Futurism and 4chan
Apr. 18th, 2025 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyGod help me I'm going to hold forth on art history again. This is mainly instigated by a friend elsewhere, who challenged my statement that the aesthetics of AI are inherently fascist. I respect his challenge, and I want to respond with something other than "vibes" so I'm going to go off half-cocked and attempt to draw an historical parallel with the OG fascist movement.
I know more a little more than a normal amount about Italian art. I would argue that it peaked not in the Renaissance but in the Baroque era (source: vibes), but Italian artists have been chasing that high ever since, as has every other artist in the Western world. You can't really blame them.
Don't get me wrong, I stan my gay king Michelangelo. But I find Gentileschi a far more interesting artist. Sue me.
Italian art continued to muddle on until a huge break, in the early 20th century, with the Futurist movement. You know, my problematic faves. The guys who wanted to burn down all the museums, turn their back on history, and who declared, in F.T. Marinetti's words, "We affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched with a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its hood adorned with large snake-like tubes with explosive breath... a roaring automobile, which seems to run on machine gun fire, is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace."
Do I agree? No, the planet is on goddamn fire because of the roaring automobile, and the Futurists were all fascists. But I find them, and their art, really compelling. Check out Carlo Carrà here, when he was still cool:
Goddamn. I'm here for that. It has a vitality to it that's lacking in much of the art that preceded it. I don't have to hand it to the fascists, but they did have a point about avoiding stagnation in the arts. It's a not dissimilar point to that made by other art movements, like the Russian Constructivists and the Dadaists, whose politics are obviously massively more sympathetic.
Marinetti and Mussolini were good friends and Marinetti is, in fact, the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto. There are points in Mussolini's own history when he was on the left. You can see the ghosts of it there, in the call for the 8-hour day, universal suffrage, votes for women, and minimum wages. Fascism begins as a radical workers' movement, and many of the early fascists, like Marinetti and Carrà, were anarchists at one point or another.
A funny thing happens when fascists get into power, however, and that's that they do not believe any of the pro-worker rhetoric they spouted when they were trying to build a movement. In fact, they are very anti-worker. And Mussolini didn't like the art that Marinetti championed after all; he was fond of a more neoclassical, RETVRN TO TRADITION kind of vibe. And so, the surviving Futurists had to adapt or quit. The regime set guidelines on what constituted appropriate art.
The results are very strange, and I don't know much about it. It spawned two movements, Novecento Italiano and Strapaese, both of which were kind of modernist takes on classical Italian art. I don't hate it??? A similar kind of thing happened in Russia, when it turned out that Stalin didn't like the radical art that the Constructivists created and turned to socialist realism, and honestly, the Italians come out of it looking a little better. It's still an odd spot, though, neither hitting the technical glories or the Renaissance, the emotive power of the Baroque, or the innovation of the Futurists.
This, for example, is Carrà's later work:
I think it's a bit shite in comparison to his early stuff.
This is Achille Funi's The earth. Also not great? But not without merit:
On the other hand, Mario Sironi's over here doing something cool and interesting which feels de Chirico-adjacent (de Chirico is also associated with Novecento Italiano, though there were competing schools there, one anti-fascist, and I have no idea what his politics were like).
And I have to give at least some props to Ubaldo Oppi's Women Friends:
So what does this have to do with AI and why I think, based on my vibes, that AI is fascist? It goes back to the pattern I suggested in both Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism. An avant-garde art movement meets a nascent political movement, the former gleefully attaches to the latter, only to be betrayed when the latter comes to power in favour of more conservative aesthetics.
And this is what I witness happening in the visual iconography of modern-day fascism. Let's take a trip down the rabbit hole to, say, 2014-2016. What's the ascendent visual style of the alt-right? It's janky, ugly-on-purpose, constructed with the most basic tools available, edgy and debauched. It's creative—evil, yes, but it's doing something different and exciting, so much so that it escapes containment. In 2025, what is the visual style of fascism? Slick, corporate, but unnerving. Too perfect in that Uncanny Valley way. More beholden to Thomas Kinkade than to Matt Furie. It feels off, because its proponents want the symbolism of power without a particular deep interest in the structure and the foundations of the aesthetic. An arcade of Roman columns that, when you turn sideways, is nothing more than a Western movie film set facade, all plywood that whole time.
Fascists are simple creatures; they want art that they can understand, none of that high-falutin' Jew degenerate modernist stuff. The problem is that artists, left alive long enough, will tend to change and innovate. They'll fall in love with the art of other cultures. They'll create community. Fascists want art without artists; art that doesn't show the brushstrokes or enable bohemian lifestyles, art that is frictionless and vapid. It's fitting to me that one of the plagiarism machines is called DALL-E because Dalí would have genuinely approved. Mussolini would have wet his pants over AI's potential, at once forward-looking and reactionary, relying on regression to the mean in all things.
Just like the Futurists of yore, the unruly and radical propagandists of 4chan have been abandoned by the same forces they put in power. Their innovation is no longer necessary. They're not even worth subjecting to the Night of the Long Knives.
The ugliness of this aesthetic doesn't even breach the top three reasons to always oppose AI, obviously. That's the environmental holocaust that it unleashes, the use of the technology to target apartment buildings in Gaza or immigrants in the former USA, the mass unemployment it threatens to unleash, and the wholesale theft of creative work. But it's also ugly in the way that the art of totalitarian regimes tends towards ugliness, bereft of a culture of experimentation that makes for great art. And that's why I think it's fascist rather than simply boring.
I know more a little more than a normal amount about Italian art. I would argue that it peaked not in the Renaissance but in the Baroque era (source: vibes), but Italian artists have been chasing that high ever since, as has every other artist in the Western world. You can't really blame them.
Don't get me wrong, I stan my gay king Michelangelo. But I find Gentileschi a far more interesting artist. Sue me.
Italian art continued to muddle on until a huge break, in the early 20th century, with the Futurist movement. You know, my problematic faves. The guys who wanted to burn down all the museums, turn their back on history, and who declared, in F.T. Marinetti's words, "We affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched with a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its hood adorned with large snake-like tubes with explosive breath... a roaring automobile, which seems to run on machine gun fire, is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace."
Do I agree? No, the planet is on goddamn fire because of the roaring automobile, and the Futurists were all fascists. But I find them, and their art, really compelling. Check out Carlo Carrà here, when he was still cool:
Goddamn. I'm here for that. It has a vitality to it that's lacking in much of the art that preceded it. I don't have to hand it to the fascists, but they did have a point about avoiding stagnation in the arts. It's a not dissimilar point to that made by other art movements, like the Russian Constructivists and the Dadaists, whose politics are obviously massively more sympathetic.
Marinetti and Mussolini were good friends and Marinetti is, in fact, the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto. There are points in Mussolini's own history when he was on the left. You can see the ghosts of it there, in the call for the 8-hour day, universal suffrage, votes for women, and minimum wages. Fascism begins as a radical workers' movement, and many of the early fascists, like Marinetti and Carrà, were anarchists at one point or another.
A funny thing happens when fascists get into power, however, and that's that they do not believe any of the pro-worker rhetoric they spouted when they were trying to build a movement. In fact, they are very anti-worker. And Mussolini didn't like the art that Marinetti championed after all; he was fond of a more neoclassical, RETVRN TO TRADITION kind of vibe. And so, the surviving Futurists had to adapt or quit. The regime set guidelines on what constituted appropriate art.
The results are very strange, and I don't know much about it. It spawned two movements, Novecento Italiano and Strapaese, both of which were kind of modernist takes on classical Italian art. I don't hate it??? A similar kind of thing happened in Russia, when it turned out that Stalin didn't like the radical art that the Constructivists created and turned to socialist realism, and honestly, the Italians come out of it looking a little better. It's still an odd spot, though, neither hitting the technical glories or the Renaissance, the emotive power of the Baroque, or the innovation of the Futurists.
This, for example, is Carrà's later work:
I think it's a bit shite in comparison to his early stuff.
This is Achille Funi's The earth. Also not great? But not without merit:
On the other hand, Mario Sironi's over here doing something cool and interesting which feels de Chirico-adjacent (de Chirico is also associated with Novecento Italiano, though there were competing schools there, one anti-fascist, and I have no idea what his politics were like).
And I have to give at least some props to Ubaldo Oppi's Women Friends:
So what does this have to do with AI and why I think, based on my vibes, that AI is fascist? It goes back to the pattern I suggested in both Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism. An avant-garde art movement meets a nascent political movement, the former gleefully attaches to the latter, only to be betrayed when the latter comes to power in favour of more conservative aesthetics.
And this is what I witness happening in the visual iconography of modern-day fascism. Let's take a trip down the rabbit hole to, say, 2014-2016. What's the ascendent visual style of the alt-right? It's janky, ugly-on-purpose, constructed with the most basic tools available, edgy and debauched. It's creative—evil, yes, but it's doing something different and exciting, so much so that it escapes containment. In 2025, what is the visual style of fascism? Slick, corporate, but unnerving. Too perfect in that Uncanny Valley way. More beholden to Thomas Kinkade than to Matt Furie. It feels off, because its proponents want the symbolism of power without a particular deep interest in the structure and the foundations of the aesthetic. An arcade of Roman columns that, when you turn sideways, is nothing more than a Western movie film set facade, all plywood that whole time.
Fascists are simple creatures; they want art that they can understand, none of that high-falutin' Jew degenerate modernist stuff. The problem is that artists, left alive long enough, will tend to change and innovate. They'll fall in love with the art of other cultures. They'll create community. Fascists want art without artists; art that doesn't show the brushstrokes or enable bohemian lifestyles, art that is frictionless and vapid. It's fitting to me that one of the plagiarism machines is called DALL-E because Dalí would have genuinely approved. Mussolini would have wet his pants over AI's potential, at once forward-looking and reactionary, relying on regression to the mean in all things.
Just like the Futurists of yore, the unruly and radical propagandists of 4chan have been abandoned by the same forces they put in power. Their innovation is no longer necessary. They're not even worth subjecting to the Night of the Long Knives.
The ugliness of this aesthetic doesn't even breach the top three reasons to always oppose AI, obviously. That's the environmental holocaust that it unleashes, the use of the technology to target apartment buildings in Gaza or immigrants in the former USA, the mass unemployment it threatens to unleash, and the wholesale theft of creative work. But it's also ugly in the way that the art of totalitarian regimes tends towards ugliness, bereft of a culture of experimentation that makes for great art. And that's why I think it's fascist rather than simply boring.
