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MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

(blog.decryption.net.au)
1034 points decryption | 1 comments | 12 Jul 25 08:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.28s | source
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seabombs ◴[12 Jul 25 10:57 UTC] No.44541090[source]▶
There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.

Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.

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lukan ◴[12 Jul 25 11:13 UTC] No.44541180[source]▶
Hm, are you sure that there is not some nostalgia at play here?

To me they look horribly pixelated and at least some would improve aesthetically a lot for me with a higher resolution.

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1. tumnus ◴[13 Jul 25 22:33 UTC] No.44554394[source]▶
Your opinion isn't popular, but I agree with you. Taking just the first image as an example... this is a digital recreation/modification of a Saul Steinberg cover for the New Yorker originally done in 1976. This cover created a extremely popular subgenre of stylized map drawing at the time, but the Mac version looks like mostly clip art images all splodged together with no real sense of composition or perspective. There are many other examples in here which I feel were made by people who happened to have access to the technology, but did not necessarily have great artistic ability.

That being said, although there are also some extremely good examples in here (in my subjective opinion), I absolutely think there is a nostalgia element at play. I worked on these machines in the 80s and feel that nostalgia myself.