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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   34311 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I understand what you're saying here, but I think it's an effect of the fact that the vast majority of people have nothing to say, rather than being some special vice that's unique to artists.

It seems to me that the Artistic class is an outlier both in per-capita vacuity, and in per-capita outspokenness. Speaking as an insider, the art world is highly politicized and supremely concerned with "message", with "starting conversations", with "ethical concerns" which mostly seem to play out as grifting by connected individuals. I've been in it for nearly two decades, and his description rings true.

So criticizing artists for having "nothing to say" doesn't seem very fair, because that's never really been their job description, and if you do have something to say, the philosophy department is right down the hall.

This sentence is difficult to square with my personal experiences with "artists' statements", general artistic activism, and what I see in the art world around me. A supermajority of the fine-art world is shitty philosophy and warmed-over social theories perched atop a mountain of narcissism bordering on the solipsistic. To say that the pop-art world is better would be damning with faint praise; it is better, but still has serious issues. Watch an average Oscars speech, and then understand that the difference between one of those big-shots and a lot of the minnows is talent and scale of audience, not temperament or worldview. It's hard to avoid people who think they're Making A Difference, and inquire pointedly about your allegiances.

I strongly disliked those people back when I was a doctrinaire progressive in the Obama era, because I thought they were clowns and their art was bullshit. My feelings toward them have not improved now that they're front-line troops in the culture war. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that's the fault-line being gestured at in the passage you quoted: people boasting emptily of how they intend to change the world, now demanding the world not change when it inconveniences them.

Well that's obviously not true. If that was true, then companies wouldn't be spending millions of dollars to build machines to replicate their work.

"Their work" isn't what people want. It's the outputs that work generates, the results. And those outputs can be had without the moralizing and pretention and activism and drama.

This doesn't sound very plausible.

It sounds pretty plausible to me, speaking as an artist. Non-artists just don't get how much of what we do is just trivially-simplistic mechanics. You need a lot of practice to actually learn how to do it, but what you're doing is often not terribly complex, it's just tedious and tiring and counter-intuitive. 3-point perspective is not some deep mystery. Neither is shading, highlights, brush-strokes and so on, any more than playing a guitar is some great mystery.

Well there are a lot of people who think your "beauty and meaning machine" is blatantly evil and anything it produces is automatically disqualified from being meaningful and beautiful, so you may have to go back to the drawing board.

There's a lot of people who claim to think that. I am extremely skeptical that they'll actually pass the artistic Turing test, out in the real world. Absent a concrete objection to the material itself, it seems to me that this is just bigotry, pure and simple. What's the difference to people not liking Jazz because it's made by black people?

”Their work” isn’t what people want.

What are you talking about? Anime and manga is a multi-million dollar industry. Of course people want the work. Again, why the fervent desire to build machines to replicate it if people don’t want the work?

I am extremely skeptical they’ll pass the artistic Turing test.

This doesn’t actually matter. Two objects can be physically identical and still have different relational properties. If you make an identical replica of a Van Gogh painting, one is still the original and one is still a fake.

Naturally, I also contend that “beauty” and “meaning” are at least partially relational properties.

Two objects can be physically identical and still have different relational properties. If you make an identical replica of a Van Gogh painting, one is still the original and one is still a fake.

It's just untrue. Overgeneralization of the concept 'original'. If you have two copies which are actually identical, neither is more original than the other.

The original must have the quality "created first." Doesn't that impose a limit on how perfectly identical any copy can be?

Let's say you have content-addressed Content-addressable file system. It supports mirroring of any piece file onto multiple devices. When user saved a new file, it is saved, identifiable only through its content hash, onto two or more devices.

If you unplug any of them and plug it to a different computer, both computers will have the file.

Which is the original file and which is a copy? Neither is original, it makes no sense to talk about 'original' in digital realm (usually).

And yes, files, digital data - abstract stuff. Maybe for 'real' objects it is different? Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms

Suppose I take two atoms of helium-4 in a balloon, and swap their locations via teleportation. I don't move them through the intervening space; I just click my fingers and cause them to swap places. Afterward, the balloon looks just the same, but two of the helium atoms have exchanged positions.

Now, did that scenario seem to make sense? Can you imagine it happening?

If you looked at that and said, "The operation of swapping two helium-4 atoms produces an identical configuration—not a similar configuration, an identical configuration, the same mathematical object—and particles have no individual identities per se—so what you just said is physical nonsense," then you're starting to get quantum mechanics.

If you furthermore had any thoughts about a particular "helium atom" being a factor in a subspace of an amplitude distribution that happens to factorize that way, so that it makes no sense to talk about swapping two identical multiplicative factors, when only the combined amplitude distribution is real, then you're seriously starting to get quantum mechanics.

If you thought about two similar billiard balls changing places inside a balloon, but nobody on the outside being able to notice a difference, then...

The concept of reality as a sum of independent individual billiard balls, seems to be built into the human parietal cortex—the parietal cortex being the part of our brain that does spatial modeling: navigating rooms, grasping objects, throwing rocks.

Even very young children, infants, look longer at a scene that violates expectations—for example, a scene where a ball rolls behind a screen, and then two balls roll out.

People try to think of a person, an identity, an awareness, as though it's an awareness-ball located inside someone's skull. Even nonsophisticated materialists tend to think that, since the consciousness ball is made up of lots of little billiard balls called "atoms", if you swap the atoms, why, you must have swapped the consciousness.

The original must have the quality "created first."

But to what do you attach this metadata, if you are presented with two bit-by-bit (or atom-by-atom) identical objects? If it's a 'real world' painting on a canvas, and you make that copy, the only way to discriminate between them is some metadata - like position in space of its center of gravity or sth. That seems rather arbitrary.

What are you talking about? Anime and manga is a multi-million dollar industry. Of course people want the work. Again, why the fervent desire to build machines to replicate it if people don’t want the work?

Apologies, terminology failure. People want "work", meaning the things the artists produce as an end-product. They don't generally care much about "work", the specific labor involved in making them. How many hours of marvel movies have you watched? how many hours of "behind the scenes" footage for those movies have you watched? I'd guess there's a serious disparity there, no?

This doesn’t actually matter. Two objects can be physically identical and still have different relational properties. If you make an identical replica of a Van Gogh painting, one is still the original and one is still a fake.

...Provided you can tell which is which in some reliable fashion, and in an extremely rarified and highly-manipulated market, yes. Neither condition generalizes. If your bastion against the AI apocalypse is to hope that general art consumption conforms to the fine-art model, I think you're setting sail for disappointment.

Naturally, I also contend that “beauty” and “meaning” are at least partially relational properties.

Elaborate?

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