>Probably the most tragic thing in my opinion is that if I visit the art exhibition for my local town, the artwork on display is wonderfully varied in quality, style and imagination, and when I visited a national gallery recently displaying the works of modern artists who have "made it" to that level, it was all absolute shite. Actual technical ability seems to be being relegated to poverty artists.
The artist becomes the artwork. The artifice here is precisely in "making it", in the act of convincing others of the value of the piece.
It's an acquired taste; I agree with you that not all people appreciate it. But surely, at the end of the pipeline, all this money must buy something of value?
And with passively consumable art such as music (which you can have playing in the background while looking at something else) it's that much easier. IIRC Blixa Bargeld predicted Spotify decades ago. Music on tap - like the power line and water mains; and that's all.
The problem is it's only whomever curates these spaces that needs to be persuaded. And they're hardly thrumming with people for all the millions they get in funding.
>Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right.
Yeahp, it's pure ideology.
In contemporary civilization, the role of creator of shared aesthetic constructs (artist) is left to an elect few. This is, on the whole, a reduction in average individual capacity.
So how about this instead: anyone making a living should be making art, as if it's some sort of obligation.
The media technologies of the XX century (recording, photography, motion photograpy) made it that much easier to be audience, and that much pointless to be artist.
This effectively robbed the common person of any reason to participate in the collective meaning-making process that is art. Eventually this was substituted by the clicktivism, the dogpiling, and all that. If you are never permitted to develop a sense of scale beyond the ouroborically narcissistic, participating social media fills a much similar psychological niche, to you, as influencing people through creative media.
Those who aspire to star status must first sacrifice a fixed amount of integrity to reproducing the kayfabe. Speakers of dead balamatomic languages may be wise to observe induction into "artist" status by humiliation-transfer - those natives were so dumb they thought they had to show publically how it's done at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBaC0IRc1Bk
>Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
Anyone [cut] is owed a living [cut]; done.
No person asks to be born; much of "what you are" and "what your function in society is" is involuntary and immutable; nobody is owed a useful function; nobody is owed a meaning.
But, through art, one can make one's own meanings, and share them in a voluntary way; as opposed to resource-constrainments (money) which is at its root an instrument of coercion.
That's the thing about art which has always terrified the money people. Eager beavers that they are, they've built (well, more like had us build for 'em) these whole elaborate semi-sensible institutions for reducing art to a special ritual for emitting high-denomination banknotes (paintings, album profits, walking banknotes in the form of performing artists who "made it big (sus)" - always loved the honesty in how the Japanese call their pop stars literally "idols"...)
>Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes
So that's why I ain't seeing much of those lately. You sayin' someone left 'em on the table?
>If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them.
Yes. Meaning, if you're big, I simply do not wish to hear about you or what you have to express; you're simply the thing that ascribes to the money its value.
Relatedly, an ancient saying: "I do not happen to be a connoiseur of the different flavours of excrement".
The objective parts of quality (technical skill) are fairly easy to saturate, most serious artists do so, but it's not sufficient to be successful.
Objective quality is common, but it sounds like you've just defined subjective quality to exclude anything mainstream.
You're right that Gibson would not have defined quality and virality to be the same. I should have used "or" in that sentence. However, he still seems to believe that they depend on properties of the content: some things have broad appeal, some things have genuine quality, some things have neither or both, and their success depends on that. I think it's all a crapshoot.
Your definition, that most art (or even things in general) are of roughly the same quality above some bar of competency is... Difficult to defend.
There are things that are just better than others. Sometimes it's because they take much longer to make (time, materials etc). Other times it's because they go into a new direction (inventions, new genres). Not all things doing these are good. In fact generally, spending more time on something or trying new things results in overbaked garbage. It's genuinely rare and special to hit upon a combination of all three - competent, new, and with high investment put into it.
Just spend time thinking about airport novels, or the countless pop artists the music industry tries to push that get no traction. Or failed hollywood blockbusters. Quality matters.
Not of the same quality, just that the objective parts of quality have been mastered by many people. What sets art apart beyond that is individual taste. "Newness" is definitely subjective; it depends on what you've seen before (though it is correlated for people within a culture.)
I suspect that you criticize airport novels, pop music, cliched movies because they are similar to stuff you've seen before. (I hope that you've tried them, and aren't just criticizing them on the perception that they're lowbrow.) But people who hadn't seen them before could still enjoy them.
You eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant. I eat a bowl of oatmeal and I enjoy it just as much. What makes your meal better?
I understand the hypothetical argument that you could enjoy a simple meal, a simple life, etc. And there are many that do - but that doesn't mean some things aren't preferable to other things to some people. It just shows that people's preferences are different.
But generally, we see that given the choice, people do rate art differently. That people prefer certain things to other things more often than chance. Some of it is perhaps cultural, sure. But does that really undermine the point? The trick of making good art/products whatever is literally hitting a thing a large group of people like. It's not cheating to try and make people of your culture, or any specific culture or subculture, like it. That's actually kinda most of the point.
You really can distinguish between a competent but otherwise uninteresting thing and something truly special by just like... Putting it out there. Many things that were widely distributed were not especially well liked, and others remain literal classics. Why?
Sounds like you mostly agree. We're not a monoculture. Mainstream culture is a compromise - consists of things that many people like, but not many people's favorite.
It's a little silly to say "mainstream is crap! Why doesn't the better stuff rise to the top?" It's because people don't agree on what's better.
Lately when I watch a video on YouTube, every single one of the recommended videos is AI slop. Not sure what the next 5 years holds. It does make me question the argument that bad AI generated content is equivalent to bad human generated content. And they all have hundreds of thousands of views, another mystery.
A dirty secret is the algorithms can't differentiate real users from fake.
The universe of content is so large now, if you don't start with a fake audience you go nowhere. Slop rises to the top, because slopfarms can spend all their money on the farming rather than the content. It's even worse if you look at short form video because it's trivial to clone anything that went viral and alter the message, no real human or attractive 20 year old American required.
If content requires a real human network for transmission, the cost of transmitting slop is your own reputation within your network. A bunch of bots circle jerking each other can't sell concert tickets or much of anything.
The idea that some artist is exceptionally talented and good and they deserve to be famous or sell out concerts is a myth. There are so many exceptionally skilled singers, songwriters, and musicians that are all unknowns. Many who are more talented than (insert famous living or dead pop star here.)
I think this is part of the reason why the AI ruins creativity is overblown. The music-art-talent pyramid always meant a tiny percent at the top walked away with all of the money. Look at the numbers from the last screen actor's guild strike, the majority of actors earn at or below minimum wage. It's a new world, and the old one people believe deserves to continue perpetually existed in but a blink of human civilization.
The uncomfortable truth is that people aren't half as dumb as they give themselves credit for. Not being able to understand something is rarely, if ever, a skill issue.
>Also given we both managed to produce more than one sentence, and include capital letters in our comments, it's entirely possible both of us will be accused of being an AI.
Could anyone explain the esoteric meaning of why people started doing that shit? I got a hypothesis, what's going on is something like this:
1. Prove you are human: write Like A Fucking Adult You Weirdo (internal designator for a specific language register, you know the one)
2. Prove you are human: _DON'T_ write Like A Fucking Adult You Weirdo (because that's how LLMs were trained to write, silly!)
3. ???? (cognitive dissonance ensues)
4. PROFIT (you were just subject to some more attrition while the AI just learned how to pass a lil bit better)
I never thought computer programmers of all people would get trapped in such a simple loop of self-contradiction.
But I guess the human materiel really has degraded since whenever. I blame remote work preventing us from even hypothetically punching bosses, but anyway weird fucking times eh?
Maybe the posts trying to figure "this post is AI, that post is not AI" are themselves predominantly AI-generated?
Or is it just people made uncomfortable by what's going on, but not able to articulate further, jumping on the first bandwagon they see?
Or maybe this "AI-doubting of probably human posters" was started by humans, yes - then became "a thing", and as such was picked up by the LLM?
Like who the fuck knows, but with all honesty that's how I felt about so many things, dating from way before LLMs became so powerful that the above became a "sensible" question to ask...
Predominantly those things which people do by sheer mimesis - such as pop culture.
"Are you a goddam robot already - don't you see how your liking the stupid-making song is turning you into stupid-you, at a greater rate than it is bringing non-stupid-you aesthetic satisfaction?" type of thing -- but then I assume in more civilized places than where I come from people are much more convincingly taught that personal taste "doesn't matter" (and simultaneously is the only thing that matters; see points 1-4... I guess that's what makes some people believe curating AI, i.e. "prompt engineering" can be a real job and not just boil down to you being the stochastic parrot's accountability sink?)
I'm not even sure English even has the notions to point out the concrete issue - I sure don't know 'em.
Ever hear of the strain of thought that says "all metaphysical questions are linguistic paradoxes (and it's self-evidently pointless to seek answers to nonsensical questions)"?
Feels kinda like the same thing, but artificially constructed within the headspace of American anti-intellectuallism.
Maybe a correct adversarial reading of the main branding acronym would be Anti-Intelligence.
You know, like bug spray, or stain remover.
But for the main bug in the system; the main stain on the white shirt: the uncomfortable observation that, in the end, some degree of independent thinking is always required to get real things done which produce some real value. (That's antithetical to standard pro-social aversive conditioning, which says: do not, under any circumstance, just put 2 and 2 together; lest you turn from "a vehicle for the progress of civilization" back into a pumpkin)
"Clap along, if you feel that happiness is the truth..." Then one of those days someone comes along and claps back.
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