There are clear differences between the painting and the photo, multiple things were added and removed. You might not place much value in them, but that's purely subjective. I must place more importance on those changes than you do because I have a preference for the photo over the painting. Objectively, those changes do exist regardless of how we feel about them.
I don't see the argument as the second painting is the original, just that it more closely resembles what they original may have looked like.
There are some recent art restorations which exemplify how much the art can change. Both pieces together add to the story.
I have no idea how you could make that comparison. The original artwork was neither destroyed, changed, or touched in any way. It's not in any way like "painting a black mustache on the Mona Lisa with a marker".
It's not even so much about stylistic choice but about the historicity of it. Van Gogh belongs to an era in art history. If you chose to paint in this style today it would have a different meaning, even if it looked the same.
The way these photographs look is as much part of history as what they portray - whether intentional or not. These enhancement processes will remove that part.
I think I reject the "conditioned" argument. If I saw this [1] painting and compared it to a hyper-realistic painting (or photograph for that matter) I suspect the photograph would be boring in comparison. Certainly not world famous.
No one would say, "well you're just conditioned to like the impressionistic form better". I think it's just objectively more interesting. An iPhone snapshot of the same scene is just boring. If anything, my point is proven by what people attempt in their photographs. They add vignetting, color treatment, bokey, etc. All these things are forms of impressionism. No one wants a perfectly realistic photo.
This is really interesting. I wish the pictures he provided were a little bigger though. I still don't know that this really improves on the originals. To me, part of the genius of Van Gogh is his unusual use of color. The "improved" versions look nice, but they also look sort of boring compared to the old versions- they are more realistic, but they also loose a lot of the whimsicality and surreally of the originals (two of my favorite traits of Van Gogh). I guess my problem with this article isn't as much the new versions of the paintings, as the authors assertion that they are superior to the originals.
It's also not the original work of art. It's a derivative.
Try thinking about this visually. If I modernize ANYTHING on the Mona Lisa, whose work is it? Are my brushstrokes over his really not changing anything fundamental about the work or is it just another option for viewing Leo's most famous portrait?
Oh sure. Nobody's telling you personally not to like it or discounting the reasons you like it. We're just talking about the thermodynamic limit of the likingness of it over a spherical cow average of humans ;) And maybe also asserting that there are many other lesser known paintings that also have those qualities that you enjoy but you haven't seen because they weren't slingshotted into the public conciousness. These things are linked but not necessarily causitive. My claim above is even simpler, which is that I'm surprised people are spending time sussing out what specific paint was used because I didn't think that was even a question people asked. It's a painting from a known artist with a known style and known materials that both it and its sibling paintings have been pretty well pored over before.
I'd put it differently. Not that aesthetics have changed, rather that the technique of displaying what you see (through painting or sculpting) has gone through considerable evolution since the days of the pharaohs. And thus the aesthetics of things were a result of that.
It seems different when we're just trying to guess what the actual colors were, since the artist is dead and the painting is destroyed, and we only have a black and white copy + textual description of the painting.
Nobody today would improve on the old. That wasn't always the case.
There is a lot of historical precedent for restorers "fixing" art. (Most often adding clothing to cover private areas). Since we now know the art by the "fixed version today there is the open question of if we remove the fix or not - either way we are destroying art.
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