An unrelated point: these pictures seem obviously bad. They look like children’s drawings, or drawings of a random amateur. The artist is blind, so this is understandable, but it doesn’t make the end result any better. It seems that the museum is more interested in promoting certain artists who are deemed deserving of attention than in promoting good art.
The whole thing looks like a “The Emperor’s New Clothes” situation: High-brow curators and visitors looking respectfully at the stuff in front of them until some random kid (no doubt dragged in against its will) just says “this looks like shit and also weirdly perverted”.
Speculation: Are we perhaps already seeing the indirect effect of diffusion model art here? When photography was invented, artists pivoted to unrealistic art. Now with text-to-image models getting better and better, even technical drawing prowess for unrealistic art is becoming unimpressive. So artists and creators have to find the interesting aspects of art elsewhere, like in the unusual personality or circumstances of the artist.
you do not need to point to AI art to explain the dominant art trend for the last 100 years. art is not just about “looking good”, or even “looking skillfully made”, there are a multitude of lenses to use in critiquing and interpreting art, among them: “who is the artist?”, “what context was this piece made in?”, “how was this art made (materials, methods, intent)?”, “what other art is this piece being made in response to?”, “what is the purpose of this art (is it functional? private? intentionally provocative? unintentional? commercial? ironic?)?”
you don’t have to like it or care about it in any way. but the “high art” world has been in that space for ages, and the comment “it looks bad” has been rejected since the impressionists in the mid 1800s, and probably earlier.
The whole thing looks like a “The Emperor’s New Clothes” situation: High-brow curators and visitors looking respectfully at the stuff in front of them until some random kid (no doubt dragged in against its will) just says “this looks like shit and also weirdly perverted”.
I can see some hidden layers here: Art is mostly about buying prestige with money or power, through some kind of plausible excuse or rationale, e.g., supporting artists who create beauty or meaning or conceptual advancements or social commentary. But the excuse/rationale has to change constantly because there’s always new demand for art (i.e., status-laundering), but the old excuses get used up (e.g. because humans get bored and start to devalue the same style of art), which creates constant risk that audiences don’t buy the new excuse, causing a “emperor has no clothes” moment.
But this very risk invites a kind of risk-taking, similar to extreme sports like solo free-climbing, where the whole point is to flex your ability to stay at the very edge of disaster. And then this boundary pushing itself changes where the boundary lies, so we get an art world that increasingly accepts as art what outsiders view as ugly or absurd.
After World War I, the art world decided to no longer aim for beautiful and edifying representation and pursue other goals instead.
In the interwar period, what this goal should be was up in the air. The point of all the art movement and manifestos was to tell the world what their goals were, and to criticize the goals of others. Fine art exploded in diversity and transgression, even producing many ugly works.
After World War II, the movement system dissolved. Since then, the art world has above all prized “authenticity” and a sense of “newness.” Any type of skill or beauty doesn’t factor into the equation at all. You can criticize this. Happily, there are plenty of artists today who pursue goodness and beauty in their work, but the Fine Art World does not care about them. They care about artists that are “marketable” in a certain way. Gossiaux fits the bill well.
This trend predates image models by decades. AFAIK image models have been basically ignored by the fine art world, though I’d be interested in learning if this isn’t the case.
Are we perhaps already seeing the indirect effect of diffusion model art here? When photography was invented, artists pivoted to unrealistic art. Now with text-to-image models getting better and better, even technical drawing prowess for unrealistic art is becoming unimpressive. So artists and creators have to find the interesting aspects of art elsewhere, like in the unusual personality or circumstances of the artist.
I was with you on the first part, but I don’t think this holds up. The sorts of things that diffusion models struggle with—functionality, for instance—are pretty easy to work into an image that still looks good. For example, a system of gears that spans an image, or a rube goldberg machine.
It’s getting trickier to put into words what diffusion model outputs are characterized by, but people can still implicitly tell, most of the time. This is not to say there hasn’t been an impact, ArtStation front page slop is a fairly dead medium nowadays, but I think it will still be quite a while to exhaust the set of artistic skills that are both hard to replicate and visually beautiful.
An unrelated point: these pictures seem obviously bad. They look like children’s drawings, or drawings of a random amateur. The artist is blind, so this is understandable, but it doesn’t make the end result any better. It seems that the museum is more interested in promoting certain artists who are deemed deserving of attention than in promoting good art.
The whole thing looks like a “The Emperor’s New Clothes” situation: High-brow curators and visitors looking respectfully at the stuff in front of them until some random kid (no doubt dragged in against its will) just says “this looks like shit and also weirdly perverted”.
Speculation: Are we perhaps already seeing the indirect effect of diffusion model art here? When photography was invented, artists pivoted to unrealistic art. Now with text-to-image models getting better and better, even technical drawing prowess for unrealistic art is becoming unimpressive. So artists and creators have to find the interesting aspects of art elsewhere, like in the unusual personality or circumstances of the artist.
you do not need to point to AI art to explain the dominant art trend for the last 100 years. art is not just about “looking good”, or even “looking skillfully made”, there are a multitude of lenses to use in critiquing and interpreting art, among them: “who is the artist?”, “what context was this piece made in?”, “how was this art made (materials, methods, intent)?”, “what other art is this piece being made in response to?”, “what is the purpose of this art (is it functional? private? intentionally provocative? unintentional? commercial? ironic?)?”
you don’t have to like it or care about it in any way. but the “high art” world has been in that space for ages, and the comment “it looks bad” has been rejected since the impressionists in the mid 1800s, and probably earlier.
...would you rather this subject were rendered in a more realistic style?
I can see some hidden layers here: Art is mostly about buying prestige with money or power, through some kind of plausible excuse or rationale, e.g., supporting artists who create beauty or meaning or conceptual advancements or social commentary. But the excuse/rationale has to change constantly because there’s always new demand for art (i.e., status-laundering), but the old excuses get used up (e.g. because humans get bored and start to devalue the same style of art), which creates constant risk that audiences don’t buy the new excuse, causing a “emperor has no clothes” moment.
But this very risk invites a kind of risk-taking, similar to extreme sports like solo free-climbing, where the whole point is to flex your ability to stay at the very edge of disaster. And then this boundary pushing itself changes where the boundary lies, so we get an art world that increasingly accepts as art what outsiders view as ugly or absurd.
After World War I, the art world decided to no longer aim for beautiful and edifying representation and pursue other goals instead.
In the interwar period, what this goal should be was up in the air. The point of all the art movement and manifestos was to tell the world what their goals were, and to criticize the goals of others. Fine art exploded in diversity and transgression, even producing many ugly works.
After World War II, the movement system dissolved. Since then, the art world has above all prized “authenticity” and a sense of “newness.” Any type of skill or beauty doesn’t factor into the equation at all. You can criticize this. Happily, there are plenty of artists today who pursue goodness and beauty in their work, but the Fine Art World does not care about them. They care about artists that are “marketable” in a certain way. Gossiaux fits the bill well.
This trend predates image models by decades. AFAIK image models have been basically ignored by the fine art world, though I’d be interested in learning if this isn’t the case.
I was with you on the first part, but I don’t think this holds up. The sorts of things that diffusion models struggle with—functionality, for instance—are pretty easy to work into an image that still looks good. For example, a system of gears that spans an image, or a rube goldberg machine.
It’s getting trickier to put into words what diffusion model outputs are characterized by, but people can still implicitly tell, most of the time. This is not to say there hasn’t been an impact, ArtStation front page slop is a fairly dead medium nowadays, but I think it will still be quite a while to exhaust the set of artistic skills that are both hard to replicate and visually beautiful.