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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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But for the artist who wants to be innovative in terms of technique, what is there to paint or draw? You can draw something new, be the guy who does portraits of SpaceX rockets or NVIDIA GPUs or something and maybe solves some minor challenge of framing or perspective involved. Kind of a niche, and limited demand. Or you can experiment with technique in a way that violates the classical laws of beauty, perspective, framing, etc that are ‘solved’.

How about coming up with new techniques to do the classical beauty more efficiently, more quickly? Perhaps by learning linear algebra and doing it a lot really really fast. I wonder if there's an alternate universe where generative AI isn't called AI and was developed by artists trying to come up with new and innovative ways to make themselves stand out.

I think there are still visual combos of technique and modern subject matter/point of view to explore, even in traditional figurative painting. See for example Dana Schutz, someone who is making exceptional, critically acclaimed paintings that are stylised but not abstract.

I like the idea of artists coming up with generative AI btw. I wonder what they'd have done with it? Probably they would have tried to monetised the output instead of the mechanism.

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