site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Will AI bring back beauty?

Looking at midjourney's top pieces of art I am struck by the beauty in them. They contain detail, high degrees of realism even when depicting surrealist themes. They tend to be symmetrical and often portray idealized versions of reality. AI art tends to portray archetypal depicitions of its motifs and often excludes blemmishes, dirt and grime.

Compare it with corporate memphis a primarily human generated art form that has gained significant traction in the public space in the past decade. This is the most expensive painting painted by a living woman.

Compare the buildings drawn by the AI with the best exterior of 2022 in Sweden according to architects.

AI gives people what it gets positive feedback from. It gives people what they want. People want visually stunning rather than the output of the art community.

You know what this showcase reminds me of? The Emergent art from A Deepness in the Sky. It looks high effort, like one of these mandala coloring books for adults. If I buy a picture like this from a "local artist", the primary reason is that it is a form of concentrated labor, "someone spent a lot of hours to make this" is the message. Photoshop has already devalued this kind of art a lot (which is why there was evidently so much of it in Midjourney's training data), with Midjourney and similar tools able to crank it out in literal seconds the devaluation is almost complete.

Highbrow art went through this crisis literally 150 years ago. Claude Monet painted this in 1872; when Ivan Shishkin painted his innumerable stalks of rye, he was already looking dated. Today you can ask a hyperrealist painter to do a landscape, and you will be able to examine every blade of grass under a loupe, but the painting won't have a "punch".

I'm not saying that AI art is useless. Just using it to replicate human art is a waste of time. However, this music video is great. It doesn't try do something humans did, it throws thousands of AI-generated images at you in a fever dream. It's not totally novel, when I watched Big Time for the first time I thought I was hallucinating, but it's sufficiently unique that it doesn't feel like one of these "stained glass" films you can glue to your windowpanes.

I'm loaded with cognitive biases against AI, though I've swallowed the bitter pill of it's ever-possible potential. But I think among those images it's notable that some genres are easy to imitate.

Let's dispense with corporate Memphis which is surely about as good as Microsoft clipart from what the wiki shows.

Midjourney does futurist, fantasy and animation guff very well, the house I find particularly evocative and it is a great blend of realistic and fantasy. The mock stop motion animal style is pretty good though a hint of something not quite right is there (particularly the cat). Least good are the humans-something uncanny creeps in, though I said I was biased. Doesn't help they have that HDR style which has been overdone in the last decades. Particularly bad is the Indian girl, though the blue hair girl 'passes' as far as I'm concerned but then it's quite low res in the face and additionally cliched Californian type art.

But all of this is to say it won't be that long before it's as good as the real thing in most styles in in imitation and enough variation in the imitation will create enough novelty to be considered as good as genuine art today.

So, what then? Surely it will just become over commodified, lose peoples interest and become devalued. People will play with it for a while and get bored, but otherwise we will become more attentive to the actual art (and not the image). Art and sculpture still require humans hands, though bit by bit I guess they'll succumb with various printing technologies. Then we will move to arts that require living, breathing humans. Drama, dance, ballet and live music will become more popular and people will reconnect with the 'vibe' of humans and life. Of course AI will come for that,and some of us will be captured by the addiction of non-reality and give up on caring about the really real. But others will be drawn to greater contact, with AI providing the contrast needed to point in the direction of the true.

We're now post-scarcity for beauty.

Unlike all ages past, if all you wish to look at are beautiful things, you're very much in luck. Any idiot with a midrange GPU, or an internet connection for the matter, can generate all the beauty on demand they want.

And I contend that this is clearly and obviously a good thing.

Ugliness sucks, going to stores and online catalogues and being forced to choose from a limited selection sucks, forced consumption of capeshit wherever you go sucks, now anyone with a modicum of taste can overcome their lack of artistic aptitude and make their own.

I can look at perfect pixelated renditions of sex via porn and art via AI. Still holding (but soon to come) on music and writing.

I can't get it at my local strip-mall or stripper joint unfortunately. Until we develop the necessary interfaces I'm still left wanting.

We're post-scarcity for the most hollow, superficial, devoid-of-meaning kinds of beauty. I get that my view is mine alone and others needn't share it, but when I look at AI art I feel cheated - there are the visual cues of an artist taking care to weave meaning and presentation together, but in truth it's just a surface-level regurgitation of previous works and lacks all sense or intention.

It's like being presented with something resembling, at a glance, a meal, only to discover that the taste is all artificial flavoring, there are no nutrients whatsoever, and the whole thing is a uniform sludge that falls apart at the fork's first touch.

Is this beauty? I'd say we're still a long way away from it. Making beauty may be the last thing the AIs learn to do rather than the first. So far all they are capable of producing is mimics, and a closer look just leads to disgust.

People spend a lot of money on art for reason that have little to do with aesthetics

People have these lofty ideals of what AI art will get used for. They're all wrong. AI art will be Harambe rule 34 for a decade before it starts replacing human artists in more mainstream applications. And it'll still go up the totem pole slowly. The ugly modern art that fills up the met and the Frank LLoyd Wright monstrosities will be the last things to get replaced with AI generated alternatives. Why these things are high status I don't know, but they quite clearly are.

Frank LLoyd Wright monstrosities

Are you sure you aren't thinking of someone else?

Probably the other Frank.

Quite a few monstrosities there, but Frank Lloyd Wright is not exactly the first name I think of when I think "terrible modernist or postmodernist architecture."

Tom Wolfe had some appreciation of Wright, and while this was a rare lapse of good taste on Wolfe's part, it wasn't like people who say that this is "beautiful":

https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p025l9j2.webp

Surely not postmodernist, given that he died in 1959.

Right, but he was a modernist or postmodernist, just not a notably bad example of either.

Frank LLoyd Wright monstrosities

Yeah, who hates on Lloyd Wright ? Maybe OP means the kind of boring modernist buildings that bastardized Bauhaus which was inspired by Lloyd wright.

A lot of his designs are fairly impractical (see fallingwaters enormous humidity issues) or the many toddler hazards common in many examples of his work. For example, the linked photo of the stair railing in the Francis Little house living room or Pope Leighey house' fireplace). They're still very smartly designed and look gorgeous.

Are you sure you sure you’re thinking of the right Wright house? I don’t see any stairs in the Francis Little house living room.

In any case, I’ve had to cat-proof two and help baby-proof one house, and it certainly reduced the artistic worth of both.

Oh the original linked picture is darker and I took the museum gratiting (large open metal grate work to be stair railing).

https://franklloydwright.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/francis-little-house-ii-living-room-reconstruction-1440x640.jpg

The railing appears to be restricting museum patrons to a viewing area not part of the original design.

Will AI bring back beauty?

Currently, it is popular to hold that AI will soon be able to do everything. If this is the case, it trivially follows that it will be able to "bring back beauty" too - not to say that it would, but simply that it could do so, among many other things. Ignoring hypothetical scenarios of godhood however, I currently see no evidence that AI is advancing the cause of beauty in any meaningful way, and indeed I only see evidence that AI is contributing to its increasingly rapid erosion.

Your last sentence seems to indicate that you embrace the following distinction, common enough in popular discourse: on the one hand we have "the people", who are in touch with "true beauty" (either because they understand it intuitively, or maybe because true beauty just is whatever the people want, or however you want to explain it); and then on the other hand we have "the art community", who, for reasons unknown, have chosen to make a bunch of ugly crap that doesn't mean anything to anyone and has no worth.

I don't wish to defend the current art establishment tout court - they really do make a lot of crap that doesn't mean anything to anyone and has no worth. We agree on that much. But still, I think those high-falutin' art snobs do get some things right (it would be weird if they were so dysfunctional that they got everything exactly wrong). I want to take this opportunity to respond to (what I think is) your conception of beauty, and explain some of my reasons for dissenting from it, as someone who's coming from "the other side of the fence" so to speak.

What really first unlocked my thinking on issues like this is the idea of comparing work in the arts to academic work in other fields. You can imagine a physicist who thinks that classical mechanics is just like, the shit - and not even the parts of classical mechanics that are still the subject of active research like chaotic systems, but specifically stuff like Newton's original laws of motion. He just only wants to solve high school physics problems all day, maybe collect some observations that confirm your standard high school physics equations, and... that's it. And if anyone tells him that if he wants to stay relevant and get grant money, he really should consider working on contemporary problems in string theory or condensed matter, he just responds with "nah, you lost me with all that abstract modern stuff; I'm only into the real good stuff, the classical stuff".

Everyone would think that he was rather missing the point and that he wasn't living up to his proper function as a physicist. The proper job of a physicist is to discover and invent new things, not just repeat what's already been said. This is a reasonable standard to hold for most intellectual activity, and the "art cabal" simply thinks that it should hold for art as well. Yes, that's a very fine painting of a sunny landscape/a woman in a trad dress/Jesus being crucified/whatever, we all agree that it's quite nice, but it's not new. We already know how to paint things like that and make them "beautiful". It's well-trodden territory, it presents no conceptual challenges, it has no capacity to surprise or perplex. It was new at one point - it used to be crucial, cutting-edge work - but now it is no longer new, and there comes a point where you simply have to move on.

Venturing into what is new and unexplored in art will inevitably bring us into contact with all that belongs to the tragic dimension of life - loss, regret, ambiguity, disconcerting feelings of all sorts, in other words all that an untrained eye will initially consider to be "ugly". But such a circuitous route can in fact reveal to us new types of beauty that remained invisible at an earlier stage of development. One of my favorite examples of this sort of "finding of light in the darkness" has always been The Ambassadors by Holbein the Younger - I could have selected a really out-there example to really drive the point home, like say, pretty much anything by Jeff Koons, but The Ambassadors works well as an example because the painting has a foot in "both worlds". It's an immaculately executed work of traditional realism, but it also gestures towards something strange and unsettling.

The painting's claim to notoriety is the giant distorted skull floating in the middle of what is otherwise a physically ordinary scene, seemingly unexplained. I think it is crucial that we take the flat 2D representation of the painting at face value; of course the trick is that the skull is anamorphic, and that if you stand in front of the painting from the right angle then the skull will appear as a full 3D object and will no longer be distorted, but this is one case where looking at a photograph on Wikipedia is actually better than seeing the painting in a gallery. In my view, the distortion of the skull is crucial for the overall aesthetic effect of the painting. Innumerable questions immediately present themselves: who are these guys? Where are they? No seriously, why is that skull there? Why is it compressed and slanted? It looks like it's kind of floating a bit? Does it even exist on the same plane of reality as the rest of the scene? The more you think about it, the more claustrophobic you start to feel - and of course there must be no comforting answer that the skull is "just" an anamorphic illusion that the painter included as a memento mori for discerning observers; that would deflate the tension, and above all our goal is to preserve the tension.

This sort of experience comes close to describing for me, not only beauty as such, but the aesthetic experience as such - this dawning realization, as you puzzle more and more and your attention gets more and more diverted, of "...what is that?". This is the experience that "aesthetic adrenaline junkies" are always chasing after, this feeling that you just got your head rearranged by the work. What separates kitsch, decoration, finery, mere objects, from capital-A Art, is that the former tend towards producing a reaction of "ah, that's nice". Art, on the other hand, "cuts into you", as Todd McGowan succinctly put it, the same way that the skull cuts into Holbein's painting. It's not supposed to be all sunshine and roses. It's supposed to take something from you at the same time that it gives.

Anyway to answer your question the answer is "no", plebs using AI to fill up the world with pictures of epic viking dudes staring straight into the camera is as far removed from beauty as the worst atrocities of the modern MFA/gallery system.

Art, on the other hand, "cuts into you", as Todd McGowan succinctly put it, the same way that the skull cuts into Holbein's painting. It's not supposed to be all sunshine and roses. It's supposed to take something from you at the same time that it gives.

Beauty and "sunshine and roses" are not the same thing. The Fall of Icarus is both extremely beautiful and eloquently says as much about the human condition as some existentialists could only do in a whole book.

It's also wrong to conflate style with demandingness. Someone who wants more beautiful art isn't necessarily asking for more laziness. Again, I point to Bruegel's best works, which works at multiple levels: you can enjoy them at the level of their beauty, but you can also study and think about their details for hours, especially if you are familiar with their historical and intellectual context.

It's not supposed to be all sunshine and roses. It's supposed to take something from you at the same time that it gives.

Plenty of classic art is not all sunshine and roses. Off the top of my head, "Saturn devouring his son", the many depictions of the rape of the Sabines, various treatments of Aeneas fleeing Troy, etc.

Compare to your example of MJ and Bubbles which as far as I can tell is just kitsch upper class countersignaling as lower class.

"Saturn devouring his son" is precisely the kind of work that, were it painted today, OP would point to as an example of ugliness in contemporary art.

OP as in @functor

In my experience, those who decry "ugly" art often conflate depicting ugly topics with aesthetic ugliness. Or perhaps it is more that they assume that the only purpose of art is to be beautiful. And they certainly don't limit their complaints to literal trash hung on walls.

On a related note, in this very thread, someone described "most" of the work here as "dreadful." (Italics in original). So, there is a lot more to the hostility to art that is not "traditional" than merely thinking that literal trash is not art.

deleted

I agree; novelty and beauty are different.

I'm alright with some level of cleverness and novelty (e.g. Escher's fun sometimes), but I recognize that it's not beauty. But Escher isn't pretending to create something beautiful, so much as something interesting. It's also possible to have both, to some extent, of course.

There are at least two differently behaving phenomena for why we do not see beauty everywhere, so far as I can tell. Interestingness being high status is one. Art galleries and architecture are both probably symptoms of this. (Well, in architecture physical and legal constraints might affect the building of buildings, but I would be very surprised to find that this did not play a role.) But there is at least one more case, exemplified by the simplified designs used by companies and other entities (like the apple logo). I'm less sure how to analyze this. In some cases it just needs to be simple for functional reasons (see street signs). In others, it seems more to be going for a particular aesthetic.

Whatever the differences are, I would be a little surprised if the newfound cheapness of detailed imagery did not increase its prevalence.

This is an interesting perspective and I thank you for it. That said, to follow your academia comparison, there are academic physicists and there are engineers. A lot of what us plebs want are the kind of things we get from the engineers of art. And very few people want engineers to design inefficient and difficult to use appliances because they might have internals that are fascinating to other engineers. It would make a lot of people really resentful if they had to buy vacuum cleaners and dish washers from the 90s because modern engineers were obsessed with putting pointless voids in the new ones and held in contempt anyone who demanded functionality, which I think is actually what is analogous to beauty here. Novelty is also important and I think the beauty/functionality crowd underrates it but there is also something underserved.

If you go to your random local downtown art scene or art galleries in a resort town you can find lots of beautiful landscape paintings. It's not that the sort of technically proficient but not novel 'engineer' art isn't being done it's just not high status and not advanced by big time museums and institutions. Look at paintings in the 4-7k range in online marketplaces, there's lots of people still doing beautiful representational art.

A fair point, but I also think there are some other factors playing into the dynamic. Perhaps it's the belief that these different types of art have their places and more and more on the plebian to art snob spectrum the art snobs have been pushing their preferences onto the plebians. Like when governments pay huge fees for things like the $10 million MLK sculture. New art meant to be transgressive and sense shocking has it's place, but it often feels like we're the both the butt of the joke and footing the bill for it. Where is all the recent big stuff with mass appeal? The best I can think of is graffiti art type stuff which I enjoy around Chicago.

Was there a time in history when the art that was championed by elites was also popular with the masses? I genuinely don't know. Renaissance artists never had the chance for economic reasons. Picasso and Monet were successful in their time but were they successful among non-art snobs of their time? Was there some period where the mass public and the art establishment agreed or has the mass public just accepted the past judgement of art establishments from centuries ago because old things are classy.

I don't think the issue with the MLK sculpture is that it's meant to be transgressive or groundbreaking. It's Martin and Coretta embracing, it has a straightforward meaning. The artists just did a bad job of considering what their sculpture would look like from all angles and the people involved in the procurement process didn't push back. That one seems like more of an indictment of city purchasing processes than the art establishment.

But the reason it's cringeworthy to pursue only classical physics problems is not just that they've already been done... but that physics is about achieving physical mastery over reality. We have clockwork and Newton effectively locked down, we have general relativity and now we try to shrink transistors (ignoring what the particle physics have been doing, spending lots of money on with few returns for the last few decades). Physics has the promise to provide energy, bombs, computing power, better rockets and so on. The grant money is for opening up new territory that has resources in it. In maths, there are also returns - cryptographic and algorithmic and so on.

Art doesn't provide returns like that. Art only has to inspire emotions in people. Novelty does not improve this, in and of itself. It's not as though we've locked down all the poems and are moving on to poems 2. There are plenty of poems left to be written, plenty of landscapes and storms to make paintings about.

Indeed physics has been mired in an excessive search for novelty for some time now. String theory has not produced any returns. It might be mathematically interesting and novel but it's not powering anything new. It provides employment to physicists and allows for many papers to be written. But it doesn't achieve the fundamental goal of physics. Likewise, putting three basketballs in a tank or making a stainless steel balloon dog is not art.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Three_Ball_Total_Equilibrium_Tank_by_Jeff_Koons%2C_Tate_Liverpool.jpg/440px-Three_Ball_Total_Equilibrium_Tank_by_Jeff_Koons%2C_Tate_Liverpool.jpg

http://www.jeffkoons.com/artwork/celebration/balloon-dog-0

Art must do more than confuse people. The Sydney Modern art gallery's $344 million expansion is a glorified convention centre - lots of empty space, little 'art' and almost no art. It's a place for people who want to look sophisticated to organize functions.

Art only has to inspire emotions in people.

Is that true?

If we could inspire the same emotions by taking the relevant pills, would art be redundant?

Really the premise is a bit self-defeating. If art is meant to inspire emotion, it's meant to make you think. Something that sticks around in your head and makes you think will generate much more complex and long-lasting emotion than a simple aesthetic achievement.

Not only that, but there are important things much more important than emotion which art aspires to capture. Who cares about a moment of appreciation when you could induce a character change in someone and alter the course of their life? That is, I think, the true purpose of art--to change us--and other claimed purposes such as "to make us feel something" or "to make us think" are just gesturing towards smaller, less ambitious versions of its true purpose.

When I listen to a classical symphony, it doesn’t inspire change or really any ideation in me at all. It’s a pure aesthetic experience, designed to manipulate my emotions and make me feel enjoyment and awe. There’s no intellectual content there, no lasting alteration in my patterns of conscious thought, no epistemic or philosophical updates on offer. Do you believe that this makes classical music “not art”? Or is it art that is failing at its one true purpose? Did Beethoven just not understand that he was supposed to be changing people’s minds, rather than simply making something beautiful for them?

I don't accept the premise that any experience is incapable of producing change. Any awe you feel while listening to music will inescapably color your behavior throughout the day to some extent, and possibly make you see things in a slightly different light.

This is of course not limited to art, but I think the value of things in general is based on how they affect and change us. If art were purely aesthetic experience, with no lasting changes to attitude, perspective, philosophy, mood, etc. then I would find it valueless, yes. Luckily such an experience is impossible. Everything we do and experience changes us to some extent, or else it's no better than wireheading and should be discounted entirely.

Every year on my birthday, I eat a delicious piece of salted caramel cheesecake, as a treat. It’s pure sugar and fat, an indulgence of atavistic hungers programmed in me by evolution. It’s orgasmically delicious in the moment, but also terrible for me, which is why I do it once a year. Is there intellectual content in my consumption of the cheesecake? Does it “produce a change in me”? Is the cheesecake art? It is a physical artifact produced by hand by a human being, with the intention of generating an emotional/aesthetic experience in the consumer. Like a classical symphony, it produces a transitory, evanescent sense of elation in me. (Thank God Beethoven’s 9th Symphony doesn’t put 1,300 calories of pure junk food into my body every time I listen to it.)

I used to draw a distinction between “art” and “entertainment”, using an exclusive definition of art the way you are now. Over time, though, I accepted that the distinction is illusory, and that there is nothing wrong with consuming content that is designed purely to excite me aesthetically and to cater to my current preferences, rather than to alter them.

I suppose I'm trying to remove the distinction from art and entertainment from the other direction--by saying that all entertainment is art, rather than that all art is entertainment. Would you eat the cheesecake if you knew that afterwards you'd forget eating it? I think even for the very most carnal pleasures (besides drugs) most of the enjoyment we get from them is still from the meaning we derive from them.

That said, at this point "art" doesn't really seem to be what I'm talking about, so I agree with your point to an extent. I don't know if I could truly define what art is, but I can say that it's not just to make us feel something and then that's the end of it.

Would art be redundant if we could inspire the same changes by popping pills?

It's a strange hypothetical. Good art causes you to reflect and compare/contrast your own thoughts and experiences to the art. The pill would have to have some sort of intellectual effect in addition to its weak calming effect (or whatever emotional effect it is that art has on you). I'd go so far as to say the only way for it to inspire the same change would be for it to be the same thing. So yes, if we could hallucinate art by popping pills, maybe there would be less need for physical art.

Ah, I see. So the changes induced by art (when carrying out its true purpose) have an intrinsic intellectual element, tied to the item of art itself? Seems quite plausible to me, though I'm no expert on the topic.

Yes.

The Experience Machine is a dumb philosophical quandry IMO. If reality and illusion are identical from the observer's perspective, what's the difference? What is valuable about a painting? The structure of its molecules? The pattern of light it produces? That's nothing without an observer to see it. Surely it must be the product of the thoughts and emotions that it inspires in those who view it. If you can remove the light and the molecules but keep the thoughts and emotions, then nothing of value is lost.

If reality and illusion are identical from the observer's perspective, what's the difference?

People's preferences are usually asymmetric over the two.

But if they can't tell the difference, then what is the meaning of the preference? If illusion can't be disproven then it differs from reality in name only.

what is the meaning of the preference?

I don't know what you mean by that phrase.

If illusion can't be disproven then it differs from reality in name only.

Why not also in fact? There's nothing mysterious about the notion of someone being trapped in an illusory state.

Why is 'incoherent bundle of glowy thing in a jar' so popular?

I was also thinking "fireflies in a jar," which is a common whimsical thing.

Sort of both. I was in Trek last week and the in-store graphics had large photographs of bike trails in the PA/WC area accompanied by text describing them and very basic maps. They were obviously decorative but trying to inspire people to learn more. They also require ultra high-resolution photography in order to get the large photos, plus copyrighting for the trail descriptions, and accurate maps. And even then the decor is an interactive experience that isn't fully effective unless the customer gets close enough to read the text and look at the map. But it's impressive, and this kind of thing is pretty common at outdoors stores, as it gives them the vibe of a park visitor's center—you feel like you're already on the adventure you're (presumably) buying.

Of course, recreational equipment has it easy in this regard because the value of photos of Youghiogheny Gorge or even a guy riding a bike down a shady gravel road is immediately evident. But what if your company doesn't sell anything that could remotely be considered fun? What if you're in financial services, or insurance, or (god forbid) tech? Traditionally, you would use stock photos of people shaking hands and sitting at desks and the like, but these are boring and nobody pretends otherwise. They're also expensive. There are two kinds of graphics: Raster graphics and vector graphics. Raster graphics are what most people think of where the canvas is so many pixels by so many pixels and each pixel is a unique color and the higher the resolution the bigger the picture can be without it looking like crap. It's what's used for photographs and most video games. Vector graphics don't store the data in pixels but instructions. If I want to create a vector graphic of a red triangle then the file tells the computer to four lines of set lengths and fill it with a specified color, or even a gradient. The advantage here is twofold; the first advantage is that you can perform as many geometric transformations as you want on the image without loss of resolution. So if your rectangle needs to go on a billboard you just scale it up and the proportions hold. The second advantage is that these instructions take up a lot less data than storing individual pixels.

Vector art has always been the go-to for corporate logos and the like, but actual vector art had its heyday among designers in the '80s and early '90s. It allowed them to take advantage of computer technology at a time when storage limits and memory were low. It was also a new look, and pros paid a lot of money for graphics libraries they could use for their designs. Then computers got more powerful and, more importantly, more ubiquitous. By the mid-'90s, there were plenty of consumer-grade design programs that offered huge libraries and soon everyone was using clip art for office flyers, party invitations, greeting cards, and the like. It got the reputation as something that your aunt would use along with Comic Sans. Even consumers were tired of it; pros wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Computers were now powerful enough that desktop publishers could use photographs at acceptable quality, and vector graphics were largely forgotten outside of pro applications where they were necessary.

But that was 20 years ago, and it's been long enough that if clip art induces any kind of reaction, it's nostalgia, but most people have either forgotten about it, were clueless, or weren't even alive for its heyday. While it went out of fashion, it never experienced any real backlash; it just went away. So by the late 2010s it was primed for a comeback. Logos had flattened out several years earlier, and maybe it was time for graphics to do so as well. Plus, the advantages of vector art didn't go away. If you want to make a store display you can blow it up to wall size without needing to start with a special camera and a huge file size. It would make your website slimmer and more portable. And with all the characters green and purple you wouldn't have to deal with people bitching about how there aren't enough minorities or thinking you're woke because there were too many minorities. If you're a boring company, using whimsical clip art is a way to make yourself stand out from the Getty Image laden masses. Or at least until everyone does it, and by everyone I mean other boring people, because the Yough Gorge will always be more compelling than some flavor of the month design trend, even if it's more expensive at the outset, and soon enough everyone associates the new style with the same boring bullshit they associated with the old style, because, let's face it, your company is boring, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I suppose I must link this video about the history of Clip Art now.

Good call. This is where I actually got a lot of my knowledge of the topic from, but I'm personally reluctant to link to a 30 minute video and expect people to watch it.

You can have vector clip art that isn't in the ugly GloboHomo style though -- those 80s clip art disks that came in every issue of MacWorld were full of Illustrator files like this; good lookin lady, sort of an art-deco/art-nouveau hybrid, definitely has something like "beauty" as an aim.

Contrast with this: https://networkcultures.org/cloudbaseddesigner/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2021/03/heroes.001.jpeg -- the ugliness seems almost deliberate.

I don't believe that the top one is more work -- you can knock that stuff out with a stylus in Illustrator really fast, you need an eye for it though. Could just be that there aren't really working illustrators available anymore, IDK.

It's possible that the ugliness is deliberate. For some people, beauty is uncomfortable and alienating. If people are insecure about their appearance or neurotic about unfavourable judgements about other people (especially "marginalized" people) perhaps to the point of trying to reject the very idea of beautiful people (more common than you would think - "Everyone is beautiful" is a rejection of the concept of beautiful people)

More generally, GloboHomo has an emotionally flattening, inclusive, and childlike quality. It wasn't present nurseries when I was young, but I can easily imagine it in them, in a way I can't imagine anything like your first picture being let anywhere near a nursery. It's hygge-culture and wholesomism, extended to art. When I think about it, GloboHomo repels me far more than brutalism or modern art, and that's saying something. At least they aspire to something daring, even if there's more than a little of Satanic bitterness to them. It's the type of thing that makes me want to join the Wagner group, and I'm about as anti-Putin/pro-Ukraine as can be.

Dude, that first one is a Patrick Nagel. If you think just anyone can "knock that stuff out" with Illustrator, well, give it a shot. You're just wrong.

The second link is indeed drawings that are assembled with fairly simple vector techniques (albeit still requiring some design skills).

Yep but it will be one of the first cabs off the rank for AI. People will 'rip it', ie train a model using all his work to create new works, not for sale, which would break copyright but just for themselves and friends. He will still command good prices initially as his meme-print grows but because of the ubiquity and virality of memes, success will inevitably erode value ultimately. Can only have one Warhol period and we've had it.

The disks were probably not full of actual Patrick Nagel files, no -- but that's rather the point isn't it? In the 80s, clip art was imitating Patrick Nagel -- now we are imitating deliberate ugliness on every damn powerpoint deck.

If you think just anyone can "knock that stuff out" with Illustrator, well, give it a shot.

Again, rather the point -- when "just anyone" tries it it kind of looks like crap: https://www.lifewire.com/photo-into-nagel-inspired-vector-portrait-1077506

But someone who is decent with Illustrator (not me) will have a stab at it for 25 buck, so it can't take all that long: https://www.fiverr.com/ikhwantaripa/turn-your-pic-into-my-version-of-a-patrick-nagel-art

I don't think the globohomo is much faster to do -- if you are good with a stylus you can trace a photo very fast, drawing all those donut shapes seems at least as hard.

They need the specific kind of legibility, for an illiterate dirt farmer in an emerging economy who just got his first internet connected smartphone on a microloan. Corporate Memphis is distilled lowest-common-denominator art.

Probably cheap, legible, and also the corporations benefit from seeming cutesy and harmless.

That midjourney stuff is utter pabulum. It's only beautiful by the most shallow and insipid standards of beauty. The kind of "beauty" that would rank Thomas Kinkaide's paintings above Rembrandt's, because the former is bright and sparkly while the latter is brown and muddy. Or the kind of "beauty" that would consider N*SYNC's music superior to Bach's because the former's is free of dissonance and the later's is rife with it.

I don't particularly like the human art you linked either, but at least the artists are trying to do something interesting. We can do better than ugly modern art without resorting to saccharine crap and calling it beauty.

AI gives people what it gets positive feedback from. It gives people what they want.

Marvel movies and McDonalds chicken nuggets are examples of giving people what they want. Mass appeal produces boring hyperpalatability, not greatness.

We can do better than ugly modern art without resorting to saccharine crap and calling it beauty.

Most art, most of the time, is going to be saccharine. It has always been that way. But better saccharine that's made to taste sweet than saccharine that's made to taste rancid.

Thomas Kincaid was obviously not a great artist, but as someone who produced uplifting art that entertains a lot of people, stirring their aesthetic senses and providing them comfort through the horrors of life, I admire him and miss him.

I scrolled through Rembrandt's Wikipedia page and there were exactly two paintings that I wanted to look at for more than 3 seconds. (Belshazzar's Feast and Pallas Athene).

The Storm on the Sea of Galilee is one of my favorites. Unfortunately I'll probably never be able to see it in person.

Sure the dog can write poetry, but it’s bad poetry.

Anyways, we’re still in early days of this technology. It’s getting batter and it’s getting better fast.

I'm not criticizing midjourney, I'm criticizing OP's standards of beauty. It's probably possible to get actual good art out of midjourney in its current form, but OP's examples are crap and were selected based purely on what was most popular among users.

OK, let me raise you this human-made art, which someone has happily vandalized (an intolerable abuse as far as Emmanuel Macron is concerned): https://twitter.com/karlitozero/status/1655510062335492098

Or we have the art of Cleon Peterson, which is (and I say this charitably) overtly ugly and malevolent. If you saw one of these on the wall of someone's house, you could have no doubt that they're a villain. He's not some no-name either, he somehow managed to get a mural under the Eiffel Tower: https://www.artsy.net/artist/cleon-peterson

There's nothing wrong with beauty. Innovation for its own sake is not a good thing. If midjourney and stablediffusion are shallow and insipid, then so much the worse for the oh-so-sophisticated works of highly-credentialed, prestigious artists like those. Since the traditional art authorities have so manifestly failed to uphold aesthetic standards, they should shut up and let AI take over.

OK, let me raise you this human-made art, which someone has happily vandalized (an intolerable abuse as far as Emmanuel Macron is concerned): https://twitter.com/karlitozero/status/1655510062335492098

I thought this one was weird at first, but I looked into it and found this:

In response to a petition by several voluntary organisations, the urgent applications judge of the Conseil d’État found today that the display of the painting “Fuck abstraction!" at the Palais de Tokyo, a venue dedicated to contemporary design, does not seriously and unlawfully harm the best interests of the child or the dignity of the human person. It found, firstly, that measures have been taken to deter access by minors and, secondly, that explanatory notices along the access path give the painting the meaning intended by Miriam Cahn, denouncing rape in Ukraine.

Voluntary organisations had appealed against the ruling of the urgent applications judge of the administrative court of Paris, who had dismissed their petition for an order to remove the painting “Fuck abstraction!” by the artist Miriam Cahn, displayed in the Palais de Tokyo, on the grounds that it depicted the rape of a child by an adult and could be seen by minors.

The Conseil d’État firstly observed that Palais de Tokyo had surrounded access to the painting with precautions intended to keep unaccompanied minors away from it and deter adults accompanied by minors. Two security guards are placed at the entrance and in the room and a mediator is always present near the painting.

The hearing and exhibits also demonstrated that the artist's only intention was to denounce a crime. The judge pointed out that information labels were placed along the path leading to the work. This contextual information gives the work the meaning intended by Miriam Cahn. The sign placed in the centre of the room indicates that the painting was made after the broadcasting of images of the massacre in Bucha in Ukraine. The sign placed next to the painting refers to the crimes committed in Bucha, denounced as war crimes, and specifies that the victim is an adult.

In view of the above, the urgent applications judge found that the display of the painting, in a venue dedicated to contemporary design and known as such, and accompanied by detailed contextual information, does not seriously or clearly unlawfully harm the best interests of the child or the dignity of the human person.

That is, the painting is meant to criticize wartime rape and other war crimes. It doesn't celebrate its subject matter, and it's not meant to be beautiful. This isn't clear without context, but context was provided in the gallery where it was exhibited, and the only place you can find it without context is on the internet where people are deliberately omitting it to stir outrage.

I don't think it's a particularly great or novel artwork, but neither is it celebrating "pedocriminality" (the French sure do have a way with words). The style is kind of ugly, but if it were more realistic, it would be much closer to actual pornography.

Or we have the art of Cleon Peterson, which is (and I say this charitably) overtly ugly and malevolent. If you saw one of these on the wall of someone's house, you could have no doubt that they're a villain. He's not some no-name either, he somehow managed to get a mural under the Eiffel Tower: https://www.artsy.net/artist/cleon-peterson

I didn't even have to research this, the message is clear from the images. Those that portray police beating people are obviously meant to denounce police brutality, and this one which is literally titled "Genocide" isn't very subtle, either.

Compare Picasso's Guernica and Massacre in Korea. If you saw them in someone's house, without knowing anything about them before, they would certainly seem bizarre and creepy.

Between Cleon Peterson and Fuck abstraction, it seems you have a problem with art that has a message and isn't just meant to be pretty. I don't think every artwork must have social change as a goal; I don't think art should necessarily be, as the quote goes, "not a mirror to hold up to society but a hammer with which to shape it". But there is a place for such art, just as there is a place for art that is only meant to be beautiful without having any deeper meaning.

Again, I'm not a fan of Peterson. I wouldn't buy anything from him or go to an exhibition of his works. He apparently has hundreds of works with the same theme. Boring. And this one is like a Ben Garrison cartoon. But complaining that his works are "overtly ugly and malevolent" is missing the point.

This is the thing that Prima's reply above made me think about: the elites have obligations towards their supposed lessers, and they can't seem to fulfill this in the arena of art. Elites who fail to justify their status tend to get torn down by the hoi-polloi, even if to the short-term or long-term detriment of all.

I suppose many of these artists should be thankful that the system they work in isn't quite so Darwinian in that corporate manner, because they'd otherwise have eventually been thrown to the streets the moment something slightly more beautiful (and profitable) came along. That said, if crass sexual imagery and crudity is all they will approve of and circulate in institutions, then why don't we just throw out all these ugliness-factories and give their comfy stipends and sinecures to Japanese hentai artists? Their stuff at least looks nicer even when there's pubes, extreme orifice distension, and that ungodly vacuum horseface fellatio going on.

I'd rather have bimbos getting gangbanged in art vs whatever the hell Cleon Peterson is smoking. At least the crass sexual stuff doesn't hate my guts.

And appealing to the community of artists produces ugly novelty purely for the sake of novelty (in this day and age at least), not greatness. Knock him all you want, but Thomas Kincaid is way better than the vast majority of modern art. At least he produced something beautiful and enjoyable.

While I agree mostly ... are the top 20% of that page really any worse than 99.9% of popular existing art? Not Rembrandt, but twitter art posts with 50k likes, or reddit posts with 10k upvotes, or 'local artist' paintings people hang in their homes.

It'd also be very funny to do blind tests on various art fans to see if they can tell the difference between the best MJ outputs and real pieces they haven't seen yet in their favorite genre. I'm certain professionals could still tell, but could 'statue avis' or fans of real anime art?

While I agree mostly ... are the top 20% of that page really any worse than 99.9% of popular existing art?

No, it's not any worse, it's about the same, and that's my point. The midjourney stuff is just as crappy as most of the art that gets made today. The "beauty" that OP thinks he's identified is just hyperpalatablity. Unlike most modern art, the midjorney art is inoffensive, but that doesn't make it good or beautiful.

Midjourney (and most other AI-gens) still struggle with physics; even with a ton of in-painting and curation. Shadow, perspective and foreshortening, clothing seams, so on, all have often-hard-to-correct mismatches. This guy does some often heroic work to try to counter it, but most prompters (myself especially included!) can't even recognize a lot of the problems without special effort.

ControlNet and depth maps can kinda help (esp if you create a depth map from conventional 3d modeling or photography), but I don't think Midjourney supports that right now. And even when it works this narrows the possibility space down a ton.

I'd say yes.

The execution is good, the content is totally absent. It is teir 2 wizard van shit, not truth and beauty.

That said, it is Really good as a wizard van panel generator, hot damn.

You'd have to cherrypick particularly cliche scenes that the image models will have an easy time with. But they're cliche precisely because real artists drew a ton of similar images and real people liked them, so it's not that big of a stretch

Man I have got to get me a wizard van.

Hell yeah brother.

The greatest casualty of the 80's wasn't free love, it was the wizard van.

Or the kind of "beauty" that would consider N*SYNC's music superior to Bach's because the former's is free of dissonance and the later's is rife with it.

It's more like preferring N*Sync to Schoenberg or Berg, not Bach.

Bach, in this analogy, is Notre Dame, the Gothic cathedrals, the gargoyles and filigree.

Schoenberg, in this analogy, is the building linked above. Gray concrete and straight lines.

And I don't blame anyone for preferring this to that, and given the choice of neither choose the other. And I like Pierrot Lunaire. It doesn't have much in the way of melody. It doesn't have much in the way of harmony. The lack of structure is glaring and intentional. That's brutalism in music, to my ears, and while brutalism may have a bad rap, it's widely disliked for a reason.

The real question: what is the musical equivalent to Corporate Memphis? Is that what NSync really represents?

The real question: what is the musical equivalent to Corporate Memphis? Is that what NSync really represents?

Elevator music

The real question: what is the musical equivalent to Corporate Memphis? Is that what NSync really represents?

No. There isn't necessarily one style that would key to Corporate Memphis exactly, but you have to think about the intended purpose. Corporate Memphis isn't art as much as it is design. The guy drawing that stuff is specifically drawing it so it can be used on some corporate website, not so he can have a gallery opening and sell it at Southeby's. Hell, no one even knows the guy's name, as he's just an employee of some design firm. the closest musical equivalent to graphic design is what is known as Library Music. Once music started being used in television, it became increasingly clear that the lower budgets weren't always conducive to hiring a music director to write original cues for each week and having a full orchestra record it. So companies formed that would hire staff composers who would be writing and recording constantly, and these companies would package the music by mood and market it to budget-conscious productions. KPM was probably the best-known of these companies, and their demonstration records are prized among a certain breed of collectors. Their best-known tune is probably "Heavy Action" by Johnny Pearson, which became the theme to Monday Night Football, but they were in business for a long time and you still occasionally hear their stuff. For example, YouTuber Jon Bois has used their stuff in the background of his Chart Party videos.

Check out this YouTube playlist if you want to get an idea of what this stuff sounded like: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4Dbs6zJG23Y&list=PLiYfiJ4rWjUvAPUyWIGxW6Uz29cOQC_lz&index=2

One thing the online Library Music cult won't recognize, though, is that the business is still going strong today. With the explosion in web content the market for cheap licenseable music is as strong as ever. Admittedly, the newer stuff coming out is consciously designed to mimic popular styles, whereas the stuff from the '70s was much more sophisticated and was often a genre unto itself. Here's a link if you want to sample what modern library music sounds like: https://www.epidemicsound.com/music/genres/

You probably don't know any of these songs but the style is ubiquitous, as it aims more for a generic representation of a style and mood rather than an expression of the artist's feelings.

The real question: what is the musical equivalent to Corporate Memphis? Is that what NSync really represents?

No, the equivalent would be generic royalty free stock music. https://youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI

Marvel movies and McDonalds chicken nuggets are examples of giving people what they want

So are shawarma and el pastor and carnitas. And they are fucking amazing.

I'll also point out that it's quite possible to have a poorly received superhero movie (DC has had quite a few), and even a poorly received Marvel superhero movie (Eternals). Calling them "capeshit" is snobbery; it isn't true that the audiences have no standards and will eat up anything they are given.

I would say that from Marvel universe - only Thor Ragnarök, Avengers Infinity Wars and the First guardians were actually good. The rest were more or less completely meh due to the terrible writing.

On one hand, midjourney’s curated collection of distinctive pieces. On the other, Wikipedia’s example of the modal design for the only corporate style infamous enough to be recognized by name. Is it more likely that human art is dead? Or that you’re comparing apples to horse-apples?

AI art will be comparable to Sakimichan. Lush with detail, high in technical quality, but without careful commission prompt engineering, interchangeable.

Well what about the New York Museum of Modern Art: https://www.moma.org/collection/?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=&classifications=any&date_begin=Pre-1850&date_end=2023&with_images=1&on_view=1&page=&direction=

The first three paintings look like they could be done by AI, or some 13 year old. There's an abstract bunch of shapes. There are some photos of some doors. Maybe 1 in 7 has something interesting going on.

Sakimichan does basically the same thing each time. But so does Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe: https://www.moma.org/artists/134447

Edit: /r/stablediffusion is nothing if not diverse

Ha! The first couple rows look like restaurant bathroom art. Well, I suppose it's probably the other way around, and there's an industry of interior designers trying to convince people that particular look is bougie.

All by the same couple artists, though? Maybe their styles just suck. Or it's some kind of Conversation with the art community. The thing about the stable diffusion or midjourney pages is that they are selecting hard for variety. That's a different paradigm from the MoMA, which is balancing some combination of variety, commentary, prestige, and edge.

I played with the filters and grabbed all paintings since 2000. These look a lot better! Interesting colors, visual complexity, weird perspective. I'm not a big fan of the Müller set, or of the couple that are just text. But I don't have a problem with the rest.

Modern art isn't perfect. I'd be sympathetic to an argument that it has stagnated relative to the insane technical achievements in fields like cinema. Is it all Corporate Memphis? Surely not.

This art was already there, because Midjourney learned all that on human art. Corporations preferred to use corporate memphis because it's presumably cheaper and perhaps more brand-recognizable and shit. I'm afraid if AI-generated memphis remains cheaper than beautiful art, we're going to see a lot more AI-memphis than AI-beauty.

I was going to say the same thing. The same people who thought Corporate Memphis was a good idea will be the ones who determine the types of prompts that will go into an AI generator. If beauty wasn't their priority before, there's no reason why it will be now, and Corporate Midjourney will not be an improvement.

That midjourney stuff is not half as beautiful as what comesup when I search Pinterest for abstract figurative watercolor. Note in particular the very pedestrian use of color in the midjourney works.

I'm gonna be honest, that's the level of quality I mostly associate with insufficient step and/or CFG values in StableDiffusion. You can get fairly similar images through imagegen, the same way you can use ControlNet to make sketches or similarly 'pencil-heavy' like work, but it's a lot less likely to get recognition because it's so facially akin to a common failure mode.

Though Midjourney in particular does tend to do the whole Newberry Award palette as a bit of a crutch.

I suspect a half-decent prompt for an existing model could put out things indistinguishable to a nonprofessional eye from that

Done. It was actually difficult getting something as visually indistinct as this. I've never used 'ugly' in the top bar either.

Positive: abstract figurative watercolor, pastel, indistinct face, ((((abstract)))), ugly, unclear, faceless, oil painting, muted color, high detail

Negative: blank spaces, empty spaces

GPT4 gives me:

"Titled "Mindful Sojourn", the artwork presents itself as an elusive, abstract rendering of an anthropomorphic form, its contours barely discernible and seemingly on the verge of disintegration into the surrounding void. This piece boldly challenges the boundaries of conventional representation by eschewing precise detail, instead engaging with the nebulous, captivating domain of the subconscious.

Inside the spectral human head, one can faintly discern the presence of what might be figures, nebulous and spectral, traversing the cerebral landscape. This acts as a compelling metaphor for the multitude of thoughts, memories, and ideas that inhabit the labyrinthine corridors of the human mind. Their ceaseless motion implies a continuous journey, a never-ending quest for meaning, identity, and self-realization within the cerebral sphere.

The figures themselves are not clear, much like the thoughts and emotions we often struggle to articulate. They are the imprints of past experiences, the echoes of dreams, the shadows of desires — unconfined by the borders of reality, moving freely within the confines of the cerebral cosmos.

"Mindful Sojourn" is therefore more than just an abstract representation, it is an invitation. An invitation to venture beyond the surface, to explore the depths of our own psyche, to wander through the labyrinth of our minds, and to confront the elusive, often blurry, nature of our own selfhood. It dares us to embrace the ambiguity and the uncertainty, to find beauty and meaning in the abstract, and to recognize the profound complexity of the human experience."

Pretty good, considering that it's never seen the piece in question!

/images/16842014682377844.webp

Most of that link looks dreadful to me.

Well, that's what makes horse races.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats