Reading Wednesday

 Just finished: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman. Hello I would like to personally complain to Mr. Grossman for making me Feel Things, which is obviously a Hague-level crime against humanity. Specifically his crime is making me Feel Things about Arthurian legend, which is not something that I have particularly given a fuck about before. How do you do that, sir? FFS.

I'm going to try to be coherent but it's really hard to put into words why I got legitimately weepy about this book and couldn't put it down. It's not that it's a tragedy as such (eucatastrophe might fit better as a term?). There are particular things that the author does that resonate with me. As I mentioned last week, this is a story about gifted kid burnout, and as a sufferer myself, it immediately makes me bond to a story. Want to win me over? Have your story start with a weird little guy* who is talented in some way and gets the thing he wants and then it turns out to be bad, actually. It's shocking that people write Hero's Journey stories when they could be writing that instead.

But beyond that, there's something in the melancholy of Grossman's writing that really does it to me. This is a story about fallen people in a fallen world. It's a post-apocalyptic story, told in the shadow of receding greatness. It positions Britain as a colonized nation abandoned by its colonizers, by the old gods and magic, and ultimately by the new God, and its misfit heroes must make sense and meaning in the ruins. If that feels a little on the nose, about 2/3 of the way through, Camelot gets a new king—I won't spoil it by saying who—who thinks more than a normal amount about the Roman Empire, is fond of flashy displays of wealth, and uses religious fanaticism as a weapon to cement his rule.

I loved this book, please read it so I am not screaming into the void about it alone.

Currently reading: The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine by Robert J. Sawyer. I'm cool so I got an ARC of this. :) I just started reading it, but it follows directly from the previous book, which is about two groups of people who accidentally stay in suspended animation for too long. One is a group of astronauts preparing for a long-haul mission to colonize a planet; the other is a group of criminals serving their sentences in a condensed time period. But there's been a war and when they wake up, civilization has fallen and, oh yeah, an asteroid is headed for earth. At the end of the first book, there are four possible pathways: Resume the long-haul voyage, go to Mars and live underground, live in a virtual reality, or stay on Earth with the Mennonites and get destroyed. The sequel is set a few months before the asteroid is due to hit. I'm curious to see where it goes.

* Note: Obviously the character doesn't have to be a guy, or little. This is a story about a weird big guy who gets what he wants and then finds out that it's bad, actually.

On shitty art

 I made a comment in my AI post the other day that a few of you rightly took issue with, which was that AI art is shitty and the world doesn't need more shitty art. Take a bow if you called me out on that because you're correct and I was not—shitty art is a stepping stone to good art. Shitty art—made by humans—is valid even if it's not a stepping stone to good art. Having recently been the recipient of a shiny new Apple Pencil, I am currently teaching myself Procreate, and I've never really done digital illustration before. Are my drawings on it as good as my acrylic paintings? Not remotely. I have a baseline competence at drawing, so they don't look like shit or anything, but I'm learning the tools and it shows. Am I absolutely just doodling random people on transit, TTRPG characters, and characters from my books? Yup. Am I having fun? Well, that's the important thing, isn't it?

(Why are you harshing on people playing around on AI, then, sabotabby ? Because it is destroying the fucking planet and killing jobs. Covered that already.)

The word I should have used is mediocre, and even that is problematic, because there's a place for mediocre art too. Sometimes I want to kick back with a competently made Marvel movie. But there are definitely enough people making good-enough-but-not-creative art that I don't see a need to add to it, and I would argue that even mediocre art needs great art to inform it. Marvel movies don't exist without George Lucas' original Star Wars movies, which were actually good and innovative, and MCU occasionally still does something mildly interesting. But they have been getting progressively worse due to model collapse, which is to say that they're cannibalizing their own work and shitting it back out rather than incorporating new influences, and it shows.

I want to ramble a bit about my favourite periods of art history, as I am wont to do. Let's talk about 1896, and Tsar Nicholas II's coronation. About half a million Russians attended. The thing you have to understand about turn-of-the-century Russian peasants is that most of them loved the tsar. It's easy to love a tsar; you almost never meet them face-to-face. It's your feudal lord doing the oppression, and if the tsar knew, well, he'd never allow it. So you can imagine that many jumped for the chance to actually be in the guy's presence. They were also giving out free food and drinks—sure, it's not Elon Musk's million dollar cheques, but to a starving population, it's not nothing. The problem is that neither the tsar nor any of his officials gave any more of a flying fuck about the peasants than Musk or Trump and so they didn't bring enough, and in the rush to get fed, 1400 people were trampled to death, and thousands more injured, in a country with a healthcare system that was presumably no better than modern-day America's.

So when I say nice things about the Russian Revolution, especially in its early days, it's not out of any love for the USSR. It's that every bit of violence that happened, all the crimes against humanity that followed, were a direct result of a political system in which it was fully unremarkable for over a thousand people to die in a single day simply to flatter an inbred tyrant's ego. You can't blame the early communists for at least trying a different thing.

The art of the early Russian Revolution is some of my favourite that has ever existed in the world. You can tell it's great because it has staying power despite looking like nothing before or since. Witness Eisenstein's Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, or Mayakovsky's Porky meme, or Lissitzky's minimal masterpiece, Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge. The one closest to my heart, Tatlin's Monument to the Third International. These are works of genius, really groundbreaking work for a moment where such innovation was possible, even desirable.

And within a few decades, it was gone. Both literally and aesthetically, the rulers of the country were back to murdering peasants. The artists were in exile, or dead, or forced to do boring-as-shit socialist realism, Stalin's preferred style. I once went to a museum where they had the largest collection of Stalinist era art, and they described what was basically a factory, in which each artist specialized in painting the leader's nose, or eyes, or moustache. Alienation of labour, as Marx would have it. By the time World War II broke out, Russia's propaganda looked barely better than that of America or Britain or Germany None of those are artistically bad, per se, and to a degree the context has made them enduring. But they're mediocre compared to Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge. Something about war and nationalism tends towards samey-sameness, the laziest kind of imagery. Real lizard-brain garbage. You'll see fascists resorting to this aesthetic again and again, and AI has made sure all your feeds are flooded with it.

A similar devolution occurred in Italy, though Italian art under Mussolini never quite reached the depths of socialist realism under Stalin. The Futurists were radicals, for whatever good or bad that entailed. Beginning as anarchists, they turned fascist and got their guy into power. Their guy, as it turned out, preferred derivative art, and ordered them to stop being so fucking weird. Unlike most of the Russian Constructivists, they largely complied, and thus died of silly things like falling off horses. I'm sure nothing that happens with 8chan or the Proud Boys will echo this trajectory.

(But Sabs! Sabs! What about Nazi Germany! They were the worst but they had Leni Riefenstahl, who is at least as important as Sergei Eisenstein. To which I will reply that 1) she was nowhere near as interesting as a filmmaker even if she was talented, and 2) they had the Degenerate Art Exhibition, proving that with the occasional exception, they mostly still had terrible taste.)

All of these strongmen would have loved DALL-E and Midjourney and the like. Even a five-year-old can create more interesting art, but these people don't want interesting, they want safe. Predictable. The most obvious thing. Even the software's occasional Dadaist turn, like Lobster Jesus, is weirdly soulless, devoid of any of the batshittery that bad or substance-impaired human artists can produce. It can only steal, and average, and since the average person prefers Thomas Kinkade to Varvara Stepanova, it will regress to Kinkade, always. It cannot surprise you with an idea unless you've never had a genuinely new idea of your own. It's mediocre propaganda at scale, minus the talent it takes to perfect Stalin's moustache, and Some More News did an amazing job of explaining its appeal to fascists, if you have an hour or so to watch a video. 

So maybe bad wasn't the right word. Maybe mediocre isn't either, except for a particular value of mediocre. Soulless, or aura-less, art that makes your brain work less well when you look at it. The reduction of the diversity and imaginativeness of humanity to a checklist of tropes, a Pixar plot outline, a Kinkade rendering. A story that always ends the same way, with the two main characters knowing that whatever comes next, they will face it together. The coldest of comforts to the most heartless of ghouls.

Make your bad art. But for fuck's sake, don't make any more of this.