Prologue

“AI-powered customization tends to cause people who use it to isolate themselves in symbolic systems that are more and more difficult to communicate to anyone outside of their bubble, causing sociopathy”

“Culture can only re-form once again in secret, in coalition with a fresh cadre of the oppressed, keeping the memory of the broken struggles alive. Artists begin to invent anew, despite the unsparing spectacle of repression”

Introduction

“after-culture”—of a culture whose forms and functions are reshaped by cataclysmic events”

“The definition of culture has democratized, nearly to the point of extinction. It’s no longer about high versus low or culture versus entertainment; it’s about relevance or irrelevance.”

“Context Determines Meaning” is an idea so important to post-1960s art that it is number thirty-two in the book of 101 Things to Learn in Art School.”

Connoisseurship and Critique

“As for painting and sculpture, they could not have existed as art objects in the modern sense before the birth of the museum, which gave the necessary institutional context to view them outside of decoration and patronage.”

“Japanese equivalent term for “fine art,” bijutsu, was consciously constructed by the modernizing Japanese government in this period of social transformation. The field of bijutsu , Satō argues, elevated genres including painting and sculpture, which became associated with individual vision and the modification of tradition for the present, attracting members of the former samurai gentry who were looking to hold on to prestige as new economic relations eroded their old privileges. Meanwhile, another term, kōgei, approximating the idea of “craft,” absorbed the remaining artisanal handicrafts and became associated with the new export economy servicing the West’s hunger for Japonisme—and therefore with alienated labor and a lower status.”

Elite Capture and Radical Chic

“While anyone, technically, can claim the idealized identity of “artist,” the economic precariousness of the profession means that those with resources coming from somewhere else—stable employment of some kind, a supportive spouse, a family fortune, a stipend from an elite institution or patron—are going to be overrepresented, both among those who make it and those who can even see themselves in a position to roll the dice and aspire to making it in the first place.”

“celebrate the processes of maintenance”

• Maintenance Art Manifesto

The Art World and the Culture Network

“Ways of Seeing was meant as a rebuttal to such bromides. That is why it begins as it does: in the first episode’s deliberately provocative opening seconds, Berger stands in front of a replica of Botticelli’s Mars and Venus and slashes it open. Kenneth Clark disdained intellectuals who sided with the “barbarians”; Berger derided art critics who “are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline”

“Berger erred in thinking that collective authorship would be a possibility opened up by a socialist project of collective ownership of the media. All this sharing, searching, and remixing may undercut certain functions of some big corporations, but it is also brought to you by other, even more massive corporations, whose algorithms and profit motives set the fundamental parameters of digital life.”

“Berger erred in thinking that collective authorship would be a possibility opened up by a socialist project of collective ownership of the media. All this sharing, searching, and remixing may undercut certain functions of some big corporations, but it is also brought to you by other, even more massive corporations, whose algorithms and profit motives set the fundamental parameters of digital life.”

““For today’s audiences, the definition of culture has democratized, nearly to the point of extinction,” a Culture Track study from 2017 on the state of culture explained. “It’s no longer about high versus low or culture versus entertainment; it’s about relevance or irrelevance. Activities that have traditionally been considered culture and those that haven’t are now on a level playing field.”

“If you take seriously the idea that the smartphone supersedes and disperses the classical promise of the museum as a gateway to both aesthetic experience and knowledge, then the core cultural dynamic today is no longer one of museums nominating what is important culture for their viewers; it’s museums competing to try to get viewers to nominate them as important culture. At the beginning of the 2010s, museums were still trying to curb phone use and picture-taking in the galleries. By the end of the 2010s, museums were begging audiences to share pictures of their shows under dedicated hashtags”

“Museums increasingly encountered the need to compete as “experiences,” a term whose very generality expressed the flattening cultural space… Charles Venable oversaw the rebranding of the Indianapolis Museum of Art as Newfields: A Place for Nature and the Arts. The refreshed identity promoted the institution less as an arc of important cultural history and more as a hub for leisure, focusing on attractions like artist-designed mini-golf, a beer garden, Christmas light shows, and an outdoor nature park—a family-friendly version of the fine art–pop art continuum. In 2020, he shocked critics with the announcement that he would remove a floor of contemporary art to make way for a walk-in Vincent van Gogh-themed immersive light environment (before being forced to step down after posting a job announcement for the museum that referred to the need to preserve the institution’s “core white audience”)

“An even more pointed hunger for an alternative consciousness was expressed in the popular fascination with rediscovering the art practices of historic female artists who worked as mediums or in occult traditions, including Hilma af Klint, Cameron, Georgina Houghton, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Pelton.

” Their spacey environments (Light and Space art) were a central influence on the new Instagram Trap attractions in the first place, which freely pillaged Turrell and Wheeler for design ideas. Marina Abramović’s invented self-help rituals are perfectly consonant with an arty performativity that blurs seamlessly into social media exhibitionism and have been a popular prop for fashion influencers and celebrities looking to distinguish themselves in a clogged media ecosystem. And the new interest in occult spirituality, rather than representing a wholesale dropping out of the attention economy for less surveilled, secret offline spaces, was impelled by a flourishing community of “business witches” on social media platforms, displaying spiritual wares, sharing spells, and touting services.60 That very active community not only further mainstreamed once far-out New Age beliefs but also greatly swelled interest in the recovery of historic spiritualist art at museums.”

“Nevertheless, the texture of these accumulated artistic examples suggests that, in response to over-stimulation in terms of inputs, imagery, and data, some portion of popular interest in aesthetic experience is migrating away from the examination of images, objects, or even performances and toward self-reflexive scrutiny of the quality of one’s own consciousness and experience. This new sensibility has a social justice dimension, as in artist Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry, an initiative that advocates for rest as a racial justice issue, working, as its website says, through “performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing to install sacred and safe spaces for the community to rest together.”

” the need for psychological breathers has found its most visible cultural rejoinder in the surging popularity of meditation and mindfulness practices, which mushroomed in the 2010s into a billion-dollar industry, even as museums struggled to redefine their pitch to an audience. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, steeped in the ambient belief that technology inherits the utopian mission of connecting the world and unleashing individual liberation, now teach their own children meditation and send them to schools where screens are forbidden”

“think of Berger’s socialist reading of how capitalist advertising sells the concept of “glamor.” Whatever is dated in Ways of Seeing, this passage probably could have been written today (if you can forgive the use of the male pronoun)

• “Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped halfway is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams.”

AI Aesthetics and Capitalism

Point 1: The Balance of Forces Between Art and Technology Does Not Favor Art Point 2: The Dominant AI Aesthetic Is Novelty Point 3: AI Art and Contemporary Art Have Opposed Theories of Substitutability Point 4: AI Aesthetics Are Most Effective Where They Are Most Convenient for Capitalism Point 5: AI Aesthetics Throw Art’s Social Function into Relief

“Computer scientist Aaron Hertzmann bluntly calls such exercises “glorified data-fitting procedures”—in effect, the old idea that a team of monkeys with typewriters would eventually bang out Shakespeare has become an actual form of art.5 Even so, the results can be spooky both in spite of and because of the strange results.”

“For Danto, the substitutability meant that the outward visual form of the artwork was less important than the symbolic world around it that made sense of that form. “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld,” he wrote”

“While experiments show that people can be fooled by AI art creations, they also show that just thinking an artwork is generated by a computer causes people to view it as less pleasant—even if they are, in reality, looking at the exact same image labeled differently.”

• “Such results are akin to those of studies of forgeries and counterfeits, where people rate works they are told are fakes as being less pleasant to be around, even if they are actually looking at an original that has been labeled a forgery.”
• “Classical music, for instance, is the best possible example of an art form where canon formation is very important, where knowledge of the finer points circulates as social currency. If its devotees have a deeply invested relationship with specific works in the repertoire that they return to over and over, with a knowledge of the history of how they have been interpreted, taking pleasure in knowing what exactly makes a great performance of a given work, then the idea of new, cloned variations naturally runs counter to that form of pleasure”
• ” Irish folk music is fun to listen and dance to, but its pleasure is also connected to associations with community and tradition and identity that are lost when you become aware that its outer forms have been mapped and remixed as a simulation.”

“Sociologist of science Harry Collins argues that we should be less worried about “the singularity”—the mythical point when machines become super-intelligent—and more concerned with what he calls “the surrender.” “Much worse, and much more pressing, than the danger of being enslaved by enormously intelligent computers,” Collins writes, “is our allowing ourselves to become the slaves of stupid computers—computers that we take to have resolved the difficult problems but that, in reality, haven’t resolved them at all.”18 The major pitfall, for Collins, lies in the way in which AI simulates aspects of thought or functions of society that are “good enough” that we allow ourselves to forget how, beneath it all, their super-intelligent capacities merely conceal or even accentuate existing human problems. Infamously, predictive policing and sentencing algorithms are sold as a way to remove human bias, but the datasets they draw on are already shaped by racist policing practices. They provide a solution that is “good enough” to generate the semblance of technocratic objectivity while at the same time creating a feedback loop, so that previous racial profiling generates future racial profiling.”

” Margaret Boden talks of the “superhuman human fallacy”—that is, the tendency to dismiss the creativity of AI because its products don’t always summit the heights of human creativity, despite the fact that most humans don’t summit the heights of human creativity. Most people can’t make music like Mozart or rap like Rakim, and if they tried, the results would be just as historically inconsequential and botched as a lot of AI efforts. The vast bulk of cultural consumption is about having something “good enough” to pass the time, not about transcendent aesthetic experiences. Pop music, franchise cinema, airport paperbacks, TV, and most big video games are already made using extremely simple formulae and basic elements, endlessly combined in “new enough” ways. The promise of AI aesthetics is to speed up this process dramatically, while redefining what an aesthetic object is in the process. According to this logic, no body of work that brings you pleasure need ever be considered a finite resource.

• In a culture of passive content engagement, this might be AIs biggest use case strength (and danger).

” Power dynamics tip sharply toward the consumer and away from the producer; or, rather, AI aesthetics enshrine what is called the “prosumer” at the center of culture, that is, the consumer whose customization or participation creates the object in their own image. Artists invest a lot in specific bodies of work, making specific decisions about what makes a given piece a successful version of their creative vision, ending a series when they think they have said enough—but the post-AI point of view enshrines the “consumer sovereignty” valued by capital at the heart of creative experience, treating as an inefficiency any resistance to having work limitlessly permuted to meet the desires of new audiences.”

“Despite this potential for mass instant personalization, the AI-enabled aesthetic experience is also more impersonal. It outsources the function of imagining to a black-box algorithm. The creative act here is weighted toward what Elgammal calls “pre-curation” and “post-curation”—selecting the set of inputs you want AI to try to distill and then the outputs that best fit your desired version.24 This certainly opens up new possibilities for creators. But all the tendencies of capitalism push toward expanding consumption and making us more and more dependent on large corporations. In a situation of intensive corporate control over the attention space, the dominant application of AI for culture is most likely refining ways to make our entertainment feeds more addictive—encouraging us to graze on the “new enough” permutations of things we like while companies come up with new and better ways to anticipate our desires in order to feed us more things, as with procedurally generated videogames that create infinite levels so you never run out of game to explore, already widely available.”

“By default, AI aesthetics tend toward constructing an idea of culture in which any non-AI subjective decision that interrupts the flow of consumption is minimized as unprofitable dead time. You don’t need to supervise what your child sees next—or, for an adult viewer, you don’t need to talk to a friend for a recommendation of something that fits your mood, to seek out a critic whose opinion you like, or even to waste time personally deciding. Ideally you just get a selection of perpetually “good enough” options. Taste is not something you cultivate through a process of education and experiment. It is something that happens to you.”

” For millennia, humans have played games as a test of intellectual excellence but also as an excuse to joke and flirt and kill time, as a relatively harmless arena for working out conflict, as a way simply of being together. Professional sports (and Esports) make a win-lose mentality the default. But in many, many social situations, achieving victory is the excuse to play, and not the point. Everyone has a story about the one person who takes winning too seriously and ruins the fun for everyone else.”

“I’ve come to think of “art”—or a certain way of thinking about art—as serving a function similar to that malfunctioning robot: an activity that is valuable for its built-in failures rather than for its efficiency.”

“And yet how different the symbolism of Poet in a Landscape is from that of the output of Shanshui-DaDA! The world as rendered by Shen Zhou was meant to reflect the value of a way of life: the amateur-scholar dedicated to laborious study and solitary contemplation. The tiny figure on the bluff, dwarfed by his craggy environs, suggests cultivated humility before the natural world and a philosophy that places nature rather than the human at the center of things.As for the output of Shanshui-DaDA, awareness of the fact that the landscape was generated by AI transforms the image into its symbolic opposite. It stands not for the value of contemplation but for the demotion of contemplation as a value; not for a sense of smallness before nature but for a sense of nature’s mutability before the user’s will.”

” As art and tech critic Nora N. Khan writes, “Giving the keys to defining reality to a secret group of engineering priests is cultural suicide.”35 Aesthetic experience is a mixture of formal invention and social meaning, and the better AI gets at automating visual interest and narrative novelty, the more directly it will force into relief the question of what is meaningful in our aesthetic worlds. This includes the question of why our cultural energy is invested in technology that locks people ever more inside their own customized taste bubbles at a historical moment when we need to be actively working toward a collective vision.”

“Do you know what the most popular type of art is—a genre so broadly loved that it is collected utterly apart from any market value or popular acclaim? Art made by children. Before art is visually splendid, before it is even articulate, it is valued as a connection to a consciousness in formation. It is preserved as a symbol of the care taken for that consciousness.”

The Anarchist in the Network