Timeless works of art
Aesthetics as a conditional average treatment effect
January 12, 2015 — December 29, 2024
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Is a work of art timeless and universal? (No) Is it contextual? (Yes)
I think these answers are trivially correct.
Now, what makes for a great experience consuming some specific artwork?
1 Artisans vs slop
I sense there will be much e-ink spilled on this theme.
Gareth Watkins in AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism reprises Kundera on kitsch. And Kundera himself:
The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. “Kitsch” is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if, the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?
The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love.
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.
And no one knows this better than politicians. Whenever a camera is in the offing, they immediately run to the nearest child, lift it in the air, kiss it on the cheek. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.
Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.
When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”
In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.
2 Most people are not aesthetes and do not care about what art they consume that much
The culture industries seem to be operating on the apparently correct impression that most people don’t care about the quality of the art they consume that much. Artisanal handcrafted stuff is of interest to a small minority and the rest of us would like sweet melodies and pretty pictures, please, and are happy to get endless supplies of that for a bottom-dollar price. Troubling implications for the leading edge of the AI art revolution.
3 Relevance and dialogue
The “suck fairy”. “Too soon”. The artistic experience of red queen signalling and subculture dynamics are both relevant to the current situation. The purity of the ungrammable.
Toby Shorin, Diminishing Marginal Returns of Aesthetic Value:
Between the zone of normalcy and the zone of experimentation, there is a sweet spot. Just outside what is considered normal yet familiar enough to be comprehended, this is where good marketers work. When Weiden Kennedy says they want to capture “lightning in a bottle” this is what they mean: to take something just outside of mainstream culture, aestheticize it, and turn it into marketing for a consumer product. […]
The crowdfunding and tiny brand revolutions indicate that the business entity can be a means of self-expression and an aesthetic medium of its own. Pop-up shops and one-off capsule collections are effective single-shot versions of this medium, but projects with greater ambitions are emerging as well. LOT2046 and Urbit are vehicles for a set of values with distinct auteurial aesthetic visions.
Gertrude Stein:
What did you think of what you saw, asked Miss Stein. […] that the Picassos were rather awful and the others were not. Sure, she said, as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty and so everybody can like it when others make it.
4 Art and subculture
Subculture is the primary way I think about my experience of conceiving of art. My stepmother Heidi is a Dressage professional, in fact a competition judge. She can see the art in what those horses do that I cannot.
I, by contrast, am immersed in certain genres of electronic music (left field bass, jungle), occasionally professionally, and can hear things in music that she cannot.
Is one of us delusional in the enjoyment we get from seeing virtuosic performances in our artform? I personally do not think so.
I have a harder time adopting this attitude when someone likes something similar to what I like, but not quite my thing (psy-trance, say, when I would rather have that massive sound system play jungle). Am I a good judge of art in my own area, and correct that psy-trance is terrible? Is my taste arbitrary and psy-trance actually good? Is nothing terrible?
A lot is written about aesthetics of course, I do not want to come up with a theory of all that stuff right here.
But I do want to think about context of appreciating something pretty for a moment, as that problem that pops up in many fields, to wit
the fixation on finding average effects when the structure of effect differences is what we ought to be interested in.
Is DIY the ultimate microtargeted marketing?
Music styles that, like hip-hop, are connected to some kind of grassroots, are fluid, with constant incremental changes building into epochal ones. When they move from their base audience, it’s often because a particular conjuncture of sounds resonates with a new crowd. But here is where a kind of misrecognition occurs: for the neophytes, the style is this one way, frozen in time. The give and take between music makers and their core followings, the push and pull, ebb and flow that built disco, hip-hop, house, reggaeton, and so on, is interrupted by listeners who in their enthusiasm don’t always understand the history or sociology of their genres. They don’t have to: when music becomes a commodity, it can travel worldwide, as all commodities do, severed from any knowledge of the conditions of its production. Genres cease to be grassroots social worlds, and instead become something more like brands: mere sonic surfaces rather than deep historical processes.
Maximillian Schich for complex network theory with an art history twist.
Mark Bernstein’s Neovictorian Computing series takes the tension between universality and specificity to the odd world of software:
by “NeoVictorian” I mean systems that are:
- Built for people
- Built by people
- Crafted in workshops
- Irregular
- Inspired
David Marx, 21st Century Culture: Boring or Static? (Or both?)
status value was always key to the appeal of avant-garde and indie culture, and (2) the internet conspires against providing such content with status value. In the ensuing vacuum, the mass media and elite consumers spend their energy engaging with mass culture, which is more likely than niche content to be conventional. And mass culture, by definition, lacks cachet. The most savvy consumers will always desire pop culture that both breaks conventions and offers a sense of cool, and today’s mass hits rarely do either.
He name-checks some other interesting pundits:
Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day: Our Frustrating Fandom Future
In a world where you can read, watch, or listen to anything, the act of consumption isn’t impressive. So now we reward each other for consuming the meta-text — the memes, the hashtags, the community drama, and the conspiracy theories. Not only does this help small communities canonise their own monocultures, but it also has led to larger mainstream institutions fracturing themselves into small subcultures to more effectively target community members.
Bob Lefsetz, What’s Cool
Used to be there were insiders and outsiders. Hipsters and the hoi polloi. The hipsters were there first, oftentimes what they were into broke through to the mainstream, sometimes it did not. But one thing was for sure, the hipsters lorded their dedication and knowledge over you. You weren’t aware of this? You’re listening to that crap? There were all kinds of bleeding edge phenomena that broke, and almost never instantly. The hipsters had to adopt it and it took years for the rest to catch on.
5 Hyperselection
As someone who makes music the tension between innovation and execution is always in the front of my mind. There is always a scope for things that are imperfectly executed because they are new and edgy, and for things that are polished to perfection.
Recently I have been wondering if the balance has shifted towards polish. It feels like pressure for producing hyper-stylized cookie-cutter EDM sounds has become high. In particular, the need for immaculate studio production has driven out the scope for live, rough, improvised stuff.
To make this precise I would need to check some things; is the appetite for DIY stuff truly shrinking? Or shrinking as proportion of an overall growing market, maybe even actually growing overall?
Discussion point: YouTube thumbnails.
Joe Veix, Your Pretty Face is Going to Sell
Everywhere you look, there’s YouTube Face.
The Face is hard to miss once you first spot it: an exaggerated expression, an overreaction to a given video’s subject, typically conveying heightened states like disgust, anger, or ecstasy. The assault of a bad smell; a bite of something intensely sour; a faked orgasm; an elbow to the guts.
YouTube Face is most prominent in the preview images for videos. It surrounds whatever video you’re watching in a big grid of emotion.
7 Ugliness of modernity
Where is ornament in the modern world? Why is everything concrete rectangles?
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things – Ben Landau-Taylor
The other interesting question is why most people say that the ornamented style is more beautiful and more pleasant, but surround themselves with plain or minimalist objects instead. Partly, it’s because people usually buy one of the “default” options that’s presented to them in store shelves or online search results rather than hunting for something specific, and the defaults will be whatever is in fashion; you make a lot of purchases in a year, and no one has the attention to think deeply about all of them. Mostly, though, it’s because most people prioritise looking normal or fashionable above their own sense of beauty.
See also Scott Alexander, Whither Tartaria?
8 Incoming
Making architecture easy - Works in Progress
Unlike nearly all other arts, architecture is inherently public and shared. That means that buildings should be designed to be agreeable – easy to like – not to be unpopular works of genius.
Dynomight Taste games
Gavin Leech, Taylor Swift as blurry jpeg
So why does Taylor Swift (your reception of Taylor Swift) make me feel like I have ants beneath my skin?
I think it’s because I am seeing a machine (a series of large corporations and 40+ writers and designers
) represent itself as a singular human being I am to empathise with. Then a large part of society greets this machine as a capital-A artist.
The interesting part is that Swift the human built the machine and controls it in some detail. A self-manufactured pop star: she is deeply invested in making the machine seem like her and in feeding it people (fans, co-writers, boyfriends, enemies, bloggers). The project is reflexive: it makes songs about its own controversies, songs which lead to even more fame, fame which automatically produces more controversies. Call the machine TS.
TS performs characters (Cinderella, say) and at the same time pretends to deeply express Swift the woman. She performed innocence (and a twang) for Nashville and now performs demisexuality (and FKA-sighing) for the glossies, BPD (and drawling) for the extremely online, and a persecution complex (and diphthongs) for everyone.
That’s half of it; the other half is the mediocrity of the output and your incredible overestimation of it. (Bowie pulled off a cheaper version of the TS trick 50 years ago and I love him for it because his songs are, at the very least, interesting and aimed at more than pleasing me.) TS songs are moderately catchy, recently moderately perverse, and expertly ape The Current Thing (Faith Hill / Kelly Clarkson / Jenny Lewis / Lady Gaga / Kesha / Lana del Rey / Lorde / FKA Twigs / whoever it is now). But TS is noticeably flatter than any of these.
Why does the music’s reception matter if the music doesn’t matter? Well, I dislike things that pretend to be deep when they’re not. Things which pretend to be personal are on tricky aesthetic ground. It is not fine for entertainment to stand in place of art. We used to be iffy about parasocial relationships, corporate machines, being played.
- Dean Kissick, Senseless Babble
In the early 2010s, there were movements on both 4chan (anonymous, nihilist trolls) and Tumblr (radicals deconstructing identity) that fulfilled the criteria of being avant-garde: they were coming up with new ways of speaking, new forms of communication and expression, and new ways of being. They offered formal innovations, critiques of modern society, and visions of a different future, all of which were very hard to find elsewhere.
4chan posters adopted some strategies of the historical avant-garde, like transgressive humour, nonsensical absurdity, and culture-jamming, and on their fast-flowing message boards you could watch language and visual culture being collectively remade in real time. Tumblr was more avant-garde still: gender, sexuality, and identity were being pulled apart and reconstructed by young people on it every day, new iteration after new iteration. Both groups produced a kind of communal folk art but were nevertheless avant-garde in their approaches — even if, or more likely because, what they made did not conform to what is traditionally understood as art or culture …
Today’s online culture is far more inventive and daring than the arts, both formally and in terms of the ideas it presents. Ordinary people, it turns out, are far weirder than artists and writers, and more imaginative too.
The Interpretive Dance | blarg
A side effect of the generative algo-art wave that’s gone at least underappreciated is the total dissolution of the notion that artistic intent exists and is anything worth investigating. Detail and context are no longer avenues of a creator’s comment or venues of study; there’s no point in engaging critically with anything that Midjourney has barfed out, because there’s nothing you could even vaguely call “intent” behind it. The fine details are reduced to the sterility of the forensic.
The internet has made our culture impermanent. And in its confusion, humanity mistook nostalgia for authenticity.
Daniel Cooper