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Notes -
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.
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.
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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