There are a lot of oft-repeated quotes from famous artists defining what art truly is to them:
“Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“Art is what you can get away with.” – Andy Warhol
“Art is lies that tell the truth.” – Pablo Picasso
“Art is art. Everything else is everything else.” – Ad Reinhardt
“Art is coming face to face with yourself.” – Jackson Pollock
“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.” – Kurt Vonnegut
“Art is like a shipwreck… it’s everyman for himself.” – Marcel Duchamp
“Art is the most intense mode of invidualism that the world has known.” – Oscar Wilde
“For there is no greater art than a busty woman’s wet t-shirt.” – Burnsy
The point is that a lot of hippies out there think that we can find art in anything, to which I’ve always asked: “What about one of my dirty socks? Is that art?” The answer, of course, is no, because stinky is not art. Neither is something as silly as Twitter, I would have thought as well, but then along came Ranjit Bhatnagar and his fancy algorithms that have rocked my understanding of art to its very core.
Bhatnagar has created an algorithm that he calls Pentametron that finds random Tweets from every corner of Twitter and then connects them to form full rhyming poems. Or to put it a little better:
With algorithms subtle and discrete
I seek iambic writings to retweet.
Translated: This dude turned Twitter into a poetic art form. And it’s so impressive that I want to crash some coffee house poetry readings and impress all of the ladies with these insane poems. I’ve included Pentametron’s latest results after the jump (NSFW language), and now I just have to buy some bongos.