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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.
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.
Marvel movies and McDonalds chicken nuggets are examples of giving people what they want. Mass appeal produces boring hyperpalatability, not greatness.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I thought this one was weird at first, but I looked into it and found this:
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
Elevator music
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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.
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No, the equivalent would be generic royalty free stock music. https://youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI
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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.
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