Doc-Hammer

Yeah, in a way, Tim taking 4 years to create painting in the fashion that was never used to create the original is really: "Tim took four years to learn to paint is an awkward mechanical fashion." And that's great. I'm glad Tim can now paint in this way. Vermeer didn't though.

Maybe the larger question is "Why do we love Vermeer?" Well, it's not because he is the worlds most miraculously accurate painter, it's because his paintings are appealing. The modern love of his works started when the National Gallery did a retrospective of him and the placed his little known "Girl With The Pearl earrings" on the cover of their magazine. People just responded to it because she was simply appealing. He made a beautiful image. Creating beauty is, as you say, a "Faustian act" in my opinion. Look, my mom can push a button and have a picture of a girl in one second. But will it be iconically beautiful? No (sorry Mom). My point is that thinking that Vermeer's method is all of Vermeer is Tim's largest act of arrogance.

This plays into your love of a guitar sound that you found out was simply alternate tuning. You clearly loved the sound. You heard the invention in it. You responded to it as we do when something is beautiful. How could that beauty fade when you learned the fingering isn't impossible? I mean, when I figure out a song I love on guitar I also learn how idiotically simple it is. My response is "You clever bastard! Damn ,why didn't I think of that!" And I fall more in love with it for it's cleanliness and simplicity. Its beauty is now, in my mind, like the effortless beauty of someone blessed with good genes. It's still beautiful, and now almost more beautiful because it is just song writing and not gymnastics.

You state that you may be "petty" for abandoning something you loved because it wasn't created in the way you first thought it was. I'm not sure I'd call it petty. But I do think you may have abandoned beauty because you found out its perfect lips were made so with lipstick. You're an idealist, not petty. But in the end, you lost your favorite band from it. 

No no, there are many scholars looking at Vermeer. Tim is too full of himself to give a shit about that. He knows nothing about art, and art history and doesn't claim to. But my point is Tim's impetus. Tim is gonna debunk greatness. Knock it down a peg. His arrogance is offensive. That's a Vermeer is to Tim; A machine making an object. The beauty, composition, sentimentality, visual power, etc. are not even in Tim's mind. He was raised in the wake of Conceptualism. All those words have nothing to do with "real art". He doesn't see Vermeer as art at all. He thinks he does, but he doesn't. He has no respect or understanding of it. It just scares him and makes him feel incompetent. "Art isn't supposed to do that!" He sees a Vermeer painting as a selfie snapped by a child. Tim can do that too!

Haha! No. Please see that I am commenting on contemporary thought and not isolated or personal manifestations of it. The point I thought I was making clear is that "cheating" and "tricks" (in word or understanding) are used to describe antique methods, as "traditional, handicraft, academic, etc." are used to slander and simply knock down representational art. I'm not sure how to reduce this to a "comment", so excuse this if it's messy:
100 years ago Duchamp presented a urinal at an art show. He was a pissed off painter, and made statement. Wow! Hip! It's new and it resonates. 50 years later Conceptual art takes a foothold. It's refreshing at first; You don't have to make a fetid commercial object, you can simply discuss the concept. It's like the cleanest form of art. But you're not supposed to look at it or be engaged by its aesthetic value which is confusing to the human animal (and that only helps Conceptualism gain an elitist foothold). It's a freeing atmosphere, but boy does it get ridged and dogmatic fast. Suddenly every Tom Dick and University is hiding behind the avant garde. "How can we be tired old blowhards? We're the hip new thing!" The hip new art is something that you're not supposed to look at, and rejects the object and any skill needed to make it. We are living in the wake of this. Generations have grown up seeing "fine art" as intentionally ugly and childish. It is! Beauty was rejected. Can you go back? (rhetorical: the Renaissance is a rejection of dogmatic Christian/Mediaeval thought and an embrace of the last time art and thought was 'right", that being the Greek ideal.) They won't. Because Greenberg and other powerful critics also came to the conclusion that art development is linear. Like, if Otto Dix rejected beauty (which he didn't, he simply broadened the rigged definition of it) then we are past beauty... Can't go back, can't be wrong. Forward into the new! And it was just this idea that became the new criteria: is it new? Is it shocking? etc. Bla bla bla.
So here we are. Rothko works are millions of dollars. Are we gonna be able to go "It's a red blob that Tim, or anyone can do in under an hour."? No. That's economic heresy. But what we can do is try to pacify ourselves. Say "It's okay. We didn't create an artistic shit-show out of the late 20th Century. We did the right thing. We made art real. We made it authentic. What we rejected is nothing. It's a sham. It is the Devil." This is the inclination. It's an old inclination. In fact it's the exact method for making a Devil. Beelzebub? That was originally the name for a Philistine god. So taking what your enemy worships and making that your Devil is an old tradition.
That's what I see happening. It's not done intentionally. It's movement of thought that has been around for ages, and this is our moment's manifestation of it. The optimist in me sees it as the beginning of the end of the Conceptualist experiment. It's not only ran its course, but it's infected the lab.
Did that make any sense? My point been truncated and hobbled to the point of being inambulatory I fear. I'm really sorry but to truly make a case I'd need a small book.