art thoughts, a bit on ai and a bit on fascism
Art is a an interaction. It is the artist in conversation with their environment, with their canvas or medium, with themselves. It is the viewer in conversation with the art, and thereby with the artist and the artist’s environment and context.
Subversion and ideology and culture and politics all play into this and are thus inseparable from the art.
But over time, art gets repackaged, revered, stripped of its context. Its subversiveness becomes tame. It becomes the context for new art. For this reason, it is important that new ideas for new art come into play. It’s important that new art is made that is newly subversive. There is no great standard to which art must be made and no art so revered that it must be made the standard for all new art, because that takes away art’s power to create meaning through novelty.
AI image generators do not make art, because there is no conversation, no novelty, just regurgitation of what has already been done.
Fascists hate contemporary art because novelty and open ideas are anathema to them and their need for control and power.
The point is this: Keep making, and let nothing be so revered that you cannot move forward. Art as expression is powerful. And do not be afraid of that which is new or different from what you know.
re: art thoughts, a bit on ai and a bit on fascism
@ziphi I agree, and supplement with;
Every conservative is, regardless of any other description, conservative. They don't like high falutin' weird shit like not strictly binary gender, wars being at best ethically complex and at worst hopelessly mired, jazz, Gay furry porn. They DO like what's wholesome, safe, KNOWN. Socialist realist art. Country music about how great it is to be a redneck. Cracker Barrel. Plantation weddings.
GenAI is a perfect fit, because you're mythologizing the past and present, while not truly acknowledging the future (for instance, that maybe blowing through that much water is a terrible idea). GenAI is meant to knock out stuff fast based on what you already want, it's essentially a medium made for advertising. And advertising is its political use here; you can make all the idealized images of the past you want, without really touching the actual messy time period.
