It is less obvious than you think. Obvious to you and me, perhaps. But a significant portion of the population genuinely believes that you are born with the talent to just do this like it's nothing, or born with the talent to be a piano prodigy, etc, and as a result never bother to apply themselves, even though with the wealth of educational resources available today anyone[1] could make paintings of this quality if they were to put in the effort to learn. I think that article headlines that reinforce this popular misconception are rather damaging.

[1] Given the level of pedantry on this site, I suppose I should say "almost anyone", since a small minority of people with severe disabilities may not be able to.

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dismantlethesun 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Cmon, even famous virtuosos still have to go through a period of being children without fine motor control.

I won’t argue about the obviousness as that’s a tarpit of comparing each others social circles, but let say it’s reasonable to assuming this wasn’t his first ever brush stroke to touch canvas.

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anonymous908213 4 hours ago | parent [-]

My observation has nothing to do with my social circle, but rather the general population. Coming back to this thread hours later, the top comment thread has people blathering on all about how talent is genetic and citing works like these as an example, despite the fact that Michelangelo is in fact a very proof of the opposite, of nurture over nature, given that he was training from a young age. The majority of people genuinely believe certain people are born with the skill to move a paintbrash well and that it's somehow not the result of years of disciplined training.

HN specifically selects for a population that leans towards a belief that hard work creates results, and yet even here you can find this nonsensical ideology of genetic paintbrush skill as a mainstream part of the discourse. It is 10x worse in the average population, and this garbage, factually incorrect framing of "first painting" rather than "earliest known published" for something that Michalangelo had spent years of his childhood practicing for contributes to that misunderstanding of the world. Rather than making misleading claims and leaving the reader to "assume the obvious", why not just correctly state the obvious in the first place?

	▲	cindyllm 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
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