независимо от субъективного восприятия. 18:53 Восприятие и искусство • Восприятие объекта как инструмента, а не как набора сенсорных данных. • Искусство по своей сути абстрактно, и восприятие делает его символическим. • Без контекста искусство остается абстрактным. 19:49 Субъективность и восприятие • Искусство требует субъективного восприятия для придания смысла. • Абстрактное искусство подавляет потребность в объективизации мира. • Абстрактное искусство учит ценить основы создания изображений. 20:40 Формальная реальность • Формальная реальность преобразует абстрактное содержание в объекты. • Объекты требуют субъективного восприятия для понимания. • Формальное искусство объективирует субъективность через светотень. 21:37 Иконическое искусство • Иконическое искусство стилизует реальность для субъективного восприятия. • Иконическое искусство использует субъективность для создания объектов. • Иконическое искусство можно понять как субъективированную объективность. 22:31 Символическое искусство • Символическое искусство завершает процесс восприятия. • Символы происходят от иконок и приобретают значение через человеческое понимание. • Символическое искусство объективирует субъективность через лексическое содержание. 23:30 Поэтапный подход к искусству • Искусство развивается через стадии субъективности и объективности. • Поэтапный подход позволяет понять искусство как процесс. • Искусство следует через стадии разделения субъекта и объекта. 24:27 Примеры искусства • Абстрактное искусство становится формальным через репрезентацию. • Формальное искусство становится иконическим через упрощение. • Иконическое искусство становится символическим через символизацию. 25:18 Применение теории к произведениям • Примеры искусства на графике: Джексон Поллок, импрессионизм, Мие "Жнецы". • Искусство становится более знаковым по мере движения вправо. • Поп-арт и графический дизайн достигают крайних знаковых форм. 27:14 Заключение • График показывает органическую связь между разными видами искусства. • Художественные стили многогранны и неконкретны. • График помогает представить логичную схему восприятия искусства. 28:12 Расширение графика • График решает проблему пунктирной линии в системе Скотта Маклеода. • Добавлены символическое измерение и переименованы ярлыки для теоретической точности. • Новый квадратный график охватывает абстрактные, формальные, знаковые и символические стили. 29:10 Проблемы оригинального графика 30:07 Субреальное искусство 31:07 Идеальное искусство 32:06 Гиперреалистичное искусство 32:56 Метаполевое искусство 33:54 Стилистические области
jesus christ this has academic quality!! i used mccloud's framework in my grad's thesis and boy o boy would i have wished to come across your video by then... if you ever chose to turn your video into a proper paper, i think it definitely will make waves!!
Hey Ryan, all my attempts at semiotics studies have finally lead me to your video. YT actually DOES know what I need. I want to thank you for helping me to put all these concepts together. You have done an outstanding job.
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!!)
This is such a deep cut. I read Understanding Comics way back in 2017, back when I barely knew how to draw. I don’t know why I read it, but regardless, it stuck with me, especially this random visualization of art styles graph he did. I’m so pleasantly surprised to see someone else talk about it 7 years later.
0:30 I saw a similar categorization: Realism-Abstract-Stylized Abstract means removing detail from realism (the right drawings) Stylized means changing it to something different (the upper axis here)
This is a tremendous video for an "abstract" artist like me. Well, as you point out in this video so thoroughly, aren't we all? I am so glad YT added your video to my feed. I'm definitely subscribing. It will take a while to understand everything I heard and saw here, today, but worth it :)
Legitimately the best video I have ever seen on TH-cam up to this point. It formalises art with a similar rigour to mathematics. Thank you for your work.
Excellent video. Provides an easy, yet comprehensive way to categorize artwork. I will be interested to see how well I am able to use the system to categorize artwork next time I visit an art museum.
Wonderful video and perfeclty explained with graphic and illustrations. Hope to see more of this type of stuff, but for the moment, need to digest this one, Keep it up !
OMG this was one of the best video i saw in a while. Normally i never comment, but i have to so the algorithm recommend this video too as many people as possible
20:08 : hm, I feel like there’s perhaps a way to make a principled distinction based on like, conditional Kolmogorov complexity or something like that? … hm, though I suppose maybe from that perspective, in the way in which the Mona Lisa is a depiction of a person, various abstract works (like the splattering ink on canvas) are “depictions” of the process by which they were produced?
21:32 : “but objectified subjectivity” : uhhh…? “For the marks on the page to become objects they must be objectified by the mind based on the initial subjective content” : ergh, I feel like these terms must be being overloaded somehow here? By “overloaded” I mean like, being used in multiple distinct ways depending on context, like how one might say both 1+3=4 and “abcd”+”efg”=“abcdefg”, overloading “+”. This is not my wheelhouse.
21:56 : “value from darkness to lightness is what allows the mind to perceive objects as three dimensional” : surely this is not true in all cases? Like, wireframe representations are perceived as 3D, right? I would think that if one had like, a camera+screen for each eye like those pass through things on VR headsets, where you set the lightness value to the same thing for every pixel, only allowing saturation and hue to vary, things would still appear with depth?
[Edit: uh, I don’t mean to be rude here, I just, am not used to this kind of analysis, and also should *really* be asleep. Sorry if this comment is possibly a bit insulting?] 23:04 : “subjected objectified subjectivity” oh come on now, Really? Surely this is not the plainest way to say this? Right??? Are you just phrasing this this way as a bit of wordplay?
what a great video, bro. 25:25 but will you consider a 3d chart (so there is no need to collapse the axis) where symbolism find it's own position in the y axis and abstract in z axis? like a triangular pyramid (or maybe other shape could work lol idk) because I don't really think it's fair to put expressionism down there when they're often heavy on symbolism, and put the alexander mosaic right in the middle of abstract and symb because imo it doesn't even belong to that axis (vertically). btw with this high of a quality, I'm sure a lot more people hope it appears on their recommendations, haha
I made the comment before finish the video, the square graph fits everything so perfectly (except the expressionism lol, I still think symbolism deserve another dimension)
Outstanding analysis here. I think I'm more sure than ever that impressionism is my favorite. But also, I think the "Everyhere at the End of Time" album art symbolizes this very well. As the "main character's" condition progresses, the art seems to move from surrealism to formalism to pure abstraction, more or less, as if regressing to a mental state where nothing really makes sense.
I was waiting for the graph to become a square the whole time. Why was it not used from the beginning? It makes no sense that an increase on the iconic axis would necessitate a decrease on the symbolic axis. Was there a reason for this?
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 have to give Scott McCloud huge props, just by the title and thumbnail, I knew this video would cover his system. It's just that recognizable, despite only being a triangle with a dotted line through it.
What a recommendation well done TH-cam. Also well done Ryan this is an incredible video. My dad would get me to read Scott’s book as a child and I completely forgot it existed
The center point of the last one could be “narrative”, because moving away from it is the art that is static and either is highly dependent to be interpreted or has nothing to be interpreted and therefore has no “movement” on its own
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.
I won the TH-cam recommandations lottery
nu mai minti porcule
Same feeling here!
Same
Same!🎉
As did I
This is something that should be taught in every art class around the world
It's first semester Graphic Desing.
At least "it was when I was in school" 😅.
Absolutely yes!
I'm an comic book artist but I graduated into social communication and I felt the need to say that I really appreciate the integration of semiotics into the overall analysis. This is a video to watch over and over again and keep for future reference.
i saw the thumbnail and title and immediately thought “is that the understanding comics words/pictures chart?” And it WAS
Insane video, I'm studying at an art academy rn and that way of systematizing art is something that never was even mentioned at any lecture.
I deeply recommend you read "Understanding Comics". Snobbery stops many art teachers from seriously imagining this is relevant to their lessons, and yet it is extremely useful to catch fundamental concepts.
It might be that given art is inherently subjective there's a fear of trying to impose any kind of system on it, not to mention a disinterest from artists given systemization is a scientific concept.
@@ender7278well even within science there is no inherent method itself, science is a dynamic form of inquiry and discussion, the method will change based on what is discussed and studied. In art as you mentioned, the subjectiveness is it's basis, to systematize art into a mechanical production is to inherently miss the point of why it's created. I made a comment about this myself, but I do find videos and approaches like this interesting, I just approach them warily because it really makes art not fun to make
@@gregthesalad495 I think it is a trend in visual art these days to branch out beyond a single approach. A body of work can contain multiple approaches but still all maintain an artists intent. Many are held back by feeling they must adhere to a "consistent" body of work. In reality, consistency stretches far beyond the surface appearance / categorization of a work of art. For instance, one can both create formally realistic or representational work that refers to and reenforces other works by the same artist that are not. These types of categorizations are handy for allowing art creator and appreciator understand the territory they are in. They can be used as a map if you will. But the map can never actually be the territory it represents.
In my younger years I attempted to tackle "definition of game" and wandered somewhat in this direction of looking for a formalism. I had read McCloud as a kid and was probably influenced by it. These days, I've internalized information theory and digital encoding as my starting point for structure. There's a fundamental relationship between "I can represent data as sequences of symbols" and McLuhan's "the medium is the message"; once established, symbolic language can build on top of itself to express original meanings. This development enabled language, literacy, telegraphy, and then modern computing and telecommunications. Transmission of words and pictures and animations and interactive experiences. The "knowledge hierarchy" resulting from practical use of symbol can be layered without bound and branch in infinite directions, and therefore is n-dimensional in what it can express.
From this perspective, most art is based around coherent knowledge tailored to the audience's context: adding specific terms over that is a notation for which contexts are in use, but the project of nomenclature is forever going to be running behind the actual state of the art, for the same reason that music theory's attempts to turn musical structure into legible language struggles to keep up with musical innovations. Simultaneously, much of the knowledge of picture-making is tacit: attempt a master study, and you learn something about how they see that doesn't appear in a book or a lecture: the wave of generative AI has created a vast project to assign labels to styles that had none. Our view of art is a fractal zoom: the boundaries cannot be linearized, but rather, become more detailed as you zoom in further and develop more awareness of what is distinctive.
In my own practice I utilize Venn diagrams to identify what contexts I am aiming to explore within a work, since the result will be within the overlap of each. The initial distinction of realistic/stylized remains relevant to me because it attaches meaning near to correspondent knowledge, and developments that break with correspondence are perceivable more readily than those at higher layers(as in English, vs French, vs German - to a baby, they are all "talking").
This video feels like an academic text. I like it a lot, even if I had to pull out all all my dormant semiotics/aesthetics knowledge from art school, and still didn't quite get it. Worth a re-watch.
Genuinely the most interesting video I’ve watched in a while
This is the best video tackling art styles and representation I've ever watched.
You perfectly summarised what usually takes an intoductory class to visual theory in over half an hour, the production is super clean and your examples are great.
I was genuinely surprised to see that you don't already have at least 100k subs, hope my subscription helps you get there.
Looking forward to more videos!
I didn't pay for TH-cam premium, yet I still got it for some reason. Great lecture!!!
Amazing video, very interesting analysis. This applies especially well to my line of work as an animation artist since I have to work with a wide range of drawing styles everyday. This is very helpful. Also, side note, at 22:04, the black and white still life painting you used was my painting that I did when I was in college in Vietnam, probably around 2007, 2008 or something. I did it with Chinese ink. It's a really funny and delightful surprise to see it appear here in a random video that youtube recommended to me today, so thank you!
really? 😮
@@andrewsfa4420 yeah
Same signature for all this time... hhhhhh, very cool.
Amazingly good video!
As an artist who also has a Masters in linguistics, my only critique is that the way you use the term language, in this video, should be referring to writing systems. Speech also represents reality sumbolically and can be a medium in art. But even more than that, historically languages are seen by linguists as primarily spoken (or signed with hands for deaf communities). And writing systems have historically always tried to represent speech on some level (though the internet is the biggest change in that trend, bc digitally mediated text behaves more like speech historically has). But even if you view writing as an equal but distinct modality of language as speech, it shouldn't just be called language or be mistaken for the primary or fundamental form of language. With all natural language at least, speech exists almost inevitably among any community of humans, with or without a writing system and any writing system, when added, is typically based on the speech thar predates it (though it can influence speech in a reverse effect). Most languages, even today (we're talking thousands of isolated minority languages not the major ones used in global trade or as official languages of nation states) don't have a writing system, and writing systems vary wildly in form and how they represent speech in image form. You could completely change the writing system without changing the speech it encodes. You could create an iconic writing system to represent English. You can use the international phonetic alphabet to write out any language on earth (that's what it is designed for). In contrast, all spoken language follows the same broad fundamental laws of language despite tremendous diversity. In particular, they all use sounds as "arbitrary" (i.e. non-iconic) symbols. Bc of this, Languages that use an iconic writing system still use non-iconic sounds in the actual language.
I'm mostly explaining all this for the sake of education, and bc it adds more nuance to your chart - I think it works well enough to incorporate spoken language as an artistic medium effectively and is a good tool!
The diamond was an excellent improvement, but the extension into a square made it even more powerful. Great work, and certainly future reference material
I've been waiting my whole life for this video
I'm absolutely flabbergasted at the quality of the video. Lucky to find it so early.
Never an original thought! I was thinking of a triangle (or maybe a gradient?) for artstyle between realist(representing features)--stylistic(accentuating features to convey concepts/ideas)--simplistic (representing concepts/ideas). Maybe I should get some Scott McCloud books.
Subbed and will be coming back soon!
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 video is absolute cinema! From the way you expand on an already good model, to the simple explanation of such difficult concepts, to the effort to put each example art piece to the model. It's like witnessing the chaotic visual art world comes together, each art style has a connection to each other and together form a beautiful unifying whole.
i like how art books/youtube authors resemble ancient philosophers that yapped with no clear or reasonable ground, eventually ending up arguing and rambling about very obscure and confused words or notions, not seeing the core of the thing that would actually solve something
@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.
This is a great video, I just have one comment I hope will be constructive.
15:33 "Primitive art starts out as being iconic. Cave paintings are iconic representations of objects..." - I see some potential problems in this assertion. First, cave painting is a medium, not a style. Many cave paintings were made by people who were culturally/geographically disconnected from each other, and some were even made by beings who were separate species from us (Neanderthals). Many examples of very ancient art are not at all representational, but are markings like spirals, zig-zags, circles, etc., and many of these coexist on the same cave walls as the representational forms of animals. Also, how do any of us know for sure what is iconic? We look at a drawing of a person whose arm ends with a long thin line and assume it represents a spear; that's a fair assumption, but how do we test that? We have no way of knowing that that marking isn't symbolic.
Very constructive comment which the presenter is ignoring.
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!
I'd love to hear a follow up to this, or just your thoughts, on how this relates to photgraphy. How much of Serano's Piss Christ is formal? Maplethorpe's Cock and Gun? Where do these fall on specifically the formal axis when the medium as a whole implies the existence of a definitive object to be photographed?
Photography, like sculpture, tends to be formal because it inherently involves accurately capturing light values. Photographs can be used as design elements which makes them more iconic and they can be edited to remove realistic lighting. I think the pieces you mentioned could either be placed in the sub-real or the hyper-real depending on how you interpret them. I think shock value might be symbolic in nature because it requires a cultural sense of shame and pride.
A must learning guide for performing artists .........Wow what a visual text book this video is........Hatsoff....For your contribution of this study to art students
Bro this is a masterpiece 😭✨♥️
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!
Absolute banger of a video mate
I absolute love this video and how the information is presented! by far the most interesting representation of the range of artstyles ive come across
Congratulations! Excellent, illuminating work. Suggestion #1: Make a poster! If it had mini-reproductions of the works you give as examples and an explanation of the structure and logic of the axes/quadrants, I'd buy it in the blink of an eye. Suggestion #2: A third (z-)axis?... (Could that be a way to "smooth out" the phenomenological curlicue at 24:02? Dunno... Can't wrap my brain around it.) Thank you for this piece!!
Hey Ryan, I wanted to thank you for putting out such a clear and concise explanation, this is a tough topic for me to wrap my head around.
I’m trying to apply this framework to photography and filmmaking… incredibly interesting.
Thanks for such an amazing contribution!!
This is good, you can go even further and extend this analysis to any representation of reality/meaning, not just visual art.
What a fantastic video. It's a rarity to get a recommendation this good. Saving for my inevitable 8000 rewatches later
This reminds me of a video by Elie Ramussen where she expands on the player alignment type in games. It's called The Player Type Alignment Tessaract.
It's a really good watch and has a similar topic and prensentation to this video.
Also i subbed❤.
if youre interested in the nature of representation/depiction, i really recommend "mimesis as make-believe" by walton. even if you don't buy its central thesis, its full of weird novel insights about how we relate to art
What you are defining are single dimensions and then combining them to create various hyperdimensional spaces.
Many people think hyperdimensions (more than 3 dimensions) is some mystical esoteric concept, but this video is essentially an example of how we process things hyperdimensionally all the time.
This is also a good example of how machine learning works. Essentially mapping out the relationship between tokens to create a hyperdimensional model of a dataset that can be explored through inference (calculating what exists between points)
I understand the computer science analogy, but what makes the graph hyperdimensional rather than two-dimensional? I don't fully get how the graph reflects higher dimensions other than being non-spaciotemporal.
Well, not the graph specifically, but you listed close to a dozen different dichotomies:
Linear Lateral
Formal Abstract
Symbol Icon
Order Chaos
Lexemic Non-Lexemic
Old New
Representational Non-Representational
Complex Simple
Objective Subjective
Specific Universal
Each one of those are a single dimension, and if you hold more than 3-4 at a time, it's a hyperdimensional space. At least, that's how I think of it.
@@AB-wf8ek I also thought of that, but the trick here that he talks about art _styles_ not art _pieces_ . So groups, not units.
So you can't really position the group of abstract paintings at the graph of complexity, because every unit of this group has a different value.
Now the problem is that he himself constructed and assigned those groups, and then says, that these groups won't fit in other characteristics, by which the groups are formed.
To put units collectively on other dimensions, you need to create new groups, corresponding to the values we estimate.
So imo, first step should be the definition of every possible characteristic, prominent in every art piece, and so we eliminate invalid ones (like stylization, that doesn't suit abstract art) and add new valid dimensions (every art piece can be estimated by it's complexity) to the multidimensional graph.
Still, imo the criteria he presented in the video are the most objectively estimable from what I can think of rn.
I was writing that on fly so don't know if my point changed during the comment :D
Hope you find something interesting here.
It depends what you mean by "dimension". Geometric dimension refers to the dimensionality of a "physical" space (how many numbers do I need to specify location?), while "abstract dimension" or "degrees of freedom" refers to the dimensionality of an abstracted "state space" (how many numbers do I need to describe all objects of this type?)
Say I have a ball and I want to describe it. It has a position defined by a location in our 3D space, so it's a "3D object". However, if I am programming a simulation, I might need to know both its position (3 numbers) and orientation / rotation (2 numbers). That's 5 degrees of freedom for a "3D object". Throw in colour, texture maps, material properties, etc. and suddenly you can have a state space with billions of degrees of freedom all to describe "a 3D object".
The same thing happens in machine learning algorithms. They're "multidimensional" in the sense that they have many degrees of freedom, but not (necessarily) multidimensional in a geometric sense. Many, such as the language models becoming so famous now, don't even relate to geometric objects.
When people say "it's hard to conceive of higher-dimensional objects", I doubt they mean to say that they're confused by anything requiring more than 3 numbers to comprehend. They are using "dimension" in a geometric sense, and indicating the challenge in attempting to comprehend multi-dimensional geometry. Something that our minds are indeed ill-equipped for given that we have evolved in a 3 (spatial) dimensional universe and can only see 2D images + some limited depth information. Our minds can conceive of higher dimensional geometry in an abstract, "degrees of freedom" sense, and perhaps even a little bit of intuitive understanding can be gained via analogy to 3D geometry, but it is unlikely that a human mind could ever interpret 4+ dimensions as naturally as we do 3D.
Thus I'd consider it a bit reductive to say "ah but you think multi-dimensionally all the time!" - being able to comprehend a shopping basket containing 4 different items doesn't make me any more capable of visualising a 4D rotation, just as understanding a shopping basket with 3 different items isn't enough to pass a normal geometry test!
@@kikivoorburg I'm talking about dimension in the most abstract form. Anything that can be expressed as existing on a single diametric line that you can assign a value between is a dimension.
In the video they're defining individual dimensions, and then combining them in different ways in order to create multidimensional spaces. So even though we may have a hard time visualizing hyperdimensional geometry, we in fact navigate hyperdimensional spaces all the time.
1.9K subscribers with this level of quality, you're really underrated.
Excuse you. It's 1.3k.
Damn this is so good. Im glad i got it in my reccomended page
01:56 Плоскость изображения и язык
02:54 Различие между визуальным искусством и языком
03:46 Проблемы существующей схемы
05:44 Улучшение схемы Маклеода
07:40 Иконический и символический язык
08:32 Примеры символов и икон
• Крест и знак буддизма - примеры символов и икон.
• Крест символизирует христианство, а знак буддизма - дхарму и восьмеричный путь.
09:26 Семиотика и язык
• Означаемое - это то, что превращается в знак, а означающее - символический знак, кодирующий значение.
• Восприятие движется вверх по графику, а понимание - вниз.
• Алфавитные языки, такие как английский, находятся в верхней части символической области, так как буквы заменяют фонетические звуки.
10:22 Пиктографический и идеографический языки
• Пиктограммы передают смысл визуально, как китайский иероглиф, обозначающий человека.
• Идеограммы находятся между буквенным и пиктографическим языками, как китайский иероглиф, обозначающий заключенного.
• Графический дизайн использует горизонтальную часть графика для стилизации символов.
11:16 Форма и содержание в искусстве
• Горизонтальное движение соответствует изменению формы произведения искусства.
• Вертикальное измерение соответствует содержанию произведения, которое меняется от абстрактного к символическому.
• Обе оси, содержание и форма, необходимы для полного понимания визуального искусства.
12:16 Язык искусства и его неоднозначность
• Реалистичный и стилизованный язык не всегда точен для описания абстрактного и символического искусства.
• Знаковое искусство не всегда простое, а абстрактное и символическое искусство может быть сложным.
• Порядок и хаос, линейность и латеральность мышления также не всегда соответствуют различию между формальным и знаковым искусством.
14:11 Лексическое и нелексическое искусство
• Лексическое искусство использует дискретные единицы значения, закодированные в языке.
• Символическое искусство является наиболее лексическим, так как использует визуальные символические единицы.
• Абстрактное искусство не представляет никакого значения и является нелексическим.
15:09 История искусства и репрезентативность
• Первобытное искусство - это символизм, затем появляется символическое искусство, связанное с религиозными системами.
• Формальное искусство использует светотень и перспективу, а абстрактное искусство нарушает правила формального искусства.
• Абстрактное искусство - самая нерепрезентативная категория, так как не пытается изобразить мир.
16:58 Объективное и субъективное восприятие
• Объективное и субъективное относятся к относительным истинным значениям утверждений.
• Объективный означает относящийся к объектам, а субъективный - относящийся к субъектам.
• Изобразительное искусство изображает объекты, но эти объекты не существуют независимо от субъективного восприятия.
18:53 Восприятие и искусство
• Восприятие объекта как инструмента, а не как набора сенсорных данных.
• Искусство по своей сути абстрактно, и восприятие делает его символическим.
• Без контекста искусство остается абстрактным.
19:49 Субъективность и восприятие
• Искусство требует субъективного восприятия для придания смысла.
• Абстрактное искусство подавляет потребность в объективизации мира.
• Абстрактное искусство учит ценить основы создания изображений.
20:40 Формальная реальность
• Формальная реальность преобразует абстрактное содержание в объекты.
• Объекты требуют субъективного восприятия для понимания.
• Формальное искусство объективирует субъективность через светотень.
21:37 Иконическое искусство
• Иконическое искусство стилизует реальность для субъективного восприятия.
• Иконическое искусство использует субъективность для создания объектов.
• Иконическое искусство можно понять как субъективированную объективность.
22:31 Символическое искусство
• Символическое искусство завершает процесс восприятия.
• Символы происходят от иконок и приобретают значение через человеческое понимание.
• Символическое искусство объективирует субъективность через лексическое содержание.
23:30 Поэтапный подход к искусству
• Искусство развивается через стадии субъективности и объективности.
• Поэтапный подход позволяет понять искусство как процесс.
• Искусство следует через стадии разделения субъекта и объекта.
24:27 Примеры искусства
• Абстрактное искусство становится формальным через репрезентацию.
• Формальное искусство становится иконическим через упрощение.
• Иконическое искусство становится символическим через символизацию.
25:18 Применение теории к произведениям
• Примеры искусства на графике: Джексон Поллок, импрессионизм, Мие "Жнецы".
• Искусство становится более знаковым по мере движения вправо.
• Поп-арт и графический дизайн достигают крайних знаковых форм.
27:14 Заключение
• График показывает органическую связь между разными видами искусства.
• Художественные стили многогранны и неконкретны.
• График помогает представить логичную схему восприятия искусства.
28:12 Расширение графика
• График решает проблему пунктирной линии в системе Скотта Маклеода.
• Добавлены символическое измерение и переименованы ярлыки для теоретической точности.
• Новый квадратный график охватывает абстрактные, формальные, знаковые и символические стили.
29:10 Проблемы оригинального графика
30:07 Субреальное искусство
31:07 Идеальное искусство
32:06 Гиперреалистичное искусство
32:56 Метаполевое искусство
33:54 Стилистические области
Классная таблица офигеть
jesus christ this has academic quality!! i used mccloud's framework in my grad's thesis and boy o boy would i have wished to come across your video by then... if you ever chose to turn your video into a proper paper, i think it definitely will make waves!!
Hey Ryan, all my attempts at semiotics studies have finally lead me to your video. YT actually DOES know what I need. I want to thank you for helping me to put all these concepts together. You have done an outstanding job.
I love Scott McCloud, and this is a great expansion of the ideas in his books. Good stuff!
This was a lovely video. And also gives me a great ideas for discussing Aphantasia!
Best video this year and I’ve only read the title, very excited for this topic
Omg, one of my fav books having one of its theories expanded upon in an epic video format?!! Sign me up! Thanks for making this! ❤
Wow thank you so much. I am still processing, but at tis moment you already gave me much more clarity! Can't wait until everything settles.
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!!)
Wow amazing video. Intellectual crack. I really loved this and intend to watch it many times over. Very well done.❤
This is such a deep cut. I read Understanding Comics way back in 2017, back when I barely knew how to draw. I don’t know why I read it, but regardless, it stuck with me, especially this random visualization of art styles graph he did. I’m so pleasantly surprised to see someone else talk about it 7 years later.
I read it maybe 14 years ago or so. More people should talk about it.
This is an excellent expansion of McCloud’s triangle! Great job on that concept and in explaining it so well in this video.
0:30 I saw a similar categorization: Realism-Abstract-Stylized
Abstract means removing detail from realism (the right drawings)
Stylized means changing it to something different (the upper axis here)
This is a tremendous video for an "abstract" artist like me. Well, as you point out in this video so thoroughly, aren't we all? I am so glad YT added your video to my feed. I'm definitely subscribing. It will take a while to understand everything I heard and saw here, today, but worth it :)
This will probably be one of my favorite TH-cam videos ever. Thank you
Legitimately the best video I have ever seen on TH-cam up to this point. It formalises art with a similar rigour to mathematics. Thank you for your work.
This rocks! I appreciate you covering different types of mediums
I cant believe im consuming this media for free. Its so informative and concise. Thank you!
This needs to be published in an academic journal
What do you mean this has 11 likes oh my god!
Literally better and more comprehensive than any lecture I have had on the topic.
Thank you for making this, amazing video
Excellent video. Provides an easy, yet comprehensive way to categorize artwork. I will be interested to see how well I am able to use the system to categorize artwork next time I visit an art museum.
I literally love this book and this concept so much I gasped when I saw the thumbnail
Wonderful video and perfeclty explained with graphic and illustrations. Hope to see more of this type of stuff, but for the moment, need to digest this one, Keep it up !
I never thought art like this. Learn a lot! Thank you!!!
Reading Scott McCloud was such a game changer to how I approached visual storytelling. Goated video
OMG this was one of the best video i saw in a while. Normally i never comment, but i have to so the algorithm recommend this video too as many people as possible
Absolutely awesome video. I feel like my mind has been opened up to a new axis of seeing the world.
Huh?
In all seriousness great video, never even heard of the triangle before this and this did a great job explaining and then expanding on it
Stuff like this is hard to find, especially at such a high quality. Well done.
GREAT hecking stuff bro, very valuable and interesting information put into concise and clean presentation, incredible job.
wow, I'm quite convinced by your arguments, well done
I'm surprised how coherent this is - art theory has often eluded me in the formal sense, but this is... really cogent? Well done.
scratched every itch in my brain plz make more videos i beg
finally a good art style video 😭
You should 100% write a paper on this! An incredible contribution
This is genius. I cannot believe how many answers I got out of this. Thanks a lot Ryan, I'm sure this was a lot of work to put together.
20:08 : hm,
I feel like there’s perhaps a way to make a principled distinction based on like, conditional Kolmogorov complexity or something like that?
… hm, though I suppose maybe from that perspective, in the way in which the Mona Lisa is a depiction of a person, various abstract works (like the splattering ink on canvas) are “depictions” of the process by which they were produced?
21:32 : “but objectified subjectivity” : uhhh…?
“For the marks on the page to become objects they must be objectified by the mind based on the initial subjective content” : ergh, I feel like these terms must be being overloaded somehow here?
By “overloaded” I mean like, being used in multiple distinct ways depending on context, like how one might say both 1+3=4 and “abcd”+”efg”=“abcdefg”, overloading “+”.
This is not my wheelhouse.
21:56 : “value from darkness to lightness is what allows the mind to perceive objects as three dimensional” : surely this is not true in all cases? Like, wireframe representations are perceived as 3D, right?
I would think that if one had like, a camera+screen for each eye like those pass through things on VR headsets, where you set the lightness value to the same thing for every pixel, only allowing saturation and hue to vary, things would still appear with depth?
[Edit: uh, I don’t mean to be rude here, I just, am not used to this kind of analysis, and also should *really* be asleep. Sorry if this comment is possibly a bit insulting?]
23:04 : “subjected objectified subjectivity” oh come on now,
Really?
Surely this is not the plainest way to say this? Right???
Are you just phrasing this this way as a bit of wordplay?
As an art student, i cant believe i found this video
same, im sending this to my painting teacher
Bless your existence for this. Truly.
I really amazing, thank you for sharing this great content! subbed! :)
what a great video, bro. 25:25 but will you consider a 3d chart (so there is no need to collapse the axis) where symbolism find it's own position in the y axis and abstract in z axis? like a triangular pyramid (or maybe other shape could work lol idk) because I don't really think it's fair to put expressionism down there when they're often heavy on symbolism, and put the alexander mosaic right in the middle of abstract and symb because imo it doesn't even belong to that axis (vertically).
btw with this high of a quality, I'm sure a lot more people hope it appears on their recommendations, haha
I made the comment before finish the video, the square graph fits everything so perfectly (except the expressionism lol, I still think symbolism deserve another dimension)
dude… insane work 👏👏👏👏
Outstanding analysis here. I think I'm more sure than ever that impressionism is my favorite. But also, I think the "Everyhere at the End of Time" album art symbolizes this very well. As the "main character's" condition progresses, the art seems to move from surrealism to formalism to pure abstraction, more or less, as if regressing to a mental state where nothing really makes sense.
I was waiting for the graph to become a square the whole time. Why was it not used from the beginning? It makes no sense that an increase on the iconic axis would necessitate a decrease on the symbolic axis. Was there a reason for this?
such a good video, thanks
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?
Incredible video, please continue to make more
I have to give Scott McCloud huge props, just by the title and thumbnail, I knew this video would cover his system. It's just that recognizable, despite only being a triangle with a dotted line through it.
I just recognized the similar art style.
I never comment but you have to know that this video is going to be life changing for my art, life, and view of the world
What a video, great detail
Wow this explains why I love symbolic art like beat the reds but never really understood "other" abstract art
What a recommendation well done TH-cam. Also well done Ryan this is an incredible video. My dad would get me to read Scott’s book as a child and I completely forgot it existed
Cool but now I'm confused, it's gonna take me a while to understand it all i think.
The center point of the last one could be “narrative”, because moving away from it is the art that is static and either is highly dependent to be interpreted or has nothing to be interpreted and therefore has no “movement” on its own
So... I'm not crazy.
The whole world is a fortune cookie!
Wow! Great job on this.
Woah this is such a great video
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.
wow this was amazing. thank you x10000000000
Absolutely GORGEOUS 3D system for understanding art💗💞💖💕
I see understanding comics, I click