Exploration of Generative Art
I am so confused / mixed on generative art. I've made a bunch. I often enjoy looking at it. I have friends that make a living from it. But I waffle on whether it's good/bad/art/not-art.<p>I've been told by commenters on HN that my generative art is not art if it was created without intent to express some truth about the world or some such criteria. Not sure I agree.<p>On the other hand it used to be a rite of passage to make a "draw random lines in random colors" program in like the first few days of learning to code and technically that is generative art.<p>My friend who makes a living on generative art for installations does lots of flowing cubes and I'm super happy for him and always say positive things. But, in my head sometimes I'm like "seriously, all you did there is write a random line generator" because having made similar pieces I know effort wise it's more like a doodle then a project. In other words most of my generative art took less than an hour to make. I can turn my generative art to make images similar to ones he gets paid for in few minutes. So, sometimes it's hard not to see certain generative art as low effort? I'm not sure how to describe my feeling here.<p>If some one showed you their program that had 2 numeric fields and an add button and you set the 2 fields, clicked add and the sum of the 2 fields is displayed (in other words the 2nd or 3rd program you ever wrote, <a href="https://jsfiddle.net/greggman/hypv0ugo/" rel="nofollow">https://jsfiddle.net/greggman/hypv0ugo/</a>). You'd be happy for them they are making progress on learning to program but if they posted that as "Show HN" you'd likely not give them much praise.<p>That's the type of thing I often feel about some percent of generative art and I don't know how to stop feeling that any more then I wouldn't feel like "why are you showing this?" about the adding 2 numbers example.