On shitty art
Jan. 22nd, 2025 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby 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.
(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.
