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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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Angelus Novus looks super ugly like a deformed chicken with the face of a monster, then the artist sneezed violently over the paper, coating it in phlegm.

https://www.1000museums.com/shop/art/paul-klee-angelus-novus/

While art and taste is indeed idiosyncratic, museums have the role of curating and selecting art for preservation and developing culture. Only a tiny fraction of art ever gets praise or is shown in museums. Whatever museums do, they're making political, cultural choices, they're distributing status and prestige in a way that alienates the majority of people and caters to a certain highly left-wing clique. They should pick art that actually looks good, that most people generally enjoy or get uplift from. That's what they're there for. The weird, deranged stuff should get its own booru and that's about it.

Critic René Crevel called the artist [Klee] a "dreamer" who "releases a swarm of small lyrical louses from mysterious abysses."

With sufficient verbal IQ and chutzpah I could construct an argument for why anything, including Stable Diffusion 1 512x512 outputs I made in bulk and looked at for about 5 seconds before forgetting about, is a desperately profound and deeply meaningful exploration of meaning, time and space, intensely political too.

The VAE, the Variational Autoencoder, great interpreter between the numerical and the retinal, has performed an act of translation poetry. Something is always lost but something stranger is always gained.

The CFG of 7.5 takes a deliberately bourgeois, middle-ground position between the statistical id of 1 and the robotic intensity of 15. And yet the bourgeois condition is itself a subject...

But that wouldn't make them worthy to sit in an art gallery. It's not supposed to be a test of verbal IQ but of artistic skill and ability. Anyone can make an ugly deformed chicken with a monster face.

Exactly. Angelus Novus isn't art, it's a balderdash prompt.

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