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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31784 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I'm intrigued by this comment by @reddit_lies:

I staunchly believe AI art is a 'checkmate' to the Postmodernist prioritization of the viewer's subjective experience over artistic intent.

When artistic intent doesn't matter, neither does the artist.

I think this really is a major crux of the argument. I saw people complaining that knowing art was AI-generated took the fun out of speculating about artist intent, and I was mystified. I didn't realize people still cared about what human artist's intentions were when making things. I had basically accepted the lessons from The Elephant and the Brain, that even the actual artist of a piece isn't an authority of the intent that went into making a work - that it is just the "press secretary" in their brain fabulizing a plausible story of the intent behind something.

With this as a background, most of the fun of art to me has always seemed to be using your own brain's "press secretary" to make up your own plausible story about how a particular painting came to be, or what hidden meanings it might have.

It probably helps that I'm a huge fan of Borges, and his story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", which is about a man trying to write Don Quixote word-for-word the same, but different because of the different time period and life circumstances that he is writing it under.

AI art is definitely a postmodernists dream - it is the ultimate death of the author, since no author even exists anymore.

One reply to that countered that postmodernism implies the opposite, actually, but I have no idea. Your point is interesting, though.

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