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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.
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.
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.
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