Budget aside, art isn't constrained or criticized by how much effort the artist put in.
All that matters is the result. A wallpaper or any other artistic creation isn't less beautiful or evocative because the artist spent thousands of hours on it.
Even without getting into semantics about "what is art", the reality is that this is promotional material for advertising. This wasn't commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMA.
This isn't to take away from the artists skill, effort, creativity etc. but the context of this is inherently a business and economic decision. There's no artistic impetus, no political/social/cultural message.
It's a computer wallpaper that monopolistic megacorp funded to show off how wealthy it is. It's a very typical "look at how much money we spent" exercise to showcase success or whatever.
They say, before making comments about what they think is art :-)
> There's no artistic impetus, no political/social/cultural message.
There is, as you state in your next couple of sentences:
> … monopolistic megacorp funded to show off … typical "look at how much money we spent" exercise to showcase
You can, probably rightly, call it a crappy impetus. But that was impetus for the exercise and could be called the artistic impetus. Even if you disagree strongly on that particular point, it is definitely a message.
To be slightly more fair, that wallpaper is a major part of the initial impression people have of the OS version, much like XP's Telly Tubby Hill did. The XP image was trying to convey “friendly, welcoming”, the Win10 one tries to convey something more like “dynamic, technically competent, flashy”. While it may not be an expression of someone's inner feelings or a societal property or anything like that, some art is more about directing your impression of something than it is about expressing someone else's and that is what this image was for and what it does.
99.9999% of all art is not commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMa. It's just something that artists do.
IT geeks are all for imposing their own creative restrictions on their work -- using Haskell when the competition is using PHP, developing their own distributed network persistence layer on top of SQLite when there are products out there that already exist but they just don't like for pseudospiritual reasons.
But artists who just make pictures are expected to be cost-effective and not to put any value on their artisanship?
> It's a computer wallpaper that monopolistic megacorp funded to show off how wealthy it is.
Groan. It's not possible to have a serious discussions with someone starting from such a cynical position. After all, what is even the point of creating anything? We're all going to turn to dust and be forgotten forevermore.
The Win XP field was the opposite. It was organic, calming, and oddly fascinating because you couldn't tell if it was a plain photo or an edit or... what. And it had an unexpected reference to the Windows branding in the composition.
Win 10 was more like meaningless window-shaped visual noise.
The proportions and composition are weird, messy, and obviously asymmetric in both axes. Both the horizontals and verticals are slightly off, which makes it feel unsettled.
It seems quite clumsily edited, with a blotchy cut-off at the left that feels claustrophobic and doesn't seem to be there for a good aesthetic reason.
IMO it would have been stronger and more powerful rotated left through 90 degrees so the light was shining down.
Disagree, HEAVILY, a ton of the biggest marvels in the world are so because of how much work was put into them.
