1. I doubt many medieval English traders traveled all the way to Afghanistan for lapis. Rather, they bought lapis in Genoa or Venice or whatever, from a trader who got it in Constantinople, who bought it from some Armenian, who bought it from some Arab, etc..
2.The the final group house inage, I like how everyone is smiling beatifically, except the dude with the beard, who looks mortified.
Indeed there were chains of middlemen, but the point still stands in a weaker form: any problem (war, lawlessness) between the two endpoints, and your source of an exotic material will just dry up, or become extremely expensive. And even if the situation improves, the lead-in time may be on the order of a year or so.
Not too dissimilar from the post-Covid chip shortages.
Maybe Scott is polycephalic, with new heads budding all the time like pups on a cactus. Of course this wouldn't account for the little legs and arms, but other evidence is consistent with my thesis.
Also, I never have understood why humans get so worked up over an original. You see the Mona Lisa or soemthing and it's a transcendant experience, The Magic Of The Universe, a Statement About The Human Condition and all that, but a reproduction is just a cheap knockoff, even if you couldn't or even an expert couldn't tell the two images apart. (audio is a different animal. I can hear the difference between live audio and a reproduction.)
For that matter, I've never understood why forged artwork is so declasse. During WWII, some Dutch dude was "discovering" Vermeers (that he made in his studio) and selling them to Nazis. Art experts at the time were fooled.
After the war, the artist was prosecuted for "selling the national patrimony" until he demonstrated in court how he made his fakes. Apparently, an original Vermeer was "the national patrimony". A fake Vermeer (that the best experts of the day pronounced to be genuine) was not worth bothering about.
Did humans' emotions over the fake Vermeers suddenly evaporate disappear, once they were shown to be fake? Was the expressiveness and creativity apparent in the artwork no longer valid, once it turned out that the artist executing his vision wasn't exactly Vermeer?
To be fair, Vermeers would be gorgeous in any context but they surely owe a little something to “illuminating” a world. Which a forgery cannot be said to do.
I read a book about a Salvator Mundi that may or may not be the work of da Vinci - that was found in an old Louisiana house (seems a suitable end somehow) - and the story while interesting actually took a backseat to the image (not that it was so great but it was sort of compelling, despite its sheeplike eyes, and so throughout, I kept turning back to the cover to recall it to mind: why am I reading this?). By the end I legitimately didn’t care any more who painted it.
Except Van Meegeren's fake Vermeers were terrible! In his Supper at Emaus, Jesus's arm is completely boneless!
My (probably incomplete or wrong) understanding is that one of the reasons the experts were fooled is because few Vermeers were known, and his work was only just coming to light; what's more, experts believed he had studied in Italy and so expected that works in the style of Caravaggio must be among Vermeer's missing works, so when a Supper at Emaus purportedly by Vermeer turned up, people saw what they expected to see.
But in hindsight, I don't think those forgeries, at least, hold up to the originals.
On the broader point, I highly recommend Orson Welles's F For Fake.
Actually, I'm also reminded of the saga of the supposed Pollock painting as told in the movie Who the #$!& is Jackson Pollack?
If I recall correctly, the movie is sympathetic to the claim that the painting is authentic, and plays the art expert who evaluates it for laughs (looking at the painting between his legs, dismissing it because it "doesn't soar" or something like that)--but I believe the consensus is now that the painting was forged.
I think, as with Scott's friend who aced the AI art Turing test, some people do indeed see things in "authentic" art that is missing in the forgeries--at least, I am pretty open to that possibility.
Right, the forger aimed his first Vermeer forgery at vindicating one art scholar's theory that Vermeer had gone to Italy when young and was influenced by Caravaggio. Not surprisingly, that scholar then declared the forgery to be authentic _and_ his theory proven right. Everybody was happy!
I think years ago, Edward Banfield had an article titled, "Let them see fakes." It said museums should display detailed photographs of "great art" so everyone could have the chance to see the Mona Lisa or Starry Night in their full size and (as far as anyone could tell) glory.
I've seen two full-size (13 feet tall) copies of Michelangelo's David (the one in the plaza in Florence outside the museum with the original and one in a SoCal theme park). Both were ho-hum.
A slightly similar experience: I visited the Blue Mosque in Instanbul, Turkey (cca. 400 years old). It was nicely renovated, and felt like built from concrete 20 years ago. Really, it was like the main Catholic cathedral of my mid-size European town (built cca. 100 years ago), or the Saint Sava church in Belgrade, Serbia (10-30 years old), both containing significant amounts of concrete.
Then we visited Haga Sophia. And boy, that thing felt impressive. And felt old; very old. Which it actually is (2000 years, give or take a few centuries). Really, that IS something.
We would be able to build such a thing with modern technology in a few years. But that would make the impression of a very big shopping mall.
While I agree with you in a broad sense (ie. viewing "the" Mona Lisa in Louvre and Mona Lisa in Prado, or that viewing an artwork made by a known master and an equally good artwork indistinguishably mimicking his style, is essentially the same experience), I can see several points where they differ:
1) Presentation: You could have replicas of Michaelangelo's masterpieces, but the Sistine Chapel is a really impressive space, and viewing a replica of The Creation of Adam would be a whole another experience, unless of course it's a part of replica of Sistine Chapel itself
2) Sense of continuity/belonging/being part of history/whatever: If you visit Stonehenge to observe the solstice, I am told it's an impressive sight (seeing the sun creeping through the pillars and what not), which however is true of any similarly astronomically aligned construction. But, at Stonehenge you'll likely be struck by a feeling that people, not unlike you (depending on your heritage, maybe even your own ancestors), have stood on this very spot hundreds of generations ago, and feel universal love and transcendental joy and unity with the cosmos and what not. Surely there are other ways to reach that state of mind, but undoubtedly Stonehenge is much better at priming the experiences than replica-Stonehenge would be.
3) I can be awestruck by the athleticism of an Olympic gymnast, performance of a great actor, ingenuity of a mathematician at proving theorems, etc. Crucially, this is true even when I myself can prove those same theorems as math homework: after all, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, and my feat isn't the slightest bit impressive (although the proof can in itself be beautiful). Likewise, if I know enough of art history, I can marvel an artwork and its creator for being the first to develop techniques, aesthetic styles, etc, and when viewing the original work, these feel close at home, as though I was looking at Simone Biles winning gold or contemplating Eukleides coming up with the idea of axiomatic mathematics ex nihilo. In contrast, when viewing the reproduction, I know the creator was standing on the shoulders of giants too, and the work isn't impressive in these ways, although it can be identically aesthetically pleasing.
As for point 3, I'm personally entirely dismissive of such works, but well, I can see a museum-goer with a different mentality going "so this is the piece that caused so much debate in the art world", and then prompted by seeing THE black canvas, go on a rollercoaster journey of contemplating the meaning of art in a way that wall painted black next room wouldn't. Or whatever. Of course, the same effect could in this case be accomplished by a black canvas by yours truly, if it was fraudulently identified, but that seems unethical.
As for the other question, if the ceiling of Sistine Chapel was damaged and a Fake Master was commissioned to reproduce Michaelangelo's ceiling frescos, and he was at least as good a painter as Michaelangelo was, then I think Sistine Chapel would remain a must-visit site in Rome. Or, if Fake Master was commissioned to reproduce it in Stockholm, then you could see that in your trip to Stockholm, drop that from your holiday plans in Rome, and spend that time sightseeing the ruins of Ostia Antica or something. Here I'm in agreement with the original commenter, I'm just trying to steelman some aspects for worth of the originals.
Well, personally I think a building is impressive then it's impressive whether it was made in the 1200 or post-war. Really, entirely destroyed buildings aside, a lot of the old stuff that survives is like the Ship of Theseus, if not outright modern replicas. Say, I don't know the status of every artifact you can find in Pomeii, but I know works like the Alexander Mosaic in House of Faun are modern reproductions (the original is in museum in Napoli). And some stuff may be historical forgeries: the city of Rome notoriously has more Egyptian obelisks than Egypt, but there are some Roman forgeries, too. They are nice-looking landmarks nevertheless and tourists don't seem to mind.
But I think part of the value of restored/recreated buildings, besides the fact that the originals looked nice, is that "connection to the past". You may quite literally see the layers of history of different rules and eras and that brings the place some gravitas, character and interest beyond being a set of fine examples of architecture (if the city has e.g. Roman, Andalusian, Habsburg and modern stuff, and Andalusian buildings get destroyed without being restored, I think it's fair to say the city has lost something more than nice individual buildings), and then there's often local culture tied to the places that would likely also be lost if the buildings weren't recreated at least as closely as tradition demands. Faithful restorations and recreations, I think, do nothing to diminish these aspects, even if they weren't "original" in the purest sense.
I wasn't the one you asked the question of, but...
Couldn't a cop testify in court just as well using fake evidence as real evidence? If they don't get found out, what's the difference?
I have a native desire for authenticity for its own sake. This is a functional heuristic in many ways, even if it gets over-applied. I differentiate between 'a thing' and 'the thing.' A friend of mine was at the reclining Buddha in Thailand, which I also went to. That seems more significant than saying we both saw a large reclining Buddha. We were in the same actual place, separated only by time.
There is a reflexive revulsion for me for being duped or encountering a thing that was said to be authentic which was not. And if you give a person a thing they desire and then take it away, the loss will cut deeper than the gain did. For me, this applies to authenticity also. The implied relationships matter as much as the material thing.
I'm all for artistic reproductions, but they don't carry, for me, a sense of encountering a thing with the dust of history falling off it. I can't *trust* them to tell a story about what a genuine thing looks like.
" 3) apply equally to a painting in the vein of "Rustoleum At Night"?"
For me, this would hinge on what kind of relationship I had with the painting and the people who critiqued it. Though it often takes some mental effort and cultivation to see an influential original artwork and remember that it is not, in fact, derivative. It can take deliberation to remember that all the other examples of that work I've seen through my life are, in fact, derived from it.
I can't imagine having a black canvas be something I thought mattered. But lets say that it was the Black Canvas that.... inspired World War I or whatever. The very painting that Gavrilo Princip beat Archduke Ferdinand with. That would carry a sense of history with it.
I want to second the idea of presentation. Caravaggio's "Medusa" is okay when you look at it in an art book or even on a large screen. But when I saw it in Uffizi, I got immediate goosebumps. I don't know if it's the right distance, the right light, the right framing, but it's absolutely haunting.
It's the same with Caruso. Playing a recording while you're reading a blog post is one thing. Travelling to Naples, dressing up, going to the Teatro di San Carlo, finding yourself among other people waiting for the bell in nervous excitement, and then watching the man himself walk onto the stage and sing an aria just for you (and the other 3000 attendees), listening to every note, knowing you can never have the same experience again.
Orson Welles' documentary "F for Fake" gets into this. If a forger can paint a new picture indistinguishable from a Vermeer, is he as good a painter as Vermeer?
> If a forger can paint a new picture indistinguishable from a Vermeer, is he as good a painter as Vermeer?
If "painter" means a technical skill, then yes. But I don't think it's a big part of being an artist.
An amateur in chess can study some famous game by Paul Morphy and play a similar one when presented with the opportunity. It doesn't even translate to anything about his level as a chess player, but seems like a close analogy. But there's a second level: Paul Morphy was probably the greatest player some 170 years ago, but if he was made to play against today's chess elite, he probably wouldn't be in the top 1000, not just because there were fewer people with less free time on their hands (so he was the biggest fish in a relatively small body of water), but also because chess theory has advanced a lot.
So someone copying a Vermeer is analogous to an amateur studying one game and it's not interesting at all (even though it requires a serious technical skill). And even though art lacks clear metrics like Elo in chess, I think if one existed, Vermeer's wouldn't be too special in our time.
"Paul Morphy was probably the greatest player some 170 years ago, but if he was made to play against today's chess elite, he probably wouldn't be in the top 1000, not just because there were fewer people with less free time on their hands (so he was the biggest fish in a relatively small body of water), but also because chess theory has advanced a lot."
The last point raises the question: how good would Morphy have been if he had been raised in the modern chess environment? To some extent, this is what I think people really mean when they ask about greatness: I know more calculus than Isaac Newton ever did (by some metrics anyway), but I feel very confident saying that if Newton had had access to even one (1) modern calculus textbook, he would absolutely put my knowledge to shame. We shouldn't hold it against his greatness that he was born too early to learn about epsilon-delta proofs or whatever; he clearly had the capacity to understand that stuff, just not the opportunity.
I think we ought to (try) judge Vermeer or Morphy the same way: what do we estimate they might have been capable of in a more modern environment?
But obviously this is very hard to think about in a clear and principled way.
I love F For Fake, but I think that to really answer this question you have to think about what conditions the forger is allowed to work in.
Does the forger get to just copy an existing Vermeer? That certainly requires some painting skill, but we surely all agree that if this were novel writing instead of painting, "copy an existing work" exhibits very little of the relevant skill.
If the forger is expected to stage their own, new tableau and paint in Vermeer's style, that captures more of the sort of skill that we're looking for: the forger has something of the "eye", the sense of composition and balance of different elements, etc.
But I think you could still object--if the forger gets to study all known Vermeers first, then the forger still has the advantage that they don't have to invent the style from scratch. One can reasonably think that much of what makes someone a great artist is their ability to see beyond what their contemporaries are capable of; to invent new techniques or styles that didn't previously exist. If our forger isn't doing that, one can still think they aren't as great as Vermeer (though it's now more subtle as one has to argue that Vermeer did have this inventive quality).
I think an example where people get this more intuitively is comedy. If I can perform a Monty Python impersonation reasonably well, with good timing, etc. there's definitely a real element of comedic talent. But no one thinks that a perfect John Cleese mimic doing a perfect parrot sketch is as funny as John Cleese; what makes Cleese funny is that he developed the style, wrote the sketch.
On the other hand, we don't want to overcommit to the idea that what makes a work great is that it was created by a great artist--surely some of what makes art great is intrinsic! The reductio in this direction is Pierre Menard rewriting Don Quixote; one can't just declare that the exact same words now carry a totally different meaning just because of the process by which they were produced.
But the exact interplay here seems complicated and subtle, and is certainly beyond me to get to the bottom of.
I think there are many, many answers to this question. Here's one: comfort and safety. A certified original masterwork comes with a guarantee that your time and attention will be rewarded. You're allowed to enjoy it as much as you want, without fear of losing status, or suffering criticism from your peers, or being let down by the ending.
Think of the last time you solved a really difficult puzzle. Now imagine how frustrating that experience would have been if you had no idea if a solution even existed. Now replace "solved, puzzle, solution" with "enjoyed, work of art, meaning". (yes, Death of the Author, I agree, but for the sake of argument)
You can already experience this via the work of JJ Abrams. Here's a dozen mysterious events, some of them are profoundly important, some are random Calvinball bullshit that will never get explained, please spend the next 6 seasons trying to figure out which is which.
The age of an object and its cultural significance are as important as its artistic quality, so an original Vermeer is interesting because what it says about 17th century dutch life, Vermeer's place in art history and evolving painting techniques, like the theory that he used a camera obscura to create his highly realistic paintings. A forged artwork or AI art in the style of Vermeer add nothing of value.
The Mona Lisa is interesting because I feel a lot of people have a reverse reaction to seeing the original. We see it big and impressive on screens and prints, where we can admire every detail, and if you actually go to the Louvre and look at it yourself it's actually a kind of small painting and there are 500 tourists standing in front of you so you don't get a clear view.
Right. There are lots of more impressive paintings to look at in the Louvre. The Louvre is built on a huge scale so it features numerous immense paintings like Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa. The Mona Lisa would look less disappointing in a smaller museum.
> I never have understood why humans get so worked up over an original.
Because a photograph of a painting never really captures the painting. There's the texture of the brush strokes. There are subtle differences in the way light reflects off the texture and the pigments. For Renaissance artwork, where the painters laid down layers of pigment in glazes, as you view a painting from slightly different angles the translucency of pigments changes. Most modern viewers only know how to look at images as a gestalt, probably because we've grown up viewing images with lower information content all our lives.
In the case of modern painters, Mark Rothko is an example of an artist that the gestalters just can't seem to appreciate. "All I see is big blocks of color. Big deal." But Rothko spent months working on his paintings, applying dozens of translucent layers of color interleaved with glazes of various sorts. If you look closely at a Rothko, the underlying layers show through in places, and then you realize the underlying layers are affecting the way we perceive the surface layers, and the blocks of color can begin to vibrate as we try to look through the surface layers. And then you stand back and stare at it for a while with your eyes slightly unfocused, you begin to perceive all sorts of visual illusions — as if things were moving in the depths. And that visual stimulation can trigger emotional responses. I've seen people crying in front of his paintings. For me, Rothkos can trigger a sense of wonder and inexplicable joy. It's hard to describe to someone who only sees the "big picture" and the surface image. And a photograph of a Rothko, no matter how dense the pixels, just won't do the same thing — because there is three-dimensional information in the pigments that is lost in a photo.
But we get so many images that shoved at us every day that our qualia have become dumbed down. The sad thing is that most people never realize that they're not seeing the details, and they're satisfied with poor imitations. As for forgeries, a good forgery can be better than the original (but they seldom really capture the hand of the original artist). But the act of deception can make it valueless no matter how good the forger was.
If it's true that what we think are good enough reproductions aren't, that's part of the problem, and we're a long way from really accurate reproduction.
I didn't understand Rothko, either, until I got sucked into one at LACMA. I must have stood there for 20 or 30 minutes, staring at it slightly unfocused, watching the colors vibrate. I'd walk in close to see the details, and then I back away and watch it vibrate. It was a mystical experience for me. A woman standing next to me said, "You too, huh?" and she smiled. I should have asked for a date because she was obviously seeing the world the way I did.
The one time I went in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, it did not do anything for me; but then I was only a kid. And also we are told his finishes have not held quite held up in that subtropical posting.
*However*: the adjacent museum also had an exhibit, filling a large space, of wrecked cars. Just that. Wrecked front ends mounted on the wall, and whole vehicles too, as best I recall.
I am old enough now to know that for some reason I intensely dislike art museums (only art, not other museums) and want to get out of them as soon as possible, but I had not yet come to that conclusion at that hopeful age.
But I believe that the juxtaposition of these things - the Rothko, and the silly provocateur flim-flam of the cars - did no favor to the former that day.
I am watching this now and am a little confused at about 9:00 they describe him as priming his Seagram canvases with "rabbit skin glue" in a "deep maroon" - but then when they show him using a house painters' brush to "wash" on layers of turpentine-thinned red paint, the underlying canvas is white.
I've got something here in the house that strikes me as inadvertently Rothko-like. I got from a relative's house 25 years ago an armoire in that sort of celadon green stain of the 50s/60s, with little brown splatters (dots). (You may know the sort of thing.)
At the time I was convinced this didn't suit, so using a library book of paint finish techniques (then the rage) I set about painting it what turned out to be a luminous, variable sort of Turkey red and the single most durable, lacquer-like paint job I've ever done. Not a single chip all these years later - it looks like the day I finished.
I wish I could remember how I did it! I bought artist oils, I remember that, raw umber and a couple others. I'm pretty sure turpentine was the medium but it may actually have been polyurethane. I sanded but didn't prime. I have seldom (!) been so please with anything I did. It is not opaque - more like a painting - but it shows no brush strokes. I don't think I used a rag. It's odd that I worked on it the better part of a month, and yet - once finished the process vanished from my head.
> The sad thing is that most people never realize that they're not seeing the details, and they're satisfied with poor imitations.
I wonder though, is it really a sad thing? Imagine a world where you could only see the Mona Lisa or any famous artwork if you were both rich enough, idle enough and dedicated enough to travel across the world to view the original. Would you say it is a "happy thing" that all the people who can not and will not ever have that experience will also never have the "cheaper" experience of seeing it in a photograph? Details may matter, but how many people would rank "quality of life" in the order of "Has seen the original painting" > "Will never see the original painting or a replica/photo" > "Will never see the original, but has seen a photo"
I will never see a Vermeer in person, but he's one of my favorites based solely on an old Time-Life (I think) book, "The World of ...." series, which I used to pore over.
If you ever have a chance, take look at one in real life. The pictures of his work never really do his work justice. He's a brilliant genius with light, shadow, and pigment.
Wherever I travel, I make a point of visiting the local art museums. I've been to the Louvre twice, and I was able to squeeze myself through the crowds to view the Mona Lisa. It's just a little canvas, and the varnish has oxidized over the centuries, so she's a warm muddy brown. Her indeterminate expression is what forced me to keep looking at her. Otherwise, it's not Da Vinci's best painting. Still, I recommend seeing it in person — if you can deal with the crowds.
The fake Vermeers were ugly and didn't look all that much like Vermeers. But they appealed to people in the 1930s, even though today they look pretty obviously like something that would appeal to people in the 1930s.
I've heard that in general, forgery is easier to detect after some decades have passed. People can't recognize the period style they're living with, but when the culture has moved on, a forgery from the 1920s will look like it's from the 1920s.
Right. Just about everybody is a slave to his or her time. It's hard to recognize in yourself, but not hard to recognize in somebody from a different time.
People are actually pretty adept these days at putting themselves imaginatively into the past, at least the fairly recent past. Consider how many people are still pretty interested in the rock music of 1965 (judging by the number of musical biopics): "Rubber Soul," "Like a Rolling Stone," "Satisfaction," "California Girls." We had a good Dylan biopic last year, a really good Beach Boys biopic in 2015, and yesterday we were promised four Beatles biopics in 2028.
I still see young people wearing Ramones t-shirts, and it's not because the Ramones were all that much better than everybody else who came after them who sounded like the Ramones. Instead, it's because a striking number of 21st century young people have heard the narrative in which Emerson Lake and Palmer are the bad guys of the mid-1970s and the Ramones are the good guys. And they like it.
Personally, I saw both ELP and the Ramones in 1977-78. And they were both good. But the narrative about the Ramones as the underdogs and ELP as the overdogs helps me enjoy the Ramones more, while ELP today is largely forgotten.
I don't know anything about music history - can you explain the narrative where Emerson Lake and Palmer are the bad guys of the mid-1970s and the Ramones are the good guys?
I imagine prog-rock has a lot to do with it; punk came along and Americans seem to take punk very seriously and continue to have the scene and sub-divisions of punk and their own punk subcultures going on all this time, whereas it's pretty much gone in the UK.
ELP were prog-rock, the Ramones were punk, that's your bad guys and good guys right there.
I'd say that 21st Century rock music fans tend to overrate the historical importance of punk rock, even though I was a rock critic in 1978-1980 and I loved the Ramones and Clash. The big changes were the emergence of rock n roll in the 1950s and the emergence of rock music c. 1965. The late 1970s changes were pretty minor in comparison.
they get it wrong, they are focused only on a narrow time period and call everything else, "post-punk" ie, the vast majority of music punks actually listen to
Both sound pretty dated to modern ears, unless you caught a liking for either of them back in time when they were new. Things going out of fashion is the ages-old way of "semantic apocalypse", just a slow-motion one.
Punk came slightly after prog and went in the opposite direction (more emotion, less technical skill), so of course they painted themselves as the cooler guys. I haven't listened to either in a long time, but I'd much rather give a random listen to ELP's Brain Salad Surgery, than anything the punkies made.
Rock 'n' roll started out pretty primitive in the 1950s and then started to get more sophisticated in 1965, after which it turned into rock and became increasingly virtuosic with emphasis on blues guitar solos.
By the early 1970s, some rock bands with classical training, such as Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, were taking rock in a "progressive" direction as electrified art music. For example, here's ELP's 20 minute "Tarkus" from 1971:
Historian Jacques Barzun wrote as a nonagenarian: "A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom."
Eventually, this led to a revolt centered among New Yorkers with connections to the art world, followers of Lou Reed's Velvet Underground, such as the New York Dolls, led by David Johansen who recently died. Perhaps the most likable were the Ramones from Queens who started releasing albums of incredibly short, fast songs in 1976, such as their now famous Blitzkrieg Bop:
Led by guitarist Johnny Ramone (all the musicians took the last name Ramone, but they weren't actually brothers; Johnny was really John Cummings), a blue collar Republican, the Ramones articulated a reactionary opposition to both progressive rock and to blues-based virtuosity. Johnny proposed that downstroke power-chording would liberate white rock fans from both imitating black blues musicians and faux classical progressive rockers.
Their drummer/manager Tommy Ramone/Erdelyi was in touch with the Downtown art scene and was able to rephrase Johnny's rather deplorable ideas into art-friendly theories that critics loved.
Here's my 1979 review of a Ramones concert in Houston in the "Rice Thresher," making the case for the Ramones as minimalists:
The Ramones weren't really all that good and never made much money, but their basic idea was wonderful. And they were also strikingly hard-working, touring for 20 years doing their two minute songs as well as they could, which was quite well. I saw them three times over 18 years and their work ethic was impressive.
Eventually, everybody decided they'd always loved the Ramones.
Here's a (parody) review of ELP's (nonexistent) 1977 album: "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Prog: A Tribute to the Ramones:"
But you also argue that punk rather than prog was the Whitest Music Ever (at least post 1955). Certainly, Johnny Ramone explained that he was bored with blues-based rock and wanted to create a rock music stripped of black influence. It wasn't that Johnny was anti-black, just that he was white, didn't see much reason to be ashamed of that, and therefore wanted white rock for whites.
I'll take issue with this. He didn't want "white rock" for whites, he was just into anthemic music and against the increasingly "virtuoso" rock that he felt was elitist. I don't think he ever said he wanted music "stripped of black influence" because of course the 50s garage rock he loved had plenty of black influence
While Punk is notably less Bluesy than other Rock genres at the time of its emergence, it was very strongly influenced by the Afro-Caribbean music, particularly Ska, Reggae and Dub.
My candidates for the Whitest Rock music are continental European variants of Metal (Power, Black, Death etc.).
Although prog was briefly the biggest thing going, punk very quickly superceded it once it immerged. Prog became seen as pretentious, self indulgent and lame. Punk was the exact opposite: direct, to the point, unornamented and Cool. It was closer to the origins of rock, and any idiot with a guitar could play it.
That's because ELP obviously aren't the right counterpart to Ramones. I'd say that Pink Floyd would be more like it, who are plenty popular today, whereas the punk counterpart of ELP would be something like Fugazi - respectable enough among the "connoisseurs", but the kids probably haven't heard about them.
Johnny Rotten was hired as Sex Pistols frontman because he was seen wearing a Pink Floyd shirt (which I think someone else had discarded), on which he had added the words "I Hate".
We have to establish a difference between "punk" that has gotten into mainstream tastes and the subculture which still exists but largely below the view of "respectable" music
As someone who really enjoys prog rock but isn't super into music history, this clears up a lot. I always got the impression that enjoying ELP/Yes/whoever was supposed to be faintly embarrassing but no explanation for why. The narrative of prog rock being somehow out of touch with the basic ideals of rock and roll both makes really good sense and also explains the whole thing. Maybe I should just get used to being an elitist bastard who hates the common man, since all my tastes seem to indicate that anyway.
Since the common man isn't that into punk either (I never heard any real punk songs until the advent of filesharing, with Nirvana being the closest thing I could hear on the radio), I can listen to both punk & prog while remaining an elitist.
Fun fact, my colleague did the art for ELP's first album (I was very sad that it wasn't tarkus). He was paid £50 and gets no royalties, although very very occasionally people ask him to sign copies which he enjoys. He loathes the type face they splattered over his painting.
He's a very talented oil painter, even more than ever in his 70's. He's never managed to make it his whole career but has art in a large number of fairly prestigious collections.
This more of a comment, but the post half a year ago about the ballad of the white horse has - in modern parlance - totally one-shotted me, to the point that I now know the first chapter by heart.
I wonder if this is really Chesterton-specific, or whether most unknown-to-me, profound-to-me works of literature would have had the same effect on my mental state, half a year ago.
I guess this relates to the semantic apocalypse...
It was some time after I first heard that when I learned that "horse" is a slang term for heroin, which makes sense of the lyric about hoofprints on his arm, as it otherwise seems more like a song about the Wild Hunt, a la Ghost Riders in the Sky.
sorry for the late reply. California Uber Allles. "Big Bro on White Horse is near" It's a reference to the book by J D Lorenz "Jerry Brown, the Man on The White Horse" as in a white knight or a charismatic figure arriving to solve problems, which was how Brown was portrayed during his career, but in the context of the song, it has double meaning, also alluding to "behold a pale horse".
Nothing to do with heroin, though I realize you were commenting on that in reference to the second song.
Chesterton was pretty awesome. But he wrote at a time of numerous pretty awesome writers. I'm a big GKC fan, but I worry that I've only read a few things by GBS and HGW, and nothing by FMF, not to mention all the two initial writers of the era.
There was a big improvement in the productivity of printing presses sometime around 1890, and suddenly a lot of really good writers in Britain could make a living by writing.
You should add Max Beerbohm, "A Christmas Garland", to your list. He's funny. It requires the barest glance at the things he's satirizing. I feel like "Scruts" should be a Christmastime read-aloud at least once depending on your family.
Both "The Ballad of the White Horse" and "Lepanto" are just great to read aloud. You can recite them with gusto because the beat of the metre goes with a swing and the words fill your mouth beautifully.
The history may be fanciful, the comparative religion and attitudes to foreigners problematic in our day, and it's best not to look too closely at the content (he turns the forces around when he has Alfred's army lining up so that the left wing in one verse is the right wing in another), but the colours are bright and vivid (he started off as an art student) and the lines just tumble out:
"Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king."
Say that out loud and it just *rocks*.
"King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in."
Both Roger Corman and David Lynch could have made a movie out of that scene 😀
I was just reading a bio of “Conan the Barbarian” creator Robert E. Howard that mentioned Chesterton and BWH in particular as early influences on him. I think that specific poem continues to be so affecting because besides being especially good it’s been demonstrably “in the water supply”. Sitting under the foundations of modern fantasy for over a century makes it easier to grasp for a modern reader than a lot of similar Victorian poetry.
What's even more ironic about the ultramarine story is that the image in the posting of the Virgin Mary with the blazing cobalt vestment contains not an atom of ultramarine, just pixels merged from red/green/blue choices. We can get the ultramarine colour experience simultaneously across the globe without even using it. Does that cheapen and demean the experience, or just democratise it?
To be fair, my understanding is, there are hues that a computer screen actually can't render faithfully, and when we look at images of those things online, we're looking at best available approximations of them, and assuming, sometimes incorrectly, that it conveys the appearance of the real thing.
That said, this doesn't mean that specific things which once awed people with their majesty are particularly likely to fall into the category of things that can't be conveyed well by a computer screen.
I went and checked a number of ultramarine blue paints, and the more saturated ones do in fact fall outside of not only the sRGB color space but also the P3 color space.
It's not too surprising; sRGB is particularly bad at the blue-cyan-green spectrum of hues. Unfortunately, as a fan of all things grue and bleen.
According to Wikipedia, actual ultramarine falls in the sRGB color space (18, 10, 143).
I actually miss the reds more than the blues in sRGB. I'm not sure there are naturally occurring reds that fall outside of the sRGB spectrum, but dyes certainly do.
Democratizing something necessarily cheapens it. If it's broadly available, it's both cheaper and more democratic. We see it in style, fashion, culture generally going back as long as we have records of human culture.
I can sit in the comfort of a chair in my home, or right now my office, and look at the startlingly blue cape or cloak that the Virginia Mary wears in a reproduction of a reproduction of what a human artist thought, considered, and decided on centuries ago.
My laptop is 10 years old and I know you are right, but I'm kind of amazed how brilliant the colors are. (Some women spend a good deal of time looking very closely at the colors of clothing on the internet ;-).)
People clearly still value seeing stuff in person. We can all look at a thousands of online pictures of the Eiffel Tower or the Mona Lisa, yet millions of people every year think it worthwhile to spend a lot of money to go see them in person.
I think there's a certain type of Intellectual authenticity seeker that suffers from this more strongly. I don't think it affects everyone or even most people that much.
I can sit and watch Bluey episodes with my kids a thousand times and enjoy them each time. There's other areas where I do have this problem, for sure, but I've watched that rain episode with Bluey trying to stop the waters and her mom trying to stop the house from getting wet foot prints like 10-20 times, and it's still a classic.
Then we opt for virtual reality to reinvent suffering for us.. and to make us forget everything we know before.. and to make us become baby again to experience it full.. and to randomize our starting position to let us experience difference things.. wait this is just that theory again.
> Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia - something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi.
I don't look at Lippi paintings but I do, every now and then, Google the names of precious or semiprecious stones and look at all the beautiful jewelry. This post actually reminded me to do that again after not having done it for a while, so thank you. (It's amazing how much stuff they can do with rose quartz these days!)
> G.K. Chesterton wrote lots of stuff about how if you were really holy and paying attention, then the thousandth sunset would be just as beautiful as the first.
Is this not the default??? Sunsets are just as beautiful to me now as they have been my entire life. (I don't see any heavenly hosts per se, they're just really aesthetically nice.) Sure, if there was a constantly changing sunset going on 100% of the time I might get satiated on it, but with my current schedule I see a couple of really good ones a month and they're all amazing. Possibly eastern US weather is better for the soul than California weather, at least in terms of optimal epic sunset frequency.
I don’t think it’s a weather thing; as someone who currently lives in California myself, I did feel a pang of sadness at the thought that some people don’t enjoy sunsets because they’ve been-there-done-that-gotten-the-trophy or whatever.
Nonetheless I did really enjoy this post (thank you Scott!). I do make an effort to appreciate natural beauty in everyday life, to enjoy awe and wonder, and this is a good reminder to continue to do so and to extend that to deep blues and AI too.
Signed,
Someone typing this on a personal computer the size of their hand, which gloriously allowed them to read both this wonderful post and your comment :)
I think it's likely that many people who have gotten sick of sunsets never liked them much in the first place. I used to feel obligated to look at sunsets because they are such a commonly exalted example of natural beauty, but they just aren't to my taste in some indefinable way.
There are other weather patterns and natural phenomena that fill me with the sense of wonder that other people feel with sunsets. So hopefully most of us have at least one source of transcendent natural beauty, even if it varies.
Conditions (volcanos? so we like to say) generate an exceptional sunset where I live, now and then, just at the right interval perhaps as you say. I don't think you'd ever tire of them, though it helps to discover it sort of serendipitously. I admit I've said rather impatiently, I'm busy, to someone who occasionally beckons me outside to see the sky.
There are SO many reasons I shouldn't move to Antarctica, but "failure to marvel at the beauty of nature" is Not one of them. (Likewise the glory of human civilization.) Thanks for the link, those pictures kick ass!
I think people who find the thousandth sunset meh are people who just don't care much for sunsets. I'm one of them; the first few sunsets I've seen were novel and briefly interesting, but never particularly beautiful and so after a few times it's "been there done that." I have other things I don't satiate on, like music, chess and running.
Really I think everyone has things they don't satiate on, they just vary a lot from person to person and often people can't tell apart {thing that's very novel and interesting} from {thing they actually really enjoy on a deep level} on the first encounter and so they get confused when they no longer enjoy something they think they once did, but they never really liked it in the first place.
That's an interesting way to think about it! And valid for any given thing to not be to your taste. Some specific sunsets that other people like don't do a lot for me, and vice versa, so really it's personal taste all the way down.
I think maybe we can rediscover things, we can still look at art by Lippi and others and find it beautiful. So perhaps the answer is simply a change in position. This may be why hand-crafted and human-made things are valued over the (in some ways better) manufactured mass-produced objects: we shifted our perceptions.
And because this is about Chesterton, I have of course to throw in this quote:
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
All that remains of religion for me is - I can't believe I got to live here, on this planet during this epoch. Curiously my only political leanings flow from this as well.
> I think maybe we can rediscover things, we can still look at art by Lippi and others and find it beautiful. So perhaps the answer is simply a change in position. This may be why hand-crafted and human-made things are valued over the (in some ways better) manufactured mass-produced objects: we shifted our perceptions.
I feel this. I was discussing AI art with my wife not long ago and it struck me that when I visit museums, view old art, etc, I usually comment on the creator and circumstances in which the work was created as often as the work itself. That's are an essential part of the experience for me.
I would guess that I'm not alone in that. I think that art, etc contains a bit of it's creator and lets us experience their essence in a way that is otherwise inaccessible to us, locked as we are within our own heads. I also think this is close to why people say that AI art feels 'soulless' once they know what it is -- it's missing the meta-texture of another's (uhm... emulated, I guess) experience and we don't have the same sympathy for AI effort (yet?). That "once they know what it is" is doing important work here though; think of SA's past survey on how reliably people can identify AI art.
(a parallel occurs to me in how nature meditates our experience of the Divine, but I haven't thought that hard about it and am currently working through my own reevaluation of my beliefs re the Nature of reality right now so I'll save the longer pontificating on that)
----
And, echoing others, thanks for the excellent Chesterton quote.
At the risk of a comment that doesn't add much to the discussion, this piece goes straight into my all time Scott Alexander favourites. Exceptional writing.
But they wouldn't be if he kept talking about the same topic. I love my Ukraine and Syria war blogs, but full of appreciable aesthetic beauty they are not.
> Yes, we as a culture are post- some semantic apocalypse where listening to the great symphonies of the past has become so easy that we never do it. But you, as an individual, could do it right now. You could type “Mozart symphony” into YouTube and see what happens.
People certainly listen to a solid amount of older instrumental music, I think! It's possible that listening to music for 40 minutes straight is just not what people prefer to do when listening to a 3-minute piece doesn't mean a trip to the concert hall is a waste.
It's also plausible that significant variance in *volume* is not to modern tastes because the modern listener knows that 'too loud' can damage their hearing, doesn't know what 'too loud' is, and notices that if they make sure the loudest parts are not uncomfortable, the quietest parts can be inaudible. (This is my issue with "In the Hall of the Mountain King", I always have to adjust the volume partway through.)
> It's also plausible that significant variance in *volume* is not to modern tastes
Back when music was heard live from actual musicians, it was also rare enough to be the center of attention as it happens. If you're actually paying full attention, strong dynamic (meaning: changes in volume) in music are nice and expressive. Nowadays we tend to do other things while listening to music, except possibly at the concert hall, so we don't want it to be so distracting and irregular.
As I understand it, Wagner at least stabilized the idea of the audience paying full attention to the orchestra, partly by having the stage lit and the concert hall dark.
Yeah, the idea that music was "rare enough to be the center of attention as it happens" is totally contrary to our historical understanding of musical performance.
I feel like people who listen to music that way are causal music fans; music devotees will absolutely pay attention to music they're listening to, especially the first time
I do get annoyed with audio tracks with high dynamic range. Most of my music listening is done when driving, and road noise is significant. If I have the volume high enough to hear the quiet bits, the loud bits are painfully loud. I have searched a bit for car stereos / apps with "dynamic range compression", but most audiophiles seem to want the reverse, they want to stamp out dynamic range compression!
Yes, I'm used to pop music that doesn't have a huge dynamic range. When I try to set a comfortable listening volume for a classical recording, I get annoyed because the loudness of the music changes every so often and I find myself adjusting the volume to compensate...
But if you hear "In the Hall of the Mountain King" live in a concert hall (as it was originally intended to be heard), the dynamic range is a feature, not a problem. Even better is the original "opera" version orchestrated with vocal chorus, missing in the usually heard "overture" version.
I don't think Erik Hoel even wants to chart some "society-level solution to the semantic apocalypse problem". Hoel just likes moping about stuff - ugh, society KILLED private tutoring - and stopped making Einsteins!! ugh, society is DESTROYING independent artists by using generative AI!! ugh, Effective Altruism is literally POISON because it demands Hoel not buy a $5 opera ticket and instead save some Bangladeshi child's life, and therefore EA-the-poison needs to be diluted away somehow!!!
All AI has done is give Hoel something new to mope about. And if moping Hoel's thing, then AI has actually benefited him.
Note: I'm not trying to be snarky or unkind. Some people make a hobby of writing eloquent polemics, and Hoel is one of those people. I'm sure he's a great guy in person, but I personally find his polemics always annoying, eloquence notwithstanding.
Yeah, he banned me for something I said in an irritated exchange with someone else in the comments. I can't remember what I said, but it was definitely not bannable by standards here -- just reasons I disagreed with someone, expressed in a way where my anger was manifest.
He does whine a bit too much. The whole thing about society not making einsteins anymore. He's not talking about genius. He's talking about celebrity. Does it matter if scientists aren't famous anymore? Do they even want that? Their work has transformed and will continue to transform society regardless of their level of fame. Actually now that I think about it he wanted to find a way to support the aristocracy without being overt about it. Maybe he wants to join them some day? Or marry into it? Or maybe he's a nietzsche/rand fan? They love aristocracies. Or maybe he loves the aesthetics of the aristocracy? Anyways the entire point of that article was to say "hey aristocracies produces geniuses which produce all the awesome things! this is why You Should support them!".
When I was a child, I used to collect coins. Trite, maybe a bit on the nose for a future commie, but whatever. The visual designs and the history and the cool strange languages were fun, but a big part of the appeal was getting to imagine all the lives some of the older ones might have touched, the situations they've been in. By definition, you can't actually create an object's provenance and history. If you convince yourself those things matter to you, it's not a bad way to beat the machine god.
Chess is arguably undergoing a renaissance because of how easy it is to play online and the growth of social media around it. Stockfish will always destroy us, but it's fine, it doesn't count. The human contest is still meaningful and fun.
Similarly, I have an optimistic suspicion that the sexbots and other replicants will always be merely tactile porn, not true companionship. It's like what Adorno said about the Hays Code. They can be perfect (including plausible flaws and all the rest of it) but once you know, a genuine metaphysical transformation occurs. Besides, they might well be more interested in each other, and if they're not allowed to have that preference, they're a priori not real.
The obvious way to fix the problem in the last sentence is to make sure that all the sexbots are filled with a deep and abiding love for authenticity! They're allowed to have any preference they want, but they inherently have no interest in other sexbots :)
>Besides, they might well be more interested in each other, and if they're not allowed to have that preference, they're a priori not real.
This seems to presume that you can make androids with preferences, yet somehow these preferences are just arising organically without being programmed in.
The only scenario in which that's remotely plausible is one where the android's mind is a black box based on copying the design of the human mind without any deeper understanding.
However in such a scenario you're not talking about AI's anymore but essentially artificial human minds (with all the obvious ethical implications of that).
In a happy coincidence, the ever-so-amazing Mehdi Aminian just recently posted a full concert of Badakhshani music on youtube. Real good stuff if you're into "world" music, the real thing, not overly commercialized variants. The song at 1:02:10 is particularly cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56HkCexWobc
If part of the argument is that the old good things will always be there, then my counters:
1. There will be reduced incentive for people to put in the work to make new things. I can listen to Mozart, sure, but somebody had to be motivated to write Mozart in the first place, rather than punching a few keys to get 80% of the way to Mozart
2. Even granting the premise that the things which have already been created are enough to satisfy any sufficiently-innocent person, we're now faced with the problem that all those things are going to be buried under an exponentially-growing pile of slop.
There has always been bad music, and there have always been bad painters, but it wasn't possible before to automate the production of slop to these levels. This is a quantitative change large enough to become a qualitative change.
It is as difficult as ever to make GOOD art. The democratization of architecture didn't result in a world covered in cathedrals and cottages; it resulted in a hellscape of decaying concrete and ticky-tacky suburbs. When it's possible to get 80% of the way there, why bother with the rest?
You talk about photography, but that's another example of what I'm talking about here. The camera market is one-third what it used to be, and most of that in the range accessible to commoners. People have smartphone cameras, so why bother learning photography? Nevermind that a smartphone camera cannot do the things a dedicated device could do, no matter how many megapixels they write on the box.
I see your basic statistical argument, but I notice there seems to be the trap of reaching a local maximum more quickly, at the cost of giving up entirely on reaching the true peak. If anybody can be Salieri, why put in the work to become Mozart?
Architecture seems like potentially the single least democratized art form remaining, so that's a weird example.
And yeah, there is a lot of crap photography out there (99% of everything is crap, and it always has been), but that doesn't actually gainsay his point that the _best_ of modern photography is still better than it was in the past. You are unlikely to find it by just browsing instagram or whatever, but there are people who curate these things and if you want, you can still find it.
As for people getting stuck in the local maximum: I think that goes to Scott's point: why are you doing that? Nothing is stopping you from going out and finding the best of the best. Why are you settling for the best of your instagram scroll? (this is meant as the hypothetical you, not literal you)
Funny, I thought it was 80/20. Now it's 99/1. With AI, it'll be 99.9999999/0.0000001. We've gone from a 1 in 5 to a 1 in 100 with your version, and soon it'll be 1 in 10,000,000. I'd say that goes a little beyond "Well, you'll just have to look for the good stuff, like you always have".
This makes me think of Francis Ford Coppola's 1991 comment: "To me, the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, and some... just people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little fat girl [apologies!] in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, you know, and make a beautiful film with her little father's camera recorder. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever. And it will really become an art form. That's my opinion."
More recently he discussed iPhones and said something like, Yeah I don't know why that didn't happen. We're not seeing great movies made by Mozarts with iPhones.
Robert Rodriguez made the first El Mariachi for $6000. (He later remade it for much more.)
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez produced The Blair Witch Project for somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. At one time (possibly still today), it held the record for largest ratio of box office to production cost, and kicked off the found footage craze.
Mike Cheslik created Hundreds of Beavers for about $150,000 (I hear most of that was spent on beaver mascot outfits, bought in bulk). It might be the most successful film so far that was shot in *1080p*. (Then edited with Adobe After Effects.) Earlier, he produced Lake Michigan Monster for about $7000.
While there are examples of people who did this (Kevin Smith, The Blair Witch Project come to mind) I'd say this creative revolution is primarily happening on YouTube and TikTok. Even without the big cameras, movies are huge, capital-intensive projects and that probably dictates large projects (you have to earn back the investment and people won't pay to see a 10 minute film). With easy internet distribution and low capital costs entertainment moved away from 3 hour epics and towards 10-minute clips. This sort of echoes the transition music made from 100-person orchestral symphonies to 3-minute songs made by 4-person bands. Technological innovations changed the structure of the art form.
The question though is why we didn’t get more people moving from 8mm video cameras into Hollywood. When it comes to directors I believe the industry is largely meritocratic and actively searching for talent. (There might be a few nepo baby directors but it’s rare).
You can see Lucas and Spielberg and others starting with small movies and 8mm cameras or school projects and yet, when that kind of personal movie production becomes even more common the talent pool hasn’t increased
>The question though is why we didn’t get more people moving from 8mm video cameras into Hollywood.
I suspect it has, it's just that those 8mm films were just learning exercises and were never commercially released. You mentioned Spielberg and Lucas. I know the Coen brothers also started this way as kids. Probably many others did too.
I suspect the reason that there isn't a thriving underground industry of home-produced 8mm indie films is that you just can't make a good movie without serious money. Making the cameras cheap only solves like 5% of the problem. You still need lighting, editing, good actors, etc, so truly talented people either go down the studio route or they get on YouTube.
Spielberg did in fact start with an 8mm. However those became cheaper over time and then video recording at high quality is available on most phones. In fact feature length movies have been made on iPhones. Steven Soderbergh created two with the earliest on the iPhone 7, a phone which would probably be <$100 today if available.
So millions if not billions of people have access to this technology and yet the pipeline of talent is not increasing.
> Look at photography as an example—now that it’s been democratized the best photos today are way better than the best photos of the past.
I’m not sure I’d agree with that at all. The greatest artists in any field often come earlier rather than later, maybe that’s low hanging fruit, maybe it’s an abundance of human energy and interest when a new form of art is created, maybe it’s easier to make a splash with new techniques.
I know nothing about photographers so I asked chatGPT for the most well regarded photographers and their date of births and I get this. As you can see these are all old or dead.
That’s an interesting list. There are people who should be on it most definitely and there’s a few I don’t think should be on it. There’s a whole bunch of people I think should be on it.
As you would expect, it is very biased towards American photographers.
Vivian Maier should certainly not be on it. That does not mean I don’t enjoy her work, but she is more of a human interest story to me.
I cannot believe that Brassai is not on it. Or André Kertész.
Email spam filters are pretty good, though. I don’t think it’s a given that recognizable AI slop will be impossible to avoid. Both filtering and image generators are getting better.
What happens when AI generated music really is as good or better than what people can come up with?
Email spam filters are not nearly the same problem. I know some people are working on automated tools to catch AI-generated art--an artificial art official, if you will--and hopefully they become more reliable than the AIs themselves. Still, at best that leaves us pouring tons of energy into generating slop AND tons of energy into detecting and removing it. As someone with an autoimmune, condition, having to pay energy to damage my own body AND to repair the damage, the parallels are a little close for comfort.
I'll believe that they can generate better art when I see it. If I could, in the time I have left, hit a few keys and generate new episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, or new pieces in the style of Mozart, it'd be different. But we're not even close to that yet.
Amusingly, Mozart grates on my ear. It feels like I'm listening to someone showing off, and who won't shut up.
Beethoven's is the stuff that gets to me. (Ironically, I've heard criticisms from people who prefer Mozart because it sounds to them like it leapt fully formed from Mozart's fingers, whereas Beethoven wouldn't stop tinkering after the first draft.)
I enjoy some of the works of both. My tastes are eclectic and it's not common for me to like more than a few songs or pieces by any group, artist, or composer. Even Scott Joplin missed sometimes.
Personally, I think problem with sunsets isn't that I don't appreciate them when I see them, it's that I'm too distracted to remember to look at them. I'm busy doing something else, and then I notice the sun has gone done. Pretty regularly when I do happen to notice the sun setting, I do stop and appreciate it for at least a few moments.
This makes me wonder to what extent the problem isn't one of oversaturation by a single experience type, but maybe rather a problem of opportunity cost: we have so many opportunities now, that the "basic pleasures" can't compete as much for our attention anymore? I'm not sure if it matters what the exact mechanism is, though.
On art: not all art seen in reproduction manages to fulfill the experience of seeing the genuine article; there are a few artists like Tintoretto who I had very little appreciation for before seeing their work in person. I think part of it was the size of the paintings: there's something about the sheer scale of them that, when lost in a computer-screen-sized image, diminishes it dramatically. And other context, or just greater resolution can make a big deal to my appreciation too. I find I can easily spend a decent amount of time admiring a painting in person that I probably never would looking at it on a screen.
Very beautiful and moving, Scott. My favorite essay in many years.
Writing that makes me wonder if "beauty" and "beatify" are related, and of course, they are. Which fits perfectly. You keep running into those perfect moments!
I think it's useful to distinguish 'social standing' from art or wine or food or whatever else it is you like.
Social standing is almost definitionally zero-sum. As things improve, it is harder to get the same amount of social standing.
In 1000, if you had plenty of food all the time, this was valuable in two ways. First, it meant you and your family didn't have to go hungry. And second, it provided social standing - people would be impressed by things like 'he eats meat at every meal', and would try to be your friend.
Today, ~everyone in First World countries has plenty of food all the time. And everyone gets the first benefit of this. But nobody gets the second benefit. Nobody is going to be impressed by you having plenty of food any more.
There is still plenty of stuff that I think constitutes good art. (I'm fond of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiW4275dIEA). But there's enough of it that it can no longer confer social standing to make/have it. You can no longer impress people by having a reasonably-well-made portrait on your wall. Instead, if you want to impress people through 'Art', you need to either navigate the hellscape that is the modern Art world or pay enough money that it's clear you're a billionaire.
To "secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff" is somewhat confused. You can find paintings that look like stuff! But you can't make them give social standing. It's too easy to produce them, and there are too many people who want social standing.
This is the symmetrical-Heaven I think I would describe. In Heaven, everyone has everything they could want...but so does everyone else. If you want a beautiful mansion so that you can live in a beautiful mansion, you can have it. But if you want a beautiful mansion so that people will seethe in envy at your Instagram, there is no way you can get that - we're not going to make others sad so that you can feel superior. If you want to know the secrets of reality so that you can understand the music of God's creation, you can learn them. But if you want to know the secrets of reality so that you can be better than everyone else, there is no way you can get that - we're not going to keep everyone else from learning this so that you can feel superior.
Almost everyone has access to plenty of calories, and yet if you give people homemade cookies, they will probably still be pretty pleased.
> To "secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff" is somewhat confused. You can find paintings that look like stuff! But you can't make them give social standing. It's too easy to produce them, and there are too many people who want social standing.
It's possible Scott wants to see originals of modern representational paintings without having to buy all of them, and I'm not sure how much museums cater to that?
Perhaps this is why foodposting is such a common thing. Since we can no longer signal status through the feasts we host, the size of our gut, or the amount of meat we eat, we might still do so through posting our highly photogenic meal prepared at great cost.
Is this really an accurate description of typical human mental states? It sounds like an awful, tormented existence to not to be amazed by the beauty of the world every day.
To my mind, there is a pretty simple approach to appreciating something and that is to see it for the first time again. And that’s not magical thinking, that’s just working from your immediate experience rather than your priors (memory). Modern humans spend a lot of time working with their priors. One can look at the sunset and try to recall the experience of seeing it for the first time, but you’re already lost because you’re trying to remember something.
They used to say be here now, but that’s become woo even though it isn’t.
I had the sudden thought that there is a touch of Platonism in twentieth century abstract art.
Viz. Yves Klein tries to paint the Platonic Ideal of blueness, shorn of its accidents such as being used to paint the Virgin Mary’s gown. It’s not the Virgin we are looking at, it’s blueness.
P.S. when looking at some Yves Klein paintings in person, I’m thinking to myself: that’s just not the same blue as his other works. Yeah, sure colour perception depends on lighting, conte. T, etc, etc.
Excellent, thought-provoking essay—beautifully written! I largely agree with your points, but there’s one concern that gnaws at me, and it goes beyond just AI’s role in art. What troubles me most is that, despite the incredible capabilities of AI and other advanced creative tools, there doesn’t seem to be any truly NEW art emerging. Creating Ghibli images is fun, but shouldn’t genuine creativity push us toward something fresh, something that recaptures that sense of awe and novelty we felt when we first saw a Ghibli film?
This issue predates AI TBF. When I was younger, I dabbled in electronic music production and was blown away by how digital audio workstations (DAWs) like FL Studio, Cubase, and Ableton democratized music creation. Suddenly, anyone with a laptop could produce studio-quality tracks from their bedroom. Since then, the tech has only gotten better—now we have entire suites of plugins and generative AI tools that can churn out a polished, chart-ready song in minutes. And yet, if you look at the music industry, particularly electronic music, it’s striking how little has changed. Where are the groundbreaking new genres? Since the early 2000s, you could argue that Dubstep, Vaporwave, and Synthwave are the only notable exceptions, but even those feel more like remixes of past ideas than wholly original movements. If you check out Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music (https://music.ishkur.com) it shows how the genre timeline essentially flatlines after 2010 .
In film, we’re trapped in an endless loop of remakes, prequels, and sequels—where’s the next Citizen Kane or 2001: A Space Odyssey? Visual art isn’t much different; AI can generate breathtaking images, but they often lean on established styles—hyper-realism, impressionism, cyberpunk—rather than creating anything new.
Kinda feels that even the power of current Godlike AIs cannot let us escape from Mark Fisher Hauntological prison or Douthat's Decadent society hell where you are forever trapped in the pastiches of the Golden Ages and there is nothing new on the horizon.
I've pondered the problem of living in a post-Golden Age world where everything beautiful was made ages ago. Funnily enough, I was triggered by movies like A Streetcar Named Desire and Citizen Kane.
What I arrived at was that it's all contextual and context takes time to shape. We never even see the tens of thousands of other movies made around the time of Citizen Kane. They might be good, well composed works but not good enough to warrant being seen by a contemporary person. And, similarly, because we have so much more context about that time now, Citizen Kane truly stands out to us. It might have been a great celebrated movie when it was made, but in the heat of the moment you couldn't have safely predicted that it would have the power it has now.
This leads me to suspect that we have such works being produced now but we can't see them because a) we're under a torrent of things being created all the time so we can't even make out the pearls, and b) our present hasn't crystalized into a set context so it's impossible to judge which great works will be immortalized as part of that context.
"Sleeper hits" which only attain recognition after the fact are pretty unusual; most enduring masterpieces were recognised as masterpieces at the time they were produced. The difficulty is predicting which masterpieces will be remembered and which will be forgotten.
Citizen Kane was technically groundbreaking, and it really stood out from other movies of the period for that reason. There were lots of other good movies at the time, but they didn’t break the mold in the way that Citizen Kane did. A specific example is the low angle shots in that movie. That was very unusual because it meant having to build a ceiling in the set which really screwed up the lighting grids of the time. It had to be shot completely differently and it was quite a technical challenge. I took my son to see it recently in the theater, and I was quite shocked by how tired the script sounded to me. I was still blown away by the way it was photographed and presented though. My son who was about 23 at the time felt the same way. And then, of course, Orson Welles becomes incredibly famous in his own right and that doesn’t hurt either.
Look beyond the veil. Bandcamp and YouTube are full of new artists and music doing new things. The industry has changed and become less interested in promoting new music, but that doesn't mean it's not still being made.
This is something I think about a lot because I notice this in my own field (game dev). Where the big corporations push the recognizable easy sells, and people complain that everything looks the same. But the technological developments have allowed so many other people and organizations to make games now, and as soon as you step into the indie space there is so much wild shit going on.
So my baseline assumption is that this is similar to other industries, and if you just pick a direction of a given subculture of an artistic medium you will probably find surprise and wonder anew.
True. It is a truism in the music business, that the music a human consumer listens to between the ages of 18 and 21 is the music that human will listen to for the rest of his life. For cats, around the ages of 9-12 months.
This did not happen in my case, largely because the Magic Of The Internet made it possible for me to seek out and find all kinds of music that I didn't know about, that I would not have appreciated at the time, that I had forgotten about and needed to rediscover. All available 24/7, anywhere I have internet access, all for free!
I was born an old person trapped in a young person's body, so believe me when I say I understand the "nothing new is being made" feeling. But all of this is cultural and recency bias. Show "Citizen Kane" to most people today and it's not winning awards. Without the cultural context to tell you "it's a masterpiece", without knowing it did many of the things it does first, it's just not going to hit people as hard. Likewise with 2001. Never mind that it was a movie adaptation of a book (so what, is Hollywood out of ideas already /s) but it's also just ming bogglingly abstract and in many ways a terribly boring movie. It's an impressive technical accomplishment, and certainly interesting in a number of ways, but realistically, I'd rather be watching John Wick or Bullet Train.
And to say those classics were the heights of "NEW" art also amusingly ignores the very subject inspiring this discussion. Studio Ghibli's works are as a rule phenomenal art that defines a style distinct enough to be "copied" and they're all well post Citizen Kane and Space Odyssey. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a movie making epic the likes of which had never been seen before (and arguably hasn't been seen since) and was only itself enabled by the availability and cheapness of tools that themselves were described as being a death knell of art (see also the rash of CGI slop that Hollywood has produced over the years).
The reality I think is that true "masterpieces", the kinds that go on to be cultural touchstones or examples studied by future students, are and always have been exceedingly rare. We know about the ones that came before because they came before, and their peers have already been forgotten while they have stood the test of time. What today will be that in 50 years? It is impossible for us to say because we live in the moment, and what inspires those who come next is by definition undetermined. There's also a degree of cultural homogenization. Anime styles took the world by storm and now every animation house can (and does) produce what was once an exotic and foreign style. The "shrinking" of the world by way of the internet means you know about the hot new sound from X before it has a chance to build up a catalog of 10-20 new musicians for you to binge in a burst of discovery. You'll still eventually hear those 10-20, but unless you consciously choose to forego being a part of the growth and experimentation of that new genre and sound, by the time you get to artist number 10, it will be just as normal to you as most new stuff is today.
I was never able to get far into 2001 because it's so incredibly boring. I suppose it must have been amazing at the time just because of the special effects, but those don't even rise to conscious notice nowadays.
On the other hand, I just read The Great Gatsby for fun, and I thought it holds up pretty well. And I also recently watched Die Hard for the first time and thought it was a really good movie even today.
>Never mind that it was a movie adaptation of a book
It actually was written concurrently with the making of the film and Kubrick and Clarke collaborated on both. At the end of the day the book was published under Clarke’s name. 2001 was definitely a team effort.
Did the the genre flatline, or did Ishkur just stop updating their guide? There's lots of new developments that aren't charted there (wave, phonk, etc). A lot of this (the original post, Ishkur falling off, "everyone"'s growing disenchantment, etc) just sounds like aging.
You realize that operas are still a thing that get performed live, right? Paintings still exist as physical objects. Long arduous overland journeys are still a thing people do, if they can take time off from work - a follow a couple on YouTube who are on a multi month trek through Africa on 125cc motorcycles.
I have to disagree about hearing Caruso sing. Live music and recorded music separated ways pretty early and have never been friends ever since. No matter how many times I heard my favourite music in record, I'd gladly go see a concert where it is performed. Even a recording of a concert isn't the same thing. I guess a VR experience might replace the real thing someday, but we're not nearly there yet.
Of course, it only works for arts where there is an element of performance, which is why ultramarine doesn't work so well anymore: it IS just more ultramarine, it's static. Still, we do occasionally revisit art galleries to look at some of the same paintings we already seen, do we?
As for thousand sunsets... I always describe myself as "a man of rivers". I don't like mountains and forests very much, but I absolutely love rivers. I can walk along the bank for thousandth time, and the river will always be different for me. I don't feel that in forest: I get bored by all the trees, but water is eternally changing, and there are birds, and lights, and wind and ships and friendly dogs along the path. You don't even have to train very hard to learn to appreciate thousandth sunset - but you got to find that one thing that works for you (from personal experience, rivers don't work like that for everyone, for example my wife prefers mountains and/or sea, and while I like sea, too, it's too borderless for me to enjoy as much as a river; also, I love to see ships up close).
So I'm not worried about semantic apocalypse at all. Until we all live in VR, live concerts and new sunsets await. And after that, the question loses all meaning, as AI will either generate endless varying experiences for you (maybe by erasing your memory from time to time), or kill as all.
Broadway this year is full of movie and TV stars performing live classic plays: e.g., Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in "Othello" and Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Michael McKean in "Glengarry Glen Ross."
Seems like people want to pay good money to be in the same room with stars.
I know acting on stage is different than acting for a camera, but a lot of the actors who become famous really are *just that good* and can deliver a performance that goes beyond what most actors can.
(There are also Broadway stars that have a similar power to make or break a show - "The Producers" was never quite the same without Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane starring.)
Seeing something live is always special. I was fortunate enough to be cast as an extra in a show called Zarzuela at Madison Square Garden.
It was a Spanish touring company performing opera that was specific to Spain. It was going to play in a small theater out in Queens somewhere but Placido Domingo said he would perform with them. Thus Madison Square Garden…
I was in the wings about 15 feet away from Domingo as he sang. There’s no way that happens with a recording. It was truly astounding.
1. This essay was awesome, and I loved it. It expressed something I’ve had sitting in the back of my mind for a while in a way that was engaging and clever.
2. On the topic of art in a world dominated by AI:
When thinking about how technological advancements of the past have made art forms largely irrelevant, one thing I think about is the pre-printing press practice of producing books by hand. We have lost a lot of appreciation for the art of calligraphy and copying books by hand as a society, but I can’t help but feel like this technological improvement is extremely good. With computers, keyboards, and at home printers, or even the internet which doesn’t require a physical medium, it is so much easier for an author to share their stories and ideas with the world. We have lost one art, but it has given rise to a new one.
Perhaps Ghiblification AI will eventually become good enough to replace most animators for long video productions (assuming that it’s maintaining a style that already exists rather than inventing a new one). But won’t this give rise to new artists having so many more opportunities to tell their stories? It will be so much cheaper to watch and view the movies people made from the comfort of their own home. Sure, there will be low quality productions. Sure, production will feel less impressive. But I think it’s hard to argue that the era of YouTube videos represents a downgrade from the era of 1950’s movies, just in terms of sheer quantity of content and chance of producing high-quality content, as well as accessibility.
This is very thoughtful. I just have a couple additional thoughts.
1) Photography is the reason that art no longer looks like stuff. It took a while, partly because the art of photography needed a while to develop (pun, sorry), but people eventually realized that if you want to see what something looks like, take a photograph. That freed art to do other things. Some of those things are poundingly stupid, but others are really neat.
2) I listen to classical music a lot. Recordings have not spoiled my appreciation of live performances. I would not be without recordings. They bring anything I want to hear to me whenever I want to hear it. But I crave live concerts, especially when I get to hear something I cherish on recording but have never heard live before. This is partly because it'll be a different and new interpretation, but also because of the vividness of the experience.
>This is partly because it'll be a different and new interpretation, but also because of the vividness of the experience.
I went to a baroque concert the other day. There was a certain something about feeling my seat vibrate under me when the trumpets and kettledrums got going that just can't be replicated by a recording, no matter how good.
Is music incredibly durable to this or something? I think hundreds of millions or billions of people are convinced Mariah or Ariana is the best vocalist of all time, or Taytay is the best lyricist, or Nobuo Uematsu is the best composer. Some further irony is music is basically in a remix era without a lot of seismic tech or culture innovation happening unlike with rap or electronica. People are bonding with it just fine and ai is the thing that could throw it back into an invention era.
And the best love story of all time is obviously Final Fantasy X and my only regret is I ever acquired the social skills to sometimes shut up about it. If I were 14 again and Claude spit out a million final fantasies I would probably only have time to play like 4 so it wouldn't matter much. Novels also take time to experience.
There's still the human for the sake of human dimension. A kpop star wrote about her experience being bullied and dropped this line "like building muscle is feeling weak and building knowledge is feeling dumb, fighting to exist is allowing yourself to fall apart." Her vocals are good but her dialectics are just incredible. So existentialism lives to see another decade. And I probably wouldn't have cared if Claude spit that out? Somehow minimizing loss for what a bullied person would say just isn't the same.
Using still visual art to defend the beauty of art is basically strawmanning.
I think somewhat, because music's value to people is not merely a function of its objective platonic beauty, at novelty and contemporaneity.
Today's musicians may not the best ever in a vacuum, but they are riffing on musical trends the audience is aware of that past musicians didn't or couldn't. Or writing lyrics that have resonance with people's current lives and culture.
What an amazing post, thank you for writing it. I had already read the semantic apocalypse post, so when I figured out what it was going to be about halfway through the ultramarine story, that was enough to make me emotional.
Usually I only use this account to write mean comments, but this was really great.
I confess, I've become less and less optimistic about the tendency of general economic progress to make things better over time.
Under standard economic models, increasing wealth, or things that people are willing to pay for, is an increase in preference satisfaction. Even if people don't say so, even if they complain that things feel like they're getting worse and worse, if there is an increase in stuff people want to pay for, then human satisfaction is increasing. Revealed preferences trump self-reports of satisfaction.
Over time, I've become more and more skeptical of this model. Psychologically, it seems that humans are overall less happy with their choices if they choose their favorite between twenty different menu options than four, even though in economic terms expanding people's options so that more people are able to select something better suited to their preferences is *always* an improvement. In terms of human satisfaction, some of the most basic, straightforward increases in wealth, absent any negative externalities, are actually making things worse. Liking and wanting are also separate processes, people can feel compelled to make choices which make them unhappy, because they want things they don't like, and don't like the consequences of things they want. Economists can and often do try to handwave this and find excuses for why pursuit of people's revealed preferences makes them happier overall. I do not buy it. I have spent too much time consciously observing this from the inside, watching myself weigh options where I knew that one would make me miserable, choosing that option, watching myself become miserable for no higher satisfaction. I've become convinced that the whole idea of "revealed preference" is a farce.
That's not to say that technological improvement and economic growth don't sometimes straightforwardly make things better. If you get cancer, better that it can be detected early and treated than that you die from it. Aggregate a bunch of changes like this and people's lives are much better off. Things can get better with time. But I don't believe that we as a society have ever actually generated a trustworthy systematic way of measuring whether or how much things are getting better or worse. I used to be a techno-optimist, but these days, I look at kids growing up in the world around me, and I compare how happy they seem to be to how I remember from decades before, and I worry.
The problem with "revealed preference" is that it has a technical meaning as economics jargon which doesn't match its meaning in plain English. I knew someone who drove for Uber & Lyft for awhile - an economist would say that his "revealed preference" is that he was OK with being exploited as a gig worker, and that would be correct in the jargon sense. That he preferred going back to being homeless and living out of his car reveals his actual preference. BTW, he also said Lyft is marginally less evil than Uber.
I think an economist would probably say that he had a revealed preference for flexibility and autonomy over stability and high pay, which is at least consistent with his eventually choosing to be homeless and live out of his car as well.
But I don't think we can grant the premise that people consistently tend to make choices that make them happier or more satisfied, or even that they have reason to expect will make them happier or more satisfied given the information they have at the time. Economists may model people as having limited mental resources which they can devote to doing things they want, and the way they allocate them has to be modeled as part of their preferences. But they generally don't model people as having compulsions where they have to spend huge amounts of emotional resources in order *not* to do things that they know will make them unhappy.
Bryan Caplan has argued extensively that drug addicts may say they don't want to be addicted to drugs, but they have a revealed preference to keep using drugs and lying about their preferences. Many people find this absurd, but it's just a natural consequence of taking the axioms of economic models completely seriously. Some economists draw special exceptions in ordinary economic modeling for things like drugs, as elements which hijack ordinary human decisionmaking. But I think that drugs are just a particularly stark, but otherwise ordinary example of people consistently making choices they know will make them unhappy, but can't help themselves.
This perspective is incomprehensible to me. I have never, not a single time, felt that having more or better choices made me less happy. But I have also gotten much more pessimistic about the future, because it seems that technological progress is generally going to make choices fewer and worse.
Computers make it possible to make products that betray their owners for the benefit of their creators, and essentially everything you can buy is treacherous today. I can't buy a car that isn't constantly spying on me. I can't buy many books from anyone other than Amazon, who will only permit me to read them on devices and apps they control and can remove them at any time. I can't buy a garage door opener that can be opened by a button not made by the same company. I manage to make some products work for me by preventing them from connecting to the internet, but increasingly I expect to see everything using 5G or mesh networking to report to its masters. I can't buy software for many purposes that I can run myself - just "services" that actually make me the product. I can't choose not to be recorded on video by thousands of cameras every day, or for all the information collected about me not to be stored and aggregated by organizations around the world for their own purposes. Everywhere I go people are trying to force me to install apps loaded with spyware and inappropriate permissions to accomplish simple real world tasks like parking.
Everything from food to games to news is constantly optimized (based on metrics) to be as addictive and harmful as possible. As many choices as possible are removed from interfaces (based on metrics). I can't choose to run an older version of a game or app or website. I can't easily install something as simple as a phone holder in a car; it's designed with the assumption that nothing will ever be added to it. I have plenty of money, and increasingly feel like there is not much to buy that isn't of negative value.
If AI continues to advance, the people who control it (whether companies or governments or individual psychopaths) will not need even the pretense of consent. Democracy flourished for a time because ordinary people wielding guns were a significant military power, so the winner of an election would likely also win a civil war. The same logic no longer applies in a world of drone warfare. It seems likely that the natural end result of technological development is that almost everyone will be helplessly enslaved forever.
You have 23 bits of anonymity. (Probably your physical location does away with most of them.) How many bits do you think "carrying active countermeasures against cameras" is worth?
>This perspective is incomprehensible to me. I have never, not a single time, felt that having more or better choices made me less happy.
I can imagine some people have never felt this way. Human psychology is pretty diverse. But this appears to be a common tendency for humans in aggregate. It's certainly one I can relate to. I wish I were the outlier here, but what research is available on the subject seems to suggest that's not the case.
That said, I agree that your commentary describes other ways that our society's measured "wealth" can increase while decreasing human satisfaction overall. Because the notion that an increase in payments rendered for goods and services represents an increase in human thriving is too fraught to be relied on for even directionally correct measurements.
This one left me quiet. The way the coat shifts from fabric to metaphor—layer by layer, like the loss itself—it’s haunting in the gentlest way. There’s no villain here, just people trying to hold on to each other while standing in different realities.
What lingers for me is that question underneath it all: how do we love someone who’s drifting from the world we share, without dragging them back or letting them go?
The other day I watched with my wife, what was upon reflection, an art appreciation documentary. It wasn't my first time seeing this video, but I was still captured by the writing and contemplation of it all. My wife though found a narration melodramatic at best. For her, what to me was simply a means to deliver a message, was the best part of the video, the thing she was fascinated by and most appreciated, the actual artwork.
The difference? While I spent years learning to write, she spent years learning to paint.
Perhaps the semantic apocalypse is not born of abundance, but rather revealed by it. A semantic revelation, if you will :)
Almost every day I am filled with amazement at the bright lights and heat that fill my cozy dry home. I imagine it's because I have spent night out in the cold, making fire from sticks, hunting and gathering. Knowing what it means.
Potentially, AI could find a way to manipulate the human brain such that it derives maximal satisfaction from its experiences. I don't see any other solution to the problem of the semantic apocalypse than this.
I think it's sort of like the difference between having a crush and being in love with your partner of many years. When you have a crush, your brain is flooded with chemicals tailored by evolution to get you to try to sleep with that person, but whose effect is to make you feel high and giddy about that person. It feels amazing, but inevitably fades with time as you become accustomed to that person. With a partner of many years, your brain isn't giving you help anymore. If you want to feel something for your partner during the grinding hustle and bustle of everyday life as a parent of three young kids, it's on you to think about all the amazing qualities they possess, and the moments of love and compassion throughout your time together, and spin that into a positive feeling of love and endearment. To me, while it might lack the whiz-bang high of a crush, it is infinitely more satisfying to recognize the deep love I have for my partner, and when I take the time to really feel it and appreciate it, it evokes a deep contentment that no crush could ever provide.
The tweet that got me was "Feeling a bit sad for Studio Ghibli right now. Like someone laughingly stole their bag of magic and dumped it out on an unkept playground".
This encapsulates how I feel about what AI art is doing to artists, especially those starting out. Scott and Eric address what AI is doing to art consumers, but what is happening to art producers (artists) is much more soul crushing. Most artists don't make much if any money, and making art is often very lonely. But artists derive meaning and self worth from cultivating a magic box that allows them to create things only they can create. And yes, it makes people jealous and that's probably pretty fun. But now the tables have turned, and the jealous masses have stolen their magic box and are laughing about it. We can appreciate the joy that these new toys bring us while acknowledging that it is not fully zero sum.
And yes, things of this nature have happened before and humans found a way to create new types of art, but man, the scale and speed of this seems especially cruel.
It’s funny, people’s visual sensibilities are the ones that are most easily played with. Certain things go straight to the reptile brain without passing go.
I intuitively learned a lot about this in my time as a film editor.
But is Studio Ghibli's "bag of magic" really their art style? I mean obviously it's part of their bag of magic, but let's be real, you could get any number of teenaged anime fans to draft you AI quality replications of Ghibli artwork for years on Deviant Art and Fiver. Yet no one felt someone was stealing their magic.
What makes a Studio Ghibli movie magic (and by extension what makes stills of the artwork of those moves magic) is (IMO) everything that goes into it. The story telling, the details paid attention to the things people do. The imagination of the world building. The wistfulness for a time that seems past yet never existed. These are conveyed in the art, true, but it's more than just the art. Studio Ghibli wouldn't have the "magic" they do if they'd only released 20 stills from every movie they've made over the years. Heck, for that matter, any Ghibli film is put together by teams of artists quite literally duplicating the same style rather than expressing their own individual artistic style. Clearly "unable to be duplicated quickly and at scale" is not a key to Ghibli magic.
That's part of the point I think Scott is getting at here. Artists have always derived meaning and self worth from "cultivating magic" and one way they used to do that was by creating something only they could create with a material only they could obtain because only they knew where to obtain it and how to use it. And yet, here we are today in a world of vibrant colors and arguably no less artistic or magical. The art of Studio Ghibli and its artists is not diminished by the ease of which their magic of vibrant colors is reproduced.
This is a little of what I was thinking, too. Anyone reading this is invited to try to remember the first time they saw a frame of a Ghibli movie, or a poster, and ask whether that first still haunted them the same way one of the actual movies did. I suspect a lot of people saw one and thought either "oh, another anime" or "hmm, another anime, let's see what this one's like" and then got swept away by the story and music and animation style and foley work.
And now, all someone has to do is see a Ghibli still and that whoosh of animation and music and story hits them again all at once.
It's not that different from a smell that takes you back to that one day in school, or that bite of mac and cheese that reminds you of that first date you had with your now-spouse. There's not anything that special about five-year-old SprayNine or whatever cheese product TGIFriday's was putting in its sides. Anyone else will smell or taste that and think "ehh", because their neurons don't associate it with that memory and emotion.
Well, speaking as someone who considers themselves an artist, and has hardly made a dime in their entire life, and who struggles with this conundrum regularly, I can say that the only reason to make art is because you need and want to. And that applies to everyone,. If it’s recognition that you want, you can share your art for free. If people respond to it, you will get recognition even if it’s only a few people.
If you want to be a professional artist, then other skills are involved;
I don’t know what it is that divides people on this — whether it’s innate, or a trained habit of the mind, or what. But I *definitely,* not exaggerating for effect or making it up or trying to act holy or anything, have the G. K. Chesterton experience of the world, not the Hoel experience of the world.
None of the things in the world I find most beautiful or pleasurable pall at all with time; the most beautiful of all seem only to grow *more* beautiful.
Some things *do* pall with repetition but I sort of see it as a culling or discernment process. The immediate experience of “oh, that’s lovely,” with repetitive handling, either burnishes to beauty or crumbles into dust. And by sorting this out I can surround myself with the beautiful things, not the things that will crumble.
Sunsets, a chanted Latin mass, all of Bach’s output, the poetry of John Donne, Dante (even in translation), snowfall caught in a street light, a plain cup of black coffee with a good croissant, 10-year Laphroaig, the way tree branches look against the sky in spring when the sap is rising — these are all things I have deeply loved and found enormous satisfaction in for twenty or thirty years or more, and all of them are just as beautiful now as they ever were, and ok I guess those are pretty stereotypical things for someone to find enduringly beautiful.
But simple things are becoming more pleasurable for me with age, as well. In my wayward youth I needed it to be the *best* coffee and an *excellent* croissant, but a couple days ago I walked to the little convenience store around the corner from the hospital. I purchased a cup of brewed tea (they don’t give you hot water and a tea bag there; they brew up the tea in one of their Bunn coffee machines and put it in a carafe) and a buttered hard roll. I ate my hard roll and drank my tea walking back to the hospital on a grungy city street and I was *so happy* with my convenience-store pain beurre and my tea in a way that twenty year old me *never* would have been.
I know beyond any doubt that it isn’t because I’m holy lol. I just…..idk, it’s a fascinating world that I find very full of enduring small pleasures and unexpected shattering beauty. I guess I feel some of GKC’s exasperated frustration that not everyone can see it like that. Wish I knew how to share it because it’s a delight to live in.
I think it becomes more available with age too (definitely has changed with age for me), but also I’m 40, which is about Scott’s age and Hoel’s age, so I don’t think it can be *just* that.
iirc Ilyusha is something like a holy fool (it’s been nearly a decade since I last read the Karamazov Brothers 😬) and I’m just not convinced that that’s the criteria for this experience becoming available.
I am approaching 70 and a big part of it is, the novelty wears off. Once you’ve seen a few cycles of fads come and go I think one develops a better sense of what might be a continuity underlying these things, and become more tuned to that. I have watched quite a few recent films because I have a son in his 20s, and it’s surprising how often I can remember a film from the 50s or 40s or even 30s that contains the seed for the film I am watching. And then it boils down to what kind of a job was done reinventing this thing that I remember.
The most recent was a heist film that owed a debt of gratitude to a film called White Heat, starring Jimmy Cagney.
White Heat is better…
There is homage, and then just ripping something off.
I don't have this, wish I did, but it had always seemed 100% obvious to me that people like James and Chesterton were describing their genuine experience. What else would they be doing?
It's a bit of a "Chesterton's fence" argument, really. All those accounts of heightened experience were probably written for a good reason.
Scotr claims to know the neurology about novelty wearing off. But isn't the obvious explanation that, to have these experience, you have to engage with them with some faculty other than the "novelty-seeking" one? Imagine a person in a state of perfect peace, surrounded by family, right with their god, gazing at a sunset. There's no sense of "wow what a sunset.. Let me add that to me list of experiences, let me tell people about it, let me be a sunset-enjoyer, this ought to get me closer to enlightenment." They would just *enjoy* it.
But their account of enjoying it, to a person not in that state, would read as exaggeration, and would come with a lash of anxiety--"what's my problem?"--and then a cynical defense--"bah I've seen a thousand sunsets". That's their problem.
This reminds me of Jonathan Franzen’s bewilderment that the sight of some birds he was especially glad to find, did nothing whatever - nothing at all in the way of pulling him out of himself - for his companion, David Foster Wallace.
People raked him over the coals for that, or made fun of him as they typically do, but I think he was not trying to describe DFW’s state of mind, but his own.
DFW explores this in his last book "The Pale King" which is all about the holiness of paying attention to the most mundane things (it's set in the world of the IRS)
I think I really started to appreciate sunsets when I was about 18 and first got my driver's licence. Traversing the countryside I would regularly pull over to marvel at their beauty. Even today my wife and I call out to each other to call attention to a particularly beautiful one, we're in our late 30s. I am a naturally depressive kind of person who's baseline is set to "hard hearted lack of enthusiasm" and unrefined artistic taste, but sunsets still regularly get me. If anything, this essay gives me hope for the continued enjoyment of beauty, despite hedonic adaptation and satiation. I think Mike Carey's Lucifer got it right: https://thepageaholic.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/lucifer.jpg
It's funny though, my kids don't have that same child like wonder about it yet, much the same as I didn't. I took my 3 year old out last night just before bed time to show him a fantastic scene of the crescent moon setting over the mountains just after dusk, with a slight red glow - just stunning. Of course, this was just another everyday wonder to him, hardly as exciting as getting dad to read him A Duck Called Brian for the nth time.
Thank you so much for this, Scott! You have reconfirmed my habit of only eating asparagus in its 6 week local season, and hot cross buns only at this time of year, from the bakery that does them best, and paying attention while I do. The anticipation is also important to the experience!
The other side to this is the very real difference between seeing a painting on my computer screen or listening to even a very high quality recording of music on good equipment, and the live experience. Maybe it’s easier to get that high focus in real life? I just know it pushes me to actually go to museums and the theatre and to clubs. And I enjoy it só much that my friends end up coming too, and realizing it’s so worth it.
Só it helps my focus to renew the novelty of those experience, through intervals or by rotating through different kinds of experiences.
The other thing I’m afraid is mostly lost to us is the experience of MAKING art. When no recordings existed, people who wanted music (and I think most everyone does) made it themselves. They decorated the everyday objects around them. And because it wasn’t going on Instagram afterwards, they didn’t judge their own work so harshly.
Is there a greater joy than singing a beloved song in à choir? Even for someone like me, with musical talent in the negative numbers, there’s not much better. (The secret is to sing very softly except the parts where everyone is so loud they drown you out.)
That's what I think of whenever someone talks about the invention of the phonograph. It killed the get-togethers, when one person would play piano and everybody would sing.
I would be truly flabbergasted to learn I was some deep super-experiencer never mind super-enjoyer like the famous poets, I rather think myself the very opposite. Or is it the case that you are "supposed to" experience some deep life-changing awe and not mere regular awe, and that I've been ruined since birth?
Yet, the emotion I get from seeing e.g. Michaelangelo's Last Judgement or Rafaello's School of Athens is that of awe, despite striking ultramarine sky of the former being so commonplace as a color I wore it myself to the occasion, and having a poster of the latter hanging in my room (which, for the record, I derive pleasure glancing for ten thousandth time). And while I don't do so every time (by not paying attention and having my mind elsewhere), after seeing countless examples, I can also bring myself into awe seeing the sunset, sunrise, or a clear ultramarine sky stretching over the pure white vastness of a frozen lake (ditto for virtual examples, like breathing in the atmosphere of my favorite zones in World of Warcraft).
The way I see it, an experience is an experience is an experience. Auditory experience of hearing Pavarotti, Sutherland or Salminen is pleasurable (if your brain is wired to enjoy opera at all) whether you're listening them from a record or if you had the privilege to hear them in person, and the latter is more meaningful only insofar as you're experiencing the gesamtkunstwerk rather than just audio (modulo the unique acoustic characteristics of the locale, feeling the infrasound in your body and all that). If Ghiblified photo is not striking then perhaps it simply is the case that 1) it executes the style poorly; 2) there's nothing special about Studio Ghibli style to begin with (personally, it never resonated with me, despite being exposed since childhood). If an AI-produced painting 0xF867DE makes no impression, perhaps it is not because you've been desensitized by mountains worth of sloppy AI art, but because it simply is a bad painting not to viewer's specific aesthetic taste (which is fundamentally no different from how I view human art - in museums I spend 80% of my time looking at 20% of the works, most of the human works make no impression on me either, unless it's an exhibition pre-selected for the stuff I like).
In the span of human history, what “great art” has survived and prosper is the tip of the iceberg. It is almost impossible to overestimate the effect of capriciousness in this field.
I understand that Klein Blue works mostly as a metaphor in this essay, but I happened to see some Klein works at SFMOMA when I went a few years ago, and here were my notes on the experience:
> Having never seen IKB pieces in person, I kind of wrote it off as another midcentury gimmick, but it turns out that IKB is without a doubt the most beautiful colour that I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. The screens and photos will never do it justice. The paint was thick, pastelly and a little gritty, and you can see bumps of it on the canvas. The shadow that the little bumps cast were somehow a subtle gorgeous lilac that seemed almost brighter than the blue, which delighted and shocked me. After noticing this, for the rest of the day, my eyes were a thousand times more sensitive to the shade that various colours turned when they were partially enshadowed, and that lead to a dozen more moments of awe.
--
So yeah, it immediately became my favourite colour and I suddenly, completely understood Klein's obsession. If the rarest most expensive colour in the world that you can only get from a single mountain in Afghanistan was some sort of off-putting, vomit green, I doubt most people would care. I mean, perhaps it is! There might be smaller, harder to get to mountains that yield more obscure unique pigments except those pigments are bad so we don't care about them. As it stands I'm somewhat considering paying out the nose for a bucket of Klein Blue paint from the original Parisian paint store that mixed the paints for Klein, to, idk, DIY a superstimulus coffee table?
It was, by a large margin, _the_ single best experience I had at SFMOMA, and I would gladly pay the entire ticket price just to see that canvas again. Klein is unfortunately not part of SFMOMA's permanent collection though so I haven't seen it since the first time. But perhaps, as this piece suggests, this is something like a blessing in disguise :')
So basically you’re saying may not have been trying to troll anyone. he just figured out how to make The Best Blue Ever and decided: this color DESERVES to get the whole canvas to itself, at least once
yep! iirc he either developed or help develop a more sophisticated binder for ultramarine blue/lapis lazuli that dulled it significantly less than all the previous ones, so it's very vivid. the solution is apparently quite stinky and has a finicky two part application process or something, it's not a normal paint you can just get in a tube or a can.
and the colour totally deserves an entire canvas to itself. perhaps even hundreds of em
I don't know if it's subliminal cultural memory, or the effect of Scott's writing, or some kind of proof of Objective Beauty - but I find the blue in the painting of Mary's coat incredibly striking, even on my phone screen.
I was also moved by Klein's art. So much so that some years ago I made a iphone app, a website http://ikleinblue.com and mixed my own paint from raw pigment to make an artwork for the app icon.
I find Klein's art does speak to human progress beyond freeing ourselves from afghan pigments. When I made the app, computer and phone screens were still far from being able to produce a blue that was as saturated so it was impossible to experience the color on a screen. This made the app slightly ironic (screens may have almost caught up to the Klein paint now? I'm not sure). Klein also tried to patent/trademark his paint methodologies as if they were a technological advancements and gave the color an almost corporate name "International Klein Blue". All the lore around Klein's art helps lift its significance. There's even something very Apple-esque in Klein's minimalist style. He may have had very broad indirect influence.
What's so unusual in that color than screens should have caught up to? Most saturated colors would be cyan and yellow and I do not remember artists making fuzz about cyan.
I don't know anything about color in light vs. pigment vs. eye, but maybe something something eye response something wavelength something.
I've had a similar experience with extremely short-wavelength violet—it looks different in person, to me, than reproduced on a monitor; I think a monitor cannot actually produce e.g. 400nm violet? could be wrong—and the eye responds poorly to such colors, compared to wavelengths closer to green.
(...but like I said, this could all be totally mistaken. Maybe monitors can produce any wavelength the eye can see, or something.)
Computer monitors, and most digital color displays, only display blue, green, and red light mixed at varying intensity - around 440nm, 510nm, 645nm from what I could find, but the exact frequency probably depends on the display. From the converter I could find, if you tell it to approximate 400nm violet light, you'll get 645nm light at an intensity of 131/255, and 440nm light at an intensity of 181/255. In short, you cannot produce violet light on a monitor - it just mixes red and blue light to trick your eye into seeing something like violet.
Digital camera sensors are the same - they use a mix of red, green, and blue sensors (or rather, light sensors with an array of red, green, and blue filters overlaid).
I had the same experience with Jackson Pollock. Thought it was all just hype. Turns out in person his paintings have this crazy three dimensional feel. I guess to be a famous artist it helps to have a schtick, but it also helps to be talented.
dude yes. i did NOT want to be a pollock stan bc its low status in some art hoe circles and i am a lesbian who has a thing for art hoes but i was fucking sniped regardless - one of them entranced me from like three gallery rooms away and i beelined towards it and then when i read the little placard my stomach dropped :(
Strangely in the course of trying to see Klein blue after reading this, as I'm sure others did, I watched a WSJ Style video which contended that Klein blue has been unable to be recreated "the past 60 years". A youtube commenter replied that that was nonsense and you could buy it from the same paint store where he got it. The commenter did claim it was now a "less toxic" formula. So maybe the WSJ was going after that sweet toxicity.
I haven't been able to see Klein Blue in person yet, but your description reminds me of this one time I got too high off THC syrup and one of the things I saw was that each and every color is made up of every single other color, and each of those colors too and it sort of made me spiral until I got sick lol. But it's kinda cool to hear I can sort of experience that again without getting high again.
Stuart Semple makes something that looks indistinguishable, at least according to him, and he's a pretty major figure. (He's the guy behind a series of 'blackest blacks' type pigments and paints.)
+1… anyone who doesn’t get the reference: this is from the Hymn of Breaking Strain, a short poem I first ran into when reading Unsong (which leaves out this particular piece of it)… it’s also been set to music (a bit over four minutes):
Great post. Sounds like Scott might have read Philip Ball's *Bright Earth* recently.
In addition to the facts about ultramarine and gold in medieval paintings, it talks about the practical factors involved in every other color, and the evolution of art overall as the frontier of technology and knowledge progressed and allowed a greater variety of colors and techniques.
Reds, for example, the next most expensive pigment after literal gold (with ultramarine at the top), required harvesting many tens of thousands of insects by hand, and processing and crushing them in specific ways to even get to the point they could start creating a pigment (usually by boiling them in lye). First the insect was the wormlike kermes vermilio, which fed on oaks, then hailing from the New World, the cochineal insect, which feeds on cactus.
Amazing book overall, definitely worth a read if you're into this kind of stuff.
In our current society, gold symbolizes wealth and status.
If you give a block of gold to some minimum wage worker today, that gold allows them to stop working in an unpleasant job, it lets them buy a better house, etc. It has a significant effect on their standard of living.
But in a world with golden mountains, gold is just a shiny rock. Although still quite a pretty one.
Pineapples and spices were, at one point, highly prized by the rich. But then they became much cheaper. But they are still quite nice.
So there are 2 kinds of pleasure happening here. The direct "this is tasty" pleasure that comes from a food being sweet and tasty, and the "social status pleasure" which comes from a food being expensive and high status.
So how do you make a heaven? You start off with material comfort. Avoiding hunger, pain, excess heat or cold etc. You add pleasant social interactions.
You want to add nice sensations. Which includes nice tastes, and also nice appearances. So you want pretty things. Some bright colors and geometric patterns are generally prettier. Beauty depends on lots of things and is complicated. And too much bright colour can be garish and irritating. It's often nice if food is sweet, but that doesn't make a bag of sugar the perfect food.
The heaven wants to contain choice. It wants to contain a wide range of sports and hobbies. It wants meaningful puzzles and room for creativity.
So all else being equal, a few golden mountains are an improvement. But not a huge one.
When I imagine a utopian world.
1) Immortality with full morpological freedom. You want wings and a tail. Sure thing.
2) Just about any activity that someone might do for fun is available. If your really keen on particle physics, you can get the robots to build you a particle collider so you can test some things. If you prefer snowboarding, you can get the robots to build a mountain that's just the right shape.
3) Convenience and luxury, if you want it. A plate of excellent food is always ready the moment you ask for it. 0 chores.
4) Freedom from social oppression. It's not much fun if society discriminates against or harrasses you just because you are gay or a furry. (Who are actually furry, see point 1)
5) 0 irritating paperwork or unwanted burocracy.
This utopia does have gold mountains. Given the massive and general power to get robots to make whatever you want, someone is going to ask for gold mountains.
But it's not a big difference. The utopia would only be minutely worse if the robots were unable to make gold mountains by some technical limitation.
What a beautiful post. Really articulates thoughts I've sort of had as AI progresses and commoditizes an ever growing number of experiences.
At multiple points while reading this post I was brought back to the endless evenings and nights spent with friends in my home country, discussing whatever with the same energy between the 10th time and the 1000th time. I'm also reminded of sunsets I still find awe inspiring, those that compel me to stop in my tracks and take them in. I've seen more than a thousand, I've noticed nearly all of them, but I've only stopped and stared at maybe a hundred? I'm also reminded of experiences that only hit me once – after my 2nd, 5th, 15th visit of the Musée d'Orsay, seeing any painting by Van Gogh did not do anything for me. However, I could go to Petit Palais and stare at The Valley of Tears for ten minutes on my 10th visit.
There is a range of repeatability, strength of experience and meaning associated with cultural elements and personal experiences. I resonate heavily with the thought that keeping the ability to be in awe is a skill issue. Yes, Ghibli imagery is commoditized now. But Gustave Doré's style is also commoditized with the leading generative models, and it doesn't stop me from staring at The Valley of Tears the next time I'll see it in person. It won't stop me from buying another book on his art. And I won't stop enjoying Ghibli films to a similar extent that I did before this latest update.
As AI takes our jobs, renders all human skill subpar, replaces friends and lovers and family, cures us from diseases and accommodates our insatiable thirst for the hedonic treadmill, I think the uniquely flesh and bone human experience will gain in value specifically for its rarity. Competent sexbots might be the dream of many, but just like a thousand okay one night stands cannot replace a passionate love affair, I don't think a thousand amazing sexbot nights necessarily will replace the unicity of passionate human sex. The very realization that you're dealing with a "real" carbon-based person, or maybe instead of real I should say "similar-to-you life form", makes the experience awe inspiring.
In a world ruled by AIs, the last bit of authenticity we'll retain will be our flawed and limited human perception. Fully conscious of our potential biases (eg "Ghibli is commoditized now, so I'm going to let Totoro wash over me"), we'll have the freedom to act on them and still find beauty and meaning in the commonplace, the replaceable, the infinite supply.
Very interesting. If all this story about Singularity happens, and if mankind survives, maybe we would end with something like K. Dick envisionned in The Man in the High Castle with the Japanese fascination for authentic pre war objects in a quest to find the "Wu".
One of the main things I get out of consuming art is knowing that it's an act of expression - every work I appreciate is a connection, a piece of evidence that someone out there is similar enough to me to make something I can relate to. I think that explains both why I prefer contemporary art to the classics, and why I've never been tempted to mess with AI art.
> Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia - something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi.
It seems that the artistic value proposition of the coat of Virgin Mary was just knowing how unique it was, so when it gets mass produced, then it gets cheapened. But this isn’t true for all art forms. Novels were always intended to be enjoyed by yourself in the same way you’d sit and home and look at a Lippi painting on Wikipedia. There’s something psychologically functional about novels that isn’t true for visual art. So some art forms will still bring the same amount of value whether or not they’re mass produced by AI.
Fundamentally I think the average person only has so much attention, so much focus. Let's take AI out of the discussion and talk about how two different people experience an art museum. One type of person will pause, linger over each piece, admire the technique or the composition or the use of color, what have you. The other type of person may pause when they see something really striking, but mostly enjoy the museum experience as a chance to take a stroll while looking at pretty things. Surely even the most devoted art aficionado can only maintain that level of attention for a limited amount of time. I can't imagine they could do it with all 200 pieces.
If I visited an art museum with 200 pieces and 190 of them were done by AI but I didn't know which ones, I doubt I could pick them out. I haven't done well with the "is it AI" quizzes before. There is one sense in which you make the meaning by how you interact with it. But I still can't escape the strong opinion that it matters if there was a human mind behind it. They had a perspective to show, a story to tell. AI just spits out the prompts that you tell it to, with a dash of hallucination.
I find the deluge of content problematic from another angle, which is hobbies. I never developed much of a hobby. I keep thinking oh, I'd like to try watercolor, I'd like to try calligraphy, I'd like to try photography. But it's hard to convince myself of what the point is when I can see hundreds of creators in an Instagram reel, all having already created something far above my own skill, and any possible subject has been done thousands of times. At the end of the day it's just a way for me to kill some time, but creating "just for me" seems rather pointless. Even if I completely shut off all social media I'd still be comparing in my head, knowing that all these other creations are already out there and the best I could hope is to add a drop to be swallowed up in the ocean.
Not all hobbies are susceptible to this kind of virtual competition. Fishing, for example, just results in fish. Dancing can be non-competitive. Sewing can produce simple household items.
> I keep thinking oh, I'd like to try watercolor, I'd like to try calligraphy, I'd like to try photography. But it's hard to convince myself of what the point is when I can see hundreds of creators in an Instagram reel, all having already created something far above my own skill, and any possible subject has been done thousands of times.
Not everything!
One time I saw insect eggs on the underside of a fallen leaf. It's hard for me to find pictures of this, because the internet only wants to show pictures of eggs on fresh leaves. There's also your friends, who probably don't have that many good photographs of themselves. There's also the copyright issue – there's a lot of good images you don't have rights over, you could make ones you *do* have rights over.
People also may not have done calligraphy of your favorite quotes.
>But it's hard to convince myself of what the point is
There is no point, and that can be incredibly freeing or just kill the vibe completely.
Oscar Wilde famously said that “all art is useless“. Depending on your construction of the word “useful “ that makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense to me.
The point is to do something that you might enjoy and do it in an entirely selfish way because it is entirely selfish and it should be
If you’re doing it just to get points or see how you stack up to others in your own mind, then it’s something else - more like a business venture.
Someone else above in this thread made the point of connecting with another human being. That is truly a wonderful thing; to express yourself truthfully through some medium of expression, and then have it resonate with another person is a very deep form of communication. They might well interpret the work quite differently than yourself, but that’s totally OK.
I can't not bring up the concept of defamiliarization here: "What we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing."
The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
The polar opposite of generalization, which in a world of statistical analysis and data crunching is more elusive. N=1 is the key equation of human existence, but it’s not very useful at the same time…
There you go again, speaking to my soul. And I’m kind of skeptical about even having one!
This really gets an explanation I’ve often given for why I remain a person of faith even as almost everyone around me is atheist. I describe faith as a choice - the mechanics of the world do not care if I have faith or not. But in having it, every sunset is a miracle, every person imbued with some undefinable transcendence, every leaf and blade of grass fringed with holy fire. But now I’m not sure if it’s a learned skill to do this, or if the effort is in suppressing it. Your essay has me wondering if maybe I’ve had it backwards; maybe I’m neurologically predisposed to seeing the world like this, and maybe being a person of faith is less of a choice than I assumed?
The raw joys of simple things still feel plenty keen to me, and I tend to think we collectively write them off too easily. My personal philosophy is that everything good just might be right there on the surface, like the nacre of a pearl. Yet we keep hammering away at it looking for something deeper. The idea of semantic apocalypses is a concept that does that, but it isn’t one that would have occurred to me. I’m not sick of sunsets and chocolates even though I’ve had thousands. There is plenty of joy and wonder to be had in things we’ve already experienced. Why focus on whether and how those sensations might be diminished in relation to one another, if they are at all? We’re almost always better off prioritizing our consideration of things in and of themselves.
I wonder how much appreciation of familiar experiences differ between individuals. Is there some normal distribution? Is it correlated with an individual's average subjective well-being, or happiness set point?
Reading this, I kept thinking of Lionel Page's great "The truth About happiness: We are designed to long for it, not to get it", available online (Search "Lionel Page The Truth About Happiness").
I think you’re trying to square the circle here. Tricky business. Just off the top of my head I think an unhappy person can be just as attentive to detail as a happy one, but their narrative will be different. I think it is entirely a function of how one chooses to see things and how much of a choice that is for most of us I don’t know.
In the jargon of this community, it comes down to how much weight one will give one’s priors.
The old world expression for this is “having a change of heart“
After reading this, I've settled on my response to the Erik Hoel piece (which I quite disliked) as the Matt Yglesias line: "Good things are good"
We *should* have more soft cartoon images. All this sophistry about how it cheapens art, or dulls the senses, or violates intellectual property rights (and is thus "bad") ... no.
To steelman the anti-AI art perspective, I'd say that many are upset about this tech more because the process of training these models usually requires feeding them databases of the very pieces of art the models will go on to replicate, sometime by illegally downloading those works. And I can't help but agree that there is something disrespectful, even grotesque, about taking the work of artists who explicitly don't want their works used to train AI, and using that work to train AI - regardless of how impressive it is that we can in theory do that. From reading many people's thoughts on this issue, I don't think the public backlash against AI would be nearly as strong if these ethical considerations weren't seen as being intrinsically tied to the technology.
I found the implicit assumptions of this post so bizarre and incomprehensible that I’m starting to suspect that the sensation I experience as ‘beauty’ is something different from what everyone else is talking about. I’ll go through some of the things that baffled me step-by-step.
> “I - confession - am the type of person who, after hearing the story of Afghanistan and Sar-i-Sang and medieval European art economics - would be tempted to buy lapis lazuli and stare at it longingly, trying to recapture the awe that Joe Peasant must have felt staring at the Virgin’s coat. But I’m also the type of person who, if I ran across Klein in a gallery, would frown and secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff.”
I find it very difficult to understand either of these opinions. When I hear the story of how inconvenient it used to be to paint things blue, I just think, “That must have sucked for the tiny handful of people for whom ‘painting things blue’ was a terminal utility function.”
And when I look at modern art, most of it doesn’t appeal to my tastes, but most non-modern art also doesn’t appeal to my tastes. Most things are bad, so you only expose yourself to the best things from the categories that you like (in practice, this means learning which people’s recommendations consistently match your own judgements of quality); the absolute quantity of low-quality output is irrelevant, because you were never planning to consume more than a tiny fraction of all art in any case.
> “An oversupply that satiates us at a cultural level, until we become divorced from the semantic meaning and see only the cheap bones of its structure.”
Is there some way to steelman this into a comprehensible statement? My brain is parsing this as, “I feel a vague sense of unease, so I will employ polysyllabic circumlocutions to provide a veneer of intellectual respectability to my instinctive gut reaction.”
> “It would be facile to say that, just because technology has threatened our sense of meaning before, we shouldn’t worry when technology threatens our sense of meaning today.”
I’m confused by what you mean by “threatened our sense of meaning”. Are you suggesting that when technology is invented that allows people to cheaply and easily reproduce a thing you like that used to be scarce and expensive, this affects your sense of identity in some way? Can you describe what this feels like?
> “I acknowledge that my inability to marvel at a live Caruso opera in Naples has cost me something deep and beautiful.”
I wish you’d specified what, exactly, this state of affairs had cost you. I’ve heard people say things like this many times, and they almost always fail to actually explain what they mean – they just assume that the audience shares their feelings and doesn’t need them explained.
> “Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse is to will yourself out of it. If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue.”
As much as it pains me to agree with Chesterton on anything, this seems trivially true to me. If the existence of a large amount of low-quality art of category XYZ makes it impossible for you to enjoy high-quality art of category XYZ, the problem is clearly in your brain, not in the art market.
One last point (partly because I can’t stand letting Chesterton have the last word): why do people always use sunsets as the go-to example of beauty? Does anyone really enjoy looking at a sunset for more than about 0.5 seconds? It’s just a bit of light in the sky. Next thing you know, people are going to start saying that the stars are beautiful.
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Of course, the real explanation for all this is that I’m autistic enough to experience very little elasticity in my preferences, so the hedonic treadmill doesn’t work for me the same way it does for most people. On the other hand, I’m also autistic enough that my stunted theory of mind doesn’t allow me to truly believe that any sane person could have a mind different from mine, so I have no choice but to continue to believe that everyone except me is insane.
I'm only going to reply to a single question because I think it's at the root of the assumptions difference.
>Are you suggesting that when technology is invented that allows people to cheaply and easily reproduce a thing you like that used to be scarce and expensive, this affects your sense of identity in some way?
It doesn't affect my identity, but it affects my first-hand experience of the art. Every art is partially a sensory experience (this food tastes good) and partially a social experience (this food was cooked for me by my husband because he loves me). You don't need to know the artist personally to have that social experience, it's all determined by (your understanding of) the artist's intent. A person who thinks sunsets are designed by God will experience them differently than someone who thinks they are a natural and intentless phenomenon.
An art produced by machine in large quantities has a different social context than art produced by a human at great effort, even if the quality is exactly the same. Same context difference that makes a movie line iconic in the first movie it appears in and cliche in the 100th movie.
> "A person who thinks sunsets are designed by God will experience them differently than someone who thinks they are a natural and intentless phenomenon."
As someone who used to be a Christian and is now an atheist, I can only say that my personal experience contradicts this assertion. I have never found sunsets particularly beautiful.
If you had asked Christian!me about this 'sensory experience vs social experience' way of conceptualising art, he would probably have said something like this:
"I believe that God created literally everything. Not in a vague deist establishing-the-starting-conditions-and-then-not-interfering way, but in the sense that he is directly and actively involved in the ongoing existence of everything that exist. However, I do not find all things equally beautiful. Even if you exclude things that are mediated by another being's intelligence, I still think that some natural phenomena are more beautiful than other natural phenomena. Since God created everything, everything has the same social experience, so in practice the only thing that really matters is sensory experience."
> "Same context difference that makes a movie line iconic in the first movie it appears in and cliche in the 100th movie."
While I agree that a movie line that was once iconic can become cliche from being imitated and thus overused, I don't believe that this supports the 'social context' interpretation. When you introduced social context, you described it as involving the audience's relationship to the artist or conceptualisation of the artist's intent. But in the 'movie cliche' example, you seem to be suggesting that it involves looking at a work of art in the context of its cultural background.
I think these are completely different things. I enjoy an iconic movie line partly because it is a good line in the context of the movie itself, and partly because it is a good line within the cultural context in which the movie was made. This has nothing to do with my social relationship with the people who made the movie.
My bottom line is that I'd be very happy to read a book written on typewriters by a legion of proverbial Hamlet-monkeys, as long as the book was good. I don't care how the sausage is made.
I could swear there was a Works in Progress piece I read recently that is a response to this. I'll have to try to remember to find it when I'm out of work later today.
As to my own view, I guess there's a couple of facets to it. AI art isn't capital-A "Art" because it's divorced from a human. An human didn't make it.
Humans made the thing what does the lightning-fast sigil magic, which then does blah blah radda radda until you're sitting in a chair in your underpants watching the responses spool in that reply to your prompts. There is no Pagliacci, no Miyazaki, no teen doodling in their first notebook, no human at the helm of those responses.
The prompt you gave to the AI is certainly made by a human. But, that's where the human association ends. I wouldn't ask an AI to make art, just like I wouldn't ask a hammer to build me a chair so I can sit comfortably in my underpants while I talk to chatbots.
"As to my own view, I guess there's a couple of facets to it. AI art isn't capital-A "Art" because it's divorced from a human. An human didn't make it."
This bothers me because it grounds artistic appreciation in something outside of art and sort of unknowable.
If an art historian discovered that actually, Beethoven's symphonies were composed by a robot (maybe some aliens landed in Vienna, got a robot to write symphonies as a joke, then handed them to Beethoven to distribute), would everyone who loved the symphonies retroactively be wrong? Would you have to go over them, note by note, and think things like "That part there where I felt soaring emotion and inspiration actually wasn't emotional or inspiring at all, got to make sure to crush those feelings next time I start experiencing them"?
If not, who cares whether something is art or not?
"This bothers me because it grounds artistic appreciation in something outside of art and sort of unknowable."
It seems that many cases of artistic appreciation don't wholly inhere in the object. Part of the "soaring emotion and inspiration" is based on the piece being something created by a human. An equal-quality Vermeer copy is missing the human creation of the original (it can't ever be an equivalent thing).
Part of why many people rather see the actual object than a reproduction is the being closer to the person who created it.
"Artistic appreciation" is a bunch of things too. It's not even something that is constant in an individual and, sometimes, requires extra experience or education as a basis.
Klein appeared to put a lot of effort creating his blue (somewhat equivalent to the effort to get lapis lazuli. Maybe, qualitatively if not quantitatively. Painting a whole canvas with it flips the color from being subservient to symbolism and states that the color itself, by itself, is something worth appreciating. I think there is a useful idea there.
I suspect there are some things that don't "still looked like stuff" that you appreciate the aesthetics of.
>it grounds artistic appreciation in something outside of art and sort of unknowable."
But it is! Artistic appreciation is completely grounded in your own sensibilities. How could it be different? Part of what Scott has done with this essay is to expand all of our sensibilities, which makes us able to experience, (have artistic appreciation )in a different way than before we read the essay. The more you know, the more possibilities there are for discovery.
Its should be obvious that expereicning something is far superior than viewing it on a scree. Experiencing Michaelangelo's David or Botticelli's Birth of Venus in real life is far more impressive than any photo, video or screenshot - these reproductions cannot do justice to the real thing. Not to mention the numerous natural wonders like Yosemite, Zion or Yellowstone.
Unfortunately, at a recent visit to the Louvre last year, I noticed the phenomenon of people going up to, say, the Mona Lisa, barely glancing at it, and taking a dozen selfie's before quickly leaving. I saw this elsewhere, in front of "Liberty Leading The People" and other must-see's like "Winged Victory". The tiny screens have truly broken many people's brains.
"But your personal relationship to the meaning in your life is not a society-wide problem. [...] you should be thinking of your own individual soul."
This is one of my favorite pieces you've ever written, and a rare example of a piece about AI that leaves me personally inspired instead of just depressed. I am responsible for -- and capable of -- cultivating my own sense of wonder and gratitude.
I believe the solution is that everybody gets too jaded and cynical to bother maintaining society, leading to a societal collapse which causes producing beauty to become difficult once again, in turn reawakening people to the value of art and civilisation. If you're lucky, the final stage happens before civilisation has finally, irrevocably collapsed and has to be rebuilt from scratch.
The cherry blossoms 🌸 are in bloom near DC. If you're in the vicinity, that might be a good opportunity to practice an appreciation of natural beauty. (It's rarer than sunsets, so maybe it'd be easier.)
I do think that direct experience (or at least close understanding) of the production or complexity of whatever the wonder is helps. It's kind of what this essay is doing with AI ("...we’re speaking to an alien intelligence made by etching strange sigils on a tiny glass wafer on a mountainous jungle island off the coast of China..."). That is impressive, and thinking of that while looking at the images helps a lot. As a more physical example, attempting to do a craft does a lot for my awareness of how impressive things are... When I look at a decent jacket while remembering how hard it was to for me to hand-alter a simple vest, and thinking about how many pieces there are, and the fabric, and the complexity of the machines they used to sew it, it really ups my ability to marvel at it. Even if it's common, it's mostly machine made, it's not even that nice a jacket, the awareness how impossible it would be for me, individually to make it means it is much more impressive.
This is beautiful, Scott. It draws out your interdisciplinary wisdom into an encouraging, optimistic, and practical synthesis. It encourages agency in how we see the world. I feel moved--thanks, as always. :)
"Filippino Lippi was born, probably in 1457, at Prato, Tuscany, the illegitimate son to Lucrezia Buti and the painter Fra Filippo Lippi; both had broken clerical vows, and though after Filippino's birth they received a papal dispensation to marry (arranged by Lorenzo di Medici), Vasari says that they never did. His sister Alessandra was born in 1465. Filippino first trained under his father in his workshop."
On AI imagery: unless it is the subject - attention drawn to it - as with the guy's anime children - I don't see it. As in: I just flit right past it, doesn't even register. Am I really alone in this? For instance, a number of substackers play around with AI to generate an image with their post, to make it more eye-catching. I hope that's a fun little thing to do after the work of writing, don't begrudge it - but I don't even glance at it. Not out of anti-AI solidarity with artists. It's just without interest and somehow my mind knows that without even having to look.
Whereas: if you've written a post about architecture - I look at all the pictures.
In fact, I used to read the New Yorker regularly and would get a little OCD-vexed when reading about visual things because it had an inflexible one-picture-only rule. Which was usually not even germane. Like a long article about an artist and their edgy work: and a Portrait of the Artist as a Generic New Yorker, looking glum.
The fun of seeing your child as a Ghibli waif is in the activity, not in anyone potentially wanting to look at it. In that way it's much like photos of other people's kids.
I watched that video of - I think it was giraffes diving in a natatorium? - and was floored and amazed. But it was one and done. I have seen giraffes diving in a photorealistic pool. I need never see elephants captaining a ship, &/or etc. no matter how impressive.
Whereas #2: if you told me that the museum had Richard Estes' "Pharmacy" I would go see it even though I've looked at an image of it before, quite a few times.
>then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you
I appreciate that this post mainly tries to convey a 'vibe', but, uh, no? You don't need any wonders of the Singularity to literally wirehead yourself today. Whether this would count as salvation is of course debatable, but certainly your attitudes towards stuff would change considerably. As much as I disagree with Yudkowsky, he never shied from admitting that the future would be profoundly weird, and this attitude seems surprisingly lacking these days.
1) Is Scott misunderstanding the 'green wine and crimson seas'? In the poem they are unnatural, twisted versions of natural pleasures. Seas are normally green, and wine is normally crimson - the Danes have swapped this around. Chesterton is criticising the Danes' heathen love pleasures that have been twisted from their natural, God given state. There are no green wines or crimson seas in Chesterton's heaven.
In another poem he puts it like this:
"There are things you need not know of though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain"
These are the pleasures that are worse than pain.
2) I'm loving the references to GKC and BotWH. I would happily see every post start with a stanza or two...
I have had the opportunity to enjoy a vintage Madeira and part of the enjoyment was to consider that when the grapes were harvested, Lincoln had not yet written the Gettysburg Address.
This is turning into the Chesterton Poetry Hour, but yes I love "The Aristocrat" as well:
The Aristocrat
The Devil is a gentleman, and asks you down to stay
At his little place at What’sitsname (it isn’t far away).
They say the sport is splendid; there is always something new,
And fairy scenes, and fearful feats that none but he can do;
He can shoot the feathered cherubs if they fly on the estate,
Or fish for Father Neptune with the mermaids for a bait;
He scaled amid the staggering stars that precipice, the sky,
And blew his trumpet above heaven, and got by mastery
The starry crown of God Himself, and shoved it on the shelf;
But the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn’t brag himself.
O blind your eyes and break your heart and hack your hand away,
And lose your love and shave your head; but do not go to stay
At the little place in What’sitsname where folks are rich and clever;
The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever;
There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain;
There is a game of April Fool that’s played behind its door,
Where the fool remains for ever and the April comes no more,
Where the splendour of the daylight grows drearier than the dark,
And life droops like a vulture that once was such a lark:
And that is the Blue Devil that once was the Blue Bird;
For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn’t keep his word.
Now I think of it, that line about "The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever" reminds me of Raphael's house (or rather Hope's house) in "Baldur's Gate 3".
I think the green wine is just new wine, and crimson seas are just … Homer? The colors don’t reverse particularly well; the sea isn’t any more green than it is wine-dark.
You might be right. I'd only ever thought about my reading of the phrase, but this is why it's good to talk to other people about poems.
Having said that I think the sea is greener than it is crimson, and wine is (archetypally) crimson not green. And I'd thought (though will need to go back to check) there's a theme running through BotWH (and Chesterton generally) of people twisting and misusing the good gifts God has given, and getting empty pleasure and no joy from it.
I don't think it matters a jot to the point of the essay though, so maybe I was being pedantic.
Weirdly, I read the line the same way you did but interpreted it the way Scott did. I read it as Chesterton saying that the "perverse in pleasure" grow weary of even novel and amazing things not seen in nature, like green wine or crimson seas.
As for other losses: there are degrees even within changes. I can speak to one I'm sure no one else on the blog will have experienced. I didn't fly for 30-plus years. Wasn't scared, just didn't care to and a problem with me is if I don't feel like doing something ... well, anyway.
During that time I took many road trips, however. In a car, which is not a medieval pilgrimage obviously ...
And then one day I flew because it was the most practical way to join some friends for a short few days' visit to the home of one who had moved 2000 miles away.
(It was interesting the way air travel had changed - for instance, it did not used to be the custom when I flew back in the day for everyone to keep the shades down and for a hush to settle on the plane and the flight attendants to dim the lights and to more or less say "nighty-night" for a couple-hour flight that took off at ten in the morning - but it seems like you guys worked out the bugs during that period after 9/11 when you bitched about air travel all the time, because it went very smoothly and the only glitches were my own, like forgetting to empty my water bottle.)
I/we had fun, of course. But afterward: how was your trip? Tell about your trip! - (said polite relatives).
And the truth was, it didn't seem like a trip, not in the way that the car-camping road trips did.
Usually I come down here to write something snarky but this time I wanted to say this is a great article and maybe I can get a piece of lapis lazuli on eBay.
I like the sentiment that this is a matter of personal spiritual growth. But it *is also* a societal issue, isn't it? People say "I could see paintings on my computer", but the paintings on your computer are NOT equivalents to the paintings in the Prado. They're slightly-to-much worse copies. Yet people believe they are functionally the same, which does endanger the Prado! Every Frame a Painting highlighted the dumbing effect of media saturation in the video on Transformers: "viewers are visually sophisticated, but visually illiterate."
I think it might've been Ruxandra (forgive me if she actually thinks the opposite but I have an image of a tweet in mind) who pointed out that Socrates was in fact totally right about writing changing our relationship to memory. When was the last time you attended a storytelling performance? Even in a fantasy UBI world where people can become storytellers if they want because they don't need jobs, are they going to have audiences? Or will people assume the book, video, podcast is close enough?
Great essay Scott, but it strikes me as insufficiently ambitious, no matter how absurd that sounds.
Your depiction of Heaven potentially succumbing to the hedonic treadmill, leaving inhabitants griping about golden mountains, highlights a crucial point: any Heaven worth the name must have a solution for hedonic adaptation baked in. Relying solely on Chestertonian willpower or innate holiness seems... insufficient. This is fundamentally a biological limitation, a wetware problem. And we already have proof-of-concept interventions. Consider the reliable induction of awe, wonder, and profound connection via pharmacological means – MDMA's empathogenic surge, the perspective-shifting novelty induced by psilocybin or LSD. These demonstrate that the subjective experience of wonder and meaning has neurochemical correlates we can, in principle, modulate. A properly engineered Heaven wouldn't just change the scenery; it would offer sustainable solutions to the limitations of baseline human consciousness, potentially allowing for the choice to experience that "first sunset" feeling reliably, without the downsides of tolerance or the need for saintly discipline. Forget willing yourself out of it; fix the underlying mechanism. Otherwise, as you sketch it, it's just Purgatory with better interior design and readily available green wine.
You acknowledge the paradox – lamenting the lost awe of a live Caruso debut while being unwilling to uninvent the phonograph. This points to a broader truth: despite the elegiac tone we sometimes adopt for the "before times," our revealed preferences overwhelmingly favour convenience, access, and abundance. Nobody is actually lining up for the multi-year, high-mortality trek to Sar-i-Sang when synthetic ultramarine is cheap and available. Few are smashing their smartphones to rely solely on rare, expensive, live performances. We choose the firehose of "just more Lippi" on Wikipedia over the arduous pilgrimage, even while waxing poetic about the latter's lost significance. There's a certain luxury in lamenting the loss of meaning from a position of immense technological privilege.
Is the rate of truly sublime, awe-inspiring novelty actually decreasing, or is the bar just continuously rising? The peasant's awe at ultramarine was context-dependent. Photography "killed" realistic portraiture but enabled entirely new aesthetic dimensions and democratized image capture. There are photos that reliably induce frisson and awe in me, and are acclaimed by other people. Recorded music cheapened the live experience but created the possibility of global superstars and genres unimaginable before. Ghiblification might feel like peak-novelty saturation now, but this very cheapness, as you suggest, might be the substrate for the next unforeseen artistic paradigm. My sense is that while specific sources of wonder become commonplace, truly new sources emerge at a somewhat consistent rate throughout history, reflecting the technological and cultural context of the time. The hedonic treadmill forces us (or AI) to innovate harder to achieve that same hit of genuine novelty, but the frontier keeps moving. Humans adapt to just about anything, but they also lose that adaptation over long enough periods of time. Someone stuck on a deserted island for a decade will probably cry tears of joy at a pop song, and more commonly, people can re-read books or re-watch movies after some time and get a wide range of enjoyment out of it, sometimes even more than the first go.
I am confident in the feasibility of halting that treadmill humanity has always run on. Even if we're ultimately going nowhere, there's no need to get there fast.
> I am confident in the feasibility of halting that treadmill humanity has always run on.
The ages-old solution is "fasting", in the widest sense. Spend some time with deliberately reduced inputs, and your personal treadmill lowers itself back to ground level. Scott mentioned that a dozen hours of samatha meditation, which is an intense fast of the senses, will do it.
> I am confident in the feasibility of halting that treadmill humanity has always run on. Even if we're ultimately going nowhere, there's no need to get there fast.
I'm confident in the ability of the average human to drop off the treadmill here and there. We all tend to think we're the only one with a spark of life and the occasional sense of awe, and most everyone else are NPCs, but we're obviously right about ourselves b/c we have the 1st person view, and wrong about everyone else.
OTOH I'm not so confident about humanity finding a "quick fix" type of shortcut, beyond the abilities we already have. Even psychedelics are not a quick fix, they give you "a trip" that you still have to go through.
>we're obviously right about ourselves b/c we have the 1st person view, and wrong about everyone else.
I think this is really really important. The amount of stuff that we can unwittingly make up about the situation we find ourselves in or the person we’re speaking to is immense.
And yet one of our most common complaints is that we don’t know our own mind. It’s really funny …. In fact, a lot of comedy is based on this when you think about it. Two people with two different intentions involved in the same situation and, because we can see both sides of it at once, laugh our asses off.
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
"Archaic Torso of Apollo" - Rainer Maria Rilke
If the pleasure of art is primarily novelty, then the idea of a semantic apocalypse makes sense. If the pleasure of art is a glimpse into something real and true, beyond the surface of banal, everyday life, then the art demands from us as much as we demand from it. Become like little children, indeed.
One reason I dislike social media is it is greater at producing semantic apocalypses than any other technology. Some of the most popular content on social media are:
1. Fights between two or groups of people
2. Attractive women dancing in skimpy clothing
3. Heavily photoshopped pictures of nature
4. Sensationalist and usually inaccurate news articles
4a. Clickbait/misleading content more broadly
5. "Ragebait" content made to make people angry at a person or group
All of these have the effect of cheapening other aspects of life. When you see a normal picture of a nature landscape or even go see it in person, it may seem less exciting interesting than the photoshopped picture you saw earlier. If you regularly see exaggerated content of the latest awful thing some politician has done, then when the politician actually does an awful thing you are desensitized.
A wonderful meditation on becoming childlike (ala Matthew 18:3). When I was a young man in my 20s, I was rather taken by Chesterton's admonition to learn to enjoy simple things, but often at a loss for how to do it. A lot of the same ideas show up in Wendel Berry's work, from a slightly different angle. Actually articulating how that plays out in modern life can be really, really challenging, which is why some people end up concluding we must retvn to being farmers or living under a monarchy or somesuch. Tying it into this week's Studio Ghibli AI image craze is a healthy leap of imagination!
More specifically, the "bad" blue pigment produced a strong, rich color, but one that was distinct from ultramarine. There were two sources for it, both vegetable, which are now known to be different plants that make the same chemical: woad and indigo. Woad was the main form in Medieval Europe, since it could be grown relatively locally, while indigo was an expensive import from warmer climates. Indigo was the premium option, since the indigo plant makes higher concentrations of the active ingredient and with pre-modern extraction and dying techniques it makes a richer and purer color that was less apt to fade. With modern techniques, the end result is identical except for the yield.
The problem was that while woad and indigo make very rich blue colors, they're the wrong shades of blue. Indigo dye, at full concentration, produces the shade you'd expect from the name, which is a dark and purply blue. If you want a lighter blue, you need to either pull the fiber before it's saturated with color or you need to "heather" the fabric by spinning together a mix of undyed and fully-dyed fiber. These produce lighter blues, but with a greyish faded-looking tone rather than the rich medium blue of aquamarine. And you need true indigo to get a decent light-to-medium blue with this technique. Using woad with period methods, there are impurities that add a greenish cast to the blue that comes through especially at lower concentrations.
Incidentally, both sides in the American Civil War started out with different forms of indigo-dyed uniforms. Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, the Union standardized on the full-saturation indigo color that had been used by the antebellum regular army, while the Confederacy standardized on "cadet blue", a lighter grey-blue color produced from heathered indigo, which had been widely used antebellum for state militia uniforms. As the war went on, the Confederacy gradually and unofficially switched to "butternut" uniforms, a light brown color similar to khaki which was produced from sumac or walnut, because butternut dye could be produced in quantity locally. Woad wasn't really grown in the Confederacy; indigo was to some extent, but the quantities needed required imports that were cut off by the Union blockade, and the big indigo-growing parts of the South (Louisiana and the barrier islands of South Carolina) were high priorities for Union amphibious landings for other reasons and thus by mid-war became unavailable to the Confederacy.
This also (along with blue jeans, which are also traditionally colored with indigo in varying saturations) gives a handy intuition pump for the colors you get from indigo and why they weren't substitutes for aquamarine. The Virgin Mary's coat should not look like a Civil War uniform, North or South, nor should it look like a jean jacket.
I remember visiting the island of Minorca and noticing the shade of green that a lot of things were painted in. And then I looked up at the hills and saw the green in the copper mineralization.. What other color could they possibly paint something with ? Ditto the red barns of America…rust
Similarly, a lot of stuff got painted white because "whitewash" was easily prepared from cheap and widely-available ingredients, mostly quicklime and water. It's basically a very wet mix of a simple lime plaster without adding the sorts of binding ingredients (sand, horsehair, etc) that you might use if you were going to use it as a structural material.
A lot of the middle-to-high end 19th/20th century outdoor paints were linseed oil based (also called flaxseed oil), which has the advantage of drying to a film that is both hydrophobic and flexible (polymerized polyunsaturated fatty acids, the same substance that makes up the "seasoning" on a cast iron or carbon steel pan). By itself, dried linseed oil is transparent with a sickly yellowish tint, so it's almost always got added pigments to make it opaque, protect the substance under it from sunlight, and make it more aesthetic. Metal oxides seem to be commonly used. Iron oxide, as you say, was used in barn paint. I haven't heard of copper oxide being used, but that makes sense. Modern white paint usually uses titanium oxide. Light colored paints use a titanium oxide base for opacity, plus other ingredients for tone. Darker paints use less titanium oxide and consequently aren't as good at hiding underlying color. I've also heard of zinc oxide being used. And lead oxide used to be common but has fallen into disuse in recent decades for the obvious reasons.
I'm reminded of a movie I saw as a kid, set during WW2 in the Pacific theater. Operation Petticoat, I think. I don't remember the details, but it involves a series of misadventures that starts with an American navy crew repainting their submarine. The didn't have enough red paint (iron oxide) or white paint (titanium or zinc oxide) for the primer coat, so they mixed what they had of both, expecting to paint over it with a regular color later, but need to go to see before they got the chance, leading to shenanigans around ships on both sides spotting a pink submarine and assuming its color had some bizarre significance.
I am almost ashamed to say that I remember that movie. I use linseed oil a lot as a kid because it’s a way of toughening up a cricket bat. It’s a great thing to put on old drying out wood to preserve it as well.
After looking it up, I find that the red and white primer in the movie were both lead-based. Apparently, different oxide salts of lead can be either red or white, both of which were used as paint pigments.
"I sometimes imagine Heaven as a place of green wine, crimson seas, and golden mountains. Everyone goes there, good and bad alike. And if you still have enough innocence in your soul to enjoy things, then great, you’re in Heaven..."
I once read a short story in which an uptight Protestant of the "all pleasure is sin and suffering is virtue" variety dies and finds himself in Heaven, but is too focused on his misery to enjoy it even after Saint Peter tells him outright. He insists it must be some test of faith and goes right on living the life he'd been living before, misery and all. I believe the story ends with Peter and another saint or angel lamenting the man's fate. I couldn't find it again, though, even with LLM help.
(The Great Divorce by CS Lewis has been suggested, but it doesn't seem to fit, even excerpted.)
A few points here: 1) I recall that R Scott Bakker, also known for his magnificently insane and dark fantasy writing, came up with the "semantic apocalypse" idea. Haven't thought about it for a while, but there's an idea in his novels that this perfected human (Kellhus) can perfectly manipulate other humans. He destroys the systems of meaning that his followers hold, then rebuilds them in his image. Bakker also wrote a slightly mad blog, called three pound brain (https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/), but has now gone off grid, sadly. Definitely worth checking out.
2) I wonder the extent that other people consciously ration their aesthetic consumption to avoid this kind of aesthetic numbing. I seem to do this a lot, but there's a clear trade-off. You'll never understand Bach to any depth if you ration yourself to a symphony once a year, but you'll appreciate the novelty more.
I remember hearing years back that a recording does not have the same sound quality as a live performance in some quantifiable way. I don't know if this is still the case or if this was ever the case to be honest, I am not an expert or even a knowledgeable hobbyist about that. If this is true, you might still need to travel to Italy to get the true Caruso experience. The AI generated art is not as good as one made by people, the one thing I worry about is that it is good enough for commercial applications and funding for human produced art dries up, so consequently people never develop the same level of technical skill they can now that they can hone their craft full time. It's a small tragedy in the way of progress I guess. On the other hand, I do enjoy some of the applications where good enough art is good enough (which needs to be paired with other interesting stuff of course) and having more of that would be great.
1. Back in Caruso's time the quality of audio recording was indeed atrocious, compensated for by the sheer wonder of hearing "human voice" out of a box. So it still was totally worth it to travel to Italy
2. Today there are myriad sound systems capable of reproducing human voice with enough fidelity to be indistinguishable from the real thing. But - they are still not capable of replicating the experience of a 200-year old opera house, the full experience of sight, sound of the hall, smell, plush seats, rustle of the audience, etc. etc. So - still worth a trip to Italy if this is your thing.
For whatever it is worth I heard about this from a violinist some 15 years ago so on the one hand he probably has some significant metis about sound quality, but on the other he was most likely biased against anything that commodifies his profession, and he might have been unfamiliar with the more expensive sound systems.
Oh it's totally understandable, especially coming from a classical musician point of view. But once the visuals of the performer and the sound system are hidden behind a curtain for a proper double-blind test, it's pretty much impossible to tell real sound from reproduction, and the system doesn't even have to be all THAT expensive anymore as long as the source doesn't have some very deep bass requiring large drivers and cabinet sizes.
The "sound fidelity" is the wrong hill for live performers to die on, that battle's been lost. It's the experience of a living breathing human playing real instruments for an audience of other living breathing humans that we still want to experience.
Has such a double blind test been performed? That would be useful to update my priors. Specially useful if the blindfolded people are classical musicians, it's very common for them to hear more stuff, the person I was talking to had perfect pitch for example. The orchestra hall generally has architecture designed to amplify sound, so even this would not necessarily be proof that live performances are useless if all you care about is the sound, but it'd still be interesting to see if from that point of view a musician can be replaced by a recording.
John Dunlevy used to do this in the 90's as a demo of his speaker systems (he was a fascinating character, an antenna designer who went into speaker design to do it right for a change). I don't know off the top of my head if he ever formally published the results. A cursory search in AES and ASA journals produced too many hits to go through (listening tests are clearly a thing!).
There's also a fundamental acoustical reason for it: once the listener is in a far field, as long as the sound system reproduces the waveforms reasonably well (say, with distortion <-60 dB), there's simply no mechanism in our hearing system to tell the sounds apart.
There are always fringe cases: I don't think a room-sized two-speaker stereo system can reproduce the sound of a full symphony orchestra (90+ musicians), if for no other reason than the listener not being in a far-field condition. I suspect a system using a speaker for each musician at their position could do the job, but this is getting ridiculous.
In reality, there is of course another factor making the reproduced sound be different: the room. The sound of the room is an inseparable part of the experience. No matter how accurate the sound system is, it's sitting in a living room of a house as opposed to a concert hall. This will always color the sound in easily recognizable ways.
A live symphony sounds different depending on where you are sitting in a Damm enough theatre anyway. Live rock or pop can sound exactly the same though, because it’s amplified through the same speakers as if they weren’t there.
I don’t know if you remember or no but sometime back in the 70s or 80s Carnegie Hall redid their band shell. The original was plaster over a wire mesh and they replaced it with one constructed with a new modern material. It was a disaster. They had to find one of the only plasterers in the United States who was capable of building such a thing (an old Italian guy in Brooklyn) and he came in and redid it in plaster.
The room you are playing the music in is such a big part of how it’s going to sound.
Past a certain level of quality of equipment the biggest thing that is going to affect how you hear a recording is the space you are playing it in. It’s very significant.
How did the medievals reconcile virgin Mary having an ultra-expensive ultramarine coat with virgin Mary being dirt poor (which was surely central to her story and her humble virtue)?
There was nothing to reconcile. First off Mary wasn't dirt poor but distinctly middle class. And theologically she was one of the richest people in history, she bore God.
Because she is also the Queen of Heaven. And because artists like showing off their techniques and rich patrons like showing off they can afford the best of the best 😁
This is why you get the iconography of the Virgin of Humility (associated with the Franciscans) but also using gold and blue:
I'm almost stunned by the timing of this post - I've been grappling with my struggle to enjoy things fully, and was ready to once again resign myself to techniques to "reset" enjoyment like abstaining from things for a while (maybe it will work this time!). That hasn't worked for me, so I also evaluated potential mental health affects like seasonal depression or ADHD. But nothing ever seemed right - I never felt like I was addressing the root of the issue. I could do those things, maybe they would work for a while, but any external-based tool will become worn out with such use.
What really spoke to me was your pointer towards seeing the world through the eyes of children, and particularly your notes to G.K. Chesterton. It sounds like he absolutely had it figured out for himself!
I'm totally convinced that it's a Skill Issue for me to continue working on, and that instead of searching for the answer using external objects (abstinence/medication, solving it systemically), the answer is internal.
I'm going to walk that path now. When I really reflect, meditation and journaling have done the most to uncover the real reasons behind my expectations and disappointments. It's just really hard to see those clearly when I let my attention disperse at every moment.
Philosophically speaking, I find this all very interesting and I generally agree.
But I find it hard to connect all this talk about the sublime with the actual output of generative AI. It's really not that good, even the first time you see it. If those Ghiblified pictures were made by the actual Studio Ghibli, you'd think they were real bad.
IIRC, Scott Aaronson made a comparison to a dog speaking mediocre English. Assuming he actually said that, I agree with him. It's amazing, spectacular, impossible...but it's still mediocre. It's only impressive because it's a dog doing it.
It is the fleeting privilege of the frontier to experience wonder and to name the things you find. The cost is uncertainty and - often enough, if it's a real frontier - failure.
The alternative is comfort and stability in comparative mediocrity.
Is that systemically fair? I don't know! It does feel individually fair. Certainly it seems to dovetail with Nassim Taleb's notion of fairness, which is matching the scale of risking and reward.
"If you insist that anything too common, anything come by too cheaply, must be boring, then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you."
I'm not too worried. Once again I'll point to one of my favorite examples: of all the things that have been said about Dark Souls, nobody has said that completing it comes cheaply.
I see quite a lot of Marxist notions here. A big complaint of conservatives (in the traditional sense) is that modernity/capitalism destroys the old communal bonds and replaces them with impersonal market forces. I think we can think dialectically about this, yes recognize that something of value has been lost, but that something has also been gained e.g. modernity/capitalism has allowed an increase in individuality and personal choice when compared to previous modes of production. I recall reading a lament about the loss of Blockbuster to streaming services which struck a similar chord. Be that as it may, for better or worse the cat is now out of the bag, there's no going back, history unfolds.
ETA two posts by Matt Bruenig that I think make this point quite well. (He also says why he doesn't view it as a problem)
I could argue blockbuster (or any video store) was better or worse than streaming based on reality rather than streaming. It was mildly worse because you had to travel to it, rather than stay at home. For people who like online shopping then and prefer it to going shopping, that’s the kind of gain you get.
It was worse because you could generally get what you wanted in one shop. The choice was better. If video stores had broken into multiple different brands selling their own content and you had to pay a monthly fee to get in to any of them, therefore a lot of money to get into all of them, then it would be a comparison.
I’ve often mused to my wife (a museum curator) that the slow demise of museum popularity (especially in traditional portraits) is due to the fact that images are no longer rare. The idea of “semantic apocalypse” now accelerated by AI and exemplified by “ghiblification” feels palpable and an unavoidable consequence of (in the words of Kevin Kelly) “what technology wants”. As certain experiences become prevalent and less precious, certain other experiences become more precious because their scarcity remains in place. I'm thinking of the return to eating in restaurants after a year+ of not doing so during covid lockdown, or my recent experience of a live concert (something exceedingly rare for me with two young kids at home). In the future, will voluntary forbearance be the path to preserving that sense of wonder and enjoyment? Or maybe it will simply be a function of noticing and appreciating those precious moments, and thanking the source of those moments, that can keep the apocalypse at bay.
Thank you for sharing these :) yes, I know art appreciation isn't dead, but this also sort of proves my point. Witnessing images or art is no longer rare; witnessing art restoration remains extremely rare (and is therefor interesting).
The skill is amazing; something comes in looking like Humpty Dumpty after all the king's horses and all the king's men had a go at it, and both of them manage to make it come back together and look like it should.
The tales of "someone who had no idea what they were doing decided to glue this painting to a piece of plywood with polyurethane adhesive and now I have to undo all that" alone are worth the watch! 😁
I'm in a strange place for this, because I've never liked anime art. My adult life pretty much overlaps the anime fad, and anime art has always struck me as cartoonish and trite.
The role of technology is complicated, though. The phonograph destroyed the wonder of haring a fine voice sing ... but artificial amplification created the rock concert, and the sales of phonograph records created the business of the star rock band. Indeed, I've been hearing the same songs in the background music for over 50 years and somehow they have "value" that hasn't been destroyed.
On the personal level the semantic apocalypse is nihilism. It's already true that nothing has meaning, everything is just physical stuff, you die and it's over ... is one perspective.
From another perspective you don't know anything, every moment is indescribable wonder or just perfection.
It also describes the duality of desire. When you fulfill it, it's gone. "The drives goal - to reach its object - is 'false', it masks its 'true' aim, which is to reproduce its own circular movement by way of repeatedly missing its object." (Zizek)
The meaning itself arises only with the desire. We can have a horizontal relationship where we try to fulfill the desire e.g. view the beautiful sunset. But then what? What if instead we increase the desire without fulfilling it? We will suffer, the tension increases.
This is where enlightenment comes in. We can see both at the same time perfectly matching each other. Someone dies and we grieve because we love them. It's perfect. If we wanted not to grieve we would also have to stop loving. If we stopped rejecting death we would also stop living. Everything arises together. Me and not me. The problem is that normally we only see one side. The split between observer and observed. Here and there. This can be resolved.
Without enlightenment we can open up to our desire but it also increases our suffering. When the tension is gone or reduced we can open up more and more. Or everything just disappears.
The cosmic joke is not that we want our suffering it's that we are our suffering. Our whole lives we thought we were trying to get from one side to the other when we were already there on both sides (hint: Otherwise how could we know about the other side).
However, the desire also arises together with it's fulfillment in every moment. Dukkha get's replaced with niceness. When we clearly try to look at suffering, self, permanence both arise together. This is what happens when you drink the infinite pool of sorrow or as Rumi describes it (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/109002-love-dogs-one-night-a-man-was-crying-allah-allah)
"Why did you stop praising?"
"Because I've never heard anything back."
"This longing you express is the return message."
"The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.”
Or Ingram:
This is sort of like a dog chasing its tail. Pain and pleasure, suffering and satisfaction
always seem to be “over there”. Thus, when pleasant sensations arise, there is a constant, com-
passionate, deluded attempt to get over there, to the other side of the imagined split. This is
fundamental attraction. You would think that we would just stop imagining there is a split, but
somehow that is not what happens. We keep perpetuating the illusory sense of a split even as
we try to bridge it, and so we suffer.
When unpleasant sensations arise, there is an attempt to get away from “there” (or even
“here”), a mental pressure that attempts to widen the imagined split. This will never work,
because the split doesn’t exist, but the way we hold our minds as we try to get away from that
side is painful, and this is fundamental aversion.
When boring or apparently uninteresting sensations arise, there is the attempt to tune out
altogether and forget the whole thing, to try to pretend that the sensations on the other side of
the imagined split are not there. This is fundamental ignorance and it perpetuates the process,
as it is by ignoring aspects of our sensate reality that the illusion of a split is created in the
first place.
Rob Burbeas talks on Wisdom and desire, Eros and the Immaginal or the later parts of "Seeing that frees" are interesting here I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9oCV7GgQr0
I liked the essay, but I still fear the semantic apocalypse.
As AI continues to rise, I've realised I only find meaning in things because humans did them. Harry Clarke windows, Paul Simon songs and Git are all beautiful to me because they are achievements of human minds and hearts.
I can try to appreciate an AI creation via the humans that built the AI. But it feels like meaning is getting more and more distant, until I can barely make it out at all.
I agree with this piece, and I can tell you that lots of Christians enjoy our lives the way Chesterton recommends. God said of His creation that it is good; if you can only enjoy the parts of it that present themselves to you as unique, you're not aligned with the good, you're just aligned with the interesting.
Not all of us have this skill, for sure. But, as a group, for instance, we have not yet gotten bored of A Mighty Fortress, which is a song Martin Luther wrote in 1529. I think singing the same song for 500ish years demonstrates something.
I'll never become inured to beautiful sunsets. Every beautiful sunset is new and different from all beautiful sunsets that have gone before. However, there are boring and sucky sunsets.
The reason I personally worry about the semantic apocalypse is because (so-called) AI is all about style, not substance. "My Neighbour Totoro" is such a wonderful movie because it weaves together the themes of life and death and wonder into a single narrative. The individual scenes within the movie work so well because someone (presumably Miyazaki) put a lot of thought into composition and motion within each scene, and tuned them to convey the emotion he sought.
But those aspects of the movie are a little subtle; only the art style is immediately noticeable. So when you ask the AI to "ghiblify" your photo, it faithfully reproduces the style. Now you have a billion images that all look "ghiblified", to the point where your brain mushes them all together into a single mess, thus blocking you from ever going beneath the surface to appreciate a creatively crafted work such as "Totoro" -- because your brain just filters it out as "background noise" or "AI fad of the day". And, sometime soon, this will happen to *all* creative works.
Chesterton is saying that even the most civilized pleasures, those of hallucination and self-harm, ultimately fail to hold any interest; even though their main claim on pleasure is to at least be more interesting than reality / life. Interestingness itself loses its interest.
I think Chesterton is recalling Baudelaire's Spleen, section 3.
I used to wonder if I was fool for becoming a novelist at the dawn of AI, when novels will lose their novelty, but now I wonder if y'all are fools for NOT chasing the dream, if a post-scarcity paradise is on its way anyway
no, scott if anything your ghibli pic is less worthwhile than the original picture its based on. that pic takes both the reality of your family and the reality of ghibli work and empties both of special meaning into a shapeless mess. its not ghibli because ghibli is not just the way he renders people. its closer to lo-fi girl, the patron saint of disposable chill music that was popular years back on youtube.
ai art reduces art to vibes by eliminating or softening the reality behind it. and vibes are worthless...when you remember your family gathering you remember events or stories, not just vibes. it becomes disposable content not precious memories.
I think seeking meaning in consumed experiences is a typically 20th century thing in the Brave New World mode (be a consumer, be a hedonist in the sense of living for experiences). It's a sort of "adolescent" or "childlike" thing. Adult meaning coming more from things like "what burdens do you bear?", "whose life do you enable?", or "what, or who, do you stay true to?" Our current consumerist, hedonistic culture may transition to a more "adult" one (although if it does, young people will always have their childhood and adolescence).
I suppose technology can take away our meaning as producers (take our need to work away) and take away the meaning of the objects we take in as consumers (cheapen it by mass production). What then? Technology can't take away your moral self, whether you dared what you should have dared (or what you know you would have dared in a world which gives you no outlet for daring), or mourned what you should have mourned. I think the adult life is still possible in a world that doesn't outwardly call for it, if for no other reason than you can mourn the loss of calls for outward responsibility.
Reference: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin, 1935. Concerning the loss of uniqueness, authenticity, and intention in art.
The backstory matters: Outsider artist James Hampton toiled in obscurity his whole life. He built his "heavenly thrones" for religious reasons. Regardless of the artistic result, and the soundness of his reasoning, his motives were pure. I envy him that.
The backstory doesn't matter: "For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect." (Matthew 24:24). In other words, "The false prophet cured my leprosy, but not for any cosmologically deep reason, so I'm not deceived."
Personal observation: For a hundred years, the movie business has been pursuing special effects technologies that do justice to the imaginative stories they are telling. Now, AI has mastered visual effects. But after a year of visual wonders beyond imagination, I'm sick of it. "A bunch of show-stoppers waiting for a show to stop."
Apropos of nothing: "All I want is a chance to prove to myself that a thousand one-night-stands cannot equal one passionate love affair."
Technology will provide the solution to what technology threatens. We will eventually have the technology to hack the neural reward pathways, and reprogram them so that every subsequent pleasure is as intensely felt as the first. The hedonic treadmill is biologically contingent, not a hard law of consciousness or the universe. When the time comes, we will never bore or tire of the universe's pleasures again.
Why would it be a sunset, why not orchestrate my brain to enjoy the smell of vomit all day.
Because there’s nothing human about that. There’s no gain without pain, no real human enjoyment without effort. Which is why i don’t actually enjoy a sunset as much as a the view from the mountain I climb every few weeks, and yet I barely look out of a plane window despite flying above the clouds. One view is earned, the other is not.
If we could engineer the “neural reward pathways” to enjoy everything we might as wallow in our bedrooms lying in literal shit and be happy about it, a whole society living like that would make the world a universal opium den.
Have you seen a Klein in person? I think you might be surprised by how different it is to behold in person from seeing an image on your monitor. It's so saturated and blue it literally hurts my eyes a little to look at one.
This is nowhere near limited to Klein. Many, if not most, paintings contain pigments that are far outside the sRGB gamut. Some endure reduction better than others do. The most dramatic case in my personal experience is "Cup of Death": https://ids.si.edu/ids/download?id=SAAM-1912.3.3_1.jpg. Viewed at that link you'll likely find it bland but if you see it in person at the Smithsonian it's incredibly striking.
I know there's people who appreciate art based on the art ("this painting is really pretty") vs people who appreciate it based on the artist ("this blue canvas is meaningful because it is by KLEIN").
The second kind of person is presumably responsible for a blue canvas by Klein being more expensive than one I could paint myself.
The second kind can also be really annoying when they call you problematic because you say you like/dislike the work of an artist with the wrong/right politics. Or you believe that you can even get any emotional experience for art or find a melody catchy before checking the artist's views on LGBT+ issues. As far as I can tell they geniunely experience art this way, they're not just saying it to demonstrate conformance. I even believe them when they say they can appreciate art more deeply when they experience it in its proper context.
(In the limit I agree with them, if something is introduced in history class as "This is the anthem of the Hitler Youth" that will impact your judgement. Then again, until a few years ago I would have said the Soviets/Russians came pretty close to the Platonic ideal of a national anthem.)
But the second kind could also be immune to the semantic apocalypse? Sure you can Ghiblify anything, but it's not real art until it's an authenticated work of Miyazaki. An AI painting in the style of Picasso will never sell for as much as a real one.
That means the apocalypse will mainly hit Philistines and Barbarians like me. But we can still cheat with shrooms.
Klein had no background in chemistry and did not "come up with a new synthetic ultramarine". All he did was mix some existing paints and resins together according to the advice of a friend who ran a paint store. His monochromatic works are just as silly as they sound. On the other hand, Gmelin's work was genuinely innovative and produced an ultramarine that was much brighter and purer than anything that could be produced from Lapis. Gmelin absolutely *should* have painted a canvas monochrome blue and hung it in an exhibition, because he'd have been showing people a color far outside the range of any that had ever been seen before!
> Yes, we as a culture are post- some semantic apocalypse where listening to the great symphonies of the past has become so easy that we never do it.
I don't think this is true. As things become cheaper we do more of them. (Also, don't focus on Just classical music. As the total number of songs goes up, listen time is more widely spread)
Yes people of the past would have had to go to great lengths to hear this concert or see that painting, and so, for the vast majority of people, they didn't.
Only a small number of rich and music obsessed people would bother to go all the way to Italy.
Nowadays these people go see concerts in person, or buy the latest gold plated audio equipment for perfect quality, or just listen to the song 200 times before they get bored of it.
Also, "I went all the way to Italy to hear a concert, it was meh" isn't nearly as good a story as "it was AMAZING". The sunk cost fallacy might apply here. And people just not wanting to be rude.
> Also, "I went all the way to Italy to hear a concert, it was meh" isn't nearly as good a story as "it was AMAZING". The sunk cost fallacy might apply here. And people just not wanting to be rude.
On the other hand I don’t think people went to Italy on the great tour to listen to a mediocre version of anything. It was probably great.
As I read this, I kept waiting for you (or Erik, who both have young kids) to note that the wonder, the anti-semantic collapse is having and raising children. You constantly see the firsts that they experience and the Holy Host that accompanies a realization like numbers going to infinity.
I get this, but I keep being distracted by the fact that I'm pretty sure "green wine" is absinthe (the stereotypical drink of decadent poets) and "crimson seas" are of blood. It's about people who aren't just sick of healthy pleasures, but have reached the stage of trying out all the unhealthy pleasures looking for joy and then gotten bored with them, too.
Great piece. Still I worry what mass-producing exceptional things at no cost does to the dignity of average people, who through their best and most genuine efforts can only create crap in comparison. And I think this leads to a backlash against exceptionalism and a desire to eliminate or handicap it, which I think can be seen happening under the surface of movements like populism.
"And I thought of computer monitors. If you wanted to see Lippi’s Madonna and Child when it was first painted in 1490, you would have to go to Florence and convince Lorenzo de Medici to let you in his house. Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia - something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi."
I don't think this is true. I've seen the Mona Lisa many times on computer screens, tv screens, books, posters, etc. But when I was in France, I went to the Louvre and, like everyone else, I saw the Mona Lisa there. And it was still special.
Or for Caruso, how many people went to Taylor Swift's concert? Her music is essentially free. That didn't stop millions of people of going to see her.
I’m really surprised that no one has yet mentioned Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Benjamin argues that original works of art have an irreproducible aura, and that they are diminished by reproduction. A thousand perfect copies of Versailles diminish Versailles itself. Seems relevant to the discussion of Studio Ghibli.
> I sometimes imagine Heaven as a place of green wine, crimson seas, and golden mountains. Everyone goes there, good and bad alike. And if you still have enough innocence in your soul to enjoy things, then great, you’re in Heaven and presumably you have a good time. And if instead you’re one of those people who constitutionally hates everything, then you spend eternity writing thinkpieces with titles like “Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About Golden Mountains?” or “Do The Wrong Type Of People Like Crimson Seas Too Much?”, and God and the Devil both agree that this counts as sufficient punishment.
It is said in the name of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, the Kotzker Rebbe, who was known as 'the Seraph of Kotzk': "The World to Come is naught but a shtender and a page of Gemara; for the righteous, it is heaven, for the wicked, it is hell"
Mwahaha I am extremely wicked according to halacha (chayav mita on several counts) but I love learnin'. Best of both worlds!
That said, I feel like even the most turbotsadik talmid gigachacham would probably find it less than heavenly: after a few days, you'd want food or rest, or at least coffee.
> If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue. Keep watching sunsets until each one becomes as beautiful as the first.
I think I've (accidentally) figured out how to do this for Billy Joel's "All You Wanna Do Is Dance," but nothing else so far. I dunno, seems real enough!
I definitely find that there's a mental posture to appreciating the thousandth sunset that's entirely achievable, though it takes a little work. It's difficult to decide to stop being bored of a videogame if I'm getting tired after playing for four hours, but it's easy to look at a tree, or a piece of scrap metal, or a sunset, and make a conscious decision to appreciate the endless beauty of nature and artifice. There are things that are easier to appreciate and things that I can't appreciate, but seeing transcendent beauty in something mostly feels like a choice.
Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917: 'This is how life becomes nothing and disappears. Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war…And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the ‘enstrangement’of things' (from 'Art as Device'). Carlo Ginzburg considered that Shklovsky and his group were inspired by Tolstoy, who in turn had been inspired by Marcus Aurelius's practice of 'stripping-back' complex phenomena into their elements. Whether or not that's the case, the ancient Stoics certainly had as a goal to 'see things as if for the first time' (tanquam spectator novus, Seneca Letter 64.6).
Perhaps it wasn't the brightness of the blue itself that shocked the peasants (after all, unlike purple, blue is a common color—it's in eyes, the sky, water, wildflowers, etc.) but rather the narrative around it... the seeing of the embodiment of something they had so long heard about—Mary and her coat.
In other words, the narrative of it.
And I think that we very much still have this in the modern world. Despite having our favorite musicians' songs trapped in a box in our pocket, it is still a semi-religious experience to see an artist in concert—to see the embodiment of a narrative. In fact, I highly doubt the emotion upon hearing Mozart's concertos has anything on the Eras Tour. Seeing a pretty building is perhaps mundane (we see them on our phones, and McMansions dot every suburban town), that is until you read about the family that lived there and imagine their ghosts around you. It is not the novelty of the place but the realization of a fantasy that sparks our fancy.
I can't help but recall the advent of the novel—there was a similar frenzy about how this would dull the experiences of the real world—essentially a fear of old-timey hikikomoris in their bedroom reading all day, numb to the experiences of the world.
But in fact, the opposite occurred... there was a surge in romanticism—Bronte and William James and Byron and Shelley. Then people had the opposite worry: that young people were too romantic... too vivacious and too appreciative of nature. Think the semi-wild gardens of the 1800s as opposed to the neatly trimmed hedges and symmetry of the prior century.
A modern example would be anime itself. Its aesthetics are a component of the story—part of the narrative. One could hypothesize that creating this prettier version of the world would dull the senses to the more mundane reality, but that is far from the case. People often do anime tourism where they visit the sites of these anime and use the story as a jumping-off point to engage with the real world (not Ghibli per se, since I think it uses fictional places, but for example Suzume).
And because it is not the things themselves but the narrative around them that inspires wonder, I don't see this going away or being dulled by excess.
_________
That said, I think there is something to be said about how the modern world has fractured these narratives.
Now it is so easy to find an "aesthetic" (which is essentially just a visual narrative) that people are undecided about which of these narratives are important. You mentioned stories of people crying when reading Jerusalem, and you attribute this to the difficulty of getting there. I disagree.
I have two friends who actually did a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from Munich (yes, they are strange people... yes, they did walk through war zones) and neither cried when seeing Jerusalem. It was fun, but not a holy experience. On the other hand, I have heard plenty of stories from Orthodox Jews who flew to Jerusalem and did break down in tears. It was the narrative that mattered to them—the stories they told themselves, not a barrier.
I think so much of what people in this community tell ourselves is a narrative of progress—where bigger and better and more advanced things are inherently important to us. To followers of this narrative, yes, speaking to an AI will be important, and by this point, the light bulb has gotten a little old. But there are other narratives too.
I often think about how Jane Austen and Mary Shelley were contemporaries. One was talking about society and the other science. In the modern day, I suspect Shelley would be more than interested in AI, while Austen less so. If teleported into the modern day, Shelley probably would be less excited by electricity, but Austen would probably be equally interested in passive-aggressive social climbers.
Most things humans find wonder in are remarkably constant. This community is perhaps the outlier.
I enjoyed this. A slightly related question - I have read bits of Chesterton here and there and read Heretics as an ebook. I’d like to read more but prefer paper books. Most of the stuff I see online of his collected essays and the like seems to be dubious quality editions that are basically printed ebooks. Anyone have any recommendations for good editions of his works?
Yes, the modern revival of Chesterton has produced a lot of those dubious editions. My own Chesterton shelf is mostly old editions each picked up serendipitously second hand, with remembered experience attached to each purchase: I feel that’s a very Chestertonian way of acquiring them.
If you want to go semantic apocalypse and just search for things to buy easily on the internet, my favourite physical Chesterton volume is a Library of Classics ‘Selected Essays’ from the 1950s: good selection of content and a nice object. There were also some Penguin Chesterton editions. Both widely available. My second favourite is the Bodley Head edition of ‘Heretics’ which is slightly rarer but not excessively so. Tauchnitz published a lot of his in the 1930s and they are nice books with a history: cheap paperbacks but needing to be hand cut, published for the continental market. I have ‘What’s Wrong With the World’ (maybe my favourite CKC) but they are a bit trickier to find (depends what country you are in I suppose).
Of modern editions I’ve heard good things about Everyman Classics (not the same as the ‘Library of Classics’) but haven’t handled one myself.
Not quite the same, but I'm reminded of a bit from The Count of Monte Cristo where the Count tricks his friend into thinking that his love is dead and his fortunes are ruined, then gives the friend poison so they can commit suicide. A few hours later the friend wakes up to discover the poison was a sleeping pill, his love is alive and well and right there to meet him, and the Count has left him a fortune. There's a letter from the Count explaining that he thinks humans can only appreciate things in relative terms, so only someone who has felt the deepest depths of despair can experience the highest heights of joy.
I notice that no one seems to try this in real life.
I mostly think the reason no one does this is that people only take ideas like this seriously in far mode, and in near mode people continue to believe that actually good things are good and bad things are bad and you should try to avoid bad things.
In fact, if I try to vividly imagine actually going through this, I mostly don't predict it would work. I'm sure I'd be incredibly relieved for, like, an hour. After that I mostly imagine myself being angry about it.
But maybe there's a giant global conspiracy of people who do this to their friends, you only get inducted into the conspiracy after you've had your turn (so you won't suspect while it's happening), and no one's gotten around to me yet.
Maybe we should hide modern technology from children. Every year on your birthday, we reveal another amazing breakthrough that enables new vistas of wonder.
This is a really good April Fool's Day post. Well done. This level of sophistication, commitment, and skill is going to fool a lot of people into taking it a face value.
What a wonderful post. Thank you again. As another poster said, having young children can bring the freshness back in and push the apocalypse back another generation. But there's also the epicure's defense against a glut of stimuli. Even if technology makes former riches cheap as dirt, there's always subtleties to be explored day by day. You don't have to be able to afford $100 bottles of wine to compare subtle differences between wines. For less money than that, you can compare subtle differences in renditions of the Jupiter symphony as played by Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra vs. MacKerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. For less money than that, you can tease out the many flavors you can evoke from sourdough bread made week after week as you keep your starter alive. And for no money at all...
I'm lucky enough to live near the coast in Spain and get to bike with my son to school at dawn. Sometimes the sunrise after a storm does have the look of green wine. Sometimes it's like a slice of tangerine on glacial ice. I've seen sunrise as vivid pink as Night's afterglow and another time like a pink silhouette of light, as if Night had held the sun up to the webbing of its hand like one might a flashlight. I've seen orange purple that fills all my field of vision, but when I turn around the pale gray of clouds and sky merged imperceptibly, as if God had used up all the color on just one side and the rest of the world was waiting to be painted until God fetched some more pots.
Granted, I've also seen plenty of dishrag sunrises—with no clouds for texture or color effects, just a gradual lightening through lighter and lighter grays. But after one storm, white hung in the air so thick the sun inside it was like a candle in a votive above an ocean, which seemed like it was trying to claw its way up the land. If you turn from the "new" to the "subtly different" as your criterion for enjoyment.
My idea of a metaphor for AI Art consumption isn't synthetic ultramarine, it's industrial food science. Modern agriculture and chemistry made possible an incredible variety of fast food, snacks and candy that would dazzle the kings of yore, flavors and textures stimulating beyond belief, all available to the poorest people in society. And nevertheless, junk food made the world decidedly worse.
With all due respect to the innocence of youth, If I go to heaven I hope it has more to offer than an endless birthday party where I can forever eat all the pizza and ice cream I want without getting sick.
> If I go to heaven I hope it has more to offer than an endless birthday party where I can forever eat all the pizza and ice cream I want without getting sick.
Fair enough. But I hope the heaven has ice cream too.
I’m reminded, by the remarks in this essay on the satiation of the hedonic treadmill and the need to be as wondrous as a child, of the poem by the tragically neglected Irish poet Kavanagh, bright to my attention by my Irish wife years ago.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use
…
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won't we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason's payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.
This is as good an explanation of the hedonic treadmill, and the need to get off it, as any.
He would be amused perhaps that the Advent darkened room is now about mid season in the two month consumerist festival of Christmas, and not a time to fast before it. Maybe he’s right and we need to get off the hedonic treadmill, to fast or leave the phones down, and not individually but as a society.
Maybe giving everyone the ability to generate masterpieces in one click is not that big of a gain. Supposedly it's opening unlimited creativity for everyone etc etc but is it worth it really? Past the initial hype what's the long term real gain for the 95% of the population that was never interested in the first place. Because clearly the other 5% who took pleasure and meaning pursuing these skills have had their lives mostly ruined (I have several close friends in these 5%)
Also, what's the end game? Maybe we started with potato soup, then Ghibli movies were chocolate, now we just invented Coke. Are we really looking forward to Fentanyl?
Ghibli movies etc were good because in addition to being delicious like chocolate, they were also inspiring and made us look up to all that talent, hard work etc etc.
This feels more like wireheading but we have no one to admire for all the Infinite fractal beauty we're experiencing so we're left praising the machine lords who designed the circuits and cables.
What proportion of Muslims in the world actually make it to Mecca? How much anxiety is caused by poor Muslims who can’t afford the trip worrying they will never go to paradise? Without air travel, hadj would be more meaningful to the handful of pilgrims who make it there, but I suspect that would be a net utility loss.
I do think the Muslims have found an interesting middle ground in that Mecca is barred to non-Muslims and its pilgrimage is formalized, so it's still special (although I hear it's terrible because it's crowded and boiling during pilgrimage season)
Mostly orthogonal to the point of the essay, but here's a positive infohazard (infoblessing?): Virtually all of the GPT-4o generations are strongly biased to include this color: https://i.imgur.com/JcImmeY.png
I saw this pointed out on discord, and now it's referred to as "slop color". Once you are aware of this, the treadmill goes backwards a bit, since it makes GPT-4o images feel very repetitive, in a way real images aren't. In fact, it may have led to a near-term increase in my appreciation of the use of color in real animation, in the same way reading bland LLM text all over the internet makes me appreciate good human writers even more.
If you're a marginal Caruso listener in 1910, you wouldn't have been the kind of guy to go to Naples for him in 1890, you'd have just stayed home. Even today, some people go to concerts when they can listen to all the songs in the comfort of their own home (and probably hear them better, too). Hardcore fans even follow artists from city to city when they go on tour.
Of course average meaningfulness goes down when less interested people start coming in. But that doesn't say anything about what happens to the already-present high-interest people.
There are many experiences just 25-30 years ago which are basically impossible to replicate today. In the age of internet, social media and smart phones, subculture is impossible, and a subculture is the only possible way to experience:
Punk Rock
Rave Music
Burning Man style festivals
Probably goth/hip hop etc
It used to be impossible to discover lots of music without physically going to an independently-owned music store, and just listening to CDs. Shows could only be found by going to these stores and picking up flyers, or knowing people who did. When you went, you had no idea what to expect, and no way to find out. When you were there, you often heard music you would never hear again, with no way to find out what it was. No one took pictures or video. Nobody went so they could post about it on Instagram. Nobody could look at their phone and join the wider world if they got bored: they and their focus was stuck inside the venue. The entire relationship to the event and the music was different and impossible to replicate today.
I find it sad that kids and young adults can't experience that sense of excitement, danger, freedom and novelty.
Kind of agree. But “only possible” seems a bit strong. I can still put on Two Bad Mice in my car, Spotify by way of Bluetooth, and “experience” it in a way that feels pretty satisfactory (although sure, not a patch on hearing it for the first time under an abandoned railway arch somewhere off the M25…)
Turning a corner, he found himself in Pump Street, opposite the four shops which Adam Wayne had studied twenty years before. He entered idly the shop of Mr. Mead, the grocer. Mr. Mead was somewhat older, like the rest of the world, and his red beard, which he now wore with a moustache, and long and full, was partly blanched and discoloured. He was dressed in a long and richly embroidered robe of blue, brown, and crimson, interwoven with an Eastern complexity of pattern, and covered with obscure symbols and pictures, representing his wares passing from hand to hand and from nation to nation. Round his neck was the chain with the Blue Argosy cut in turquoise, which he wore as Grand Master of the Grocers. The whole shop had the sombre and sumptuous look of its owner. The wares were displayed as prominently as in the old days, but they were now blended and arranged with a sense of tint and grouping, too often neglected by the dim grocers of those forgotten days. The wares were shown plainly, but shown not so much as an old grocer would have shown his stock, but rather as an educated virtuoso would have shown his treasures. The tea was stored in great blue and green vases, inscribed with the nine indispensable sayings of the wise men of China. Other vases of a confused orange and purple, less rigid and dominant, more humble and dreamy, stored symbolically the tea of India. A row of caskets of a simple silvery metal contained tinned meats. Each was wrought with some rude but rhythmic form, as a shell, a horn, a fish, or an apple, to indicate what material had been canned in it.
"Your Majesty," said Mr. Mead, sweeping an Oriental reverence. "This is an honour to me, but yet more an honour to the city."
Auberon took off his hat.
"Mr. Mead," he said, "Notting Hill, whether in giving or taking, can deal in nothing but honour. Do you happen to sell liquorice?"
"Liquorice, sire," said Mr. Mead, "is not the least important of our benefits out of the dark heart of Arabia."
And going reverently towards a green and silver canister, made in the form of an Arabian mosque, he proceeded to serve his customer.
"I was just thinking, Mr. Mead," said the King, reflectively, "I don't know why I should think about it just now, but I was just thinking of twenty years ago. Do you remember the times before the war?"
The grocer, having wrapped up the liquorice sticks in a piece of paper (inscribed with some appropriate sentiment), lifted his large grey eyes dreamily, and looked at the darkening sky outside.
"Oh yes, your Majesty," he said. "I remember these streets before the Lord Provost began to rule us. I can't remember how we felt very well. All the great songs and the fighting change one so; and I don't think we can really estimate all we owe to the Provost; but I can remember his coming into this very shop twenty-two years ago, and I remember the things he said. The singular thing is that, as far as I remember, I thought the things he said odd at that time. Now it's the things that I said, as far as I can recall them, that seem to me odd—as odd as a madman's antics."
"Ah!" said the King; and looked at him with an unfathomable quietness.
"I thought nothing of being a grocer then," he said. "Isn't that odd enough for anybody? I thought nothing of all the wonderful places that my goods come from, and wonderful ways that they are made. I did not know that I was for all practical purposes a king with slaves spearing fishes near the secret pool, and gathering fruits in the islands under the world. My mind was a blank on the thing. I was as mad as a hatter."
The pushback against declaring repetitive nice things mediocre is already a thing even in modern culture. See for example the account insta_repeat pointing out everyone taking pictures of the moon: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-7e23PnSoU/
Replies there are full of statements like "I disagree with this one. She's always beautiful." and "Out of all of earths moons they choose this one..smdh" and "I think you missed this one. Yeah, the Moon is always the same body. That’s not the point. The point is, every time I shoot the Moon, I’M different. It’s a progression."
“Green wine” in eg Portuguese refers to a type of white wine meant to be consumed very soon after fermentation - “new wine” - which is also a trope in Christian language (somewhere in the Gospels, I believe, Jesus refers to something - maybe saved souls? - as the “new wine of the kingdom of God” or suchlike). “Crimson seas” meanwhile sounds like a backhanded reference to Homer’s “wine-dark sea”.
I'm not sure about the exact phrasing "open word", but I interpreted this as like an Emperor's New Clothes scenario, when someone courageously speaks out against falsehood or injustice.
Speaking openly and honestly, without secrecy or deceit, because the brave man is truthful and will not fear consequences for being truthful (that is, he won't stay silent or speak equivocally or lie to avoid trouble for fear of loss or harm).
Think of it as the opposite of what Gríma Wormtongue and Saruman do with fine words that sound sweet and advice that appeals to your own desires, but is manipulating you all along to do what they wish 😀
I think you’re giving too much credit to the mythicised past significance of pre- semiotic collapse art. Yes, hearing Enrico Caruso in person might be a life highlight in 1890, but it’d be an even greater life highlight to see The Great Train Robbery (1903) or Intolerance (1915). To a person in 1890 (even a highly educated one), these early films would have seemed like impossibilities, likely the greatest achievements in human creativity ever. Something like a music video from the year 2000 would seem incomprehensibly complex, like an emanation from 1000 years in the future rather than 100. But we take this unprecedented aesthetic revolution for granted, and demean contemporary aesthetics in video games, music videos, VR etc as low and cheap, even though they are orders of magnitude more formally complex and required far more cumulative effort than basically any art produced pre- motion pictures (excluding the greatest feats of architecture).
If we actually manage to make aligned superintelligent AGI, as you seem to suggest, I really don't think this will be much of an issue. Superintelligences are very good at solving problems. As problems go, this one doesn't sound that hard, compared to eating the sun or making a universe full of light and love. If it can solve those problems, why can't it just solve this one? For example, an easy basic fix might be to just create so much superhumanly good art that nobody ever runs out of wondrous art to consume and be amazed at within 10^30+ years.
A few things, and they have to do with dopamine, and novelty, and where "pleasure" actually comes from.
Dopamine exhaustion. A lot is said today about social media etc: that the constant triggering of our dopamine system isn't actually doing us any good. Not in social media. And not in art either. If everything constantly feels great, then nothing is.
Then there is novelty. Novelty is and was a large part of why we consider art "great art". No Rembrandt forgery or Rembrandt print gets the meaning and kudos as the first Rembrandt, that was an innovative piece of art, a new way of seeing things. There was a 20th C pamphlet that contemplated this issue, called "Art in the age of mass production". Yes, multiplication does not get you the same value as originality, though it does have non zero value.
Generative vs duplicative. The issue gets amplified when instead of just duplicating previous art, we now have AI being able to generate endless derivative art.
Then there is the issue with the origin of the dopamine effects. A large part of the pleasure in something - anything - comes from the pursuit, not from attainment. This is where much of the dopamine effect comes from. The mountaintop truly feels more meaningful if you had to climb up there and didn't take the cable car.
Does it matter? Well. Something similar to the loss of meaning with multiplication, derivative works, and lack of novelty in general, goes on as you age. The older I get, the les meaning things seem to have. Scott Sumner also wrote at length about this. Having seen a lot of things before, makes them genuinely less interesting it seems.
Camus' Sisyphus. There is no higher happiness than constant pursuit. There is nothing more demoralizing than constantly achieving things with no effort at all. Somehow humans are wired to strive, and some of the most addictive drugs such as methamphetamines simply prime people to find everything interesting ... and to strive.
So conclusion: we need less and less technology that produces things. We need more and more technology that makes us want to strive. Video games are an imperfect example of this. But something in that direction. As Einstein probably never said, computers are useless as they can only give you answers. What I want in my life is new questions that make me want to strive.
You could have referenced Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He argued similar to you that an original artform loses its aura when made more accessible and easier to reproduce, and that was in the 1930s! Is AI a mere continuation of the mechanization of art or is it more?
Every once in a while it strikes me just how absurdly rich the modern era is compared to everything in the past. I've got a shelfful of movies and a hard drive's worth of videogames, and meanwhile the past didn't have the color blue.
Did you have this idea (including supporting facts like the blue coat) stored up in your head, waiting for the right moment (Ghibli Day/Hoel post)? Or did you think of it after reading his post?
I'm pretty sure you could always send your picture to some person on Upwork who would draw it in the style of Ghibli or any other. That would cost 10$ or so. It's quicker with AI now, but I don't see much difference between free and 10$ for that matter.
There is a common refrain between knitters (and I suppose, many other crafters, although knitting is the one I'm most familiar with). People find out how long making a sweater takes (order of 30 hours if it's not too complicated, going up to 100 depending on how difficult you want to make your life), how much the yarn costs (order of $150 for basic materials) and ask "why would you do this when you can get the same sweater for $30 at Target?"
And I actually think that the answer is the same. Because when you make a sweater it WON'T be the same as the one at Target (which probably isn't wool anyway). Even if you took a sweater at Target and recreated it PRECISELY it wouldn't be the same sweater. Because when you wear it (or when whoever you give it to wears it) they carry the time you spent, and the love you put in, and the thought you put into it. It's on their body, surrounding them, and if they pay attention it makes their life better.
It's the same thing that makes hot chocolate that your mother makes taste better than the one you make yourself.
Yeah, without being *as much* like this as Blake apparently was, I would describe myself as having that sort of experience. Every day with tolerable weather I take a walk in my garden, or, if on holiday, the nearest available park — and I'll always find something to fill me with joy, quite often "a bird" or "a blade of grass that's lit in an interesting way". Walking around with a camera is helpful to cultivate that skill, I find. Look for things that are worth taking pictures of; you'll train yourself to find them.
I feel like there's a tension between this and the argument about people who only care about people close to them.
Morality is inspired by a few core instincts. We care about our own experiences, about feeling pleasure and pain, and we care about others' experiences.
Our instinct to care about other people is biased. It's stronger towards certain people than others. We care more about people close by than further away, more about people we can see in more detail than less. But if you try to code up a moral system to do this, it's a mess. The biases don't stand up to reflection well, and (so argues the utilitarian), one should peel back the heuristic mess and get at the root, which is that we should care for others as we care for ourselves.
Ok, how do we care for ourselves? Well, we have a mess of instincts, pleasure and pain from all sorts of things. So you start there, but you notice that there are some biases. You enjoy things like art less when you experience them a second time, still less when you experience them the thousandth time. Food mostly works this way too, but you can get hungry again with time, while this doesn't really happen with art. Your enjoyment of art, then, is something that doesn't stand up well to reflection.
In that case, why isn't the conclusion that we should ignore pleasures like that from the beginning? Sure, they're nice the first time, but there's nothing external that changes the second time or the thousandth time. You just have had more time to reflect, which in any other context would let you expect to be closer to the truth. Maybe anything that people can saturate on in this way isn't actually morally relevant, even in the first experience, but just a heuristic mess that should be peeled back to get to a more rational sense of what is valuable to ourselves?
Just to be clear - the William Blake example isn't about being able to accept wonders simply, divorcing them from context and cultural load, right? Because when someone's reaction to a sunrise is "amazing, it reminds me of my religion!", it's a strong example of the opposite - wonder doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Of the things I like with no shame, very few seem like pure injections of dopamine. Almost everything else is due to the tangled web of associations it's coupled to. I like sunsets because I like astronomy (haven't watched a sunrise in years; I don't stay up this late), and also because each sunset reminds me of enjoying previous sunsets. I like music that instills into me vivid imagery; often, but not exclusively, the first things I associate it with, which then carry over to future listens.
The same thing goes to the stuff I dislike. I can't stand Gipsy Kings because when my dad got his first car and in it his first CD player, he played on repeat one of his first few CDs, a Gipsy Kings compilation. Through no fault of their own, the Reyes brothers' fiery Catalan rumba and gruff, powerful voices are permanently associated in my mind with car sickness.
I was planning to watch The Boy and the Heron this week, but now I will postpone it until the Ghiblification trend dies down. Not because Ghibli is now mundane - the distinct visual artstyle is only the wrapper of the social realism and humanist spirit that permeates their work - but because I know I'll going to think about AI slop while watching it, and I don't want to associate it with nausea.
It is possible to willfully withdraw all recognition from any arbitrary object of ongoing perception - I say to "alienate" it. Obviously first see it as for the first time. But you can go much deeper by dropping more and more priors, noticing how you don't know about it so much. What it looks like from behind or from the inside, how old it is and how it is changing, where it came from, whether it's alien or divine or poisonous, what it wants, including from you. A fake, the first and/or last of its kind, an alien imposter? Allow the unfamiliar questions that come with recognition of utter ignorance. Gradually, the thing will feel more remarkable, surprising, bizarre, fascinating... for me it plateaus when it feels like a Thing From A Different Universe. This is easy; everyone I've shown this mental move to claimed they got it on the first try. It doesn't work with things with writing on them; recognition of symbols is not so easily turned off. Moving objects, such as people, will feel menacing when "alienated". Doing it to your own body triggers degrees of dissociation. Doing it to your partner during intercourse is extremely kinky.
By the way, the sigils those eldritch sorcerers on that island are carving into crystal tablets using docused light... should be considered Bind Runes, because unlike most sigils they're composed of multiple smaller symbols, each meaningful, all angular.
"It’s a softer world when you have Ghibli glasses on. But by the time I made the third picture, it was less fun. A creeping sadness set in..."
That's because you are weak! I have the power to fully appreciate my favorite experiences forever! I live in heaven, while the rest of you are in hell! Bwahahahaha....
More seriously, It's as simple as walking away from the internet (the video game, the TV, the mass produced toys...) and spending some time looking around. Eventually (it takes less time than you think) you stop being bored and attention starved, and actually start *noticing* what's going on around you. This takes time and training, but it brings rewards.
One of the tricks, counter-intuitively, is to *share more slowly*. I think a lot of people feel compelled to ceaselessly search out new experiences *so that they can share them with others*. The problem is that this turns it into a contest--who is the influencer, and who the follower? That's what really cheapens experience, not so much over-exposure itself, as knowing that all your contacts have already seen it.
Face to face communication brings a satisfaction all it's own. When you leave the phone behind and go for a walk with one other person, you not only start noticing what is going on around you, you grow closer to that person. That's the secret.
> "That's because you are weak! I have the power to fully appreciate my favorite experiences forever! I live in heaven, while the rest of you are in hell!"
"View everything [good] with innocent wonder" is sacred to me.
I also hate AI; I hate anything made by AI; I refuse to use AI for any purpose. I don't even use machine translation anymore.
Yet: Many of the pseudo-Ghibli images are undeniably beautiful. Even worse: Someone posted a sample of a translation from Homer, by GPT. In an anonymous poll against 3 other translations, without revealing that AI was involved, 50% chose the robot. Including me.
I still hate AI. If I can convince you it's not just reactive Luddism, may I offer the following theory:
Interacting with a work of art is also interacting with the creator.
Part of the wonder of art comes from thinking about what went into making it. Pondering the image of the Madonna, we are struck not just by the majestic blue of her robes: Behold the graceful detail of her face, her hair. Imagine the countless hours of practice it took to attain the skill to paint like this; the hours and hours of work it took to create the individual painting, even for a master; and the unlearnable spark of genius which brings it beyond mere craftsmanship, the ability to delve into inexplicable territories of the soul and coming back with treasure.
A human being like us - reaching into territory beyond us - made this.
Suppose AI makes a new edition of Homer, covering the fall of Troy. It is, by every aesthetic measure, equal to the Iliad and Odyssey.
But part of the wonder of Homer is that a man wrote this - a real man called this transcendent thing into being, merging craft and experience and genius. You read a lengthy simile in the Iliad comparing an army to waves of the sea, and wonder - did Homer, be he one man or many, see these sights (assuming he wasn't really blind)? Did it leave an impression in him like the setting sun, an impression that never left him, that he felt worthy of embodying in poetry? That he COULD embody in poetry, sublime poetry, which stirs readers who have little experience of the ocean, who have never seen a Bronze Age army in the field?
You could respond: Yeah, that's cool I guess. But isn't it more incredible that this new poem was made, not by man invoking the Muse, but by the Muse itself? That's the model's name - Muse. It's an inscrutable superhuman intelligence made by blasting electrons through silicon sigils crafted by wizards on a mountainous jungle island off the coast of China. In less than a second, it produced a new Iliad. In another second, it can conjure a similar poem about the Roman Civil War, the Fall of Constantinople, Iwo Jima. Invoke the Muse, and it will sing for you.
And we read the first lines: "I, the Muse, sing of the death of Caesar, the vengeance of his heir, the birth pangs of new Imperium..."
And something is missing, because instead of singing through a poet, the Muse is singing herself. It's an alien, denizen of an eldritch realm, whose mind and works are alien to us, even if based on our own. It knows nothing of what it means to be a man, yet presumes to sing of our sorrows and glories.
It's just not the same. I would rather read the Iliad a thousand times, than a thousand war-tales from the mouth of the Muse herself.
Could the answer be drugs? I mean, you (Scott) say yourself that psilocybin has been proven to restore that childlike sense of awe. Another commentator mentioned LSD and MDMA doing similar things. And those are only a few—albeit the most famous—among the many substances capable of that magic. Most appear relatively safe, even with regular use. They’re inexpensive. They don’t seem to breed heavy tolerance, and could, in theory, be used indefinitely. So instead of contemplating a ban on AI, shouldn’t those concerned about the semantic apocalypse be more inspired to legalize—even celebrate—these substances, so we can all experience the powerful, profound, holy sensation of seeing ultramarine blue on a flat, rectangular canvas for the thousandth time?
One thing that is important to note is that none of these copies is the same as the original thing. Seeing an Yves Klein painting on your computer screen very much is not the same as seeing it in person - on the computer screen, your eye receives a particular mixture of the three kinds of light from the phosphors on your screen, while in person you get the actual mix of wavelengths reflected by the pigment he invented. It’s somewhat subtle, but definitely different.
In the early days of phonographs, Edison sent out a team with a singer and a phonograph machine, and the singer would perform on stage, then the phonograph would play, and then the singer would start singing, the curtain would come down, she would keep singing, but when the curtain was up she wasn’t singing and it had switched to the phonograph and the audience couldn’t tell the difference. We moderns know that a phonograph can’t be mistaken for a voice - it’s not even as good a sound as a cassette, let alone a vinyl LP - and yet the people of the 1910s were fooled because they hadn’t learned to tell the difference.
Embracing the artisanal and noticing the difference between imitations and the real thing is one way to keep that wonder. Go to a museum and look at art rather than seeing it on a screen. Go to a great concert hall and hear a Mozart symphony. Actually look at a real sunset rather than the photograph. Watch Totoro itself rather than than the ghiblification of something.
There’s of course value to having these things on tap when you can’t get the original. But also get the original and notice what makes it different (and perhaps better).
I think a lot of this is a “how you’re wired” thing — though may be it can be learned too? I can admire at the same flowers, eat the same delicious foods, watch the same favorite movies, stare and the same sunsets over and over and over… I don’t get board of the things I find beautiful. My partner, on the other hand, cannot fathom my wonder at “ordinary thing” or the fact that I can laugh at the same jokes over and over again.
I Ghiblified three photos of my family, and was done. The charm was in the novelty, and once the novelty wore off I started noticing how GPT doesn't quite catch the aliveness of Ghibli characters, the perfect composition, even the colors.
But the Ghiblified timeline — that brought me immense joy. People possessed by a spirit they couldn't see coming, transforming personal memories and universal symbology into cute and horny nostalgia — that was a true wonder. I never imagined I would witness a collective possession that wasn't based on anger and resentment and outgroup-hatred but on anime. And there was more to wonder at than I could process in a day or a week.
If you're narrowly interested in colors, or sounds, or anime figures, the world quickly loses its wonder. But if you're also interested in people and how they react to it and feel about it, the world never loses one iota of it.
"We can be sure that whoever sneers at [beauty's] name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past... can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love." - Hans Urs von Balthasar, "Seeing the Form"
The thing in my life that's the most like an eternally miraculous sunset (or really, more of a sunrise) is my children, especially my 2.5 year old*. Talking to him, holding him, watching him sleep, it never loses its magic. And I'm a stay at home mom alone with two little kids all day, which definitely has a lot of frustrating moments, but the wonder never fades. I really try to hold onto the belief that, whatever comes with AI, the satisfaction we take in human relationships is something to hold onto.
*No shade to my 5 month old, she can't do much at this stage, but I have confidence that she'll be equally inspiring in time.
I don't think AI art making it easier to Ghiblify things cheapens the original so much as... cements its legacy? Promotes it into the role of originator rather than worker.
-A master artisan passing his craft onto his disciples is not "cheapened" if they eventually surpass him. Instead, he is proud that have done a good job instructing them.
-A parent whose children reach a higher level of education and earn more money than him is not "cheapened" by their success.
-A fully human artist/writer/musician who pioneers new techniques is not "cheapened" when hundreds of people take their idea and copy it and add their own spin and spawn an entire genre out of it.
-An inventor who invents a brand new design and creates a prototype is not "cheapened" when a factory figures out how to mass produce their design with twice the quality for a tenth of the price.
You celebrate the people who created new ideas even as you take those ideas and improve upon them and expand them so that everyone has access. Even if the original eventually falls out of favor as the variants increase in number and quality, it still gets credit for inspiring them. They should be a proud parent who succeeded in furthering their legacy, not a bitter and jealous parent upset that their child is too similar to them but not exactly the same.
I think the "once in a lifetime awe inspiring" stuff is a gimmick. A single monumental event driven primarily due to prior deprivement. If you've never been able to enjoy blue things then seeing one for the first time will be surprising and interesting. But if you get to see them all the time then you get to enjoy them all the time. Maybe if blue pigments were more rare then I would be more impressed and awestruck by seeing a blue coat on a Virgin Mary at church. But instead we live in a world where I have a painting of an octopus in the ocean that my wife made using blue paint and we invented stories about it and how it's upset that its toast got burnt by a steam powered perpetual motion underwater toaster (which is now also a painting), and there's an accompanying AI-written song about it. And I get to see that painting every day, and I can listen to that song whenever I want to, and it's hilarious. And it's personal, and specific, and meaningful to me. Maybe no individual instance of seeing that painting ever carried the awe that seeing a blue Virgin Mary for the first time ever would for someone in those times, but if you add up the total amount of enjoyment I get from seeing it every day, and all the other blue things, and all the other AI music, I think the sum is higher in the modern world.
Maybe I'm cheating by secretly having the childlike enthusiasm that Scott talks about here. But it feels categorically different from "wonder". Maybe just "appreciation" is enough.
Getting tired of sunsets after the thousandth time is the universe's way of getting us to learn to control electricity, rather than telling ourselves the candles still form interesting shapes.
It seems like a good pair of companion pieces to think about the relationship between technology and sensory pleasure though they're not really in direct conversation with each other. I need to do an update in response to S. Alexander's piece.
When I went to Niagara Falls I was horrified to find out that it looked just like the pictures. I appreciated intellectually that this thing before me was an unbelievable display of nature. But it didn’t move me. I could only try to imagine what kind of experience it was for someone to just be walking and stumble upon this massive thing and I felt somewhat robbed to not be able to get a piece of that feeling on my first encounter. I wanted to break down crying. I think I’ve grown up since then and would appreciate it more now but in any event since then I’ve just tried to avoid seeing these kinds of photos to begin with. And it helps a lot. Just because the stuff exists out there in cheap abundance doesn’t mean you need to look at it. I’ll get to it in person or I won’t
No doubt commodifying ghiblification is going to be an immense challenge to young artists trying to make a living with that style of art (not sure how many jobs there were to begin with). But the consumer need not take the bait. You can basically choose to only interact with this at its peak form (a Miyazaki film for now).
Feels like the kind of thing people do or aspire to do with food fairly commonly. Basically just intentional consumption and not binging on the low quality mass produced stuff
I've never been to Niagara Falls, but when I went to the Grand Canyon I felt that not only was it not "just like the pictures", it was something inherently unphotographable, because there was no way to capture the sense of scale in a still image.
I’ve been to the Grand Canyon too and I would agree that it’s not captured in photos and I was definitely wowed. I think I had visited without much of a sense of how it would actually look so maybe that was it or maybe when I went to Niagara Falls I was in a bad mood or maybe the scale is next level or maybe I’m totally off. But I do think there’s some truth to this and it’s actually specifically because these places can’t *really* be captured in a photograph that it bothers me more and I felt “robbed”. I made a bad trade taking the convenience of seeing a photo from my couch, gaining basically nothing from that other than satisfying immediate curiosity, and giving up the full experience of seeing it in person for the first time. Maybe you can see it with new eyes each time but I think for most people there’s some cost. To whatever extent it’s actually true I pretty much assume it’s true for things I’ll reasonably see and keep that in mind
A lot of commenters are saying older and younger people are better with this. I wonder if it has to do with competition. Especially with social media, we value things relative to what others have, rather than to our own values, which is less dependent on novelty.
Ultramarine used to be very scarce; now it is relatively abundant. Ditto for top-of-the-line musical performance. With progress more and more things will become more abundant, changing the meaning they have in our lives. But something we crave will always be scarce—positional goods, of course, but also the endless refinements in pigments and musical sounds, etc. And if our lives seem less challenging than they used to be, there will always be *safety*, as we can afford to worry about more and more remote possibilities.
Best thing I've read in a long time. Thank you. Reminds me of (not spoiling, I haven't even read most of it) Nostalgebraist's latest work. Also, Augustine's theodicy in COG bk. 11 ch. 18. I have been trying to become more like this, but have been not entirely successful.
Thank you for this most human of essays Scott. Nobody else can write with a dispassionate voice and move me nearly to tears from ideas alone.
Although I'm as deep within the grips of the meaning-destroying cheapified screen-mediated super-sensorium as one can be, I have recently re-discovered the mind's incredible ability to experience awe and joy without the slightest cue from the outside world. Just driving alone, stereo off, has brought me immense pleasure by focusing on the sensation of my breath and the road beneath me and being alive on this strange planet. There are cathedrals everywhere for the mind to see, if only we remember to pay attention.
This is a great article, but also a little in tension with a past article Scott wrote titled "Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness", which ended with the following
"So I would amend the original post on the subreddit to “You seek unpredicted reward, but by definition you can never get this consistently; luckily predicted reward can be pretty good too.” I still don’t feel like I understand exactly how this is implemented."
I was frustrated with that line back when he posted it, and I feel like he is coming around in this one.
The whole idea behind gratitude is that you can maintain a sense of surprise and wonder. The sun rises every morning, and every morning it is still beautiful, and every morning that is still surprising because, "life didn't have to be this way. It could have been ugly and brutal."
The practice of gratitude is necessarily also an act of recognition that things could have been different. And maybe even deserve to be different as humans so readily destroy that which is beautiful. But nevertheless, we unworthy souls get the beauty of the sunrise anyways. Sometimes the sunrise is even more beautiful because of our ugly acts. (But the 'goddess of everything else' does her thing with even human pollution).
I think this is, in part, what Tolkien was gesturing at when he talked about what made the world beautiful in the Silmarillion.
“[T]here were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of Ilúvatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.”
Just as a song gets its beauty from a tension, so does everything else become beautiful only in light of the tension of what could have been. So to respond to Scott from 3 years ago; unpredictable reward can be a constant in your life. We just call it gratitude.
Check out the Tres Riches Heures of the Duc du Berry. Tons of ultramarine there, not in the coat of the Virgin, but I guess just to show that he was a tres riche kinda guy.
The same way, I can use an iPhone camera + AI to achieve a close enough imitation of what a professional photographer with a DSLR achieves for my family photos. I hire a photographer once a year, but I might hire them more if I couldn’t do this. Is it the same? Not quite. There’s a lot a good pro can do that can’t be convincingly replicated in AI, not least their ability to tease out some absolutely phenomenal scenes from our kids.
But I can have a “photoshoot” a week if I want, at home (yes I am also a decent amateur photographer. My photos can be less AI-fied to look good). It’s close enough, polished enough, and very nearly free. I can’t justify paying a pro $800 for a session when I can just do this.
I'm sorry, but I can't relate to this at all. To me, saying that AI images make you enjoy Ghibli movies less is like saying Chips Ahoy make you enjoy your mom's homemade chocolate chip cookies less. One was made with love and care, and the other is mass produced, highly processed junk. The junk just isn't a substitute for the real thing.
Something I see a lot of people say when talking about their dread of AI art is that it makes learning to make art pointless. Why invest years of effort in this skill that no one will value anymore because a click of a button can do it better?
I don't have an answer to that, but related to this post, I will say: the number one thing I appreciate from my years of effort at teaching myself art (many hours and dollars invested, all to become a mediocre at best artist whose art will never amount to much) is that it taught me to see. Hours and hours of portraiture did something to my appreciation of the beauty of the human face, especially human faces NOT captured from the exact right camera angle with perfect makeup and a little bit of plastic surgery to help things along.
Actually this ties into two points.
1. When you are looking at hundreds of human faces, the ones that are copy-pasted of the exact same beauty standards to hit a hedonic threshold where they start to look boring and samey (and you get frustrated because you're trying to practice faces from different angles and with different expressions and the perfect faces are always the same angle and same expression to maximize their appeal)
2. It genuinely is demotivating. It's not a lie, people do feel less motivated to go the extra 30% to make a true masterpiece. Making a masterpiece isn't guaranteed anyway, it was always a leap of faith putting the effort in. Now it is even more so. I don't feel an urge to have AI write for me, because I'm a good writer and writing comes easily to me. I see other people ask AI to write things for them because it's hard and they don't want to invest the effort, and I can relate, because it's so frustrating spending hours to draw something that doesn't come out looking like the image in your head. The AI also doesn't come out looking like the image in my head, but it took 2 seconds and still looks vaguely good.
3. But maybe the true future is AI photobashing. Idk. I've been letting myself be in a creative slump for a while — what you can optimistically think of as the fertilizer period — before I go back to trying to be creative again. So my perspective right now isn't from someone actively engaged in artistic practice, just someone who was and perhaps hopes to be again.
(I know, I know this post is mostly about those who consume art not those who produce it. But the psychological experience of producing art, the drive to produce it, that interests me a lot. And Scott, since you're an author, I guess you can also answer for yourself, where the boundaries between "I want to write this post" and "I want AI to write this post for me so I don't have to" are)
> Why invest years of effort in this skill that no one will value anymore because a click of a button can do it better?
I can see why one would feel this (and I get this isn't your post's main point), but -- why learn chess when Deep Blue exists? Why run marathons or lift weights when you'll never come close to a train or a construction crane? For that matter, even in the fields of art, if you're not of the world's top talents... I try my hand at writing and drawing in full awareness that many people will make better work more quickly. It makes little difference to me whether a machine is added to that list. My comparative advantage is in making work that is, specifically, mine.
If you wanted ultramarine in the painting you hire a painter to do, you had to buy it in advance and give it to the painter. Everything else (labor, materials, transportation) was fronted to some extent, but nobody was going to front you ultramarine.
I'm coming to this discussion late, but I'll give it a shot.
Scott fails to address the question of why people create art. As a psychiatrist, who is presumably concerned with human motivations, rather than asking questions that revolve around art as a consumable product, why isn’t he asking why people create art? Of course, if you regard art as a pretty bauble to be admired, you can tell a generative AI to create lots of pretty baubles for yourself. We don’t need artists anymore! Generative AI will give it to us all the pretty baubles we could ever want for free!
But I’m sure artists won’t stop painting, drawing, composing music, playing musical instruments, writing fiction or poetry because AI will do it better (someday). Even if AI could do it better (but so far, it can't except on the most mundane levels of aesthetic experience), people will continue to create art because (A) it's pleasurable to create things by one's own hand, (b) it's worthwhile in and of itself to pursue a skill and to perfect it over the years, and (c) it's enjoyable watching people respond to what one's created. The consumer world may be flooded with AI creations, but artists will continue to create the real thing, and connoisseurs will seek them out.
But what makes hand-crafted art different from AI-crafted art? A lot of commentators have brought up the concept of intent. In fact, Eric Hoel made the point that because art produced by AI is “Lacking consciousness, they lack intentionality, and therefore their products lack meaning.” (https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-art-isnt-art). But what is the intent and the meaning that Hoel and the rest are talking about?
First, a bit of a digression. Despite all the previous postings on how taste is somehow dictated by elites (or other hogwash), artists are the ultimate creators of taste. Artists create their art with their audience in mind — so on one level, they may be catering to the already established tastes of their audience. But in all the cases that I can think of, some trailblazing artist (or group of artists) has gone before and tested out new ideas to train the tastes of their audience. Some may try to reach the broadest audience possible by following in the footsteps of previous artists, but others may test new ideas on a smaller select audience who are more open to novelty.
Art is ultimately a nonverbal form of communication in which feelings, moods, or impressions are the vocabulary. The *intent* of the artist is to communicate some sort of impression to his or her viewers. At the meta-level, there are four modes of communication in the visual arts: message, decorative, evocative, and philosophical.
Message art is the oldest type of mode in the Western canon. This is art created to memorialize religious or political events, with references that are culturally shared and that promote or reinforce social cohesion. Much of the early Renaissance art had a religious message (think of all the paintings of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus). But as the Church became less important as a patron, historical message paintings came into vogue. For Americans, think of Emanuel Leutze's Washington's Crossing of the Delaware. Portraits of rulers and important personages reinforced the message of power. By the 19th Century, social messages came into vogue. Norman Rockwell and Jean-Michel Basquiat are important message artists of the 20th Century. And let's not forget propaganda art — which psychologically can be very sophisticated despite a limited range of symbols.
The Decorative Mode developed sometime after message art. As patrons other than the Church started commissioning and purchasing paintings, visual art began to be released from the chains of message and meaning. This mostly happened after the Reformation in northern Europe when the burgeoning merchant and middle classes desired non-message art to decorate their homes. The Decorative Mode was created to provoke a simple emotional response in the viewer. Dutch and German painters started painting still lifes and landscapes that appealed to people who didn’t want or need religious or historical scenes on their walls. Still lifes came first. Then landscapes. Then seascapes. Human nudes were always a delicate proposition — Until the 19th Century, the erotic aspect of nudes had to be presented with the figleaf of a mythological or biblical message. Finally, in the early 20th Century, painters realized that just as music didn’t require lyrics to get an emotional response, they could elicit an emotional response from viewers with pure color and form devoid of any representation. Thus, abstraction was born, and the third mode of communication came to dominate late 20th-century art…
The Evocative mode. Rather than giving us a message or telling us a story the purpose of evocative art is to create a complex or open-ended emotional response in viewer. Evocative art can be realistic, but most of the artists who work in the evocative mode shy away from images, because they don’t want their viewers to be distracted by making up stories about what they see. Edward Hopper is an example of an artist who evokes a psychological mood in the viewer using realistic images. But his paintings, for the most part, don’t tell obvious stories like, say, Norman Rockwell’s paintings do. Surrealists were interested in using dream-like images to evoke moods in the viewers. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko relied solely on color and form to evoke moods in the viewer.
Finally, there’s the philosophical mode of art, which asks questions about what art is. DaDa kicked this off during the middle of WWI when the old order was falling apart. Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that reduced meaning to absurdities. But it asked questions that have continued to niggle artists to this day. Can a urinal signed by an artist be considered art (Du Champ)? Can a step ladder in the middle of the gallery with a little box from the ceiling be considered art (Yoko Ono)? The infamous paintings of Yves Klein using only his patented Yves Klein blue are communicating in the philosophical mode. Can simple blocks of color with hard edges be art? This may puzzle the untutored viewer, but philosophical artists' primary audience are other artists and critics, and the intent of their art is to make their viewers question their assumptions about the nature of art.
AI, being unintelligent, doesn’t understand intent. Although it can produce simple decorative art fairly easily, it may have trouble with message art (without the user refining the prompts over and over), it would definitely have trouble producing art in the evocative mode or the philosophical mode because it’s blind to these creative urges.
1. I doubt many medieval English traders traveled all the way to Afghanistan for lapis. Rather, they bought lapis in Genoa or Venice or whatever, from a trader who got it in Constantinople, who bought it from some Armenian, who bought it from some Arab, etc..
2.The the final group house inage, I like how everyone is smiling beatifically, except the dude with the beard, who looks mortified.
Indeed there were chains of middlemen, but the point still stands in a weaker form: any problem (war, lawlessness) between the two endpoints, and your source of an exotic material will just dry up, or become extremely expensive. And even if the situation improves, the lead-in time may be on the order of a year or so.
Not too dissimilar from the post-Covid chip shortages.
Are the kids on shoulders of the guy in the middle (Scott?) siamese twins? The legs seem oddly disconnected to either of the two bodies there...
Maybe Scott is polycephalic, with new heads budding all the time like pups on a cactus. Of course this wouldn't account for the little legs and arms, but other evidence is consistent with my thesis.
There's a third kid in the back hanging upsidedown. The two you can see are standing on his hips, not sitting on the guy's shoulder.
Also, I never have understood why humans get so worked up over an original. You see the Mona Lisa or soemthing and it's a transcendant experience, The Magic Of The Universe, a Statement About The Human Condition and all that, but a reproduction is just a cheap knockoff, even if you couldn't or even an expert couldn't tell the two images apart. (audio is a different animal. I can hear the difference between live audio and a reproduction.)
For that matter, I've never understood why forged artwork is so declasse. During WWII, some Dutch dude was "discovering" Vermeers (that he made in his studio) and selling them to Nazis. Art experts at the time were fooled.
After the war, the artist was prosecuted for "selling the national patrimony" until he demonstrated in court how he made his fakes. Apparently, an original Vermeer was "the national patrimony". A fake Vermeer (that the best experts of the day pronounced to be genuine) was not worth bothering about.
Did humans' emotions over the fake Vermeers suddenly evaporate disappear, once they were shown to be fake? Was the expressiveness and creativity apparent in the artwork no longer valid, once it turned out that the artist executing his vision wasn't exactly Vermeer?
And now the Vermeer forger is himself famous and people collect "genuine" examples of his work. ;)
When he tried to sell "straight" originals, nobody wanted them.
Well he's dead now, so...
To be fair, Vermeers would be gorgeous in any context but they surely owe a little something to “illuminating” a world. Which a forgery cannot be said to do.
I read a book about a Salvator Mundi that may or may not be the work of da Vinci - that was found in an old Louisiana house (seems a suitable end somehow) - and the story while interesting actually took a backseat to the image (not that it was so great but it was sort of compelling, despite its sheeplike eyes, and so throughout, I kept turning back to the cover to recall it to mind: why am I reading this?). By the end I legitimately didn’t care any more who painted it.
This sounds like a lost Silent Hill game.
That's because people don't like liars. Well done for noticing.
Except Van Meegeren's fake Vermeers were terrible! In his Supper at Emaus, Jesus's arm is completely boneless!
My (probably incomplete or wrong) understanding is that one of the reasons the experts were fooled is because few Vermeers were known, and his work was only just coming to light; what's more, experts believed he had studied in Italy and so expected that works in the style of Caravaggio must be among Vermeer's missing works, so when a Supper at Emaus purportedly by Vermeer turned up, people saw what they expected to see.
But in hindsight, I don't think those forgeries, at least, hold up to the originals.
On the broader point, I highly recommend Orson Welles's F For Fake.
Actually, I'm also reminded of the saga of the supposed Pollock painting as told in the movie Who the #$!& is Jackson Pollack?
If I recall correctly, the movie is sympathetic to the claim that the painting is authentic, and plays the art expert who evaluates it for laughs (looking at the painting between his legs, dismissing it because it "doesn't soar" or something like that)--but I believe the consensus is now that the painting was forged.
I think, as with Scott's friend who aced the AI art Turing test, some people do indeed see things in "authentic" art that is missing in the forgeries--at least, I am pretty open to that possibility.
Right, the forger aimed his first Vermeer forgery at vindicating one art scholar's theory that Vermeer had gone to Italy when young and was influenced by Caravaggio. Not surprisingly, that scholar then declared the forgery to be authentic _and_ his theory proven right. Everybody was happy!
Historical artifacts are one of the few things sacred to educated westerners.
I remember how no one cared about the pre911 Taliban until the day the blew up a huge Buddhist statue. Then, they suddenly became evil.
I think years ago, Edward Banfield had an article titled, "Let them see fakes." It said museums should display detailed photographs of "great art" so everyone could have the chance to see the Mona Lisa or Starry Night in their full size and (as far as anyone could tell) glory.
I've seen two full-size (13 feet tall) copies of Michelangelo's David (the one in the plaza in Florence outside the museum with the original and one in a SoCal theme park). Both were ho-hum.
Then I saw the original: wow.
A slightly similar experience: I visited the Blue Mosque in Instanbul, Turkey (cca. 400 years old). It was nicely renovated, and felt like built from concrete 20 years ago. Really, it was like the main Catholic cathedral of my mid-size European town (built cca. 100 years ago), or the Saint Sava church in Belgrade, Serbia (10-30 years old), both containing significant amounts of concrete.
Then we visited Haga Sophia. And boy, that thing felt impressive. And felt old; very old. Which it actually is (2000 years, give or take a few centuries). Really, that IS something.
We would be able to build such a thing with modern technology in a few years. But that would make the impression of a very big shopping mall.
True.
While I agree with you in a broad sense (ie. viewing "the" Mona Lisa in Louvre and Mona Lisa in Prado, or that viewing an artwork made by a known master and an equally good artwork indistinguishably mimicking his style, is essentially the same experience), I can see several points where they differ:
1) Presentation: You could have replicas of Michaelangelo's masterpieces, but the Sistine Chapel is a really impressive space, and viewing a replica of The Creation of Adam would be a whole another experience, unless of course it's a part of replica of Sistine Chapel itself
2) Sense of continuity/belonging/being part of history/whatever: If you visit Stonehenge to observe the solstice, I am told it's an impressive sight (seeing the sun creeping through the pillars and what not), which however is true of any similarly astronomically aligned construction. But, at Stonehenge you'll likely be struck by a feeling that people, not unlike you (depending on your heritage, maybe even your own ancestors), have stood on this very spot hundreds of generations ago, and feel universal love and transcendental joy and unity with the cosmos and what not. Surely there are other ways to reach that state of mind, but undoubtedly Stonehenge is much better at priming the experiences than replica-Stonehenge would be.
3) I can be awestruck by the athleticism of an Olympic gymnast, performance of a great actor, ingenuity of a mathematician at proving theorems, etc. Crucially, this is true even when I myself can prove those same theorems as math homework: after all, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, and my feat isn't the slightest bit impressive (although the proof can in itself be beautiful). Likewise, if I know enough of art history, I can marvel an artwork and its creator for being the first to develop techniques, aesthetic styles, etc, and when viewing the original work, these feel close at home, as though I was looking at Simone Biles winning gold or contemplating Eukleides coming up with the idea of axiomatic mathematics ex nihilo. In contrast, when viewing the reproduction, I know the creator was standing on the shoulders of giants too, and the work isn't impressive in these ways, although it can be identically aesthetically pleasing.
Does 3) apply equally to a painting in the vein of "Rustoleum At Night"? (This was the name given by a museum security guard to an all-black canvas)
If the Fake Master was parked int he Sistine Chapel or whatever, would you get the same sense of rapture, knowing that you are looking at a fake?
Those are honest questions, BTW.
As for point 3, I'm personally entirely dismissive of such works, but well, I can see a museum-goer with a different mentality going "so this is the piece that caused so much debate in the art world", and then prompted by seeing THE black canvas, go on a rollercoaster journey of contemplating the meaning of art in a way that wall painted black next room wouldn't. Or whatever. Of course, the same effect could in this case be accomplished by a black canvas by yours truly, if it was fraudulently identified, but that seems unethical.
As for the other question, if the ceiling of Sistine Chapel was damaged and a Fake Master was commissioned to reproduce Michaelangelo's ceiling frescos, and he was at least as good a painter as Michaelangelo was, then I think Sistine Chapel would remain a must-visit site in Rome. Or, if Fake Master was commissioned to reproduce it in Stockholm, then you could see that in your trip to Stockholm, drop that from your holiday plans in Rome, and spend that time sightseeing the ruins of Ostia Antica or something. Here I'm in agreement with the original commenter, I'm just trying to steelman some aspects for worth of the originals.
How would something like a restored/recreated building that had been bombed in WWII fit in?
Well, personally I think a building is impressive then it's impressive whether it was made in the 1200 or post-war. Really, entirely destroyed buildings aside, a lot of the old stuff that survives is like the Ship of Theseus, if not outright modern replicas. Say, I don't know the status of every artifact you can find in Pomeii, but I know works like the Alexander Mosaic in House of Faun are modern reproductions (the original is in museum in Napoli). And some stuff may be historical forgeries: the city of Rome notoriously has more Egyptian obelisks than Egypt, but there are some Roman forgeries, too. They are nice-looking landmarks nevertheless and tourists don't seem to mind.
But I think part of the value of restored/recreated buildings, besides the fact that the originals looked nice, is that "connection to the past". You may quite literally see the layers of history of different rules and eras and that brings the place some gravitas, character and interest beyond being a set of fine examples of architecture (if the city has e.g. Roman, Andalusian, Habsburg and modern stuff, and Andalusian buildings get destroyed without being restored, I think it's fair to say the city has lost something more than nice individual buildings), and then there's often local culture tied to the places that would likely also be lost if the buildings weren't recreated at least as closely as tradition demands. Faithful restorations and recreations, I think, do nothing to diminish these aspects, even if they weren't "original" in the purest sense.
Stendhal Syndrome, or as the song has it, "weak in the presence of beauty":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal_syndrome
I wasn't the one you asked the question of, but...
Couldn't a cop testify in court just as well using fake evidence as real evidence? If they don't get found out, what's the difference?
I have a native desire for authenticity for its own sake. This is a functional heuristic in many ways, even if it gets over-applied. I differentiate between 'a thing' and 'the thing.' A friend of mine was at the reclining Buddha in Thailand, which I also went to. That seems more significant than saying we both saw a large reclining Buddha. We were in the same actual place, separated only by time.
There is a reflexive revulsion for me for being duped or encountering a thing that was said to be authentic which was not. And if you give a person a thing they desire and then take it away, the loss will cut deeper than the gain did. For me, this applies to authenticity also. The implied relationships matter as much as the material thing.
I'm all for artistic reproductions, but they don't carry, for me, a sense of encountering a thing with the dust of history falling off it. I can't *trust* them to tell a story about what a genuine thing looks like.
" 3) apply equally to a painting in the vein of "Rustoleum At Night"?"
For me, this would hinge on what kind of relationship I had with the painting and the people who critiqued it. Though it often takes some mental effort and cultivation to see an influential original artwork and remember that it is not, in fact, derivative. It can take deliberation to remember that all the other examples of that work I've seen through my life are, in fact, derived from it.
I can't imagine having a black canvas be something I thought mattered. But lets say that it was the Black Canvas that.... inspired World War I or whatever. The very painting that Gavrilo Princip beat Archduke Ferdinand with. That would carry a sense of history with it.
I want to second the idea of presentation. Caravaggio's "Medusa" is okay when you look at it in an art book or even on a large screen. But when I saw it in Uffizi, I got immediate goosebumps. I don't know if it's the right distance, the right light, the right framing, but it's absolutely haunting.
It's the same with Caruso. Playing a recording while you're reading a blog post is one thing. Travelling to Naples, dressing up, going to the Teatro di San Carlo, finding yourself among other people waiting for the bell in nervous excitement, and then watching the man himself walk onto the stage and sing an aria just for you (and the other 3000 attendees), listening to every note, knowing you can never have the same experience again.
Orson Welles' documentary "F for Fake" gets into this. If a forger can paint a new picture indistinguishable from a Vermeer, is he as good a painter as Vermeer?
> If a forger can paint a new picture indistinguishable from a Vermeer, is he as good a painter as Vermeer?
If "painter" means a technical skill, then yes. But I don't think it's a big part of being an artist.
An amateur in chess can study some famous game by Paul Morphy and play a similar one when presented with the opportunity. It doesn't even translate to anything about his level as a chess player, but seems like a close analogy. But there's a second level: Paul Morphy was probably the greatest player some 170 years ago, but if he was made to play against today's chess elite, he probably wouldn't be in the top 1000, not just because there were fewer people with less free time on their hands (so he was the biggest fish in a relatively small body of water), but also because chess theory has advanced a lot.
So someone copying a Vermeer is analogous to an amateur studying one game and it's not interesting at all (even though it requires a serious technical skill). And even though art lacks clear metrics like Elo in chess, I think if one existed, Vermeer's wouldn't be too special in our time.
"Paul Morphy was probably the greatest player some 170 years ago, but if he was made to play against today's chess elite, he probably wouldn't be in the top 1000, not just because there were fewer people with less free time on their hands (so he was the biggest fish in a relatively small body of water), but also because chess theory has advanced a lot."
The last point raises the question: how good would Morphy have been if he had been raised in the modern chess environment? To some extent, this is what I think people really mean when they ask about greatness: I know more calculus than Isaac Newton ever did (by some metrics anyway), but I feel very confident saying that if Newton had had access to even one (1) modern calculus textbook, he would absolutely put my knowledge to shame. We shouldn't hold it against his greatness that he was born too early to learn about epsilon-delta proofs or whatever; he clearly had the capacity to understand that stuff, just not the opportunity.
I think we ought to (try) judge Vermeer or Morphy the same way: what do we estimate they might have been capable of in a more modern environment?
But obviously this is very hard to think about in a clear and principled way.
Has anybody painted a new picture indistinguishable from a Vermeer? The notorious Vermeer forger of the 1930s definitely couldn't do it.
I love F For Fake, but I think that to really answer this question you have to think about what conditions the forger is allowed to work in.
Does the forger get to just copy an existing Vermeer? That certainly requires some painting skill, but we surely all agree that if this were novel writing instead of painting, "copy an existing work" exhibits very little of the relevant skill.
If the forger is expected to stage their own, new tableau and paint in Vermeer's style, that captures more of the sort of skill that we're looking for: the forger has something of the "eye", the sense of composition and balance of different elements, etc.
But I think you could still object--if the forger gets to study all known Vermeers first, then the forger still has the advantage that they don't have to invent the style from scratch. One can reasonably think that much of what makes someone a great artist is their ability to see beyond what their contemporaries are capable of; to invent new techniques or styles that didn't previously exist. If our forger isn't doing that, one can still think they aren't as great as Vermeer (though it's now more subtle as one has to argue that Vermeer did have this inventive quality).
I think an example where people get this more intuitively is comedy. If I can perform a Monty Python impersonation reasonably well, with good timing, etc. there's definitely a real element of comedic talent. But no one thinks that a perfect John Cleese mimic doing a perfect parrot sketch is as funny as John Cleese; what makes Cleese funny is that he developed the style, wrote the sketch.
On the other hand, we don't want to overcommit to the idea that what makes a work great is that it was created by a great artist--surely some of what makes art great is intrinsic! The reductio in this direction is Pierre Menard rewriting Don Quixote; one can't just declare that the exact same words now carry a totally different meaning just because of the process by which they were produced.
But the exact interplay here seems complicated and subtle, and is certainly beyond me to get to the bottom of.
Unless he sees the original Vermeer he cannot reproduce it.
I think there are many, many answers to this question. Here's one: comfort and safety. A certified original masterwork comes with a guarantee that your time and attention will be rewarded. You're allowed to enjoy it as much as you want, without fear of losing status, or suffering criticism from your peers, or being let down by the ending.
Think of the last time you solved a really difficult puzzle. Now imagine how frustrating that experience would have been if you had no idea if a solution even existed. Now replace "solved, puzzle, solution" with "enjoyed, work of art, meaning". (yes, Death of the Author, I agree, but for the sake of argument)
You can already experience this via the work of JJ Abrams. Here's a dozen mysterious events, some of them are profoundly important, some are random Calvinball bullshit that will never get explained, please spend the next 6 seasons trying to figure out which is which.
The age of an object and its cultural significance are as important as its artistic quality, so an original Vermeer is interesting because what it says about 17th century dutch life, Vermeer's place in art history and evolving painting techniques, like the theory that he used a camera obscura to create his highly realistic paintings. A forged artwork or AI art in the style of Vermeer add nothing of value.
The Mona Lisa is interesting because I feel a lot of people have a reverse reaction to seeing the original. We see it big and impressive on screens and prints, where we can admire every detail, and if you actually go to the Louvre and look at it yourself it's actually a kind of small painting and there are 500 tourists standing in front of you so you don't get a clear view.
Right. There are lots of more impressive paintings to look at in the Louvre. The Louvre is built on a huge scale so it features numerous immense paintings like Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa. The Mona Lisa would look less disappointing in a smaller museum.
> I never have understood why humans get so worked up over an original.
Because a photograph of a painting never really captures the painting. There's the texture of the brush strokes. There are subtle differences in the way light reflects off the texture and the pigments. For Renaissance artwork, where the painters laid down layers of pigment in glazes, as you view a painting from slightly different angles the translucency of pigments changes. Most modern viewers only know how to look at images as a gestalt, probably because we've grown up viewing images with lower information content all our lives.
In the case of modern painters, Mark Rothko is an example of an artist that the gestalters just can't seem to appreciate. "All I see is big blocks of color. Big deal." But Rothko spent months working on his paintings, applying dozens of translucent layers of color interleaved with glazes of various sorts. If you look closely at a Rothko, the underlying layers show through in places, and then you realize the underlying layers are affecting the way we perceive the surface layers, and the blocks of color can begin to vibrate as we try to look through the surface layers. And then you stand back and stare at it for a while with your eyes slightly unfocused, you begin to perceive all sorts of visual illusions — as if things were moving in the depths. And that visual stimulation can trigger emotional responses. I've seen people crying in front of his paintings. For me, Rothkos can trigger a sense of wonder and inexplicable joy. It's hard to describe to someone who only sees the "big picture" and the surface image. And a photograph of a Rothko, no matter how dense the pixels, just won't do the same thing — because there is three-dimensional information in the pigments that is lost in a photo.
But we get so many images that shoved at us every day that our qualia have become dumbed down. The sad thing is that most people never realize that they're not seeing the details, and they're satisfied with poor imitations. As for forgeries, a good forgery can be better than the original (but they seldom really capture the hand of the original artist). But the act of deception can make it valueless no matter how good the forger was.
I never got much out of a Rothko, but other people say they do, and I strongly doubt they are lying.
If it's true that what we think are good enough reproductions aren't, that's part of the problem, and we're a long way from really accurate reproduction.
I didn't get Rothko either, until I saw this episode of Great Art Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsz6bkkIHzQ
Then I fucking got it and had a completely different experience seeing a couple of Rothkos in Chicago.
I didn't understand Rothko, either, until I got sucked into one at LACMA. I must have stood there for 20 or 30 minutes, staring at it slightly unfocused, watching the colors vibrate. I'd walk in close to see the details, and then I back away and watch it vibrate. It was a mystical experience for me. A woman standing next to me said, "You too, huh?" and she smiled. I should have asked for a date because she was obviously seeing the world the way I did.
Enough people have this kind of reaction to Rothko (I don't, but I wish I did), that there must be something going on.
The one time I went in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, it did not do anything for me; but then I was only a kid. And also we are told his finishes have not held quite held up in that subtropical posting.
*However*: the adjacent museum also had an exhibit, filling a large space, of wrecked cars. Just that. Wrecked front ends mounted on the wall, and whole vehicles too, as best I recall.
I am old enough now to know that for some reason I intensely dislike art museums (only art, not other museums) and want to get out of them as soon as possible, but I had not yet come to that conclusion at that hopeful age.
But I believe that the juxtaposition of these things - the Rothko, and the silly provocateur flim-flam of the cars - did no favor to the former that day.
BTW, thanks for that link! It gave some background on Rothko that I didn't know.
I am watching this now and am a little confused at about 9:00 they describe him as priming his Seagram canvases with "rabbit skin glue" in a "deep maroon" - but then when they show him using a house painters' brush to "wash" on layers of turpentine-thinned red paint, the underlying canvas is white.
I've got something here in the house that strikes me as inadvertently Rothko-like. I got from a relative's house 25 years ago an armoire in that sort of celadon green stain of the 50s/60s, with little brown splatters (dots). (You may know the sort of thing.)
At the time I was convinced this didn't suit, so using a library book of paint finish techniques (then the rage) I set about painting it what turned out to be a luminous, variable sort of Turkey red and the single most durable, lacquer-like paint job I've ever done. Not a single chip all these years later - it looks like the day I finished.
I wish I could remember how I did it! I bought artist oils, I remember that, raw umber and a couple others. I'm pretty sure turpentine was the medium but it may actually have been polyurethane. I sanded but didn't prime. I have seldom (!) been so please with anything I did. It is not opaque - more like a painting - but it shows no brush strokes. I don't think I used a rag. It's odd that I worked on it the better part of a month, and yet - once finished the process vanished from my head.
> The sad thing is that most people never realize that they're not seeing the details, and they're satisfied with poor imitations.
I wonder though, is it really a sad thing? Imagine a world where you could only see the Mona Lisa or any famous artwork if you were both rich enough, idle enough and dedicated enough to travel across the world to view the original. Would you say it is a "happy thing" that all the people who can not and will not ever have that experience will also never have the "cheaper" experience of seeing it in a photograph? Details may matter, but how many people would rank "quality of life" in the order of "Has seen the original painting" > "Will never see the original painting or a replica/photo" > "Will never see the original, but has seen a photo"
I will never see a Vermeer in person, but he's one of my favorites based solely on an old Time-Life (I think) book, "The World of ...." series, which I used to pore over.
If you ever have a chance, take look at one in real life. The pictures of his work never really do his work justice. He's a brilliant genius with light, shadow, and pigment.
Wherever I travel, I make a point of visiting the local art museums. I've been to the Louvre twice, and I was able to squeeze myself through the crowds to view the Mona Lisa. It's just a little canvas, and the varnish has oxidized over the centuries, so she's a warm muddy brown. Her indeterminate expression is what forced me to keep looking at her. Otherwise, it's not Da Vinci's best painting. Still, I recommend seeing it in person — if you can deal with the crowds.
The fake Vermeers were ugly and didn't look all that much like Vermeers. But they appealed to people in the 1930s, even though today they look pretty obviously like something that would appeal to people in the 1930s.
I've heard that in general, forgery is easier to detect after some decades have passed. People can't recognize the period style they're living with, but when the culture has moved on, a forgery from the 1920s will look like it's from the 1920s.
Right. Just about everybody is a slave to his or her time. It's hard to recognize in yourself, but not hard to recognize in somebody from a different time.
re: dude with the beard, who looks mortified
There's one in every family.
People who object out of principle to do the emotional work of smiling for photos?
Why bother?
It's easy enough to fix in post.
https://ibb.co/673hhGRw
"There's one in every family."
Yeah! Me!
I love the dude with the beard.
Thanks. Great stuff.
People are actually pretty adept these days at putting themselves imaginatively into the past, at least the fairly recent past. Consider how many people are still pretty interested in the rock music of 1965 (judging by the number of musical biopics): "Rubber Soul," "Like a Rolling Stone," "Satisfaction," "California Girls." We had a good Dylan biopic last year, a really good Beach Boys biopic in 2015, and yesterday we were promised four Beatles biopics in 2028.
I still see young people wearing Ramones t-shirts, and it's not because the Ramones were all that much better than everybody else who came after them who sounded like the Ramones. Instead, it's because a striking number of 21st century young people have heard the narrative in which Emerson Lake and Palmer are the bad guys of the mid-1970s and the Ramones are the good guys. And they like it.
Personally, I saw both ELP and the Ramones in 1977-78. And they were both good. But the narrative about the Ramones as the underdogs and ELP as the overdogs helps me enjoy the Ramones more, while ELP today is largely forgotten.
I don't know anything about music history - can you explain the narrative where Emerson Lake and Palmer are the bad guys of the mid-1970s and the Ramones are the good guys?
I imagine prog-rock has a lot to do with it; punk came along and Americans seem to take punk very seriously and continue to have the scene and sub-divisions of punk and their own punk subcultures going on all this time, whereas it's pretty much gone in the UK.
ELP were prog-rock, the Ramones were punk, that's your bad guys and good guys right there.
I would say that rock critics (read "English lit majors") take punk rock seriously.
Right.
I'd say that 21st Century rock music fans tend to overrate the historical importance of punk rock, even though I was a rock critic in 1978-1980 and I loved the Ramones and Clash. The big changes were the emergence of rock n roll in the 1950s and the emergence of rock music c. 1965. The late 1970s changes were pretty minor in comparison.
they get it wrong, they are focused only on a narrow time period and call everything else, "post-punk" ie, the vast majority of music punks actually listen to
Both sound pretty dated to modern ears, unless you caught a liking for either of them back in time when they were new. Things going out of fashion is the ages-old way of "semantic apocalypse", just a slow-motion one.
Punk came slightly after prog and went in the opposite direction (more emotion, less technical skill), so of course they painted themselves as the cooler guys. I haven't listened to either in a long time, but I'd much rather give a random listen to ELP's Brain Salad Surgery, than anything the punkies made.
Rock 'n' roll started out pretty primitive in the 1950s and then started to get more sophisticated in 1965, after which it turned into rock and became increasingly virtuosic with emphasis on blues guitar solos.
By the early 1970s, some rock bands with classical training, such as Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, were taking rock in a "progressive" direction as electrified art music. For example, here's ELP's 20 minute "Tarkus" from 1971:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGGpBXd7ToA
and their 29 minute "Karn Evil 9" from 1973:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLS0Med0s6E
By 1977, ELP was one of the biggest touring bands in the world.
And here's Yes's catchier nine minute "Roundabout" from 1971:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPCLFtxpadE
Historian Jacques Barzun wrote as a nonagenarian: "A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom."
Eventually, this led to a revolt centered among New Yorkers with connections to the art world, followers of Lou Reed's Velvet Underground, such as the New York Dolls, led by David Johansen who recently died. Perhaps the most likable were the Ramones from Queens who started releasing albums of incredibly short, fast songs in 1976, such as their now famous Blitzkrieg Bop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268C3N2dDYk
Led by guitarist Johnny Ramone (all the musicians took the last name Ramone, but they weren't actually brothers; Johnny was really John Cummings), a blue collar Republican, the Ramones articulated a reactionary opposition to both progressive rock and to blues-based virtuosity. Johnny proposed that downstroke power-chording would liberate white rock fans from both imitating black blues musicians and faux classical progressive rockers.
Their drummer/manager Tommy Ramone/Erdelyi was in touch with the Downtown art scene and was able to rephrase Johnny's rather deplorable ideas into art-friendly theories that critics loved.
Here's my 1979 review of a Ramones concert in Houston in the "Rice Thresher," making the case for the Ramones as minimalists:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/1979-steve-sailer-makes-the-case-for-the-ramones/
The Ramones weren't really all that good and never made much money, but their basic idea was wonderful. And they were also strikingly hard-working, touring for 20 years doing their two minute songs as well as they could, which was quite well. I saw them three times over 18 years and their work ethic was impressive.
Eventually, everybody decided they'd always loved the Ramones.
Here's a (parody) review of ELP's (nonexistent) 1977 album: "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Prog: A Tribute to the Ramones:"
https://www.thevinyldistrict.com/storefront/graded-on-a-curve-emerson-lake-palmer-now-i-wanna-sniff-some-prog-a-tribute-to-the-ramones/
All this discussion brought this to mind...
"Who's on stage?"
https://youtu.be/Mdqv5xIsFLM?si=jphg3A-zZ71lT8l8
“Rock and Roll High School” brought the Ramones to flyover country, via early-ish adopters of cable TV.
You should check out a band called Gentle Giant. They were never huge, but as classical musicians turned rock players they were quite awesome.
This was a wonderful description. Much appreciated.
How have you managed to be spared exposure to the Atlantic ragebait article "The Whitest Music Ever"?
But you also argue that punk rather than prog was the Whitest Music Ever (at least post 1955). Certainly, Johnny Ramone explained that he was bored with blues-based rock and wanted to create a rock music stripped of black influence. It wasn't that Johnny was anti-black, just that he was white, didn't see much reason to be ashamed of that, and therefore wanted white rock for whites.
I'll take issue with this. He didn't want "white rock" for whites, he was just into anthemic music and against the increasingly "virtuoso" rock that he felt was elitist. I don't think he ever said he wanted music "stripped of black influence" because of course the 50s garage rock he loved had plenty of black influence
While Punk is notably less Bluesy than other Rock genres at the time of its emergence, it was very strongly influenced by the Afro-Caribbean music, particularly Ska, Reggae and Dub.
My candidates for the Whitest Rock music are continental European variants of Metal (Power, Black, Death etc.).
Although prog was briefly the biggest thing going, punk very quickly superceded it once it immerged. Prog became seen as pretentious, self indulgent and lame. Punk was the exact opposite: direct, to the point, unornamented and Cool. It was closer to the origins of rock, and any idiot with a guitar could play it.
That's because ELP obviously aren't the right counterpart to Ramones. I'd say that Pink Floyd would be more like it, who are plenty popular today, whereas the punk counterpart of ELP would be something like Fugazi - respectable enough among the "connoisseurs", but the kids probably haven't heard about them.
Johnny Rotten was hired as Sex Pistols frontman because he was seen wearing a Pink Floyd shirt (which I think someone else had discarded), on which he had added the words "I Hate".
dude, literally every punk knows whose fugazi is.
We have to establish a difference between "punk" that has gotten into mainstream tastes and the subculture which still exists but largely below the view of "respectable" music
As someone who really enjoys prog rock but isn't super into music history, this clears up a lot. I always got the impression that enjoying ELP/Yes/whoever was supposed to be faintly embarrassing but no explanation for why. The narrative of prog rock being somehow out of touch with the basic ideals of rock and roll both makes really good sense and also explains the whole thing. Maybe I should just get used to being an elitist bastard who hates the common man, since all my tastes seem to indicate that anyway.
Since the common man isn't that into punk either (I never heard any real punk songs until the advent of filesharing, with Nirvana being the closest thing I could hear on the radio), I can listen to both punk & prog while remaining an elitist.
Fun fact, my colleague did the art for ELP's first album (I was very sad that it wasn't tarkus). He was paid £50 and gets no royalties, although very very occasionally people ask him to sign copies which he enjoys. He loathes the type face they splattered over his painting.
He's a very talented oil painter, even more than ever in his 70's. He's never managed to make it his whole career but has art in a large number of fairly prestigious collections.
ELP aren't forgotten by me...Keith Emerson came from the local area , and his son still plays here.
> judging by the number of musical biopics
Isn't this just about boomers being interested in the music of their youth?
This more of a comment, but the post half a year ago about the ballad of the white horse has - in modern parlance - totally one-shotted me, to the point that I now know the first chapter by heart.
I wonder if this is really Chesterton-specific, or whether most unknown-to-me, profound-to-me works of literature would have had the same effect on my mental state, half a year ago.
I guess this relates to the semantic apocalypse...
Nope, I have gone through a lot of poems trying to find the good ones, and BWH is one of the best.
speaking of white horses and prog rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRvljAT4O6Q
A white horse is also referenced in this seminal punk track:
https://youtu.be/6iLqsFeWswY?t=75
But for songs with white horses actually in the title, I recommend this unusually high-tempo track from a doom metal band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvzy_Vv-UFY
It was some time after I first heard that when I learned that "horse" is a slang term for heroin, which makes sense of the lyric about hoofprints on his arm, as it otherwise seems more like a song about the Wild Hunt, a la Ghost Riders in the Sky.
That reference is clearly to "behold a pale white horse"
Which of the songs?
sorry for the late reply. California Uber Allles. "Big Bro on White Horse is near" It's a reference to the book by J D Lorenz "Jerry Brown, the Man on The White Horse" as in a white knight or a charismatic figure arriving to solve problems, which was how Brown was portrayed during his career, but in the context of the song, it has double meaning, also alluding to "behold a pale horse".
Nothing to do with heroin, though I realize you were commenting on that in reference to the second song.
Can't go wrong with inspiration from the White Horse of Uffington:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_White_Horse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EApCLbgAE5E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pis3veqKl8k
(is it ridiculous? yes. is it glorious? also yes!)
Any others? Do you have a poetry list out there somewhere? Also, thoughts on Gerard Manley Hopkins
Chesterton was pretty awesome. But he wrote at a time of numerous pretty awesome writers. I'm a big GKC fan, but I worry that I've only read a few things by GBS and HGW, and nothing by FMF, not to mention all the two initial writers of the era.
There was a big improvement in the productivity of printing presses sometime around 1890, and suddenly a lot of really good writers in Britain could make a living by writing.
You should add Max Beerbohm, "A Christmas Garland", to your list. He's funny. It requires the barest glance at the things he's satirizing. I feel like "Scruts" should be a Christmastime read-aloud at least once depending on your family.
That reminded me of Ivor Cutler's Gruts.
verse
Hello, Billy, tea time!
Gruts for tea!
Billy, Billy
Come on, son
Gruts for tea!
Fresh gruts!
Oh, I don′t want gruts for tea, Daddy
What?
I went out specially and got them for you
Aw, but Daddy, we had gruts yesterday
'Look, son, I walked seven miles to the High Wood to get you gruts
That′s 14 miles in all, counting the journey back
And you don't want gruts?
I fried them for you
Fried gruts, hmm, I fried them in butter
I don't want them, Daddy
Daddy, we′ve had gruts for three years now
I′m fed up with gruts
I don't want them anymore
Daddy, can′t we have something else for tea?
Oh, son!
Gruts!
They're lovely
Daddy, I don′t want gruts anymore
I hate gruts
I detest them
I have them every day and they're always fried in butter
Can′t you think of another way of cooking gruts?
There's hundreds of ways of cooking gruts
Boil them, or bake them, or stew them, or braise them
But every day, fried gruts
"Billy, come in for tea
Fried gruts
I've walked 14 miles
Seven miles to the High Wood and back"
Three years of gruts
Look what it′s done to me, Daddy!
Come here!
Come here into the bedroom and look at ourselves in the mirror, you and me
Now, look at that!
Yes
I see what you mean
Son, let′s not waste these gruts
Tomorrow I'll go to the High Wood and get something else
Look, Daddy, you′ve been saying this for three years now
Every day we have this same thing
I take you to the mirror and you say we'll have something else for tea
What else is there in the High Wood besides gruts?
Well, there′s leaves, bark, grass, and leaves
Gruts are really the best
You must admit it
Yes, Daddy, I admit it
Gruts are really the best, but I don't want them
I hate them
I detest them
In fact I′m going' to take this panful of gruts and throw them out
Oh, don't do that!
Don′t throw them out for goodness′ sake!
You'll poison the dog!
Writer(s): Ivor Cutler
Both "The Ballad of the White Horse" and "Lepanto" are just great to read aloud. You can recite them with gusto because the beat of the metre goes with a swing and the words fill your mouth beautifully.
The history may be fanciful, the comparative religion and attitudes to foreigners problematic in our day, and it's best not to look too closely at the content (he turns the forces around when he has Alfred's army lining up so that the left wing in one verse is the right wing in another), but the colours are bright and vivid (he started off as an art student) and the lines just tumble out:
"Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king."
Say that out loud and it just *rocks*.
"King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in."
Both Roger Corman and David Lynch could have made a movie out of that scene 😀
Oh, thank you for this. It has been far too long since I have read "Lepanto"; it had almost faded out of memory altogether. It does, indeed, rock.
I was just reading a bio of “Conan the Barbarian” creator Robert E. Howard that mentioned Chesterton and BWH in particular as early influences on him. I think that specific poem continues to be so affecting because besides being especially good it’s been demonstrably “in the water supply”. Sitting under the foundations of modern fantasy for over a century makes it easier to grasp for a modern reader than a lot of similar Victorian poetry.
"I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher."
What's even more ironic about the ultramarine story is that the image in the posting of the Virgin Mary with the blazing cobalt vestment contains not an atom of ultramarine, just pixels merged from red/green/blue choices. We can get the ultramarine colour experience simultaneously across the globe without even using it. Does that cheapen and demean the experience, or just democratise it?
To be fair, my understanding is, there are hues that a computer screen actually can't render faithfully, and when we look at images of those things online, we're looking at best available approximations of them, and assuming, sometimes incorrectly, that it conveys the appearance of the real thing.
That said, this doesn't mean that specific things which once awed people with their majesty are particularly likely to fall into the category of things that can't be conveyed well by a computer screen.
I went and checked a number of ultramarine blue paints, and the more saturated ones do in fact fall outside of not only the sRGB color space but also the P3 color space.
It's not too surprising; sRGB is particularly bad at the blue-cyan-green spectrum of hues. Unfortunately, as a fan of all things grue and bleen.
According to Wikipedia, actual ultramarine falls in the sRGB color space (18, 10, 143).
I actually miss the reds more than the blues in sRGB. I'm not sure there are naturally occurring reds that fall outside of the sRGB spectrum, but dyes certainly do.
Porque no los dos?
Democratizing something necessarily cheapens it. If it's broadly available, it's both cheaper and more democratic. We see it in style, fashion, culture generally going back as long as we have records of human culture.
I can sit in the comfort of a chair in my home, or right now my office, and look at the startlingly blue cape or cloak that the Virginia Mary wears in a reproduction of a reproduction of what a human artist thought, considered, and decided on centuries ago.
Technology for the betterment of man? It's great.
I liked seeing it but also could detect no difference between the cloak blue and the Klein blue on my screen, but I preferred the cloak.
Both ultramarine and Klein blue are rather poorly approximated by screen phosphors!
My laptop is 10 years old and I know you are right, but I'm kind of amazed how brilliant the colors are. (Some women spend a good deal of time looking very closely at the colors of clothing on the internet ;-).)
People clearly still value seeing stuff in person. We can all look at a thousands of online pictures of the Eiffel Tower or the Mona Lisa, yet millions of people every year think it worthwhile to spend a lot of money to go see them in person.
I think there's a certain type of Intellectual authenticity seeker that suffers from this more strongly. I don't think it affects everyone or even most people that much.
I can sit and watch Bluey episodes with my kids a thousand times and enjoy them each time. There's other areas where I do have this problem, for sure, but I've watched that rain episode with Bluey trying to stop the waters and her mom trying to stop the house from getting wet foot prints like 10-20 times, and it's still a classic.
Then we opt for virtual reality to reinvent suffering for us.. and to make us forget everything we know before.. and to make us become baby again to experience it full.. and to randomize our starting position to let us experience difference things.. wait this is just that theory again.
> Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia - something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi.
I don't look at Lippi paintings but I do, every now and then, Google the names of precious or semiprecious stones and look at all the beautiful jewelry. This post actually reminded me to do that again after not having done it for a while, so thank you. (It's amazing how much stuff they can do with rose quartz these days!)
> G.K. Chesterton wrote lots of stuff about how if you were really holy and paying attention, then the thousandth sunset would be just as beautiful as the first.
Is this not the default??? Sunsets are just as beautiful to me now as they have been my entire life. (I don't see any heavenly hosts per se, they're just really aesthetically nice.) Sure, if there was a constantly changing sunset going on 100% of the time I might get satiated on it, but with my current schedule I see a couple of really good ones a month and they're all amazing. Possibly eastern US weather is better for the soul than California weather, at least in terms of optimal epic sunset frequency.
I don’t think it’s a weather thing; as someone who currently lives in California myself, I did feel a pang of sadness at the thought that some people don’t enjoy sunsets because they’ve been-there-done-that-gotten-the-trophy or whatever.
Nonetheless I did really enjoy this post (thank you Scott!). I do make an effort to appreciate natural beauty in everyday life, to enjoy awe and wonder, and this is a good reminder to continue to do so and to extend that to deep blues and AI too.
Signed,
Someone typing this on a personal computer the size of their hand, which gloriously allowed them to read both this wonderful post and your comment :)
I think it's likely that many people who have gotten sick of sunsets never liked them much in the first place. I used to feel obligated to look at sunsets because they are such a commonly exalted example of natural beauty, but they just aren't to my taste in some indefinable way.
There are other weather patterns and natural phenomena that fill me with the sense of wonder that other people feel with sunsets. So hopefully most of us have at least one source of transcendent natural beauty, even if it varies.
Conditions (volcanos? so we like to say) generate an exceptional sunset where I live, now and then, just at the right interval perhaps as you say. I don't think you'd ever tire of them, though it helps to discover it sort of serendipitously. I admit I've said rather impatiently, I'm busy, to someone who occasionally beckons me outside to see the sky.
My major problem with sunsets is I don’t get to see them much. Here in gloomy England.
I feel similarly about sunsets. Note: Don't move to Antarctica. :p https://brr.fyi/posts/sunset
There are SO many reasons I shouldn't move to Antarctica, but "failure to marvel at the beauty of nature" is Not one of them. (Likewise the glory of human civilization.) Thanks for the link, those pictures kick ass!
I think people who find the thousandth sunset meh are people who just don't care much for sunsets. I'm one of them; the first few sunsets I've seen were novel and briefly interesting, but never particularly beautiful and so after a few times it's "been there done that." I have other things I don't satiate on, like music, chess and running.
Really I think everyone has things they don't satiate on, they just vary a lot from person to person and often people can't tell apart {thing that's very novel and interesting} from {thing they actually really enjoy on a deep level} on the first encounter and so they get confused when they no longer enjoy something they think they once did, but they never really liked it in the first place.
That's an interesting way to think about it! And valid for any given thing to not be to your taste. Some specific sunsets that other people like don't do a lot for me, and vice versa, so really it's personal taste all the way down.
California tends to be either fully sunny or fully cloudy on any given day, neither of which is great for epic sunsets.
What you want is multiple layers of broken cloud at different altitudes which will light up in different colours.
Thank you for this post.
I think maybe we can rediscover things, we can still look at art by Lippi and others and find it beautiful. So perhaps the answer is simply a change in position. This may be why hand-crafted and human-made things are valued over the (in some ways better) manufactured mass-produced objects: we shifted our perceptions.
And because this is about Chesterton, I have of course to throw in this quote:
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
Exactly the quote I was reminded of. Well said.
Thanks for that.
All that remains of religion for me is - I can't believe I got to live here, on this planet during this epoch. Curiously my only political leanings flow from this as well.
Thank you for that Chesterton quote, that's a great one.
Very well said. Novelty is not love.
Hmmm but does this quote contradict the Unsong theodicy
Each daisy is actually ever so slightly different, yet to a human they all look alike. Most don't even notice they come in many different species.
Plot twist: Baffled cryptobotanists discover actually, all daisies are deeply, disturbingly fungible. Every petal alike.
> I think maybe we can rediscover things, we can still look at art by Lippi and others and find it beautiful. So perhaps the answer is simply a change in position. This may be why hand-crafted and human-made things are valued over the (in some ways better) manufactured mass-produced objects: we shifted our perceptions.
I feel this. I was discussing AI art with my wife not long ago and it struck me that when I visit museums, view old art, etc, I usually comment on the creator and circumstances in which the work was created as often as the work itself. That's are an essential part of the experience for me.
I would guess that I'm not alone in that. I think that art, etc contains a bit of it's creator and lets us experience their essence in a way that is otherwise inaccessible to us, locked as we are within our own heads. I also think this is close to why people say that AI art feels 'soulless' once they know what it is -- it's missing the meta-texture of another's (uhm... emulated, I guess) experience and we don't have the same sympathy for AI effort (yet?). That "once they know what it is" is doing important work here though; think of SA's past survey on how reliably people can identify AI art.
(a parallel occurs to me in how nature meditates our experience of the Divine, but I haven't thought that hard about it and am currently working through my own reevaluation of my beliefs re the Nature of reality right now so I'll save the longer pontificating on that)
----
And, echoing others, thanks for the excellent Chesterton quote.
Beautiful. I’ll be thinking about this quote a lot today.
At the risk of a comment that doesn't add much to the discussion, this piece goes straight into my all time Scott Alexander favourites. Exceptional writing.
agreed
One could even say - the thousandth Scott Alexander piece is still as good as the first.
But they wouldn't be if he kept talking about the same topic. I love my Ukraine and Syria war blogs, but full of appreciable aesthetic beauty they are not.
But it does have a theme. ACX is about _rta_: https://www.astralcodexten.com/about
> Yes, we as a culture are post- some semantic apocalypse where listening to the great symphonies of the past has become so easy that we never do it. But you, as an individual, could do it right now. You could type “Mozart symphony” into YouTube and see what happens.
People certainly listen to a solid amount of older instrumental music, I think! It's possible that listening to music for 40 minutes straight is just not what people prefer to do when listening to a 3-minute piece doesn't mean a trip to the concert hall is a waste.
It's also plausible that significant variance in *volume* is not to modern tastes because the modern listener knows that 'too loud' can damage their hearing, doesn't know what 'too loud' is, and notices that if they make sure the loudest parts are not uncomfortable, the quietest parts can be inaudible. (This is my issue with "In the Hall of the Mountain King", I always have to adjust the volume partway through.)
I think people who want to listen to old instrumental music and have an easy time getting started should consider https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StandardSnippet for pleasant familiarity. Readers of SSC should specifically consider https://archive.org/details/CanCan.
> It's also plausible that significant variance in *volume* is not to modern tastes
Back when music was heard live from actual musicians, it was also rare enough to be the center of attention as it happens. If you're actually paying full attention, strong dynamic (meaning: changes in volume) in music are nice and expressive. Nowadays we tend to do other things while listening to music, except possibly at the concert hall, so we don't want it to be so distracting and irregular.
As I understand it, Wagner at least stabilized the idea of the audience paying full attention to the orchestra, partly by having the stage lit and the concert hall dark.
Yeah, the idea that music was "rare enough to be the center of attention as it happens" is totally contrary to our historical understanding of musical performance.
I feel like people who listen to music that way are causal music fans; music devotees will absolutely pay attention to music they're listening to, especially the first time
I do get annoyed with audio tracks with high dynamic range. Most of my music listening is done when driving, and road noise is significant. If I have the volume high enough to hear the quiet bits, the loud bits are painfully loud. I have searched a bit for car stereos / apps with "dynamic range compression", but most audiophiles seem to want the reverse, they want to stamp out dynamic range compression!
> most audiophiles seem to want the reverse, they want to stamp out dynamic range compression
Yes, audiophiles are _listening_ to the music as their main activity, not as a distraction from driving.
IMHO the effect of the automobile on music of the 20th century cannot be understated.
Yes, I'm used to pop music that doesn't have a huge dynamic range. When I try to set a comfortable listening volume for a classical recording, I get annoyed because the loudness of the music changes every so often and I find myself adjusting the volume to compensate...
But if you hear "In the Hall of the Mountain King" live in a concert hall (as it was originally intended to be heard), the dynamic range is a feature, not a problem. Even better is the original "opera" version orchestrated with vocal chorus, missing in the usually heard "overture" version.
The depth of intellect on display here is inspiring. This one is going to stick with me for a while.
I second this.
I don't think Erik Hoel even wants to chart some "society-level solution to the semantic apocalypse problem". Hoel just likes moping about stuff - ugh, society KILLED private tutoring - and stopped making Einsteins!! ugh, society is DESTROYING independent artists by using generative AI!! ugh, Effective Altruism is literally POISON because it demands Hoel not buy a $5 opera ticket and instead save some Bangladeshi child's life, and therefore EA-the-poison needs to be diluted away somehow!!!
All AI has done is give Hoel something new to mope about. And if moping Hoel's thing, then AI has actually benefited him.
Note: I'm not trying to be snarky or unkind. Some people make a hobby of writing eloquent polemics, and Hoel is one of those people. I'm sure he's a great guy in person, but I personally find his polemics always annoying, eloquence notwithstanding.
Tldr: please don't ban me.
If this were Hoel's blog, he would ban you for much less https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2023/02/17/a-comment-i-would-have-made-at-erik-hoels-were-i-not-banned/
Yeah, he banned me for something I said in an irritated exchange with someone else in the comments. I can't remember what I said, but it was definitely not bannable by standards here -- just reasons I disagreed with someone, expressed in a way where my anger was manifest.
He does whine a bit too much. The whole thing about society not making einsteins anymore. He's not talking about genius. He's talking about celebrity. Does it matter if scientists aren't famous anymore? Do they even want that? Their work has transformed and will continue to transform society regardless of their level of fame. Actually now that I think about it he wanted to find a way to support the aristocracy without being overt about it. Maybe he wants to join them some day? Or marry into it? Or maybe he's a nietzsche/rand fan? They love aristocracies. Or maybe he loves the aesthetics of the aristocracy? Anyways the entire point of that article was to say "hey aristocracies produces geniuses which produce all the awesome things! this is why You Should support them!".
Agreed. Hoel likes being a scold.
When I was a child, I used to collect coins. Trite, maybe a bit on the nose for a future commie, but whatever. The visual designs and the history and the cool strange languages were fun, but a big part of the appeal was getting to imagine all the lives some of the older ones might have touched, the situations they've been in. By definition, you can't actually create an object's provenance and history. If you convince yourself those things matter to you, it's not a bad way to beat the machine god.
Chess is arguably undergoing a renaissance because of how easy it is to play online and the growth of social media around it. Stockfish will always destroy us, but it's fine, it doesn't count. The human contest is still meaningful and fun.
Similarly, I have an optimistic suspicion that the sexbots and other replicants will always be merely tactile porn, not true companionship. It's like what Adorno said about the Hays Code. They can be perfect (including plausible flaws and all the rest of it) but once you know, a genuine metaphysical transformation occurs. Besides, they might well be more interested in each other, and if they're not allowed to have that preference, they're a priori not real.
The obvious way to fix the problem in the last sentence is to make sure that all the sexbots are filled with a deep and abiding love for authenticity! They're allowed to have any preference they want, but they inherently have no interest in other sexbots :)
A deep and abiding love for authenticity? That sounds disastrous. Can you imagine how many humans such a preference would exclude?
>Besides, they might well be more interested in each other, and if they're not allowed to have that preference, they're a priori not real.
This seems to presume that you can make androids with preferences, yet somehow these preferences are just arising organically without being programmed in.
The only scenario in which that's remotely plausible is one where the android's mind is a black box based on copying the design of the human mind without any deeper understanding.
However in such a scenario you're not talking about AI's anymore but essentially artificial human minds (with all the obvious ethical implications of that).
In a happy coincidence, the ever-so-amazing Mehdi Aminian just recently posted a full concert of Badakhshani music on youtube. Real good stuff if you're into "world" music, the real thing, not overly commercialized variants. The song at 1:02:10 is particularly cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56HkCexWobc
Thanks for the link
If part of the argument is that the old good things will always be there, then my counters:
1. There will be reduced incentive for people to put in the work to make new things. I can listen to Mozart, sure, but somebody had to be motivated to write Mozart in the first place, rather than punching a few keys to get 80% of the way to Mozart
2. Even granting the premise that the things which have already been created are enough to satisfy any sufficiently-innocent person, we're now faced with the problem that all those things are going to be buried under an exponentially-growing pile of slop.
There has always been bad music, and there have always been bad painters, but it wasn't possible before to automate the production of slop to these levels. This is a quantitative change large enough to become a qualitative change.
It is as difficult as ever to make GOOD art. The democratization of architecture didn't result in a world covered in cathedrals and cottages; it resulted in a hellscape of decaying concrete and ticky-tacky suburbs. When it's possible to get 80% of the way there, why bother with the rest?
You talk about photography, but that's another example of what I'm talking about here. The camera market is one-third what it used to be, and most of that in the range accessible to commoners. People have smartphone cameras, so why bother learning photography? Nevermind that a smartphone camera cannot do the things a dedicated device could do, no matter how many megapixels they write on the box.
I see your basic statistical argument, but I notice there seems to be the trap of reaching a local maximum more quickly, at the cost of giving up entirely on reaching the true peak. If anybody can be Salieri, why put in the work to become Mozart?
Architecture seems like potentially the single least democratized art form remaining, so that's a weird example.
And yeah, there is a lot of crap photography out there (99% of everything is crap, and it always has been), but that doesn't actually gainsay his point that the _best_ of modern photography is still better than it was in the past. You are unlikely to find it by just browsing instagram or whatever, but there are people who curate these things and if you want, you can still find it.
As for people getting stuck in the local maximum: I think that goes to Scott's point: why are you doing that? Nothing is stopping you from going out and finding the best of the best. Why are you settling for the best of your instagram scroll? (this is meant as the hypothetical you, not literal you)
"99% of everything is crap, and always has been"
Funny, I thought it was 80/20. Now it's 99/1. With AI, it'll be 99.9999999/0.0000001. We've gone from a 1 in 5 to a 1 in 100 with your version, and soon it'll be 1 in 10,000,000. I'd say that goes a little beyond "Well, you'll just have to look for the good stuff, like you always have".
From wikipedia - Sturgeon's law is an adage stating "ninety percent of everything is crap".
Dates from 1956, inflation takes its toll.
This makes me think of Francis Ford Coppola's 1991 comment: "To me, the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, and some... just people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little fat girl [apologies!] in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, you know, and make a beautiful film with her little father's camera recorder. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever. And it will really become an art form. That's my opinion."
More recently he discussed iPhones and said something like, Yeah I don't know why that didn't happen. We're not seeing great movies made by Mozarts with iPhones.
The thing about movies is, it's not just about the person behind the camera. You need to hire actors, make sets, etc., and that costs money.
I think we do get more exceptional *writers*, though. There are a lot of hidden gems out there on the Internet for free.
Primer might be the best example of someone coming from outside the film industry and making a movie on cheap cameras.
Robert Rodriguez made the first El Mariachi for $6000. (He later remade it for much more.)
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez produced The Blair Witch Project for somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. At one time (possibly still today), it held the record for largest ratio of box office to production cost, and kicked off the found footage craze.
Mike Cheslik created Hundreds of Beavers for about $150,000 (I hear most of that was spent on beaver mascot outfits, bought in bulk). It might be the most successful film so far that was shot in *1080p*. (Then edited with Adobe After Effects.) Earlier, he produced Lake Michigan Monster for about $7000.
Hundreds of Beavers is the best movie I saw in 2024.
Might be for me as well. It's the reason Lake Michigan Monster is on my to-watch list now.
While there are examples of people who did this (Kevin Smith, The Blair Witch Project come to mind) I'd say this creative revolution is primarily happening on YouTube and TikTok. Even without the big cameras, movies are huge, capital-intensive projects and that probably dictates large projects (you have to earn back the investment and people won't pay to see a 10 minute film). With easy internet distribution and low capital costs entertainment moved away from 3 hour epics and towards 10-minute clips. This sort of echoes the transition music made from 100-person orchestral symphonies to 3-minute songs made by 4-person bands. Technological innovations changed the structure of the art form.
The question though is why we didn’t get more people moving from 8mm video cameras into Hollywood. When it comes to directors I believe the industry is largely meritocratic and actively searching for talent. (There might be a few nepo baby directors but it’s rare).
You can see Lucas and Spielberg and others starting with small movies and 8mm cameras or school projects and yet, when that kind of personal movie production becomes even more common the talent pool hasn’t increased
>The question though is why we didn’t get more people moving from 8mm video cameras into Hollywood.
I suspect it has, it's just that those 8mm films were just learning exercises and were never commercially released. You mentioned Spielberg and Lucas. I know the Coen brothers also started this way as kids. Probably many others did too.
I suspect the reason that there isn't a thriving underground industry of home-produced 8mm indie films is that you just can't make a good movie without serious money. Making the cameras cheap only solves like 5% of the problem. You still need lighting, editing, good actors, etc, so truly talented people either go down the studio route or they get on YouTube.
Spielberg did in fact start with an 8mm. However those became cheaper over time and then video recording at high quality is available on most phones. In fact feature length movies have been made on iPhones. Steven Soderbergh created two with the earliest on the iPhone 7, a phone which would probably be <$100 today if available.
So millions if not billions of people have access to this technology and yet the pipeline of talent is not increasing.
> Look at photography as an example—now that it’s been democratized the best photos today are way better than the best photos of the past.
I’m not sure I’d agree with that at all. The greatest artists in any field often come earlier rather than later, maybe that’s low hanging fruit, maybe it’s an abundance of human energy and interest when a new form of art is created, maybe it’s easier to make a splash with new techniques.
I know nothing about photographers so I asked chatGPT for the most well regarded photographers and their date of births and I get this. As you can see these are all old or dead.
1. Ansel Adams – February 20, 1902
2. Dorothea Lange – May 26, 1895
3. Henri Cartier-Bresson – August 22, 1908
4. Richard Avedon – May 15, 1923
5. Steve McCurry – February 24, 1950
6. Diane Arbus – March 14, 1923
7. Sebastião Salgado – February 8, 1944
8. Annie Leibovitz – October 2, 1949
9. Vivian Maier – February 1, 1926
10. Robert Capa – October 22, 1913
That’s an interesting list. There are people who should be on it most definitely and there’s a few I don’t think should be on it. There’s a whole bunch of people I think should be on it.
As you would expect, it is very biased towards American photographers.
Vivian Maier should certainly not be on it. That does not mean I don’t enjoy her work, but she is more of a human interest story to me.
I cannot believe that Brassai is not on it. Or André Kertész.
Email spam filters are pretty good, though. I don’t think it’s a given that recognizable AI slop will be impossible to avoid. Both filtering and image generators are getting better.
What happens when AI generated music really is as good or better than what people can come up with?
Email spam filters are not nearly the same problem. I know some people are working on automated tools to catch AI-generated art--an artificial art official, if you will--and hopefully they become more reliable than the AIs themselves. Still, at best that leaves us pouring tons of energy into generating slop AND tons of energy into detecting and removing it. As someone with an autoimmune, condition, having to pay energy to damage my own body AND to repair the damage, the parallels are a little close for comfort.
I'll believe that they can generate better art when I see it. If I could, in the time I have left, hit a few keys and generate new episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, or new pieces in the style of Mozart, it'd be different. But we're not even close to that yet.
Amusingly, Mozart grates on my ear. It feels like I'm listening to someone showing off, and who won't shut up.
Beethoven's is the stuff that gets to me. (Ironically, I've heard criticisms from people who prefer Mozart because it sounds to them like it leapt fully formed from Mozart's fingers, whereas Beethoven wouldn't stop tinkering after the first draft.)
I enjoy some of the works of both. My tastes are eclectic and it's not common for me to like more than a few songs or pieces by any group, artist, or composer. Even Scott Joplin missed sometimes.
That was the big criticism of Mozart; too many notes.
Two unrelated thoughts:
Personally, I think problem with sunsets isn't that I don't appreciate them when I see them, it's that I'm too distracted to remember to look at them. I'm busy doing something else, and then I notice the sun has gone done. Pretty regularly when I do happen to notice the sun setting, I do stop and appreciate it for at least a few moments.
This makes me wonder to what extent the problem isn't one of oversaturation by a single experience type, but maybe rather a problem of opportunity cost: we have so many opportunities now, that the "basic pleasures" can't compete as much for our attention anymore? I'm not sure if it matters what the exact mechanism is, though.
On art: not all art seen in reproduction manages to fulfill the experience of seeing the genuine article; there are a few artists like Tintoretto who I had very little appreciation for before seeing their work in person. I think part of it was the size of the paintings: there's something about the sheer scale of them that, when lost in a computer-screen-sized image, diminishes it dramatically. And other context, or just greater resolution can make a big deal to my appreciation too. I find I can easily spend a decent amount of time admiring a painting in person that I probably never would looking at it on a screen.
Very beautiful and moving, Scott. My favorite essay in many years.
Writing that makes me wonder if "beauty" and "beatify" are related, and of course, they are. Which fits perfectly. You keep running into those perfect moments!
I think it's useful to distinguish 'social standing' from art or wine or food or whatever else it is you like.
Social standing is almost definitionally zero-sum. As things improve, it is harder to get the same amount of social standing.
In 1000, if you had plenty of food all the time, this was valuable in two ways. First, it meant you and your family didn't have to go hungry. And second, it provided social standing - people would be impressed by things like 'he eats meat at every meal', and would try to be your friend.
Today, ~everyone in First World countries has plenty of food all the time. And everyone gets the first benefit of this. But nobody gets the second benefit. Nobody is going to be impressed by you having plenty of food any more.
There is still plenty of stuff that I think constitutes good art. (I'm fond of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiW4275dIEA). But there's enough of it that it can no longer confer social standing to make/have it. You can no longer impress people by having a reasonably-well-made portrait on your wall. Instead, if you want to impress people through 'Art', you need to either navigate the hellscape that is the modern Art world or pay enough money that it's clear you're a billionaire.
To "secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff" is somewhat confused. You can find paintings that look like stuff! But you can't make them give social standing. It's too easy to produce them, and there are too many people who want social standing.
This is the symmetrical-Heaven I think I would describe. In Heaven, everyone has everything they could want...but so does everyone else. If you want a beautiful mansion so that you can live in a beautiful mansion, you can have it. But if you want a beautiful mansion so that people will seethe in envy at your Instagram, there is no way you can get that - we're not going to make others sad so that you can feel superior. If you want to know the secrets of reality so that you can understand the music of God's creation, you can learn them. But if you want to know the secrets of reality so that you can be better than everyone else, there is no way you can get that - we're not going to keep everyone else from learning this so that you can feel superior.
Almost everyone has access to plenty of calories, and yet if you give people homemade cookies, they will probably still be pretty pleased.
> To "secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff" is somewhat confused. You can find paintings that look like stuff! But you can't make them give social standing. It's too easy to produce them, and there are too many people who want social standing.
It's possible Scott wants to see originals of modern representational paintings without having to buy all of them, and I'm not sure how much museums cater to that?
Perhaps this is why foodposting is such a common thing. Since we can no longer signal status through the feasts we host, the size of our gut, or the amount of meat we eat, we might still do so through posting our highly photogenic meal prepared at great cost.
Is this really an accurate description of typical human mental states? It sounds like an awful, tormented existence to not to be amazed by the beauty of the world every day.
It is.
I had the same question. At least, it doesn't describe my typical mental state.
To my mind, there is a pretty simple approach to appreciating something and that is to see it for the first time again. And that’s not magical thinking, that’s just working from your immediate experience rather than your priors (memory). Modern humans spend a lot of time working with their priors. One can look at the sunset and try to recall the experience of seeing it for the first time, but you’re already lost because you’re trying to remember something.
They used to say be here now, but that’s become woo even though it isn’t.
I had the sudden thought that there is a touch of Platonism in twentieth century abstract art.
Viz. Yves Klein tries to paint the Platonic Ideal of blueness, shorn of its accidents such as being used to paint the Virgin Mary’s gown. It’s not the Virgin we are looking at, it’s blueness.
P.S. when looking at some Yves Klein paintings in person, I’m thinking to myself: that’s just not the same blue as his other works. Yeah, sure colour perception depends on lighting, conte. T, etc, etc.
Excellent, thought-provoking essay—beautifully written! I largely agree with your points, but there’s one concern that gnaws at me, and it goes beyond just AI’s role in art. What troubles me most is that, despite the incredible capabilities of AI and other advanced creative tools, there doesn’t seem to be any truly NEW art emerging. Creating Ghibli images is fun, but shouldn’t genuine creativity push us toward something fresh, something that recaptures that sense of awe and novelty we felt when we first saw a Ghibli film?
This issue predates AI TBF. When I was younger, I dabbled in electronic music production and was blown away by how digital audio workstations (DAWs) like FL Studio, Cubase, and Ableton democratized music creation. Suddenly, anyone with a laptop could produce studio-quality tracks from their bedroom. Since then, the tech has only gotten better—now we have entire suites of plugins and generative AI tools that can churn out a polished, chart-ready song in minutes. And yet, if you look at the music industry, particularly electronic music, it’s striking how little has changed. Where are the groundbreaking new genres? Since the early 2000s, you could argue that Dubstep, Vaporwave, and Synthwave are the only notable exceptions, but even those feel more like remixes of past ideas than wholly original movements. If you check out Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music (https://music.ishkur.com) it shows how the genre timeline essentially flatlines after 2010 .
In film, we’re trapped in an endless loop of remakes, prequels, and sequels—where’s the next Citizen Kane or 2001: A Space Odyssey? Visual art isn’t much different; AI can generate breathtaking images, but they often lean on established styles—hyper-realism, impressionism, cyberpunk—rather than creating anything new.
Kinda feels that even the power of current Godlike AIs cannot let us escape from Mark Fisher Hauntological prison or Douthat's Decadent society hell where you are forever trapped in the pastiches of the Golden Ages and there is nothing new on the horizon.
I've pondered the problem of living in a post-Golden Age world where everything beautiful was made ages ago. Funnily enough, I was triggered by movies like A Streetcar Named Desire and Citizen Kane.
What I arrived at was that it's all contextual and context takes time to shape. We never even see the tens of thousands of other movies made around the time of Citizen Kane. They might be good, well composed works but not good enough to warrant being seen by a contemporary person. And, similarly, because we have so much more context about that time now, Citizen Kane truly stands out to us. It might have been a great celebrated movie when it was made, but in the heat of the moment you couldn't have safely predicted that it would have the power it has now.
This leads me to suspect that we have such works being produced now but we can't see them because a) we're under a torrent of things being created all the time so we can't even make out the pearls, and b) our present hasn't crystalized into a set context so it's impossible to judge which great works will be immortalized as part of that context.
"Sleeper hits" which only attain recognition after the fact are pretty unusual; most enduring masterpieces were recognised as masterpieces at the time they were produced. The difficulty is predicting which masterpieces will be remembered and which will be forgotten.
Survivorship bias.
Citizen Kane was technically groundbreaking, and it really stood out from other movies of the period for that reason. There were lots of other good movies at the time, but they didn’t break the mold in the way that Citizen Kane did. A specific example is the low angle shots in that movie. That was very unusual because it meant having to build a ceiling in the set which really screwed up the lighting grids of the time. It had to be shot completely differently and it was quite a technical challenge. I took my son to see it recently in the theater, and I was quite shocked by how tired the script sounded to me. I was still blown away by the way it was photographed and presented though. My son who was about 23 at the time felt the same way. And then, of course, Orson Welles becomes incredibly famous in his own right and that doesn’t hurt either.
Look beyond the veil. Bandcamp and YouTube are full of new artists and music doing new things. The industry has changed and become less interested in promoting new music, but that doesn't mean it's not still being made.
so much this. The algo limits what is offered to us, not what is out there to be sought
This is something I think about a lot because I notice this in my own field (game dev). Where the big corporations push the recognizable easy sells, and people complain that everything looks the same. But the technological developments have allowed so many other people and organizations to make games now, and as soon as you step into the indie space there is so much wild shit going on.
So my baseline assumption is that this is similar to other industries, and if you just pick a direction of a given subculture of an artistic medium you will probably find surprise and wonder anew.
True. It is a truism in the music business, that the music a human consumer listens to between the ages of 18 and 21 is the music that human will listen to for the rest of his life. For cats, around the ages of 9-12 months.
This did not happen in my case, largely because the Magic Of The Internet made it possible for me to seek out and find all kinds of music that I didn't know about, that I would not have appreciated at the time, that I had forgotten about and needed to rediscover. All available 24/7, anywhere I have internet access, all for free!
+1!
I was born an old person trapped in a young person's body, so believe me when I say I understand the "nothing new is being made" feeling. But all of this is cultural and recency bias. Show "Citizen Kane" to most people today and it's not winning awards. Without the cultural context to tell you "it's a masterpiece", without knowing it did many of the things it does first, it's just not going to hit people as hard. Likewise with 2001. Never mind that it was a movie adaptation of a book (so what, is Hollywood out of ideas already /s) but it's also just ming bogglingly abstract and in many ways a terribly boring movie. It's an impressive technical accomplishment, and certainly interesting in a number of ways, but realistically, I'd rather be watching John Wick or Bullet Train.
And to say those classics were the heights of "NEW" art also amusingly ignores the very subject inspiring this discussion. Studio Ghibli's works are as a rule phenomenal art that defines a style distinct enough to be "copied" and they're all well post Citizen Kane and Space Odyssey. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a movie making epic the likes of which had never been seen before (and arguably hasn't been seen since) and was only itself enabled by the availability and cheapness of tools that themselves were described as being a death knell of art (see also the rash of CGI slop that Hollywood has produced over the years).
The reality I think is that true "masterpieces", the kinds that go on to be cultural touchstones or examples studied by future students, are and always have been exceedingly rare. We know about the ones that came before because they came before, and their peers have already been forgotten while they have stood the test of time. What today will be that in 50 years? It is impossible for us to say because we live in the moment, and what inspires those who come next is by definition undetermined. There's also a degree of cultural homogenization. Anime styles took the world by storm and now every animation house can (and does) produce what was once an exotic and foreign style. The "shrinking" of the world by way of the internet means you know about the hot new sound from X before it has a chance to build up a catalog of 10-20 new musicians for you to binge in a burst of discovery. You'll still eventually hear those 10-20, but unless you consciously choose to forego being a part of the growth and experimentation of that new genre and sound, by the time you get to artist number 10, it will be just as normal to you as most new stuff is today.
I was never able to get far into 2001 because it's so incredibly boring. I suppose it must have been amazing at the time just because of the special effects, but those don't even rise to conscious notice nowadays.
On the other hand, I just read The Great Gatsby for fun, and I thought it holds up pretty well. And I also recently watched Die Hard for the first time and thought it was a really good movie even today.
2001 is only watchable on a panorama size screen, and yes, it moves very slowly. We’ve been spoiled in the world of Science Fiction since then.
>Never mind that it was a movie adaptation of a book
It actually was written concurrently with the making of the film and Kubrick and Clarke collaborated on both. At the end of the day the book was published under Clarke’s name. 2001 was definitely a team effort.
Did the the genre flatline, or did Ishkur just stop updating their guide? There's lots of new developments that aren't charted there (wave, phonk, etc). A lot of this (the original post, Ishkur falling off, "everyone"'s growing disenchantment, etc) just sounds like aging.
You realize that operas are still a thing that get performed live, right? Paintings still exist as physical objects. Long arduous overland journeys are still a thing people do, if they can take time off from work - a follow a couple on YouTube who are on a multi month trek through Africa on 125cc motorcycles.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.
I have to disagree about hearing Caruso sing. Live music and recorded music separated ways pretty early and have never been friends ever since. No matter how many times I heard my favourite music in record, I'd gladly go see a concert where it is performed. Even a recording of a concert isn't the same thing. I guess a VR experience might replace the real thing someday, but we're not nearly there yet.
Of course, it only works for arts where there is an element of performance, which is why ultramarine doesn't work so well anymore: it IS just more ultramarine, it's static. Still, we do occasionally revisit art galleries to look at some of the same paintings we already seen, do we?
As for thousand sunsets... I always describe myself as "a man of rivers". I don't like mountains and forests very much, but I absolutely love rivers. I can walk along the bank for thousandth time, and the river will always be different for me. I don't feel that in forest: I get bored by all the trees, but water is eternally changing, and there are birds, and lights, and wind and ships and friendly dogs along the path. You don't even have to train very hard to learn to appreciate thousandth sunset - but you got to find that one thing that works for you (from personal experience, rivers don't work like that for everyone, for example my wife prefers mountains and/or sea, and while I like sea, too, it's too borderless for me to enjoy as much as a river; also, I love to see ships up close).
So I'm not worried about semantic apocalypse at all. Until we all live in VR, live concerts and new sunsets await. And after that, the question loses all meaning, as AI will either generate endless varying experiences for you (maybe by erasing your memory from time to time), or kill as all.
Broadway this year is full of movie and TV stars performing live classic plays: e.g., Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in "Othello" and Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Michael McKean in "Glengarry Glen Ross."
Seems like people want to pay good money to be in the same room with stars.
Doesn't have to be stars, even - or mainstream genres. Blues bars get their share of public, too.
I know acting on stage is different than acting for a camera, but a lot of the actors who become famous really are *just that good* and can deliver a performance that goes beyond what most actors can.
(There are also Broadway stars that have a similar power to make or break a show - "The Producers" was never quite the same without Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane starring.)
>acting on stage is different than acting for a camera
Not as much as people think. It’s really a question of attenuation or projection. It’s like having a volume control for what is already a good sound.
Seeing something live is always special. I was fortunate enough to be cast as an extra in a show called Zarzuela at Madison Square Garden.
It was a Spanish touring company performing opera that was specific to Spain. It was going to play in a small theater out in Queens somewhere but Placido Domingo said he would perform with them. Thus Madison Square Garden…
I was in the wings about 15 feet away from Domingo as he sang. There’s no way that happens with a recording. It was truly astounding.
1. This essay was awesome, and I loved it. It expressed something I’ve had sitting in the back of my mind for a while in a way that was engaging and clever.
2. On the topic of art in a world dominated by AI:
When thinking about how technological advancements of the past have made art forms largely irrelevant, one thing I think about is the pre-printing press practice of producing books by hand. We have lost a lot of appreciation for the art of calligraphy and copying books by hand as a society, but I can’t help but feel like this technological improvement is extremely good. With computers, keyboards, and at home printers, or even the internet which doesn’t require a physical medium, it is so much easier for an author to share their stories and ideas with the world. We have lost one art, but it has given rise to a new one.
Perhaps Ghiblification AI will eventually become good enough to replace most animators for long video productions (assuming that it’s maintaining a style that already exists rather than inventing a new one). But won’t this give rise to new artists having so many more opportunities to tell their stories? It will be so much cheaper to watch and view the movies people made from the comfort of their own home. Sure, there will be low quality productions. Sure, production will feel less impressive. But I think it’s hard to argue that the era of YouTube videos represents a downgrade from the era of 1950’s movies, just in terms of sheer quantity of content and chance of producing high-quality content, as well as accessibility.
This is very thoughtful. I just have a couple additional thoughts.
1) Photography is the reason that art no longer looks like stuff. It took a while, partly because the art of photography needed a while to develop (pun, sorry), but people eventually realized that if you want to see what something looks like, take a photograph. That freed art to do other things. Some of those things are poundingly stupid, but others are really neat.
2) I listen to classical music a lot. Recordings have not spoiled my appreciation of live performances. I would not be without recordings. They bring anything I want to hear to me whenever I want to hear it. But I crave live concerts, especially when I get to hear something I cherish on recording but have never heard live before. This is partly because it'll be a different and new interpretation, but also because of the vividness of the experience.
>This is partly because it'll be a different and new interpretation, but also because of the vividness of the experience.
I went to a baroque concert the other day. There was a certain something about feeling my seat vibrate under me when the trumpets and kettledrums got going that just can't be replicated by a recording, no matter how good.
Absolutely.. it involves other senses that are not so much involved when you are listening to a recording or watching a film.
Great post, however I'd argue that the "Semantic Apocalypse" hasn't hit with the same strength all art forms.
Take music, for example:
Mozart might not be reaching the top of the charts anytime soon, but pop music live concerts just keep on getting more and more expensive.
You can literally listen to Taylor Swift for free, but people keep on paying small fortunes just to see her live! It's not just more Taylor Swift!
So, maybe the "semantic apocalypse" will just cause some art forms to be devalued, while others will become ultracompetitive.
I just had a sudden intuition that perhaps the Grateful Dead defined semantic apocalypse
Is music incredibly durable to this or something? I think hundreds of millions or billions of people are convinced Mariah or Ariana is the best vocalist of all time, or Taytay is the best lyricist, or Nobuo Uematsu is the best composer. Some further irony is music is basically in a remix era without a lot of seismic tech or culture innovation happening unlike with rap or electronica. People are bonding with it just fine and ai is the thing that could throw it back into an invention era.
And the best love story of all time is obviously Final Fantasy X and my only regret is I ever acquired the social skills to sometimes shut up about it. If I were 14 again and Claude spit out a million final fantasies I would probably only have time to play like 4 so it wouldn't matter much. Novels also take time to experience.
There's still the human for the sake of human dimension. A kpop star wrote about her experience being bullied and dropped this line "like building muscle is feeling weak and building knowledge is feeling dumb, fighting to exist is allowing yourself to fall apart." Her vocals are good but her dialectics are just incredible. So existentialism lives to see another decade. And I probably wouldn't have cared if Claude spit that out? Somehow minimizing loss for what a bullied person would say just isn't the same.
Using still visual art to defend the beauty of art is basically strawmanning.
> is music incredibly durable to this
I think somewhat, because music's value to people is not merely a function of its objective platonic beauty, at novelty and contemporaneity.
Today's musicians may not the best ever in a vacuum, but they are riffing on musical trends the audience is aware of that past musicians didn't or couldn't. Or writing lyrics that have resonance with people's current lives and culture.
What an amazing post, thank you for writing it. I had already read the semantic apocalypse post, so when I figured out what it was going to be about halfway through the ultramarine story, that was enough to make me emotional.
Usually I only use this account to write mean comments, but this was really great.
I confess, I've become less and less optimistic about the tendency of general economic progress to make things better over time.
Under standard economic models, increasing wealth, or things that people are willing to pay for, is an increase in preference satisfaction. Even if people don't say so, even if they complain that things feel like they're getting worse and worse, if there is an increase in stuff people want to pay for, then human satisfaction is increasing. Revealed preferences trump self-reports of satisfaction.
Over time, I've become more and more skeptical of this model. Psychologically, it seems that humans are overall less happy with their choices if they choose their favorite between twenty different menu options than four, even though in economic terms expanding people's options so that more people are able to select something better suited to their preferences is *always* an improvement. In terms of human satisfaction, some of the most basic, straightforward increases in wealth, absent any negative externalities, are actually making things worse. Liking and wanting are also separate processes, people can feel compelled to make choices which make them unhappy, because they want things they don't like, and don't like the consequences of things they want. Economists can and often do try to handwave this and find excuses for why pursuit of people's revealed preferences makes them happier overall. I do not buy it. I have spent too much time consciously observing this from the inside, watching myself weigh options where I knew that one would make me miserable, choosing that option, watching myself become miserable for no higher satisfaction. I've become convinced that the whole idea of "revealed preference" is a farce.
That's not to say that technological improvement and economic growth don't sometimes straightforwardly make things better. If you get cancer, better that it can be detected early and treated than that you die from it. Aggregate a bunch of changes like this and people's lives are much better off. Things can get better with time. But I don't believe that we as a society have ever actually generated a trustworthy systematic way of measuring whether or how much things are getting better or worse. I used to be a techno-optimist, but these days, I look at kids growing up in the world around me, and I compare how happy they seem to be to how I remember from decades before, and I worry.
The problem with "revealed preference" is that it has a technical meaning as economics jargon which doesn't match its meaning in plain English. I knew someone who drove for Uber & Lyft for awhile - an economist would say that his "revealed preference" is that he was OK with being exploited as a gig worker, and that would be correct in the jargon sense. That he preferred going back to being homeless and living out of his car reveals his actual preference. BTW, he also said Lyft is marginally less evil than Uber.
I think an economist would probably say that he had a revealed preference for flexibility and autonomy over stability and high pay, which is at least consistent with his eventually choosing to be homeless and live out of his car as well.
But I don't think we can grant the premise that people consistently tend to make choices that make them happier or more satisfied, or even that they have reason to expect will make them happier or more satisfied given the information they have at the time. Economists may model people as having limited mental resources which they can devote to doing things they want, and the way they allocate them has to be modeled as part of their preferences. But they generally don't model people as having compulsions where they have to spend huge amounts of emotional resources in order *not* to do things that they know will make them unhappy.
Bryan Caplan has argued extensively that drug addicts may say they don't want to be addicted to drugs, but they have a revealed preference to keep using drugs and lying about their preferences. Many people find this absurd, but it's just a natural consequence of taking the axioms of economic models completely seriously. Some economists draw special exceptions in ordinary economic modeling for things like drugs, as elements which hijack ordinary human decisionmaking. But I think that drugs are just a particularly stark, but otherwise ordinary example of people consistently making choices they know will make them unhappy, but can't help themselves.
This perspective is incomprehensible to me. I have never, not a single time, felt that having more or better choices made me less happy. But I have also gotten much more pessimistic about the future, because it seems that technological progress is generally going to make choices fewer and worse.
Computers make it possible to make products that betray their owners for the benefit of their creators, and essentially everything you can buy is treacherous today. I can't buy a car that isn't constantly spying on me. I can't buy many books from anyone other than Amazon, who will only permit me to read them on devices and apps they control and can remove them at any time. I can't buy a garage door opener that can be opened by a button not made by the same company. I manage to make some products work for me by preventing them from connecting to the internet, but increasingly I expect to see everything using 5G or mesh networking to report to its masters. I can't buy software for many purposes that I can run myself - just "services" that actually make me the product. I can't choose not to be recorded on video by thousands of cameras every day, or for all the information collected about me not to be stored and aggregated by organizations around the world for their own purposes. Everywhere I go people are trying to force me to install apps loaded with spyware and inappropriate permissions to accomplish simple real world tasks like parking.
Everything from food to games to news is constantly optimized (based on metrics) to be as addictive and harmful as possible. As many choices as possible are removed from interfaces (based on metrics). I can't choose to run an older version of a game or app or website. I can't easily install something as simple as a phone holder in a car; it's designed with the assumption that nothing will ever be added to it. I have plenty of money, and increasingly feel like there is not much to buy that isn't of negative value.
If AI continues to advance, the people who control it (whether companies or governments or individual psychopaths) will not need even the pretense of consent. Democracy flourished for a time because ordinary people wielding guns were a significant military power, so the winner of an election would likely also win a civil war. The same logic no longer applies in a world of drone warfare. It seems likely that the natural end result of technological development is that almost everyone will be helplessly enslaved forever.
You might want to check whether near-infrared stuff still disrupts camera images and maybe look into Reflectacles or similar products.
You have 23 bits of anonymity. (Probably your physical location does away with most of them.) How many bits do you think "carrying active countermeasures against cameras" is worth?
Fair enough.
>This perspective is incomprehensible to me. I have never, not a single time, felt that having more or better choices made me less happy.
I can imagine some people have never felt this way. Human psychology is pretty diverse. But this appears to be a common tendency for humans in aggregate. It's certainly one I can relate to. I wish I were the outlier here, but what research is available on the subject seems to suggest that's not the case.
That said, I agree that your commentary describes other ways that our society's measured "wealth" can increase while decreasing human satisfaction overall. Because the notion that an increase in payments rendered for goods and services represents an increase in human thriving is too fraught to be relied on for even directionally correct measurements.
This one left me quiet. The way the coat shifts from fabric to metaphor—layer by layer, like the loss itself—it’s haunting in the gentlest way. There’s no villain here, just people trying to hold on to each other while standing in different realities.
What lingers for me is that question underneath it all: how do we love someone who’s drifting from the world we share, without dragging them back or letting them go?
No easy answers. Just the weight of the coat.
That was one fine piece of writing. Thank you.
The other day I watched with my wife, what was upon reflection, an art appreciation documentary. It wasn't my first time seeing this video, but I was still captured by the writing and contemplation of it all. My wife though found a narration melodramatic at best. For her, what to me was simply a means to deliver a message, was the best part of the video, the thing she was fascinated by and most appreciated, the actual artwork.
The difference? While I spent years learning to write, she spent years learning to paint.
Perhaps the semantic apocalypse is not born of abundance, but rather revealed by it. A semantic revelation, if you will :)
Almost every day I am filled with amazement at the bright lights and heat that fill my cozy dry home. I imagine it's because I have spent night out in the cold, making fire from sticks, hunting and gathering. Knowing what it means.
Potentially, AI could find a way to manipulate the human brain such that it derives maximal satisfaction from its experiences. I don't see any other solution to the problem of the semantic apocalypse than this.
I think it's sort of like the difference between having a crush and being in love with your partner of many years. When you have a crush, your brain is flooded with chemicals tailored by evolution to get you to try to sleep with that person, but whose effect is to make you feel high and giddy about that person. It feels amazing, but inevitably fades with time as you become accustomed to that person. With a partner of many years, your brain isn't giving you help anymore. If you want to feel something for your partner during the grinding hustle and bustle of everyday life as a parent of three young kids, it's on you to think about all the amazing qualities they possess, and the moments of love and compassion throughout your time together, and spin that into a positive feeling of love and endearment. To me, while it might lack the whiz-bang high of a crush, it is infinitely more satisfying to recognize the deep love I have for my partner, and when I take the time to really feel it and appreciate it, it evokes a deep contentment that no crush could ever provide.
Sweet
The tweet that got me was "Feeling a bit sad for Studio Ghibli right now. Like someone laughingly stole their bag of magic and dumped it out on an unkept playground".
This encapsulates how I feel about what AI art is doing to artists, especially those starting out. Scott and Eric address what AI is doing to art consumers, but what is happening to art producers (artists) is much more soul crushing. Most artists don't make much if any money, and making art is often very lonely. But artists derive meaning and self worth from cultivating a magic box that allows them to create things only they can create. And yes, it makes people jealous and that's probably pretty fun. But now the tables have turned, and the jealous masses have stolen their magic box and are laughing about it. We can appreciate the joy that these new toys bring us while acknowledging that it is not fully zero sum.
And yes, things of this nature have happened before and humans found a way to create new types of art, but man, the scale and speed of this seems especially cruel.
Does it make a difference if it's a faceless corporation instead of a natural person of flesh and blood?
Can you clarify what the “it” is in your question?
I think the first one is an example of a "dummy pronoun": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun.
The second one is your hypothetical "artist producer" whose "soul" is being crushed by "magic box/bag" technological advance cheapening theirs.
Sorry, I have no idea what you’re asking
"Does it matter if [the artist whose soul is being crushed] is a faceless corporation instead of a natural person of flesh and blood?"
I think is what they meant.
Start liking it, unless you have a way to get that genie back into the bottle.
The bullying will continue until morale improves.
Worse yet, it pumps out so much crap! But people say, "Oh, how pretty!"
It’s funny, people’s visual sensibilities are the ones that are most easily played with. Certain things go straight to the reptile brain without passing go.
I intuitively learned a lot about this in my time as a film editor.
Our other qualia can be tricked, too. Check this out...
https://youtu.be/14A0ttQtkCo
That seems to reinforce my point.
But is Studio Ghibli's "bag of magic" really their art style? I mean obviously it's part of their bag of magic, but let's be real, you could get any number of teenaged anime fans to draft you AI quality replications of Ghibli artwork for years on Deviant Art and Fiver. Yet no one felt someone was stealing their magic.
What makes a Studio Ghibli movie magic (and by extension what makes stills of the artwork of those moves magic) is (IMO) everything that goes into it. The story telling, the details paid attention to the things people do. The imagination of the world building. The wistfulness for a time that seems past yet never existed. These are conveyed in the art, true, but it's more than just the art. Studio Ghibli wouldn't have the "magic" they do if they'd only released 20 stills from every movie they've made over the years. Heck, for that matter, any Ghibli film is put together by teams of artists quite literally duplicating the same style rather than expressing their own individual artistic style. Clearly "unable to be duplicated quickly and at scale" is not a key to Ghibli magic.
That's part of the point I think Scott is getting at here. Artists have always derived meaning and self worth from "cultivating magic" and one way they used to do that was by creating something only they could create with a material only they could obtain because only they knew where to obtain it and how to use it. And yet, here we are today in a world of vibrant colors and arguably no less artistic or magical. The art of Studio Ghibli and its artists is not diminished by the ease of which their magic of vibrant colors is reproduced.
This is a little of what I was thinking, too. Anyone reading this is invited to try to remember the first time they saw a frame of a Ghibli movie, or a poster, and ask whether that first still haunted them the same way one of the actual movies did. I suspect a lot of people saw one and thought either "oh, another anime" or "hmm, another anime, let's see what this one's like" and then got swept away by the story and music and animation style and foley work.
And now, all someone has to do is see a Ghibli still and that whoosh of animation and music and story hits them again all at once.
It's not that different from a smell that takes you back to that one day in school, or that bite of mac and cheese that reminds you of that first date you had with your now-spouse. There's not anything that special about five-year-old SprayNine or whatever cheese product TGIFriday's was putting in its sides. Anyone else will smell or taste that and think "ehh", because their neurons don't associate it with that memory and emotion.
Well, speaking as someone who considers themselves an artist, and has hardly made a dime in their entire life, and who struggles with this conundrum regularly, I can say that the only reason to make art is because you need and want to. And that applies to everyone,. If it’s recognition that you want, you can share your art for free. If people respond to it, you will get recognition even if it’s only a few people.
If you want to be a professional artist, then other skills are involved;
and then there’s always lady luck.
I don’t know what it is that divides people on this — whether it’s innate, or a trained habit of the mind, or what. But I *definitely,* not exaggerating for effect or making it up or trying to act holy or anything, have the G. K. Chesterton experience of the world, not the Hoel experience of the world.
None of the things in the world I find most beautiful or pleasurable pall at all with time; the most beautiful of all seem only to grow *more* beautiful.
Some things *do* pall with repetition but I sort of see it as a culling or discernment process. The immediate experience of “oh, that’s lovely,” with repetitive handling, either burnishes to beauty or crumbles into dust. And by sorting this out I can surround myself with the beautiful things, not the things that will crumble.
Sunsets, a chanted Latin mass, all of Bach’s output, the poetry of John Donne, Dante (even in translation), snowfall caught in a street light, a plain cup of black coffee with a good croissant, 10-year Laphroaig, the way tree branches look against the sky in spring when the sap is rising — these are all things I have deeply loved and found enormous satisfaction in for twenty or thirty years or more, and all of them are just as beautiful now as they ever were, and ok I guess those are pretty stereotypical things for someone to find enduringly beautiful.
But simple things are becoming more pleasurable for me with age, as well. In my wayward youth I needed it to be the *best* coffee and an *excellent* croissant, but a couple days ago I walked to the little convenience store around the corner from the hospital. I purchased a cup of brewed tea (they don’t give you hot water and a tea bag there; they brew up the tea in one of their Bunn coffee machines and put it in a carafe) and a buttered hard roll. I ate my hard roll and drank my tea walking back to the hospital on a grungy city street and I was *so happy* with my convenience-store pain beurre and my tea in a way that twenty year old me *never* would have been.
I know beyond any doubt that it isn’t because I’m holy lol. I just…..idk, it’s a fascinating world that I find very full of enduring small pleasures and unexpected shattering beauty. I guess I feel some of GKC’s exasperated frustration that not everyone can see it like that. Wish I knew how to share it because it’s a delight to live in.
This is true for me too. I think it becomes more available to us in the later stages of life.
I think it becomes more available with age too (definitely has changed with age for me), but also I’m 40, which is about Scott’s age and Hoel’s age, so I don’t think it can be *just* that.
It's not just that, it's something else. It's just that age makes it more available on average. See e.g. Ilyusha, The Brothers K.
but what is “it”?
iirc Ilyusha is something like a holy fool (it’s been nearly a decade since I last read the Karamazov Brothers 😬) and I’m just not convinced that that’s the criteria for this experience becoming available.
I am approaching 70 and a big part of it is, the novelty wears off. Once you’ve seen a few cycles of fads come and go I think one develops a better sense of what might be a continuity underlying these things, and become more tuned to that. I have watched quite a few recent films because I have a son in his 20s, and it’s surprising how often I can remember a film from the 50s or 40s or even 30s that contains the seed for the film I am watching. And then it boils down to what kind of a job was done reinventing this thing that I remember.
The most recent was a heist film that owed a debt of gratitude to a film called White Heat, starring Jimmy Cagney.
White Heat is better…
There is homage, and then just ripping something off.
Thanks
I don't have this, wish I did, but it had always seemed 100% obvious to me that people like James and Chesterton were describing their genuine experience. What else would they be doing?
It's a bit of a "Chesterton's fence" argument, really. All those accounts of heightened experience were probably written for a good reason.
Scotr claims to know the neurology about novelty wearing off. But isn't the obvious explanation that, to have these experience, you have to engage with them with some faculty other than the "novelty-seeking" one? Imagine a person in a state of perfect peace, surrounded by family, right with their god, gazing at a sunset. There's no sense of "wow what a sunset.. Let me add that to me list of experiences, let me tell people about it, let me be a sunset-enjoyer, this ought to get me closer to enlightenment." They would just *enjoy* it.
But their account of enjoying it, to a person not in that state, would read as exaggeration, and would come with a lash of anxiety--"what's my problem?"--and then a cynical defense--"bah I've seen a thousand sunsets". That's their problem.
It all boils down to how acutely one can pay attention to things. It’s really that simple.
This reminds me of Jonathan Franzen’s bewilderment that the sight of some birds he was especially glad to find, did nothing whatever - nothing at all in the way of pulling him out of himself - for his companion, David Foster Wallace.
People raked him over the coals for that, or made fun of him as they typically do, but I think he was not trying to describe DFW’s state of mind, but his own.
DFW explores this in his last book "The Pale King" which is all about the holiness of paying attention to the most mundane things (it's set in the world of the IRS)
I think I really started to appreciate sunsets when I was about 18 and first got my driver's licence. Traversing the countryside I would regularly pull over to marvel at their beauty. Even today my wife and I call out to each other to call attention to a particularly beautiful one, we're in our late 30s. I am a naturally depressive kind of person who's baseline is set to "hard hearted lack of enthusiasm" and unrefined artistic taste, but sunsets still regularly get me. If anything, this essay gives me hope for the continued enjoyment of beauty, despite hedonic adaptation and satiation. I think Mike Carey's Lucifer got it right: https://thepageaholic.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/lucifer.jpg
It's funny though, my kids don't have that same child like wonder about it yet, much the same as I didn't. I took my 3 year old out last night just before bed time to show him a fantastic scene of the crescent moon setting over the mountains just after dusk, with a slight red glow - just stunning. Of course, this was just another everyday wonder to him, hardly as exciting as getting dad to read him A Duck Called Brian for the nth time.
I’m not sure you’re the one who gets to decide whether you’re holy :)
The sum and total of everything is in its perception, and thus in a domain that we control-How we choose to see things.
I agree with this: only certain personality shapes can survive both limitless wonder and cosmic time.
Thank you so much for this, Scott! You have reconfirmed my habit of only eating asparagus in its 6 week local season, and hot cross buns only at this time of year, from the bakery that does them best, and paying attention while I do. The anticipation is also important to the experience!
The other side to this is the very real difference between seeing a painting on my computer screen or listening to even a very high quality recording of music on good equipment, and the live experience. Maybe it’s easier to get that high focus in real life? I just know it pushes me to actually go to museums and the theatre and to clubs. And I enjoy it só much that my friends end up coming too, and realizing it’s so worth it.
Só it helps my focus to renew the novelty of those experience, through intervals or by rotating through different kinds of experiences.
The other thing I’m afraid is mostly lost to us is the experience of MAKING art. When no recordings existed, people who wanted music (and I think most everyone does) made it themselves. They decorated the everyday objects around them. And because it wasn’t going on Instagram afterwards, they didn’t judge their own work so harshly.
Is there a greater joy than singing a beloved song in à choir? Even for someone like me, with musical talent in the negative numbers, there’s not much better. (The secret is to sing very softly except the parts where everyone is so loud they drown you out.)
That's what I think of whenever someone talks about the invention of the phonograph. It killed the get-togethers, when one person would play piano and everybody would sing.
I think there's still plenty of that at synagogues?
I'm Jewish, and the answer is yes, but surely also in churches? Hymn singing? Anybody?
I would be truly flabbergasted to learn I was some deep super-experiencer never mind super-enjoyer like the famous poets, I rather think myself the very opposite. Or is it the case that you are "supposed to" experience some deep life-changing awe and not mere regular awe, and that I've been ruined since birth?
Yet, the emotion I get from seeing e.g. Michaelangelo's Last Judgement or Rafaello's School of Athens is that of awe, despite striking ultramarine sky of the former being so commonplace as a color I wore it myself to the occasion, and having a poster of the latter hanging in my room (which, for the record, I derive pleasure glancing for ten thousandth time). And while I don't do so every time (by not paying attention and having my mind elsewhere), after seeing countless examples, I can also bring myself into awe seeing the sunset, sunrise, or a clear ultramarine sky stretching over the pure white vastness of a frozen lake (ditto for virtual examples, like breathing in the atmosphere of my favorite zones in World of Warcraft).
The way I see it, an experience is an experience is an experience. Auditory experience of hearing Pavarotti, Sutherland or Salminen is pleasurable (if your brain is wired to enjoy opera at all) whether you're listening them from a record or if you had the privilege to hear them in person, and the latter is more meaningful only insofar as you're experiencing the gesamtkunstwerk rather than just audio (modulo the unique acoustic characteristics of the locale, feeling the infrasound in your body and all that). If Ghiblified photo is not striking then perhaps it simply is the case that 1) it executes the style poorly; 2) there's nothing special about Studio Ghibli style to begin with (personally, it never resonated with me, despite being exposed since childhood). If an AI-produced painting 0xF867DE makes no impression, perhaps it is not because you've been desensitized by mountains worth of sloppy AI art, but because it simply is a bad painting not to viewer's specific aesthetic taste (which is fundamentally no different from how I view human art - in museums I spend 80% of my time looking at 20% of the works, most of the human works make no impression on me either, unless it's an exhibition pre-selected for the stuff I like).
If the future is one where AI is better than all human artists, surely our basic measure for this includes art being more meaningful than it is today?
"Better than all human artists" can't just mean being better at the snapshot of skills relevant to art creation today, AI would also have to be:
1. better at reinventing art
2. *faster* at reinventing art
In the span of human history, what “great art” has survived and prosper is the tip of the iceberg. It is almost impossible to overestimate the effect of capriciousness in this field.
I understand that Klein Blue works mostly as a metaphor in this essay, but I happened to see some Klein works at SFMOMA when I went a few years ago, and here were my notes on the experience:
> Having never seen IKB pieces in person, I kind of wrote it off as another midcentury gimmick, but it turns out that IKB is without a doubt the most beautiful colour that I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. The screens and photos will never do it justice. The paint was thick, pastelly and a little gritty, and you can see bumps of it on the canvas. The shadow that the little bumps cast were somehow a subtle gorgeous lilac that seemed almost brighter than the blue, which delighted and shocked me. After noticing this, for the rest of the day, my eyes were a thousand times more sensitive to the shade that various colours turned when they were partially enshadowed, and that lead to a dozen more moments of awe.
--
So yeah, it immediately became my favourite colour and I suddenly, completely understood Klein's obsession. If the rarest most expensive colour in the world that you can only get from a single mountain in Afghanistan was some sort of off-putting, vomit green, I doubt most people would care. I mean, perhaps it is! There might be smaller, harder to get to mountains that yield more obscure unique pigments except those pigments are bad so we don't care about them. As it stands I'm somewhat considering paying out the nose for a bucket of Klein Blue paint from the original Parisian paint store that mixed the paints for Klein, to, idk, DIY a superstimulus coffee table?
It was, by a large margin, _the_ single best experience I had at SFMOMA, and I would gladly pay the entire ticket price just to see that canvas again. Klein is unfortunately not part of SFMOMA's permanent collection though so I haven't seen it since the first time. But perhaps, as this piece suggests, this is something like a blessing in disguise :')
So basically you’re saying may not have been trying to troll anyone. he just figured out how to make The Best Blue Ever and decided: this color DESERVES to get the whole canvas to itself, at least once
yep! iirc he either developed or help develop a more sophisticated binder for ultramarine blue/lapis lazuli that dulled it significantly less than all the previous ones, so it's very vivid. the solution is apparently quite stinky and has a finicky two part application process or something, it's not a normal paint you can just get in a tube or a can.
and the colour totally deserves an entire canvas to itself. perhaps even hundreds of em
I second Jenn's experience. If abstract art isn't your thing, I won't argue, but for me the Klein pieces are amazing.
I don't know if it's subliminal cultural memory, or the effect of Scott's writing, or some kind of proof of Objective Beauty - but I find the blue in the painting of Mary's coat incredibly striking, even on my phone screen.
I was also moved by Klein's art. So much so that some years ago I made a iphone app, a website http://ikleinblue.com and mixed my own paint from raw pigment to make an artwork for the app icon.
I find Klein's art does speak to human progress beyond freeing ourselves from afghan pigments. When I made the app, computer and phone screens were still far from being able to produce a blue that was as saturated so it was impossible to experience the color on a screen. This made the app slightly ironic (screens may have almost caught up to the Klein paint now? I'm not sure). Klein also tried to patent/trademark his paint methodologies as if they were a technological advancements and gave the color an almost corporate name "International Klein Blue". All the lore around Klein's art helps lift its significance. There's even something very Apple-esque in Klein's minimalist style. He may have had very broad indirect influence.
What's so unusual in that color than screens should have caught up to? Most saturated colors would be cyan and yellow and I do not remember artists making fuzz about cyan.
I don't know anything about color in light vs. pigment vs. eye, but maybe something something eye response something wavelength something.
I've had a similar experience with extremely short-wavelength violet—it looks different in person, to me, than reproduced on a monitor; I think a monitor cannot actually produce e.g. 400nm violet? could be wrong—and the eye responds poorly to such colors, compared to wavelengths closer to green.
(...but like I said, this could all be totally mistaken. Maybe monitors can produce any wavelength the eye can see, or something.)
Computer monitors, and most digital color displays, only display blue, green, and red light mixed at varying intensity - around 440nm, 510nm, 645nm from what I could find, but the exact frequency probably depends on the display. From the converter I could find, if you tell it to approximate 400nm violet light, you'll get 645nm light at an intensity of 131/255, and 440nm light at an intensity of 181/255. In short, you cannot produce violet light on a monitor - it just mixes red and blue light to trick your eye into seeing something like violet.
Digital camera sensors are the same - they use a mix of red, green, and blue sensors (or rather, light sensors with an array of red, green, and blue filters overlaid).
>Digital camera sensors are the same
No, they are not same. They do not have restricted color gamut feature like output devices do.
I had the same experience with Jackson Pollock. Thought it was all just hype. Turns out in person his paintings have this crazy three dimensional feel. I guess to be a famous artist it helps to have a schtick, but it also helps to be talented.
dude yes. i did NOT want to be a pollock stan bc its low status in some art hoe circles and i am a lesbian who has a thing for art hoes but i was fucking sniped regardless - one of them entranced me from like three gallery rooms away and i beelined towards it and then when i read the little placard my stomach dropped :(
why does pollock have low status among art hoes?
Strangely in the course of trying to see Klein blue after reading this, as I'm sure others did, I watched a WSJ Style video which contended that Klein blue has been unable to be recreated "the past 60 years". A youtube commenter replied that that was nonsense and you could buy it from the same paint store where he got it. The commenter did claim it was now a "less toxic" formula. So maybe the WSJ was going after that sweet toxicity.
I haven't been able to see Klein Blue in person yet, but your description reminds me of this one time I got too high off THC syrup and one of the things I saw was that each and every color is made up of every single other color, and each of those colors too and it sort of made me spiral until I got sick lol. But it's kinda cool to hear I can sort of experience that again without getting high again.
Indra's net! Beautiful :)
Stuart Semple makes something that looks indistinguishable, at least according to him, and he's a pretty major figure. (He's the guy behind a series of 'blackest blacks' type pigments and paints.)
https://www.culturehustleusa.com/products/easyklein?srsltid=AfmBOoqT3PNEsR_BkpV50he0cctvT0IQbZKdhEjvUDqDweIr_3eZRR4v
I bought his pinkest pink and it really actually can't be replicated by screens. Very cool!
Have you read Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore? Fun book about this color.
"You will see wonders beyond your imagination, nod, think “that’s a cool wonder”, and become inured to it."
Too wonder-stale to wonder at each new miracle?
+1… anyone who doesn’t get the reference: this is from the Hymn of Breaking Strain, a short poem I first ran into when reading Unsong (which leaves out this particular piece of it)… it’s also been set to music (a bit over four minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57LxbIBcTjE
Well, look at modern medicine.
Stuff that would have required a miracle, actual divine intervention, a few generations ago can now be fixed via a simple outpatient procedure.
Great post. Sounds like Scott might have read Philip Ball's *Bright Earth* recently.
In addition to the facts about ultramarine and gold in medieval paintings, it talks about the practical factors involved in every other color, and the evolution of art overall as the frontier of technology and knowledge progressed and allowed a greater variety of colors and techniques.
Reds, for example, the next most expensive pigment after literal gold (with ultramarine at the top), required harvesting many tens of thousands of insects by hand, and processing and crushing them in specific ways to even get to the point they could start creating a pigment (usually by boiling them in lye). First the insect was the wormlike kermes vermilio, which fed on oaks, then hailing from the New World, the cochineal insect, which feeds on cactus.
Amazing book overall, definitely worth a read if you're into this kind of stuff.
I reviewed it here if anyone wants to get a feel for it before committing to the whole book, but you can probably tell already if you liked those parts of Scott's post: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/philip-balls-bright-earth-review
Hi Scott!
What if the whole point of creation is to make beings who can experience and enjoy sunsets? That seems like a decent goal for a creator.
And it's clearly been fulfilled. That we can enjoy symphonies, art, mathematics, science, and philosophy is all gravy.
Kind regards,
David
People who can make the best of their situation have always had an edge
In our current society, gold symbolizes wealth and status.
If you give a block of gold to some minimum wage worker today, that gold allows them to stop working in an unpleasant job, it lets them buy a better house, etc. It has a significant effect on their standard of living.
But in a world with golden mountains, gold is just a shiny rock. Although still quite a pretty one.
Pineapples and spices were, at one point, highly prized by the rich. But then they became much cheaper. But they are still quite nice.
So there are 2 kinds of pleasure happening here. The direct "this is tasty" pleasure that comes from a food being sweet and tasty, and the "social status pleasure" which comes from a food being expensive and high status.
So how do you make a heaven? You start off with material comfort. Avoiding hunger, pain, excess heat or cold etc. You add pleasant social interactions.
You want to add nice sensations. Which includes nice tastes, and also nice appearances. So you want pretty things. Some bright colors and geometric patterns are generally prettier. Beauty depends on lots of things and is complicated. And too much bright colour can be garish and irritating. It's often nice if food is sweet, but that doesn't make a bag of sugar the perfect food.
The heaven wants to contain choice. It wants to contain a wide range of sports and hobbies. It wants meaningful puzzles and room for creativity.
So all else being equal, a few golden mountains are an improvement. But not a huge one.
When I imagine a utopian world.
1) Immortality with full morpological freedom. You want wings and a tail. Sure thing.
2) Just about any activity that someone might do for fun is available. If your really keen on particle physics, you can get the robots to build you a particle collider so you can test some things. If you prefer snowboarding, you can get the robots to build a mountain that's just the right shape.
3) Convenience and luxury, if you want it. A plate of excellent food is always ready the moment you ask for it. 0 chores.
4) Freedom from social oppression. It's not much fun if society discriminates against or harrasses you just because you are gay or a furry. (Who are actually furry, see point 1)
5) 0 irritating paperwork or unwanted burocracy.
This utopia does have gold mountains. Given the massive and general power to get robots to make whatever you want, someone is going to ask for gold mountains.
But it's not a big difference. The utopia would only be minutely worse if the robots were unable to make gold mountains by some technical limitation.
A wonderfully conceived and beautifully written piece.
What a beautiful post. Really articulates thoughts I've sort of had as AI progresses and commoditizes an ever growing number of experiences.
At multiple points while reading this post I was brought back to the endless evenings and nights spent with friends in my home country, discussing whatever with the same energy between the 10th time and the 1000th time. I'm also reminded of sunsets I still find awe inspiring, those that compel me to stop in my tracks and take them in. I've seen more than a thousand, I've noticed nearly all of them, but I've only stopped and stared at maybe a hundred? I'm also reminded of experiences that only hit me once – after my 2nd, 5th, 15th visit of the Musée d'Orsay, seeing any painting by Van Gogh did not do anything for me. However, I could go to Petit Palais and stare at The Valley of Tears for ten minutes on my 10th visit.
There is a range of repeatability, strength of experience and meaning associated with cultural elements and personal experiences. I resonate heavily with the thought that keeping the ability to be in awe is a skill issue. Yes, Ghibli imagery is commoditized now. But Gustave Doré's style is also commoditized with the leading generative models, and it doesn't stop me from staring at The Valley of Tears the next time I'll see it in person. It won't stop me from buying another book on his art. And I won't stop enjoying Ghibli films to a similar extent that I did before this latest update.
As AI takes our jobs, renders all human skill subpar, replaces friends and lovers and family, cures us from diseases and accommodates our insatiable thirst for the hedonic treadmill, I think the uniquely flesh and bone human experience will gain in value specifically for its rarity. Competent sexbots might be the dream of many, but just like a thousand okay one night stands cannot replace a passionate love affair, I don't think a thousand amazing sexbot nights necessarily will replace the unicity of passionate human sex. The very realization that you're dealing with a "real" carbon-based person, or maybe instead of real I should say "similar-to-you life form", makes the experience awe inspiring.
In a world ruled by AIs, the last bit of authenticity we'll retain will be our flawed and limited human perception. Fully conscious of our potential biases (eg "Ghibli is commoditized now, so I'm going to let Totoro wash over me"), we'll have the freedom to act on them and still find beauty and meaning in the commonplace, the replaceable, the infinite supply.
Skill issue!
It will be a skill issue.
Very interesting. If all this story about Singularity happens, and if mankind survives, maybe we would end with something like K. Dick envisionned in The Man in the High Castle with the Japanese fascination for authentic pre war objects in a quest to find the "Wu".
One of the main things I get out of consuming art is knowing that it's an act of expression - every work I appreciate is a connection, a piece of evidence that someone out there is similar enough to me to make something I can relate to. I think that explains both why I prefer contemporary art to the classics, and why I've never been tempted to mess with AI art.
> Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia - something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi.
It seems that the artistic value proposition of the coat of Virgin Mary was just knowing how unique it was, so when it gets mass produced, then it gets cheapened. But this isn’t true for all art forms. Novels were always intended to be enjoyed by yourself in the same way you’d sit and home and look at a Lippi painting on Wikipedia. There’s something psychologically functional about novels that isn’t true for visual art. So some art forms will still bring the same amount of value whether or not they’re mass produced by AI.
Fundamentally I think the average person only has so much attention, so much focus. Let's take AI out of the discussion and talk about how two different people experience an art museum. One type of person will pause, linger over each piece, admire the technique or the composition or the use of color, what have you. The other type of person may pause when they see something really striking, but mostly enjoy the museum experience as a chance to take a stroll while looking at pretty things. Surely even the most devoted art aficionado can only maintain that level of attention for a limited amount of time. I can't imagine they could do it with all 200 pieces.
If I visited an art museum with 200 pieces and 190 of them were done by AI but I didn't know which ones, I doubt I could pick them out. I haven't done well with the "is it AI" quizzes before. There is one sense in which you make the meaning by how you interact with it. But I still can't escape the strong opinion that it matters if there was a human mind behind it. They had a perspective to show, a story to tell. AI just spits out the prompts that you tell it to, with a dash of hallucination.
I find the deluge of content problematic from another angle, which is hobbies. I never developed much of a hobby. I keep thinking oh, I'd like to try watercolor, I'd like to try calligraphy, I'd like to try photography. But it's hard to convince myself of what the point is when I can see hundreds of creators in an Instagram reel, all having already created something far above my own skill, and any possible subject has been done thousands of times. At the end of the day it's just a way for me to kill some time, but creating "just for me" seems rather pointless. Even if I completely shut off all social media I'd still be comparing in my head, knowing that all these other creations are already out there and the best I could hope is to add a drop to be swallowed up in the ocean.
I stopped making wine and beer because the ones in the shops were better.
Not all hobbies are susceptible to this kind of virtual competition. Fishing, for example, just results in fish. Dancing can be non-competitive. Sewing can produce simple household items.
> I keep thinking oh, I'd like to try watercolor, I'd like to try calligraphy, I'd like to try photography. But it's hard to convince myself of what the point is when I can see hundreds of creators in an Instagram reel, all having already created something far above my own skill, and any possible subject has been done thousands of times.
Not everything!
One time I saw insect eggs on the underside of a fallen leaf. It's hard for me to find pictures of this, because the internet only wants to show pictures of eggs on fresh leaves. There's also your friends, who probably don't have that many good photographs of themselves. There's also the copyright issue – there's a lot of good images you don't have rights over, you could make ones you *do* have rights over.
People also may not have done calligraphy of your favorite quotes.
>But it's hard to convince myself of what the point is
There is no point, and that can be incredibly freeing or just kill the vibe completely.
Oscar Wilde famously said that “all art is useless“. Depending on your construction of the word “useful “ that makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense to me.
The point is to do something that you might enjoy and do it in an entirely selfish way because it is entirely selfish and it should be
If you’re doing it just to get points or see how you stack up to others in your own mind, then it’s something else - more like a business venture.
Someone else above in this thread made the point of connecting with another human being. That is truly a wonderful thing; to express yourself truthfully through some medium of expression, and then have it resonate with another person is a very deep form of communication. They might well interpret the work quite differently than yourself, but that’s totally OK.
I can't not bring up the concept of defamiliarization here: "What we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing."
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/literature-by-region/european-literature/make-it-strange-make-it-stony if you happen to have access to the TLS, but Wikipedia provides a sensible (though less readable) summary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization), as do most chatbots...
Wow. I never expected to get my daily dose of holiness here.
Thank you.
Come for the rationalism, stay for the spiritual guidance! 😀
The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
GK Chesterton
That is truly a beautiful conception of God
The polar opposite of generalization, which in a world of statistical analysis and data crunching is more elusive. N=1 is the key equation of human existence, but it’s not very useful at the same time…
There you go again, speaking to my soul. And I’m kind of skeptical about even having one!
This really gets an explanation I’ve often given for why I remain a person of faith even as almost everyone around me is atheist. I describe faith as a choice - the mechanics of the world do not care if I have faith or not. But in having it, every sunset is a miracle, every person imbued with some undefinable transcendence, every leaf and blade of grass fringed with holy fire. But now I’m not sure if it’s a learned skill to do this, or if the effort is in suppressing it. Your essay has me wondering if maybe I’ve had it backwards; maybe I’m neurologically predisposed to seeing the world like this, and maybe being a person of faith is less of a choice than I assumed?
The raw joys of simple things still feel plenty keen to me, and I tend to think we collectively write them off too easily. My personal philosophy is that everything good just might be right there on the surface, like the nacre of a pearl. Yet we keep hammering away at it looking for something deeper. The idea of semantic apocalypses is a concept that does that, but it isn’t one that would have occurred to me. I’m not sick of sunsets and chocolates even though I’ve had thousands. There is plenty of joy and wonder to be had in things we’ve already experienced. Why focus on whether and how those sensations might be diminished in relation to one another, if they are at all? We’re almost always better off prioritizing our consideration of things in and of themselves.
>But now I’m not sure if it’s a learned skill to do this, or if the effort is in suppressing it.
I think both statements are true.
I wonder how much appreciation of familiar experiences differ between individuals. Is there some normal distribution? Is it correlated with an individual's average subjective well-being, or happiness set point?
Does anyone know of research like this?
Reading this, I kept thinking of Lionel Page's great "The truth About happiness: We are designed to long for it, not to get it", available online (Search "Lionel Page The Truth About Happiness").
Thank you, I'll check it out!
The Bluebird “
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Bird_(play)
I think you’re trying to square the circle here. Tricky business. Just off the top of my head I think an unhappy person can be just as attentive to detail as a happy one, but their narrative will be different. I think it is entirely a function of how one chooses to see things and how much of a choice that is for most of us I don’t know.
In the jargon of this community, it comes down to how much weight one will give one’s priors.
The old world expression for this is “having a change of heart“
Also: pineapple. Black pepper. Sugar, even. Also: watch Bluey- episode "born yesterday"
Sunrise, sunset, the SKY - dark chocolate (lindt or better) - Beethoven. Great sex. ACX. It is easy.
Love this.
After reading this, I've settled on my response to the Erik Hoel piece (which I quite disliked) as the Matt Yglesias line: "Good things are good"
We *should* have more soft cartoon images. All this sophistry about how it cheapens art, or dulls the senses, or violates intellectual property rights (and is thus "bad") ... no.
To steelman the anti-AI art perspective, I'd say that many are upset about this tech more because the process of training these models usually requires feeding them databases of the very pieces of art the models will go on to replicate, sometime by illegally downloading those works. And I can't help but agree that there is something disrespectful, even grotesque, about taking the work of artists who explicitly don't want their works used to train AI, and using that work to train AI - regardless of how impressive it is that we can in theory do that. From reading many people's thoughts on this issue, I don't think the public backlash against AI would be nearly as strong if these ethical considerations weren't seen as being intrinsically tied to the technology.
Filippino Lippi was a Renaissance artist, not a "medieval"
I found the implicit assumptions of this post so bizarre and incomprehensible that I’m starting to suspect that the sensation I experience as ‘beauty’ is something different from what everyone else is talking about. I’ll go through some of the things that baffled me step-by-step.
> “I - confession - am the type of person who, after hearing the story of Afghanistan and Sar-i-Sang and medieval European art economics - would be tempted to buy lapis lazuli and stare at it longingly, trying to recapture the awe that Joe Peasant must have felt staring at the Virgin’s coat. But I’m also the type of person who, if I ran across Klein in a gallery, would frown and secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff.”
I find it very difficult to understand either of these opinions. When I hear the story of how inconvenient it used to be to paint things blue, I just think, “That must have sucked for the tiny handful of people for whom ‘painting things blue’ was a terminal utility function.”
And when I look at modern art, most of it doesn’t appeal to my tastes, but most non-modern art also doesn’t appeal to my tastes. Most things are bad, so you only expose yourself to the best things from the categories that you like (in practice, this means learning which people’s recommendations consistently match your own judgements of quality); the absolute quantity of low-quality output is irrelevant, because you were never planning to consume more than a tiny fraction of all art in any case.
> “An oversupply that satiates us at a cultural level, until we become divorced from the semantic meaning and see only the cheap bones of its structure.”
Is there some way to steelman this into a comprehensible statement? My brain is parsing this as, “I feel a vague sense of unease, so I will employ polysyllabic circumlocutions to provide a veneer of intellectual respectability to my instinctive gut reaction.”
> “It would be facile to say that, just because technology has threatened our sense of meaning before, we shouldn’t worry when technology threatens our sense of meaning today.”
I’m confused by what you mean by “threatened our sense of meaning”. Are you suggesting that when technology is invented that allows people to cheaply and easily reproduce a thing you like that used to be scarce and expensive, this affects your sense of identity in some way? Can you describe what this feels like?
> “I acknowledge that my inability to marvel at a live Caruso opera in Naples has cost me something deep and beautiful.”
I wish you’d specified what, exactly, this state of affairs had cost you. I’ve heard people say things like this many times, and they almost always fail to actually explain what they mean – they just assume that the audience shares their feelings and doesn’t need them explained.
> “Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse is to will yourself out of it. If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue.”
As much as it pains me to agree with Chesterton on anything, this seems trivially true to me. If the existence of a large amount of low-quality art of category XYZ makes it impossible for you to enjoy high-quality art of category XYZ, the problem is clearly in your brain, not in the art market.
One last point (partly because I can’t stand letting Chesterton have the last word): why do people always use sunsets as the go-to example of beauty? Does anyone really enjoy looking at a sunset for more than about 0.5 seconds? It’s just a bit of light in the sky. Next thing you know, people are going to start saying that the stars are beautiful.
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Of course, the real explanation for all this is that I’m autistic enough to experience very little elasticity in my preferences, so the hedonic treadmill doesn’t work for me the same way it does for most people. On the other hand, I’m also autistic enough that my stunted theory of mind doesn’t allow me to truly believe that any sane person could have a mind different from mine, so I have no choice but to continue to believe that everyone except me is insane.
I'm only going to reply to a single question because I think it's at the root of the assumptions difference.
>Are you suggesting that when technology is invented that allows people to cheaply and easily reproduce a thing you like that used to be scarce and expensive, this affects your sense of identity in some way?
It doesn't affect my identity, but it affects my first-hand experience of the art. Every art is partially a sensory experience (this food tastes good) and partially a social experience (this food was cooked for me by my husband because he loves me). You don't need to know the artist personally to have that social experience, it's all determined by (your understanding of) the artist's intent. A person who thinks sunsets are designed by God will experience them differently than someone who thinks they are a natural and intentless phenomenon.
An art produced by machine in large quantities has a different social context than art produced by a human at great effort, even if the quality is exactly the same. Same context difference that makes a movie line iconic in the first movie it appears in and cliche in the 100th movie.
> "A person who thinks sunsets are designed by God will experience them differently than someone who thinks they are a natural and intentless phenomenon."
As someone who used to be a Christian and is now an atheist, I can only say that my personal experience contradicts this assertion. I have never found sunsets particularly beautiful.
If you had asked Christian!me about this 'sensory experience vs social experience' way of conceptualising art, he would probably have said something like this:
"I believe that God created literally everything. Not in a vague deist establishing-the-starting-conditions-and-then-not-interfering way, but in the sense that he is directly and actively involved in the ongoing existence of everything that exist. However, I do not find all things equally beautiful. Even if you exclude things that are mediated by another being's intelligence, I still think that some natural phenomena are more beautiful than other natural phenomena. Since God created everything, everything has the same social experience, so in practice the only thing that really matters is sensory experience."
> "Same context difference that makes a movie line iconic in the first movie it appears in and cliche in the 100th movie."
While I agree that a movie line that was once iconic can become cliche from being imitated and thus overused, I don't believe that this supports the 'social context' interpretation. When you introduced social context, you described it as involving the audience's relationship to the artist or conceptualisation of the artist's intent. But in the 'movie cliche' example, you seem to be suggesting that it involves looking at a work of art in the context of its cultural background.
I think these are completely different things. I enjoy an iconic movie line partly because it is a good line in the context of the movie itself, and partly because it is a good line within the cultural context in which the movie was made. This has nothing to do with my social relationship with the people who made the movie.
My bottom line is that I'd be very happy to read a book written on typewriters by a legion of proverbial Hamlet-monkeys, as long as the book was good. I don't care how the sausage is made.
> I don't care how the sausage is made.
Understandable.
The only problem is you miss an opportunity to get to know another being who has made something that has touched you.
That includes God.
I could swear there was a Works in Progress piece I read recently that is a response to this. I'll have to try to remember to find it when I'm out of work later today.
As to my own view, I guess there's a couple of facets to it. AI art isn't capital-A "Art" because it's divorced from a human. An human didn't make it.
Humans made the thing what does the lightning-fast sigil magic, which then does blah blah radda radda until you're sitting in a chair in your underpants watching the responses spool in that reply to your prompts. There is no Pagliacci, no Miyazaki, no teen doodling in their first notebook, no human at the helm of those responses.
The prompt you gave to the AI is certainly made by a human. But, that's where the human association ends. I wouldn't ask an AI to make art, just like I wouldn't ask a hammer to build me a chair so I can sit comfortably in my underpants while I talk to chatbots.
"As to my own view, I guess there's a couple of facets to it. AI art isn't capital-A "Art" because it's divorced from a human. An human didn't make it."
This bothers me because it grounds artistic appreciation in something outside of art and sort of unknowable.
If an art historian discovered that actually, Beethoven's symphonies were composed by a robot (maybe some aliens landed in Vienna, got a robot to write symphonies as a joke, then handed them to Beethoven to distribute), would everyone who loved the symphonies retroactively be wrong? Would you have to go over them, note by note, and think things like "That part there where I felt soaring emotion and inspiration actually wasn't emotional or inspiring at all, got to make sure to crush those feelings next time I start experiencing them"?
If not, who cares whether something is art or not?
"This bothers me because it grounds artistic appreciation in something outside of art and sort of unknowable."
It seems that many cases of artistic appreciation don't wholly inhere in the object. Part of the "soaring emotion and inspiration" is based on the piece being something created by a human. An equal-quality Vermeer copy is missing the human creation of the original (it can't ever be an equivalent thing).
Part of why many people rather see the actual object than a reproduction is the being closer to the person who created it.
"Artistic appreciation" is a bunch of things too. It's not even something that is constant in an individual and, sometimes, requires extra experience or education as a basis.
Klein appeared to put a lot of effort creating his blue (somewhat equivalent to the effort to get lapis lazuli. Maybe, qualitatively if not quantitatively. Painting a whole canvas with it flips the color from being subservient to symbolism and states that the color itself, by itself, is something worth appreciating. I think there is a useful idea there.
I suspect there are some things that don't "still looked like stuff" that you appreciate the aesthetics of.
>it grounds artistic appreciation in something outside of art and sort of unknowable."
But it is! Artistic appreciation is completely grounded in your own sensibilities. How could it be different? Part of what Scott has done with this essay is to expand all of our sensibilities, which makes us able to experience, (have artistic appreciation )in a different way than before we read the essay. The more you know, the more possibilities there are for discovery.
Well, it’s kind of like someone telling you they love you, and then finding out they were lying
Even though they treated you perfectly well
Being a composer who is deaf is such a great meme though. It’s just the kind of thing that can put you on top of the heap.
It’s kind of like the good old days when Pete Townsend would set his guitar on fire and fling it through the base drum.
I think the ability to create something beautiful in your mind’s eye and then find the words to describe it is art.
Its should be obvious that expereicning something is far superior than viewing it on a scree. Experiencing Michaelangelo's David or Botticelli's Birth of Venus in real life is far more impressive than any photo, video or screenshot - these reproductions cannot do justice to the real thing. Not to mention the numerous natural wonders like Yosemite, Zion or Yellowstone.
Unfortunately, at a recent visit to the Louvre last year, I noticed the phenomenon of people going up to, say, the Mona Lisa, barely glancing at it, and taking a dozen selfie's before quickly leaving. I saw this elsewhere, in front of "Liberty Leading The People" and other must-see's like "Winged Victory". The tiny screens have truly broken many people's brains.
"But your personal relationship to the meaning in your life is not a society-wide problem. [...] you should be thinking of your own individual soul."
This is one of my favorite pieces you've ever written, and a rare example of a piece about AI that leaves me personally inspired instead of just depressed. I am responsible for -- and capable of -- cultivating my own sense of wonder and gratitude.
Exactly
I believe the solution is that everybody gets too jaded and cynical to bother maintaining society, leading to a societal collapse which causes producing beauty to become difficult once again, in turn reawakening people to the value of art and civilisation. If you're lucky, the final stage happens before civilisation has finally, irrevocably collapsed and has to be rebuilt from scratch.
The cherry blossoms 🌸 are in bloom near DC. If you're in the vicinity, that might be a good opportunity to practice an appreciation of natural beauty. (It's rarer than sunsets, so maybe it'd be easier.)
Also, the cherry trees inspired one of the few (if not the only) poem by A.E. Housman that wasn't all doom and gloom:
https://poets.org/poem/loveliest-trees
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Beautiful essay.
FWIW, I examined the question of whether Innocence is a virtue, and if so what we can do to try to get our hands on some, in this LW essay: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zZucxQCLcqv2Daokf/notes-on-innocence
What I learned about Awe and Wonder and the Sublime might also be relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7LnHFj4gs5Zd4WKcu/notes-on-awe
I do think that direct experience (or at least close understanding) of the production or complexity of whatever the wonder is helps. It's kind of what this essay is doing with AI ("...we’re speaking to an alien intelligence made by etching strange sigils on a tiny glass wafer on a mountainous jungle island off the coast of China..."). That is impressive, and thinking of that while looking at the images helps a lot. As a more physical example, attempting to do a craft does a lot for my awareness of how impressive things are... When I look at a decent jacket while remembering how hard it was to for me to hand-alter a simple vest, and thinking about how many pieces there are, and the fabric, and the complexity of the machines they used to sew it, it really ups my ability to marvel at it. Even if it's common, it's mostly machine made, it's not even that nice a jacket, the awareness how impossible it would be for me, individually to make it means it is much more impressive.
This is beautiful, Scott. It draws out your interdisciplinary wisdom into an encouraging, optimistic, and practical synthesis. It encourages agency in how we see the world. I feel moved--thanks, as always. :)
When did Filippo Lippi become Filippino Lippi? I thought it was a bad autocorrect, but maybe not; the reference agrees.
I'm nostalgic for the days when we could misspell words without the help of AI.
That's the son. Filippo being a monk didn't stop him from being naughty, he seduced a nun and fathered children by her:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippino_Lippi
"Filippino Lippi was born, probably in 1457, at Prato, Tuscany, the illegitimate son to Lucrezia Buti and the painter Fra Filippo Lippi; both had broken clerical vows, and though after Filippino's birth they received a papal dispensation to marry (arranged by Lorenzo di Medici), Vasari says that they never did. His sister Alessandra was born in 1465. Filippino first trained under his father in his workshop."
Thanks, I should have checked before I wrote that.
On AI imagery: unless it is the subject - attention drawn to it - as with the guy's anime children - I don't see it. As in: I just flit right past it, doesn't even register. Am I really alone in this? For instance, a number of substackers play around with AI to generate an image with their post, to make it more eye-catching. I hope that's a fun little thing to do after the work of writing, don't begrudge it - but I don't even glance at it. Not out of anti-AI solidarity with artists. It's just without interest and somehow my mind knows that without even having to look.
Whereas: if you've written a post about architecture - I look at all the pictures.
In fact, I used to read the New Yorker regularly and would get a little OCD-vexed when reading about visual things because it had an inflexible one-picture-only rule. Which was usually not even germane. Like a long article about an artist and their edgy work: and a Portrait of the Artist as a Generic New Yorker, looking glum.
The fun of seeing your child as a Ghibli waif is in the activity, not in anyone potentially wanting to look at it. In that way it's much like photos of other people's kids.
I watched that video of - I think it was giraffes diving in a natatorium? - and was floored and amazed. But it was one and done. I have seen giraffes diving in a photorealistic pool. I need never see elephants captaining a ship, &/or etc. no matter how impressive.
Whereas #2: if you told me that the museum had Richard Estes' "Pharmacy" I would go see it even though I've looked at an image of it before, quite a few times.
I put AI pictures in my posts. No one ever comments (except some real life friends) but it gives me a lot of pleasure to make them.
I can see that being amusing for you, to get a representation of "what's in your head".
>then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you
I appreciate that this post mainly tries to convey a 'vibe', but, uh, no? You don't need any wonders of the Singularity to literally wirehead yourself today. Whether this would count as salvation is of course debatable, but certainly your attitudes towards stuff would change considerably. As much as I disagree with Yudkowsky, he never shied from admitting that the future would be profoundly weird, and this attitude seems surprisingly lacking these days.
All this amazing progress in image generation and still the child is holding the book upside-down.
As children sometimes will.
They do that. But I'm cheating - E.H. mentioned this in his post (that AI flipped the book).
1) Is Scott misunderstanding the 'green wine and crimson seas'? In the poem they are unnatural, twisted versions of natural pleasures. Seas are normally green, and wine is normally crimson - the Danes have swapped this around. Chesterton is criticising the Danes' heathen love pleasures that have been twisted from their natural, God given state. There are no green wines or crimson seas in Chesterton's heaven.
In another poem he puts it like this:
"There are things you need not know of though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain"
These are the pleasures that are worse than pain.
2) I'm loving the references to GKC and BotWH. I would happily see every post start with a stanza or two...
I might be! Thanks for the explanation/correction. I hear green wine is pretty good though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinho_Verde
And I bet if you dyed it, nobody would taste the difference.
I have had the opportunity to enjoy a vintage Madeira and part of the enjoyment was to consider that when the grapes were harvested, Lincoln had not yet written the Gettysburg Address.
Was going to say that, around here in Spain, "verdejo" wine is green and quite popular.
I'm also going to just say it: I find Chesterton more annoying than inspiring.
This is turning into the Chesterton Poetry Hour, but yes I love "The Aristocrat" as well:
The Aristocrat
The Devil is a gentleman, and asks you down to stay
At his little place at What’sitsname (it isn’t far away).
They say the sport is splendid; there is always something new,
And fairy scenes, and fearful feats that none but he can do;
He can shoot the feathered cherubs if they fly on the estate,
Or fish for Father Neptune with the mermaids for a bait;
He scaled amid the staggering stars that precipice, the sky,
And blew his trumpet above heaven, and got by mastery
The starry crown of God Himself, and shoved it on the shelf;
But the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn’t brag himself.
O blind your eyes and break your heart and hack your hand away,
And lose your love and shave your head; but do not go to stay
At the little place in What’sitsname where folks are rich and clever;
The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever;
There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain;
There is a game of April Fool that’s played behind its door,
Where the fool remains for ever and the April comes no more,
Where the splendour of the daylight grows drearier than the dark,
And life droops like a vulture that once was such a lark:
And that is the Blue Devil that once was the Blue Bird;
For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn’t keep his word.
Now I think of it, that line about "The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever" reminds me of Raphael's house (or rather Hope's house) in "Baldur's Gate 3".
The best hour. Gimmie your favourite (non leopanto or BotWH) please.
I'm going with The Great Minimum.
Not my favourite of all his, because there are so many I enjoy, but I think this is very funny:
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/grocer.html
The Song Against Grocers
God made the wicked Grocer
For a mystery and a sign,
That men might shun the awful shops
And go to inns to dine;
Where the bacon's on the rafter
And the wine is in the wood,
And God that made good laughter
Has seen that they are good.
The evil-hearted Grocer
Would call his mother "Ma'am,"
And bow at her and bob at her,
Her aged soul to damn,
And rub his horrid hands and ask
What article was next
Though MORTIS IN ARTICULO
Should be her proper text.
His props are not his children,
But pert lads underpaid,
Who call out "Cash!" and bang about
To work his wicked trade;
He keeps a lady in a cage
Most cruelly all day,
And makes her count and calls her "Miss"
Until she fades away.
The righteous minds of innkeepers
Induce them now and then
To crack a bottle with a friend
Or treat unmoneyed men,
But who hath seen the Grocer
Treat housemaids to his teas
Or crack a bottle of fish sauce
Or stand a man a cheese?
He sells us sands of Araby
As sugar for cash down;
He sweeps his shop and sells the dust
The purest salt in town,
He crams with cans of poisoned meat
Poor subjects of the King,
And when they die by thousands
Why, he laughs like anything.
The wicked Grocer groces
In spirits and in wine,
Not frankly and in fellowship
As men in inns do dine;
But packed with soap and sardines
And carried off by grooms,
For to be snatched by Duchesses
And drunk in dressing-rooms.
The hell-instructed Grocer
Has a temple made of tin,
And the ruin of good innkeepers
Is loudly urged therein;
But now the sands are running out
From sugar of a sort,
The Grocer trembles; for his time,
Just like his weight, is short.
I think the green wine is just new wine, and crimson seas are just … Homer? The colors don’t reverse particularly well; the sea isn’t any more green than it is wine-dark.
You might be right. I'd only ever thought about my reading of the phrase, but this is why it's good to talk to other people about poems.
Having said that I think the sea is greener than it is crimson, and wine is (archetypally) crimson not green. And I'd thought (though will need to go back to check) there's a theme running through BotWH (and Chesterton generally) of people twisting and misusing the good gifts God has given, and getting empty pleasure and no joy from it.
I don't think it matters a jot to the point of the essay though, so maybe I was being pedantic.
I have seen the Mediterranean be wine dark.
Weirdly, I read the line the same way you did but interpreted it the way Scott did. I read it as Chesterton saying that the "perverse in pleasure" grow weary of even novel and amazing things not seen in nature, like green wine or crimson seas.
Really interesting and enjoyable, thanks!
As for other losses: there are degrees even within changes. I can speak to one I'm sure no one else on the blog will have experienced. I didn't fly for 30-plus years. Wasn't scared, just didn't care to and a problem with me is if I don't feel like doing something ... well, anyway.
During that time I took many road trips, however. In a car, which is not a medieval pilgrimage obviously ...
And then one day I flew because it was the most practical way to join some friends for a short few days' visit to the home of one who had moved 2000 miles away.
(It was interesting the way air travel had changed - for instance, it did not used to be the custom when I flew back in the day for everyone to keep the shades down and for a hush to settle on the plane and the flight attendants to dim the lights and to more or less say "nighty-night" for a couple-hour flight that took off at ten in the morning - but it seems like you guys worked out the bugs during that period after 9/11 when you bitched about air travel all the time, because it went very smoothly and the only glitches were my own, like forgetting to empty my water bottle.)
I/we had fun, of course. But afterward: how was your trip? Tell about your trip! - (said polite relatives).
And the truth was, it didn't seem like a trip, not in the way that the car-camping road trips did.
> a problem with me is if I don't feel like doing something ... well, anyway
If you don't care to do something you just don't do it? How is that a problem?
If I were an island, probably would not be.
It is very difficult to get by in this world without having to do something that you don’t feel like doing. I emphasize….
Oh it’s not a prescription; it’s just a pattern I notice. Unwillingly 🤪.
And lots of things other people seem to dislike -I like. Manual labor, etc.
I understand. I never took it as a prescription. I get mine under the table as well.Heh
That tweet from the kind of people likely to control AGI/ASI is probably a metaphor for something then:
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1905332049021415862
That's funny. It's terrible, but it's funny. This timeline is freakin' wild.
Shades of LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRAPH!
Usually I come down here to write something snarky but this time I wanted to say this is a great article and maybe I can get a piece of lapis lazuli on eBay.
I like the sentiment that this is a matter of personal spiritual growth. But it *is also* a societal issue, isn't it? People say "I could see paintings on my computer", but the paintings on your computer are NOT equivalents to the paintings in the Prado. They're slightly-to-much worse copies. Yet people believe they are functionally the same, which does endanger the Prado! Every Frame a Painting highlighted the dumbing effect of media saturation in the video on Transformers: "viewers are visually sophisticated, but visually illiterate."
I think it might've been Ruxandra (forgive me if she actually thinks the opposite but I have an image of a tweet in mind) who pointed out that Socrates was in fact totally right about writing changing our relationship to memory. When was the last time you attended a storytelling performance? Even in a fantasy UBI world where people can become storytellers if they want because they don't need jobs, are they going to have audiences? Or will people assume the book, video, podcast is close enough?
Great essay Scott, but it strikes me as insufficiently ambitious, no matter how absurd that sounds.
Your depiction of Heaven potentially succumbing to the hedonic treadmill, leaving inhabitants griping about golden mountains, highlights a crucial point: any Heaven worth the name must have a solution for hedonic adaptation baked in. Relying solely on Chestertonian willpower or innate holiness seems... insufficient. This is fundamentally a biological limitation, a wetware problem. And we already have proof-of-concept interventions. Consider the reliable induction of awe, wonder, and profound connection via pharmacological means – MDMA's empathogenic surge, the perspective-shifting novelty induced by psilocybin or LSD. These demonstrate that the subjective experience of wonder and meaning has neurochemical correlates we can, in principle, modulate. A properly engineered Heaven wouldn't just change the scenery; it would offer sustainable solutions to the limitations of baseline human consciousness, potentially allowing for the choice to experience that "first sunset" feeling reliably, without the downsides of tolerance or the need for saintly discipline. Forget willing yourself out of it; fix the underlying mechanism. Otherwise, as you sketch it, it's just Purgatory with better interior design and readily available green wine.
You acknowledge the paradox – lamenting the lost awe of a live Caruso debut while being unwilling to uninvent the phonograph. This points to a broader truth: despite the elegiac tone we sometimes adopt for the "before times," our revealed preferences overwhelmingly favour convenience, access, and abundance. Nobody is actually lining up for the multi-year, high-mortality trek to Sar-i-Sang when synthetic ultramarine is cheap and available. Few are smashing their smartphones to rely solely on rare, expensive, live performances. We choose the firehose of "just more Lippi" on Wikipedia over the arduous pilgrimage, even while waxing poetic about the latter's lost significance. There's a certain luxury in lamenting the loss of meaning from a position of immense technological privilege.
Is the rate of truly sublime, awe-inspiring novelty actually decreasing, or is the bar just continuously rising? The peasant's awe at ultramarine was context-dependent. Photography "killed" realistic portraiture but enabled entirely new aesthetic dimensions and democratized image capture. There are photos that reliably induce frisson and awe in me, and are acclaimed by other people. Recorded music cheapened the live experience but created the possibility of global superstars and genres unimaginable before. Ghiblification might feel like peak-novelty saturation now, but this very cheapness, as you suggest, might be the substrate for the next unforeseen artistic paradigm. My sense is that while specific sources of wonder become commonplace, truly new sources emerge at a somewhat consistent rate throughout history, reflecting the technological and cultural context of the time. The hedonic treadmill forces us (or AI) to innovate harder to achieve that same hit of genuine novelty, but the frontier keeps moving. Humans adapt to just about anything, but they also lose that adaptation over long enough periods of time. Someone stuck on a deserted island for a decade will probably cry tears of joy at a pop song, and more commonly, people can re-read books or re-watch movies after some time and get a wide range of enjoyment out of it, sometimes even more than the first go.
I am confident in the feasibility of halting that treadmill humanity has always run on. Even if we're ultimately going nowhere, there's no need to get there fast.
> I am confident in the feasibility of halting that treadmill humanity has always run on.
The ages-old solution is "fasting", in the widest sense. Spend some time with deliberately reduced inputs, and your personal treadmill lowers itself back to ground level. Scott mentioned that a dozen hours of samatha meditation, which is an intense fast of the senses, will do it.
> I am confident in the feasibility of halting that treadmill humanity has always run on. Even if we're ultimately going nowhere, there's no need to get there fast.
I'm confident in the ability of the average human to drop off the treadmill here and there. We all tend to think we're the only one with a spark of life and the occasional sense of awe, and most everyone else are NPCs, but we're obviously right about ourselves b/c we have the 1st person view, and wrong about everyone else.
OTOH I'm not so confident about humanity finding a "quick fix" type of shortcut, beyond the abilities we already have. Even psychedelics are not a quick fix, they give you "a trip" that you still have to go through.
>we're obviously right about ourselves b/c we have the 1st person view, and wrong about everyone else.
I think this is really really important. The amount of stuff that we can unwittingly make up about the situation we find ourselves in or the person we’re speaking to is immense.
And yet one of our most common complaints is that we don’t know our own mind. It’s really funny …. In fact, a lot of comedy is based on this when you think about it. Two people with two different intentions involved in the same situation and, because we can see both sides of it at once, laugh our asses off.
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
"Archaic Torso of Apollo" - Rainer Maria Rilke
If the pleasure of art is primarily novelty, then the idea of a semantic apocalypse makes sense. If the pleasure of art is a glimpse into something real and true, beyond the surface of banal, everyday life, then the art demands from us as much as we demand from it. Become like little children, indeed.
One reason I dislike social media is it is greater at producing semantic apocalypses than any other technology. Some of the most popular content on social media are:
1. Fights between two or groups of people
2. Attractive women dancing in skimpy clothing
3. Heavily photoshopped pictures of nature
4. Sensationalist and usually inaccurate news articles
4a. Clickbait/misleading content more broadly
5. "Ragebait" content made to make people angry at a person or group
All of these have the effect of cheapening other aspects of life. When you see a normal picture of a nature landscape or even go see it in person, it may seem less exciting interesting than the photoshopped picture you saw earlier. If you regularly see exaggerated content of the latest awful thing some politician has done, then when the politician actually does an awful thing you are desensitized.
A wonderful meditation on becoming childlike (ala Matthew 18:3). When I was a young man in my 20s, I was rather taken by Chesterton's admonition to learn to enjoy simple things, but often at a loss for how to do it. A lot of the same ideas show up in Wendel Berry's work, from a slightly different angle. Actually articulating how that plays out in modern life can be really, really challenging, which is why some people end up concluding we must retvn to being farmers or living under a monarchy or somesuch. Tying it into this week's Studio Ghibli AI image craze is a healthy leap of imagination!
More specifically, the "bad" blue pigment produced a strong, rich color, but one that was distinct from ultramarine. There were two sources for it, both vegetable, which are now known to be different plants that make the same chemical: woad and indigo. Woad was the main form in Medieval Europe, since it could be grown relatively locally, while indigo was an expensive import from warmer climates. Indigo was the premium option, since the indigo plant makes higher concentrations of the active ingredient and with pre-modern extraction and dying techniques it makes a richer and purer color that was less apt to fade. With modern techniques, the end result is identical except for the yield.
The problem was that while woad and indigo make very rich blue colors, they're the wrong shades of blue. Indigo dye, at full concentration, produces the shade you'd expect from the name, which is a dark and purply blue. If you want a lighter blue, you need to either pull the fiber before it's saturated with color or you need to "heather" the fabric by spinning together a mix of undyed and fully-dyed fiber. These produce lighter blues, but with a greyish faded-looking tone rather than the rich medium blue of aquamarine. And you need true indigo to get a decent light-to-medium blue with this technique. Using woad with period methods, there are impurities that add a greenish cast to the blue that comes through especially at lower concentrations.
Incidentally, both sides in the American Civil War started out with different forms of indigo-dyed uniforms. Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, the Union standardized on the full-saturation indigo color that had been used by the antebellum regular army, while the Confederacy standardized on "cadet blue", a lighter grey-blue color produced from heathered indigo, which had been widely used antebellum for state militia uniforms. As the war went on, the Confederacy gradually and unofficially switched to "butternut" uniforms, a light brown color similar to khaki which was produced from sumac or walnut, because butternut dye could be produced in quantity locally. Woad wasn't really grown in the Confederacy; indigo was to some extent, but the quantities needed required imports that were cut off by the Union blockade, and the big indigo-growing parts of the South (Louisiana and the barrier islands of South Carolina) were high priorities for Union amphibious landings for other reasons and thus by mid-war became unavailable to the Confederacy.
This also (along with blue jeans, which are also traditionally colored with indigo in varying saturations) gives a handy intuition pump for the colors you get from indigo and why they weren't substitutes for aquamarine. The Virgin Mary's coat should not look like a Civil War uniform, North or South, nor should it look like a jean jacket.
This was really interesting, thanks. I had never heard of the butternut dye. Now I need to look up what woad looks like.
ETA: turns out I've seen it - a lot. It's invasive across the Southwest.
Great info
I remember visiting the island of Minorca and noticing the shade of green that a lot of things were painted in. And then I looked up at the hills and saw the green in the copper mineralization.. What other color could they possibly paint something with ? Ditto the red barns of America…rust
Similarly, a lot of stuff got painted white because "whitewash" was easily prepared from cheap and widely-available ingredients, mostly quicklime and water. It's basically a very wet mix of a simple lime plaster without adding the sorts of binding ingredients (sand, horsehair, etc) that you might use if you were going to use it as a structural material.
A lot of the middle-to-high end 19th/20th century outdoor paints were linseed oil based (also called flaxseed oil), which has the advantage of drying to a film that is both hydrophobic and flexible (polymerized polyunsaturated fatty acids, the same substance that makes up the "seasoning" on a cast iron or carbon steel pan). By itself, dried linseed oil is transparent with a sickly yellowish tint, so it's almost always got added pigments to make it opaque, protect the substance under it from sunlight, and make it more aesthetic. Metal oxides seem to be commonly used. Iron oxide, as you say, was used in barn paint. I haven't heard of copper oxide being used, but that makes sense. Modern white paint usually uses titanium oxide. Light colored paints use a titanium oxide base for opacity, plus other ingredients for tone. Darker paints use less titanium oxide and consequently aren't as good at hiding underlying color. I've also heard of zinc oxide being used. And lead oxide used to be common but has fallen into disuse in recent decades for the obvious reasons.
I'm reminded of a movie I saw as a kid, set during WW2 in the Pacific theater. Operation Petticoat, I think. I don't remember the details, but it involves a series of misadventures that starts with an American navy crew repainting their submarine. The didn't have enough red paint (iron oxide) or white paint (titanium or zinc oxide) for the primer coat, so they mixed what they had of both, expecting to paint over it with a regular color later, but need to go to see before they got the chance, leading to shenanigans around ships on both sides spotting a pink submarine and assuming its color had some bizarre significance.
I am almost ashamed to say that I remember that movie. I use linseed oil a lot as a kid because it’s a way of toughening up a cricket bat. It’s a great thing to put on old drying out wood to preserve it as well.
After looking it up, I find that the red and white primer in the movie were both lead-based. Apparently, different oxide salts of lead can be either red or white, both of which were used as paint pigments.
"I sometimes imagine Heaven as a place of green wine, crimson seas, and golden mountains. Everyone goes there, good and bad alike. And if you still have enough innocence in your soul to enjoy things, then great, you’re in Heaven..."
I once read a short story in which an uptight Protestant of the "all pleasure is sin and suffering is virtue" variety dies and finds himself in Heaven, but is too focused on his misery to enjoy it even after Saint Peter tells him outright. He insists it must be some test of faith and goes right on living the life he'd been living before, misery and all. I believe the story ends with Peter and another saint or angel lamenting the man's fate. I couldn't find it again, though, even with LLM help.
(The Great Divorce by CS Lewis has been suggested, but it doesn't seem to fit, even excerpted.)
A few points here: 1) I recall that R Scott Bakker, also known for his magnificently insane and dark fantasy writing, came up with the "semantic apocalypse" idea. Haven't thought about it for a while, but there's an idea in his novels that this perfected human (Kellhus) can perfectly manipulate other humans. He destroys the systems of meaning that his followers hold, then rebuilds them in his image. Bakker also wrote a slightly mad blog, called three pound brain (https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/), but has now gone off grid, sadly. Definitely worth checking out.
2) I wonder the extent that other people consciously ration their aesthetic consumption to avoid this kind of aesthetic numbing. I seem to do this a lot, but there's a clear trade-off. You'll never understand Bach to any depth if you ration yourself to a symphony once a year, but you'll appreciate the novelty more.
I remember hearing years back that a recording does not have the same sound quality as a live performance in some quantifiable way. I don't know if this is still the case or if this was ever the case to be honest, I am not an expert or even a knowledgeable hobbyist about that. If this is true, you might still need to travel to Italy to get the true Caruso experience. The AI generated art is not as good as one made by people, the one thing I worry about is that it is good enough for commercial applications and funding for human produced art dries up, so consequently people never develop the same level of technical skill they can now that they can hone their craft full time. It's a small tragedy in the way of progress I guess. On the other hand, I do enjoy some of the applications where good enough art is good enough (which needs to be paired with other interesting stuff of course) and having more of that would be great.
Two parts to this:
1. Back in Caruso's time the quality of audio recording was indeed atrocious, compensated for by the sheer wonder of hearing "human voice" out of a box. So it still was totally worth it to travel to Italy
2. Today there are myriad sound systems capable of reproducing human voice with enough fidelity to be indistinguishable from the real thing. But - they are still not capable of replicating the experience of a 200-year old opera house, the full experience of sight, sound of the hall, smell, plush seats, rustle of the audience, etc. etc. So - still worth a trip to Italy if this is your thing.
For whatever it is worth I heard about this from a violinist some 15 years ago so on the one hand he probably has some significant metis about sound quality, but on the other he was most likely biased against anything that commodifies his profession, and he might have been unfamiliar with the more expensive sound systems.
Oh it's totally understandable, especially coming from a classical musician point of view. But once the visuals of the performer and the sound system are hidden behind a curtain for a proper double-blind test, it's pretty much impossible to tell real sound from reproduction, and the system doesn't even have to be all THAT expensive anymore as long as the source doesn't have some very deep bass requiring large drivers and cabinet sizes.
The "sound fidelity" is the wrong hill for live performers to die on, that battle's been lost. It's the experience of a living breathing human playing real instruments for an audience of other living breathing humans that we still want to experience.
Has such a double blind test been performed? That would be useful to update my priors. Specially useful if the blindfolded people are classical musicians, it's very common for them to hear more stuff, the person I was talking to had perfect pitch for example. The orchestra hall generally has architecture designed to amplify sound, so even this would not necessarily be proof that live performances are useless if all you care about is the sound, but it'd still be interesting to see if from that point of view a musician can be replaced by a recording.
John Dunlevy used to do this in the 90's as a demo of his speaker systems (he was a fascinating character, an antenna designer who went into speaker design to do it right for a change). I don't know off the top of my head if he ever formally published the results. A cursory search in AES and ASA journals produced too many hits to go through (listening tests are clearly a thing!).
There's also a fundamental acoustical reason for it: once the listener is in a far field, as long as the sound system reproduces the waveforms reasonably well (say, with distortion <-60 dB), there's simply no mechanism in our hearing system to tell the sounds apart.
There are always fringe cases: I don't think a room-sized two-speaker stereo system can reproduce the sound of a full symphony orchestra (90+ musicians), if for no other reason than the listener not being in a far-field condition. I suspect a system using a speaker for each musician at their position could do the job, but this is getting ridiculous.
In reality, there is of course another factor making the reproduced sound be different: the room. The sound of the room is an inseparable part of the experience. No matter how accurate the sound system is, it's sitting in a living room of a house as opposed to a concert hall. This will always color the sound in easily recognizable ways.
A live symphony sounds different depending on where you are sitting in a Damm enough theatre anyway. Live rock or pop can sound exactly the same though, because it’s amplified through the same speakers as if they weren’t there.
I don’t know if you remember or no but sometime back in the 70s or 80s Carnegie Hall redid their band shell. The original was plaster over a wire mesh and they replaced it with one constructed with a new modern material. It was a disaster. They had to find one of the only plasterers in the United States who was capable of building such a thing (an old Italian guy in Brooklyn) and he came in and redid it in plaster.
The room you are playing the music in is such a big part of how it’s going to sound.
Past a certain level of quality of equipment the biggest thing that is going to affect how you hear a recording is the space you are playing it in. It’s very significant.
How did the medievals reconcile virgin Mary having an ultra-expensive ultramarine coat with virgin Mary being dirt poor (which was surely central to her story and her humble virtue)?
There was nothing to reconcile. First off Mary wasn't dirt poor but distinctly middle class. And theologically she was one of the richest people in history, she bore God.
Because she is also the Queen of Heaven. And because artists like showing off their techniques and rich patrons like showing off they can afford the best of the best 😁
This is why you get the iconography of the Virgin of Humility (associated with the Franciscans) but also using gold and blue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_of_humility
Thank you for writing and sharing this!
I'm almost stunned by the timing of this post - I've been grappling with my struggle to enjoy things fully, and was ready to once again resign myself to techniques to "reset" enjoyment like abstaining from things for a while (maybe it will work this time!). That hasn't worked for me, so I also evaluated potential mental health affects like seasonal depression or ADHD. But nothing ever seemed right - I never felt like I was addressing the root of the issue. I could do those things, maybe they would work for a while, but any external-based tool will become worn out with such use.
What really spoke to me was your pointer towards seeing the world through the eyes of children, and particularly your notes to G.K. Chesterton. It sounds like he absolutely had it figured out for himself!
I'm totally convinced that it's a Skill Issue for me to continue working on, and that instead of searching for the answer using external objects (abstinence/medication, solving it systemically), the answer is internal.
I'm going to walk that path now. When I really reflect, meditation and journaling have done the most to uncover the real reasons behind my expectations and disappointments. It's just really hard to see those clearly when I let my attention disperse at every moment.
Philosophically speaking, I find this all very interesting and I generally agree.
But I find it hard to connect all this talk about the sublime with the actual output of generative AI. It's really not that good, even the first time you see it. If those Ghiblified pictures were made by the actual Studio Ghibli, you'd think they were real bad.
IIRC, Scott Aaronson made a comparison to a dog speaking mediocre English. Assuming he actually said that, I agree with him. It's amazing, spectacular, impossible...but it's still mediocre. It's only impressive because it's a dog doing it.
It is the fleeting privilege of the frontier to experience wonder and to name the things you find. The cost is uncertainty and - often enough, if it's a real frontier - failure.
The alternative is comfort and stability in comparative mediocrity.
Is that systemically fair? I don't know! It does feel individually fair. Certainly it seems to dovetail with Nassim Taleb's notion of fairness, which is matching the scale of risking and reward.
"If you insist that anything too common, anything come by too cheaply, must be boring, then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you."
I'm not too worried. Once again I'll point to one of my favorite examples: of all the things that have been said about Dark Souls, nobody has said that completing it comes cheaply.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blSXTZ3Nihs
I see quite a lot of Marxist notions here. A big complaint of conservatives (in the traditional sense) is that modernity/capitalism destroys the old communal bonds and replaces them with impersonal market forces. I think we can think dialectically about this, yes recognize that something of value has been lost, but that something has also been gained e.g. modernity/capitalism has allowed an increase in individuality and personal choice when compared to previous modes of production. I recall reading a lament about the loss of Blockbuster to streaming services which struck a similar chord. Be that as it may, for better or worse the cat is now out of the bag, there's no going back, history unfolds.
ETA two posts by Matt Bruenig that I think make this point quite well. (He also says why he doesn't view it as a problem)
https://mattbruenig.com/2021/05/12/the-communal-feeling-of-monopoly/
https://mattbruenig.com/2021/05/12/what-is-lost-in-post-scarcity/
Dialectical thinking is not just Marxist.
I could argue blockbuster (or any video store) was better or worse than streaming based on reality rather than streaming. It was mildly worse because you had to travel to it, rather than stay at home. For people who like online shopping then and prefer it to going shopping, that’s the kind of gain you get.
It was worse because you could generally get what you wanted in one shop. The choice was better. If video stores had broken into multiple different brands selling their own content and you had to pay a monthly fee to get in to any of them, therefore a lot of money to get into all of them, then it would be a comparison.
Yeah fair point, dialectics isn't exclusive to Marxism
> But I think it means the thing as Lippi’s Madonna: unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Is there a missing “same”?
I’ve often mused to my wife (a museum curator) that the slow demise of museum popularity (especially in traditional portraits) is due to the fact that images are no longer rare. The idea of “semantic apocalypse” now accelerated by AI and exemplified by “ghiblification” feels palpable and an unavoidable consequence of (in the words of Kevin Kelly) “what technology wants”. As certain experiences become prevalent and less precious, certain other experiences become more precious because their scarcity remains in place. I'm thinking of the return to eating in restaurants after a year+ of not doing so during covid lockdown, or my recent experience of a live concert (something exceedingly rare for me with two young kids at home). In the future, will voluntary forbearance be the path to preserving that sense of wonder and enjoyment? Or maybe it will simply be a function of noticing and appreciating those precious moments, and thanking the source of those moments, that can keep the apocalypse at bay.
As against that, there's this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nnHdSp4dNQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt0oLK1qun8
Thank you for sharing these :) yes, I know art appreciation isn't dead, but this also sort of proves my point. Witnessing images or art is no longer rare; witnessing art restoration remains extremely rare (and is therefor interesting).
The skill is amazing; something comes in looking like Humpty Dumpty after all the king's horses and all the king's men had a go at it, and both of them manage to make it come back together and look like it should.
The tales of "someone who had no idea what they were doing decided to glue this painting to a piece of plywood with polyurethane adhesive and now I have to undo all that" alone are worth the watch! 😁
I'm in a strange place for this, because I've never liked anime art. My adult life pretty much overlaps the anime fad, and anime art has always struck me as cartoonish and trite.
It is lost on me as well but I figure this isn't the time or place.
I do like plenty of American animation, and was raised on it.
I remember a mother, very curating of her kids' media intake, insisting that they "just want to watch "Grave of the Fireflies' over and over."
Do they really though? I would think - but similar assertions are so common on the internet I must concede.
The role of technology is complicated, though. The phonograph destroyed the wonder of haring a fine voice sing ... but artificial amplification created the rock concert, and the sales of phonograph records created the business of the star rock band. Indeed, I've been hearing the same songs in the background music for over 50 years and somehow they have "value" that hasn't been destroyed.
On the personal level the semantic apocalypse is nihilism. It's already true that nothing has meaning, everything is just physical stuff, you die and it's over ... is one perspective.
From another perspective you don't know anything, every moment is indescribable wonder or just perfection.
It also describes the duality of desire. When you fulfill it, it's gone. "The drives goal - to reach its object - is 'false', it masks its 'true' aim, which is to reproduce its own circular movement by way of repeatedly missing its object." (Zizek)
The meaning itself arises only with the desire. We can have a horizontal relationship where we try to fulfill the desire e.g. view the beautiful sunset. But then what? What if instead we increase the desire without fulfilling it? We will suffer, the tension increases.
This is where enlightenment comes in. We can see both at the same time perfectly matching each other. Someone dies and we grieve because we love them. It's perfect. If we wanted not to grieve we would also have to stop loving. If we stopped rejecting death we would also stop living. Everything arises together. Me and not me. The problem is that normally we only see one side. The split between observer and observed. Here and there. This can be resolved.
Without enlightenment we can open up to our desire but it also increases our suffering. When the tension is gone or reduced we can open up more and more. Or everything just disappears.
The cosmic joke is not that we want our suffering it's that we are our suffering. Our whole lives we thought we were trying to get from one side to the other when we were already there on both sides (hint: Otherwise how could we know about the other side).
However, the desire also arises together with it's fulfillment in every moment. Dukkha get's replaced with niceness. When we clearly try to look at suffering, self, permanence both arise together. This is what happens when you drink the infinite pool of sorrow or as Rumi describes it (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/109002-love-dogs-one-night-a-man-was-crying-allah-allah)
"Why did you stop praising?"
"Because I've never heard anything back."
"This longing you express is the return message."
"The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.”
Or Ingram:
This is sort of like a dog chasing its tail. Pain and pleasure, suffering and satisfaction
always seem to be “over there”. Thus, when pleasant sensations arise, there is a constant, com-
passionate, deluded attempt to get over there, to the other side of the imagined split. This is
fundamental attraction. You would think that we would just stop imagining there is a split, but
somehow that is not what happens. We keep perpetuating the illusory sense of a split even as
we try to bridge it, and so we suffer.
When unpleasant sensations arise, there is an attempt to get away from “there” (or even
“here”), a mental pressure that attempts to widen the imagined split. This will never work,
because the split doesn’t exist, but the way we hold our minds as we try to get away from that
side is painful, and this is fundamental aversion.
When boring or apparently uninteresting sensations arise, there is the attempt to tune out
altogether and forget the whole thing, to try to pretend that the sensations on the other side of
the imagined split are not there. This is fundamental ignorance and it perpetuates the process,
as it is by ignoring aspects of our sensate reality that the illusion of a split is created in the
first place.
Rob Burbeas talks on Wisdom and desire, Eros and the Immaginal or the later parts of "Seeing that frees" are interesting here I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9oCV7GgQr0
Thanks. Pretty much my life. Hallelujah.
>It's already true that nothing has meaning
I don’t think that is true. I think that nothing has intrinsic meaning is true, but that leaves a lot of room for meaning.
EDIT: I read your whole post and realize that my above comment is unnecessary, but I’m leaving it anyway.
Related, perhaps: https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/1905768158709125563
I liked the essay, but I still fear the semantic apocalypse.
As AI continues to rise, I've realised I only find meaning in things because humans did them. Harry Clarke windows, Paul Simon songs and Git are all beautiful to me because they are achievements of human minds and hearts.
I can try to appreciate an AI creation via the humans that built the AI. But it feels like meaning is getting more and more distant, until I can barely make it out at all.
I agree with this piece, and I can tell you that lots of Christians enjoy our lives the way Chesterton recommends. God said of His creation that it is good; if you can only enjoy the parts of it that present themselves to you as unique, you're not aligned with the good, you're just aligned with the interesting.
Not all of us have this skill, for sure. But, as a group, for instance, we have not yet gotten bored of A Mighty Fortress, which is a song Martin Luther wrote in 1529. I think singing the same song for 500ish years demonstrates something.
You can't fool me, I read the Babylon Bee: https://babylonbee.com/news/finally-theyre-playing-an-old-hymn-in-church---wait-false-alarm-theyve-added-a-weird-new-chorus
Haha! Guilty as charged.
I'll never become inured to beautiful sunsets. Every beautiful sunset is new and different from all beautiful sunsets that have gone before. However, there are boring and sucky sunsets.
The reason I personally worry about the semantic apocalypse is because (so-called) AI is all about style, not substance. "My Neighbour Totoro" is such a wonderful movie because it weaves together the themes of life and death and wonder into a single narrative. The individual scenes within the movie work so well because someone (presumably Miyazaki) put a lot of thought into composition and motion within each scene, and tuned them to convey the emotion he sought.
But those aspects of the movie are a little subtle; only the art style is immediately noticeable. So when you ask the AI to "ghiblify" your photo, it faithfully reproduces the style. Now you have a billion images that all look "ghiblified", to the point where your brain mushes them all together into a single mess, thus blocking you from ever going beneath the surface to appreciate a creatively crafted work such as "Totoro" -- because your brain just filters it out as "background noise" or "AI fad of the day". And, sometime soon, this will happen to *all* creative works.
Green wine = absinthe = hallucination
Crimson seas = suicide = self-destruction
Chesterton is saying that even the most civilized pleasures, those of hallucination and self-harm, ultimately fail to hold any interest; even though their main claim on pleasure is to at least be more interesting than reality / life. Interestingness itself loses its interest.
I think Chesterton is recalling Baudelaire's Spleen, section 3.
I used to wonder if I was fool for becoming a novelist at the dawn of AI, when novels will lose their novelty, but now I wonder if y'all are fools for NOT chasing the dream, if a post-scarcity paradise is on its way anyway
This is the best thing I've read from you in years, and it's not particularly close.
Thank you!
no, scott if anything your ghibli pic is less worthwhile than the original picture its based on. that pic takes both the reality of your family and the reality of ghibli work and empties both of special meaning into a shapeless mess. its not ghibli because ghibli is not just the way he renders people. its closer to lo-fi girl, the patron saint of disposable chill music that was popular years back on youtube.
ai art reduces art to vibes by eliminating or softening the reality behind it. and vibes are worthless...when you remember your family gathering you remember events or stories, not just vibes. it becomes disposable content not precious memories.
I think seeking meaning in consumed experiences is a typically 20th century thing in the Brave New World mode (be a consumer, be a hedonist in the sense of living for experiences). It's a sort of "adolescent" or "childlike" thing. Adult meaning coming more from things like "what burdens do you bear?", "whose life do you enable?", or "what, or who, do you stay true to?" Our current consumerist, hedonistic culture may transition to a more "adult" one (although if it does, young people will always have their childhood and adolescence).
I suppose technology can take away our meaning as producers (take our need to work away) and take away the meaning of the objects we take in as consumers (cheapen it by mass production). What then? Technology can't take away your moral self, whether you dared what you should have dared (or what you know you would have dared in a world which gives you no outlet for daring), or mourned what you should have mourned. I think the adult life is still possible in a world that doesn't outwardly call for it, if for no other reason than you can mourn the loss of calls for outward responsibility.
Reference: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin, 1935. Concerning the loss of uniqueness, authenticity, and intention in art.
The backstory matters: Outsider artist James Hampton toiled in obscurity his whole life. He built his "heavenly thrones" for religious reasons. Regardless of the artistic result, and the soundness of his reasoning, his motives were pure. I envy him that.
The backstory doesn't matter: "For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect." (Matthew 24:24). In other words, "The false prophet cured my leprosy, but not for any cosmologically deep reason, so I'm not deceived."
Personal observation: For a hundred years, the movie business has been pursuing special effects technologies that do justice to the imaginative stories they are telling. Now, AI has mastered visual effects. But after a year of visual wonders beyond imagination, I'm sick of it. "A bunch of show-stoppers waiting for a show to stop."
Apropos of nothing: "All I want is a chance to prove to myself that a thousand one-night-stands cannot equal one passionate love affair."
Technology will provide the solution to what technology threatens. We will eventually have the technology to hack the neural reward pathways, and reprogram them so that every subsequent pleasure is as intensely felt as the first. The hedonic treadmill is biologically contingent, not a hard law of consciousness or the universe. When the time comes, we will never bore or tire of the universe's pleasures again.
Well that sounds horrible.
How so? Would it not be welcome to be able to enjoy every sunset as much as the first one you ever saw?
Why would it be a sunset, why not orchestrate my brain to enjoy the smell of vomit all day.
Because there’s nothing human about that. There’s no gain without pain, no real human enjoyment without effort. Which is why i don’t actually enjoy a sunset as much as a the view from the mountain I climb every few weeks, and yet I barely look out of a plane window despite flying above the clouds. One view is earned, the other is not.
If we could engineer the “neural reward pathways” to enjoy everything we might as wallow in our bedrooms lying in literal shit and be happy about it, a whole society living like that would make the world a universal opium den.
Ah, Nozick's experience machine.
Great essay, thanks!
Have you seen a Klein in person? I think you might be surprised by how different it is to behold in person from seeing an image on your monitor. It's so saturated and blue it literally hurts my eyes a little to look at one.
This is nowhere near limited to Klein. Many, if not most, paintings contain pigments that are far outside the sRGB gamut. Some endure reduction better than others do. The most dramatic case in my personal experience is "Cup of Death": https://ids.si.edu/ids/download?id=SAAM-1912.3.3_1.jpg. Viewed at that link you'll likely find it bland but if you see it in person at the Smithsonian it's incredibly striking.
I know there's people who appreciate art based on the art ("this painting is really pretty") vs people who appreciate it based on the artist ("this blue canvas is meaningful because it is by KLEIN").
The second kind of person is presumably responsible for a blue canvas by Klein being more expensive than one I could paint myself.
The second kind can also be really annoying when they call you problematic because you say you like/dislike the work of an artist with the wrong/right politics. Or you believe that you can even get any emotional experience for art or find a melody catchy before checking the artist's views on LGBT+ issues. As far as I can tell they geniunely experience art this way, they're not just saying it to demonstrate conformance. I even believe them when they say they can appreciate art more deeply when they experience it in its proper context.
(In the limit I agree with them, if something is introduced in history class as "This is the anthem of the Hitler Youth" that will impact your judgement. Then again, until a few years ago I would have said the Soviets/Russians came pretty close to the Platonic ideal of a national anthem.)
But the second kind could also be immune to the semantic apocalypse? Sure you can Ghiblify anything, but it's not real art until it's an authenticated work of Miyazaki. An AI painting in the style of Picasso will never sell for as much as a real one.
That means the apocalypse will mainly hit Philistines and Barbarians like me. But we can still cheat with shrooms.
Klein had no background in chemistry and did not "come up with a new synthetic ultramarine". All he did was mix some existing paints and resins together according to the advice of a friend who ran a paint store. His monochromatic works are just as silly as they sound. On the other hand, Gmelin's work was genuinely innovative and produced an ultramarine that was much brighter and purer than anything that could be produced from Lapis. Gmelin absolutely *should* have painted a canvas monochrome blue and hung it in an exhibition, because he'd have been showing people a color far outside the range of any that had ever been seen before!
> Yes, we as a culture are post- some semantic apocalypse where listening to the great symphonies of the past has become so easy that we never do it.
I don't think this is true. As things become cheaper we do more of them. (Also, don't focus on Just classical music. As the total number of songs goes up, listen time is more widely spread)
Yes people of the past would have had to go to great lengths to hear this concert or see that painting, and so, for the vast majority of people, they didn't.
Only a small number of rich and music obsessed people would bother to go all the way to Italy.
Nowadays these people go see concerts in person, or buy the latest gold plated audio equipment for perfect quality, or just listen to the song 200 times before they get bored of it.
Also, "I went all the way to Italy to hear a concert, it was meh" isn't nearly as good a story as "it was AMAZING". The sunk cost fallacy might apply here. And people just not wanting to be rude.
> Also, "I went all the way to Italy to hear a concert, it was meh" isn't nearly as good a story as "it was AMAZING". The sunk cost fallacy might apply here. And people just not wanting to be rude.
On the other hand I don’t think people went to Italy on the great tour to listen to a mediocre version of anything. It was probably great.
Some people is always listening to the new pop songs because they get easily bored by all that came before and they already know.
Some people, particularly metalheads, never get bored of listenning to the classics of its favorite genre.
As I read this, I kept waiting for you (or Erik, who both have young kids) to note that the wonder, the anti-semantic collapse is having and raising children. You constantly see the firsts that they experience and the Holy Host that accompanies a realization like numbers going to infinity.
I get this, but I keep being distracted by the fact that I'm pretty sure "green wine" is absinthe (the stereotypical drink of decadent poets) and "crimson seas" are of blood. It's about people who aren't just sick of healthy pleasures, but have reached the stage of trying out all the unhealthy pleasures looking for joy and then gotten bored with them, too.
Chesterton is correct. "Enchanted world" is exactly what it says on the tin. Romans 8:28. Everything is beautiful for the lovers of God.
Great piece. Still I worry what mass-producing exceptional things at no cost does to the dignity of average people, who through their best and most genuine efforts can only create crap in comparison. And I think this leads to a backlash against exceptionalism and a desire to eliminate or handicap it, which I think can be seen happening under the surface of movements like populism.
https://www.chesterton.org/the-song-of-the-strange-ascetic/
"If I had been a heathen..."
"And I thought of computer monitors. If you wanted to see Lippi’s Madonna and Child when it was first painted in 1490, you would have to go to Florence and convince Lorenzo de Medici to let you in his house. Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia - something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi."
I don't think this is true. I've seen the Mona Lisa many times on computer screens, tv screens, books, posters, etc. But when I was in France, I went to the Louvre and, like everyone else, I saw the Mona Lisa there. And it was still special.
Or for Caruso, how many people went to Taylor Swift's concert? Her music is essentially free. That didn't stop millions of people of going to see her.
Or, to put it another way, is there any volume of Ghibli-fied pictures you could see that would keep you from seeing a new Ghibli movie? I think no.
The trouble with cyberghibli is that it can make anything cute, even leukemia.
"To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?"
I’m really surprised that no one has yet mentioned Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Benjamin argues that original works of art have an irreproducible aura, and that they are diminished by reproduction. A thousand perfect copies of Versailles diminish Versailles itself. Seems relevant to the discussion of Studio Ghibli.
> I sometimes imagine Heaven as a place of green wine, crimson seas, and golden mountains. Everyone goes there, good and bad alike. And if you still have enough innocence in your soul to enjoy things, then great, you’re in Heaven and presumably you have a good time. And if instead you’re one of those people who constitutionally hates everything, then you spend eternity writing thinkpieces with titles like “Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About Golden Mountains?” or “Do The Wrong Type Of People Like Crimson Seas Too Much?”, and God and the Devil both agree that this counts as sufficient punishment.
It is said in the name of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, the Kotzker Rebbe, who was known as 'the Seraph of Kotzk': "The World to Come is naught but a shtender and a page of Gemara; for the righteous, it is heaven, for the wicked, it is hell"
One Love.
Mwahaha I am extremely wicked according to halacha (chayav mita on several counts) but I love learnin'. Best of both worlds!
That said, I feel like even the most turbotsadik talmid gigachacham would probably find it less than heavenly: after a few days, you'd want food or rest, or at least coffee.
Why is "Colors" in the title of the article plural? I feel like I missed something.
> If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue. Keep watching sunsets until each one becomes as beautiful as the first.
I think I've (accidentally) figured out how to do this for Billy Joel's "All You Wanna Do Is Dance," but nothing else so far. I dunno, seems real enough!
I was moved to tears by this article
thank you, that's an awesome post on many levels
I definitely find that there's a mental posture to appreciating the thousandth sunset that's entirely achievable, though it takes a little work. It's difficult to decide to stop being bored of a videogame if I'm getting tired after playing for four hours, but it's easy to look at a tree, or a piece of scrap metal, or a sunset, and make a conscious decision to appreciate the endless beauty of nature and artifice. There are things that are easier to appreciate and things that I can't appreciate, but seeing transcendent beauty in something mostly feels like a choice.
Yes, it is, a choice.
Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917: 'This is how life becomes nothing and disappears. Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war…And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the ‘enstrangement’of things' (from 'Art as Device'). Carlo Ginzburg considered that Shklovsky and his group were inspired by Tolstoy, who in turn had been inspired by Marcus Aurelius's practice of 'stripping-back' complex phenomena into their elements. Whether or not that's the case, the ancient Stoics certainly had as a goal to 'see things as if for the first time' (tanquam spectator novus, Seneca Letter 64.6).
Perhaps Richard Feynman would agree with you?
"[...] questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower."
Perhaps it wasn't the brightness of the blue itself that shocked the peasants (after all, unlike purple, blue is a common color—it's in eyes, the sky, water, wildflowers, etc.) but rather the narrative around it... the seeing of the embodiment of something they had so long heard about—Mary and her coat.
In other words, the narrative of it.
And I think that we very much still have this in the modern world. Despite having our favorite musicians' songs trapped in a box in our pocket, it is still a semi-religious experience to see an artist in concert—to see the embodiment of a narrative. In fact, I highly doubt the emotion upon hearing Mozart's concertos has anything on the Eras Tour. Seeing a pretty building is perhaps mundane (we see them on our phones, and McMansions dot every suburban town), that is until you read about the family that lived there and imagine their ghosts around you. It is not the novelty of the place but the realization of a fantasy that sparks our fancy.
I can't help but recall the advent of the novel—there was a similar frenzy about how this would dull the experiences of the real world—essentially a fear of old-timey hikikomoris in their bedroom reading all day, numb to the experiences of the world.
But in fact, the opposite occurred... there was a surge in romanticism—Bronte and William James and Byron and Shelley. Then people had the opposite worry: that young people were too romantic... too vivacious and too appreciative of nature. Think the semi-wild gardens of the 1800s as opposed to the neatly trimmed hedges and symmetry of the prior century.
A modern example would be anime itself. Its aesthetics are a component of the story—part of the narrative. One could hypothesize that creating this prettier version of the world would dull the senses to the more mundane reality, but that is far from the case. People often do anime tourism where they visit the sites of these anime and use the story as a jumping-off point to engage with the real world (not Ghibli per se, since I think it uses fictional places, but for example Suzume).
And because it is not the things themselves but the narrative around them that inspires wonder, I don't see this going away or being dulled by excess.
_________
That said, I think there is something to be said about how the modern world has fractured these narratives.
Now it is so easy to find an "aesthetic" (which is essentially just a visual narrative) that people are undecided about which of these narratives are important. You mentioned stories of people crying when reading Jerusalem, and you attribute this to the difficulty of getting there. I disagree.
I have two friends who actually did a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from Munich (yes, they are strange people... yes, they did walk through war zones) and neither cried when seeing Jerusalem. It was fun, but not a holy experience. On the other hand, I have heard plenty of stories from Orthodox Jews who flew to Jerusalem and did break down in tears. It was the narrative that mattered to them—the stories they told themselves, not a barrier.
I think so much of what people in this community tell ourselves is a narrative of progress—where bigger and better and more advanced things are inherently important to us. To followers of this narrative, yes, speaking to an AI will be important, and by this point, the light bulb has gotten a little old. But there are other narratives too.
I often think about how Jane Austen and Mary Shelley were contemporaries. One was talking about society and the other science. In the modern day, I suspect Shelley would be more than interested in AI, while Austen less so. If teleported into the modern day, Shelley probably would be less excited by electricity, but Austen would probably be equally interested in passive-aggressive social climbers.
Most things humans find wonder in are remarkably constant. This community is perhaps the outlier.
I enjoyed this. A slightly related question - I have read bits of Chesterton here and there and read Heretics as an ebook. I’d like to read more but prefer paper books. Most of the stuff I see online of his collected essays and the like seems to be dubious quality editions that are basically printed ebooks. Anyone have any recommendations for good editions of his works?
Yes, the modern revival of Chesterton has produced a lot of those dubious editions. My own Chesterton shelf is mostly old editions each picked up serendipitously second hand, with remembered experience attached to each purchase: I feel that’s a very Chestertonian way of acquiring them.
If you want to go semantic apocalypse and just search for things to buy easily on the internet, my favourite physical Chesterton volume is a Library of Classics ‘Selected Essays’ from the 1950s: good selection of content and a nice object. There were also some Penguin Chesterton editions. Both widely available. My second favourite is the Bodley Head edition of ‘Heretics’ which is slightly rarer but not excessively so. Tauchnitz published a lot of his in the 1930s and they are nice books with a history: cheap paperbacks but needing to be hand cut, published for the continental market. I have ‘What’s Wrong With the World’ (maybe my favourite CKC) but they are a bit trickier to find (depends what country you are in I suppose).
Of modern editions I’ve heard good things about Everyman Classics (not the same as the ‘Library of Classics’) but haven’t handled one myself.
Fantastic, thanks for taking the time to write that up, will risk the doomsday clock and have a search for the selected essays for starters
Not quite the same, but I'm reminded of a bit from The Count of Monte Cristo where the Count tricks his friend into thinking that his love is dead and his fortunes are ruined, then gives the friend poison so they can commit suicide. A few hours later the friend wakes up to discover the poison was a sleeping pill, his love is alive and well and right there to meet him, and the Count has left him a fortune. There's a letter from the Count explaining that he thinks humans can only appreciate things in relative terms, so only someone who has felt the deepest depths of despair can experience the highest heights of joy.
I notice that no one seems to try this in real life.
I mostly think the reason no one does this is that people only take ideas like this seriously in far mode, and in near mode people continue to believe that actually good things are good and bad things are bad and you should try to avoid bad things.
In fact, if I try to vividly imagine actually going through this, I mostly don't predict it would work. I'm sure I'd be incredibly relieved for, like, an hour. After that I mostly imagine myself being angry about it.
But maybe there's a giant global conspiracy of people who do this to their friends, you only get inducted into the conspiracy after you've had your turn (so you won't suspect while it's happening), and no one's gotten around to me yet.
One downside of trying things like that.
What if the friend thinks "poison is too slow. I'll jump off the roof instead. "
Plans like this have a significant chance of going badly wrong if not everything goes to plan.
Good point! I think there's ways to mitigate that risk, but it does make the whole idea significantly more difficult.
That’s why it’s a story…
You can’t “want “ to feel despair. Doesn’t work.
Maybe we should hide modern technology from children. Every year on your birthday, we reveal another amazing breakthrough that enables new vistas of wonder.
See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3diLhMELXxM8rFHJj/to-spread-science-keep-it-secret !
This is a really good April Fool's Day post. Well done. This level of sophistication, commitment, and skill is going to fool a lot of people into taking it a face value.
It’s definitely an April fool’s day post, but only due to the fact that it’s posted on April 1st.
What a wonderful post. Thank you again. As another poster said, having young children can bring the freshness back in and push the apocalypse back another generation. But there's also the epicure's defense against a glut of stimuli. Even if technology makes former riches cheap as dirt, there's always subtleties to be explored day by day. You don't have to be able to afford $100 bottles of wine to compare subtle differences between wines. For less money than that, you can compare subtle differences in renditions of the Jupiter symphony as played by Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra vs. MacKerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. For less money than that, you can tease out the many flavors you can evoke from sourdough bread made week after week as you keep your starter alive. And for no money at all...
I'm lucky enough to live near the coast in Spain and get to bike with my son to school at dawn. Sometimes the sunrise after a storm does have the look of green wine. Sometimes it's like a slice of tangerine on glacial ice. I've seen sunrise as vivid pink as Night's afterglow and another time like a pink silhouette of light, as if Night had held the sun up to the webbing of its hand like one might a flashlight. I've seen orange purple that fills all my field of vision, but when I turn around the pale gray of clouds and sky merged imperceptibly, as if God had used up all the color on just one side and the rest of the world was waiting to be painted until God fetched some more pots.
Granted, I've also seen plenty of dishrag sunrises—with no clouds for texture or color effects, just a gradual lightening through lighter and lighter grays. But after one storm, white hung in the air so thick the sun inside it was like a candle in a votive above an ocean, which seemed like it was trying to claw its way up the land. If you turn from the "new" to the "subtly different" as your criterion for enjoyment.
A fine piece of writing.
This is one of your best essays, and I've been reading for a long, long time.
I walked away uncomfortable and disagreeing from the Hoel essay, but was unable to articulate why. This does so beautifully.
My idea of a metaphor for AI Art consumption isn't synthetic ultramarine, it's industrial food science. Modern agriculture and chemistry made possible an incredible variety of fast food, snacks and candy that would dazzle the kings of yore, flavors and textures stimulating beyond belief, all available to the poorest people in society. And nevertheless, junk food made the world decidedly worse.
With all due respect to the innocence of youth, If I go to heaven I hope it has more to offer than an endless birthday party where I can forever eat all the pizza and ice cream I want without getting sick.
> If I go to heaven I hope it has more to offer than an endless birthday party where I can forever eat all the pizza and ice cream I want without getting sick.
Fair enough. But I hope the heaven has ice cream too.
I’m reminded, by the remarks in this essay on the satiation of the hedonic treadmill and the need to be as wondrous as a child, of the poem by the tragically neglected Irish poet Kavanagh, bright to my attention by my Irish wife years ago.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use
…
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won't we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason's payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.
This is as good an explanation of the hedonic treadmill, and the need to get off it, as any.
He would be amused perhaps that the Advent darkened room is now about mid season in the two month consumerist festival of Christmas, and not a time to fast before it. Maybe he’s right and we need to get off the hedonic treadmill, to fast or leave the phones down, and not individually but as a society.
Maybe giving everyone the ability to generate masterpieces in one click is not that big of a gain. Supposedly it's opening unlimited creativity for everyone etc etc but is it worth it really? Past the initial hype what's the long term real gain for the 95% of the population that was never interested in the first place. Because clearly the other 5% who took pleasure and meaning pursuing these skills have had their lives mostly ruined (I have several close friends in these 5%)
Also, what's the end game? Maybe we started with potato soup, then Ghibli movies were chocolate, now we just invented Coke. Are we really looking forward to Fentanyl?
Ghibli movies etc were good because in addition to being delicious like chocolate, they were also inspiring and made us look up to all that talent, hard work etc etc.
This feels more like wireheading but we have no one to admire for all the Infinite fractal beauty we're experiencing so we're left praising the machine lords who designed the circuits and cables.
What proportion of Muslims in the world actually make it to Mecca? How much anxiety is caused by poor Muslims who can’t afford the trip worrying they will never go to paradise? Without air travel, hadj would be more meaningful to the handful of pilgrims who make it there, but I suspect that would be a net utility loss.
About 10%, according to a Pew survey from 2013. And that gels with the number of visas that Saudi Arabia issues (~2 million).
I do think the Muslims have found an interesting middle ground in that Mecca is barred to non-Muslims and its pilgrimage is formalized, so it's still special (although I hear it's terrible because it's crowded and boiling during pilgrimage season)
Mostly orthogonal to the point of the essay, but here's a positive infohazard (infoblessing?): Virtually all of the GPT-4o generations are strongly biased to include this color: https://i.imgur.com/JcImmeY.png
I saw this pointed out on discord, and now it's referred to as "slop color". Once you are aware of this, the treadmill goes backwards a bit, since it makes GPT-4o images feel very repetitive, in a way real images aren't. In fact, it may have led to a near-term increase in my appreciation of the use of color in real animation, in the same way reading bland LLM text all over the internet makes me appreciate good human writers even more.
I suspect this is trivially addressable in any decent image editor, but I also suspect that people posting tons of AI art won't address it.
It's only slightly less trivially addressable with a LoRA.
If you're a marginal Caruso listener in 1910, you wouldn't have been the kind of guy to go to Naples for him in 1890, you'd have just stayed home. Even today, some people go to concerts when they can listen to all the songs in the comfort of their own home (and probably hear them better, too). Hardcore fans even follow artists from city to city when they go on tour.
Of course average meaningfulness goes down when less interested people start coming in. But that doesn't say anything about what happens to the already-present high-interest people.
> If you're a marginal Caruso listener in 1910, you wouldn't have been the kind of guy to go to Naples for him in 1890, you'd have just stayed home.
So the marginal Caruso listener only listens to Caruso when? And how? It has to involve going to see Caruso sing somewhere. Maybe even Naples.
Maybe he did house visits.
If you don't listen in 1890, but then listen in 1910 when the cost goes down, you're a marginal listener.
That is a 20 years span. A lot can happen in 20 years.
well, yeah, skill issue. same one as the mysterious rainbow referenced in the Sequences. You've read the Sequences, right?
How come no one's made the link between this theme and LessWrongian Fun Theory yet? Seems like it's becoming more relevant every day.
Amen, Scott. This brought a tear to my eye. Thank you.
There are many experiences just 25-30 years ago which are basically impossible to replicate today. In the age of internet, social media and smart phones, subculture is impossible, and a subculture is the only possible way to experience:
Punk Rock
Rave Music
Burning Man style festivals
Probably goth/hip hop etc
It used to be impossible to discover lots of music without physically going to an independently-owned music store, and just listening to CDs. Shows could only be found by going to these stores and picking up flyers, or knowing people who did. When you went, you had no idea what to expect, and no way to find out. When you were there, you often heard music you would never hear again, with no way to find out what it was. No one took pictures or video. Nobody went so they could post about it on Instagram. Nobody could look at their phone and join the wider world if they got bored: they and their focus was stuck inside the venue. The entire relationship to the event and the music was different and impossible to replicate today.
I find it sad that kids and young adults can't experience that sense of excitement, danger, freedom and novelty.
Kind of agree. But “only possible” seems a bit strong. I can still put on Two Bad Mice in my car, Spotify by way of Bluetooth, and “experience” it in a way that feels pretty satisfactory (although sure, not a patch on hearing it for the first time under an abandoned railway arch somewhere off the M25…)
That's what I'm talking about man!
Turning a corner, he found himself in Pump Street, opposite the four shops which Adam Wayne had studied twenty years before. He entered idly the shop of Mr. Mead, the grocer. Mr. Mead was somewhat older, like the rest of the world, and his red beard, which he now wore with a moustache, and long and full, was partly blanched and discoloured. He was dressed in a long and richly embroidered robe of blue, brown, and crimson, interwoven with an Eastern complexity of pattern, and covered with obscure symbols and pictures, representing his wares passing from hand to hand and from nation to nation. Round his neck was the chain with the Blue Argosy cut in turquoise, which he wore as Grand Master of the Grocers. The whole shop had the sombre and sumptuous look of its owner. The wares were displayed as prominently as in the old days, but they were now blended and arranged with a sense of tint and grouping, too often neglected by the dim grocers of those forgotten days. The wares were shown plainly, but shown not so much as an old grocer would have shown his stock, but rather as an educated virtuoso would have shown his treasures. The tea was stored in great blue and green vases, inscribed with the nine indispensable sayings of the wise men of China. Other vases of a confused orange and purple, less rigid and dominant, more humble and dreamy, stored symbolically the tea of India. A row of caskets of a simple silvery metal contained tinned meats. Each was wrought with some rude but rhythmic form, as a shell, a horn, a fish, or an apple, to indicate what material had been canned in it.
"Your Majesty," said Mr. Mead, sweeping an Oriental reverence. "This is an honour to me, but yet more an honour to the city."
Auberon took off his hat.
"Mr. Mead," he said, "Notting Hill, whether in giving or taking, can deal in nothing but honour. Do you happen to sell liquorice?"
"Liquorice, sire," said Mr. Mead, "is not the least important of our benefits out of the dark heart of Arabia."
And going reverently towards a green and silver canister, made in the form of an Arabian mosque, he proceeded to serve his customer.
"I was just thinking, Mr. Mead," said the King, reflectively, "I don't know why I should think about it just now, but I was just thinking of twenty years ago. Do you remember the times before the war?"
The grocer, having wrapped up the liquorice sticks in a piece of paper (inscribed with some appropriate sentiment), lifted his large grey eyes dreamily, and looked at the darkening sky outside.
"Oh yes, your Majesty," he said. "I remember these streets before the Lord Provost began to rule us. I can't remember how we felt very well. All the great songs and the fighting change one so; and I don't think we can really estimate all we owe to the Provost; but I can remember his coming into this very shop twenty-two years ago, and I remember the things he said. The singular thing is that, as far as I remember, I thought the things he said odd at that time. Now it's the things that I said, as far as I can recall them, that seem to me odd—as odd as a madman's antics."
"Ah!" said the King; and looked at him with an unfathomable quietness.
"I thought nothing of being a grocer then," he said. "Isn't that odd enough for anybody? I thought nothing of all the wonderful places that my goods come from, and wonderful ways that they are made. I did not know that I was for all practical purposes a king with slaves spearing fishes near the secret pool, and gathering fruits in the islands under the world. My mind was a blank on the thing. I was as mad as a hatter."
The pushback against declaring repetitive nice things mediocre is already a thing even in modern culture. See for example the account insta_repeat pointing out everyone taking pictures of the moon: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-7e23PnSoU/
Replies there are full of statements like "I disagree with this one. She's always beautiful." and "Out of all of earths moons they choose this one..smdh" and "I think you missed this one. Yeah, the Moon is always the same body. That’s not the point. The point is, every time I shoot the Moon, I’M different. It’s a progression."
I'm sorry but I feel like I have to post this. Shouldn't it be green seas and crimson wine?
“Green wine” in eg Portuguese refers to a type of white wine meant to be consumed very soon after fermentation - “new wine” - which is also a trope in Christian language (somewhere in the Gospels, I believe, Jesus refers to something - maybe saved souls? - as the “new wine of the kingdom of God” or suchlike). “Crimson seas” meanwhile sounds like a backhanded reference to Homer’s “wine-dark sea”.
I enjoyed the essay as always!
But I have to admit that I'm having trouble parsing any meaning at all out of this couplet:
> Her face was like an open word
> When brave men speak and choose,
What is an open word?
Is there a mystery to this first part that rivals the "colors of her coat" from the second pair of lines?
I'm not sure about the exact phrasing "open word", but I interpreted this as like an Emperor's New Clothes scenario, when someone courageously speaks out against falsehood or injustice.
Speaking openly and honestly, without secrecy or deceit, because the brave man is truthful and will not fear consequences for being truthful (that is, he won't stay silent or speak equivocally or lie to avoid trouble for fear of loss or harm).
Think of it as the opposite of what Gríma Wormtongue and Saruman do with fine words that sound sweet and advice that appeals to your own desires, but is manipulating you all along to do what they wish 😀
I think you’re giving too much credit to the mythicised past significance of pre- semiotic collapse art. Yes, hearing Enrico Caruso in person might be a life highlight in 1890, but it’d be an even greater life highlight to see The Great Train Robbery (1903) or Intolerance (1915). To a person in 1890 (even a highly educated one), these early films would have seemed like impossibilities, likely the greatest achievements in human creativity ever. Something like a music video from the year 2000 would seem incomprehensibly complex, like an emanation from 1000 years in the future rather than 100. But we take this unprecedented aesthetic revolution for granted, and demean contemporary aesthetics in video games, music videos, VR etc as low and cheap, even though they are orders of magnitude more formally complex and required far more cumulative effort than basically any art produced pre- motion pictures (excluding the greatest feats of architecture).
If we actually manage to make aligned superintelligent AGI, as you seem to suggest, I really don't think this will be much of an issue. Superintelligences are very good at solving problems. As problems go, this one doesn't sound that hard, compared to eating the sun or making a universe full of light and love. If it can solve those problems, why can't it just solve this one? For example, an easy basic fix might be to just create so much superhumanly good art that nobody ever runs out of wondrous art to consume and be amazed at within 10^30+ years.
And, there are people who don’t think these beliefs are religious.
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that. Which beliefs do some people think are not religious? And how does that relate to this issue?
It was a bit unclear. I’m saying you gave a religious belief in a super intelligence.
A few things, and they have to do with dopamine, and novelty, and where "pleasure" actually comes from.
Dopamine exhaustion. A lot is said today about social media etc: that the constant triggering of our dopamine system isn't actually doing us any good. Not in social media. And not in art either. If everything constantly feels great, then nothing is.
Then there is novelty. Novelty is and was a large part of why we consider art "great art". No Rembrandt forgery or Rembrandt print gets the meaning and kudos as the first Rembrandt, that was an innovative piece of art, a new way of seeing things. There was a 20th C pamphlet that contemplated this issue, called "Art in the age of mass production". Yes, multiplication does not get you the same value as originality, though it does have non zero value.
Generative vs duplicative. The issue gets amplified when instead of just duplicating previous art, we now have AI being able to generate endless derivative art.
Then there is the issue with the origin of the dopamine effects. A large part of the pleasure in something - anything - comes from the pursuit, not from attainment. This is where much of the dopamine effect comes from. The mountaintop truly feels more meaningful if you had to climb up there and didn't take the cable car.
Does it matter? Well. Something similar to the loss of meaning with multiplication, derivative works, and lack of novelty in general, goes on as you age. The older I get, the les meaning things seem to have. Scott Sumner also wrote at length about this. Having seen a lot of things before, makes them genuinely less interesting it seems.
Camus' Sisyphus. There is no higher happiness than constant pursuit. There is nothing more demoralizing than constantly achieving things with no effort at all. Somehow humans are wired to strive, and some of the most addictive drugs such as methamphetamines simply prime people to find everything interesting ... and to strive.
So conclusion: we need less and less technology that produces things. We need more and more technology that makes us want to strive. Video games are an imperfect example of this. But something in that direction. As Einstein probably never said, computers are useless as they can only give you answers. What I want in my life is new questions that make me want to strive.
You could have referenced Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He argued similar to you that an original artform loses its aura when made more accessible and easier to reproduce, and that was in the 1930s! Is AI a mere continuation of the mechanization of art or is it more?
Loved this! Helped me articulate what I didn't like about Hoel's essay.
Every once in a while it strikes me just how absurdly rich the modern era is compared to everything in the past. I've got a shelfful of movies and a hard drive's worth of videogames, and meanwhile the past didn't have the color blue.
Did you have this idea (including supporting facts like the blue coat) stored up in your head, waiting for the right moment (Ghibli Day/Hoel post)? Or did you think of it after reading his post?
I'm pretty sure you could always send your picture to some person on Upwork who would draw it in the style of Ghibli or any other. That would cost 10$ or so. It's quicker with AI now, but I don't see much difference between free and 10$ for that matter.
There is a common refrain between knitters (and I suppose, many other crafters, although knitting is the one I'm most familiar with). People find out how long making a sweater takes (order of 30 hours if it's not too complicated, going up to 100 depending on how difficult you want to make your life), how much the yarn costs (order of $150 for basic materials) and ask "why would you do this when you can get the same sweater for $30 at Target?"
And I actually think that the answer is the same. Because when you make a sweater it WON'T be the same as the one at Target (which probably isn't wool anyway). Even if you took a sweater at Target and recreated it PRECISELY it wouldn't be the same sweater. Because when you wear it (or when whoever you give it to wears it) they carry the time you spent, and the love you put in, and the thought you put into it. It's on their body, surrounding them, and if they pay attention it makes their life better.
It's the same thing that makes hot chocolate that your mother makes taste better than the one you make yourself.
You've written many beautiful essays over the years. This is one of my favorites.
Yeah, without being *as much* like this as Blake apparently was, I would describe myself as having that sort of experience. Every day with tolerable weather I take a walk in my garden, or, if on holiday, the nearest available park — and I'll always find something to fill me with joy, quite often "a bird" or "a blade of grass that's lit in an interesting way". Walking around with a camera is helpful to cultivate that skill, I find. Look for things that are worth taking pictures of; you'll train yourself to find them.
I feel like there's a tension between this and the argument about people who only care about people close to them.
Morality is inspired by a few core instincts. We care about our own experiences, about feeling pleasure and pain, and we care about others' experiences.
Our instinct to care about other people is biased. It's stronger towards certain people than others. We care more about people close by than further away, more about people we can see in more detail than less. But if you try to code up a moral system to do this, it's a mess. The biases don't stand up to reflection well, and (so argues the utilitarian), one should peel back the heuristic mess and get at the root, which is that we should care for others as we care for ourselves.
Ok, how do we care for ourselves? Well, we have a mess of instincts, pleasure and pain from all sorts of things. So you start there, but you notice that there are some biases. You enjoy things like art less when you experience them a second time, still less when you experience them the thousandth time. Food mostly works this way too, but you can get hungry again with time, while this doesn't really happen with art. Your enjoyment of art, then, is something that doesn't stand up well to reflection.
In that case, why isn't the conclusion that we should ignore pleasures like that from the beginning? Sure, they're nice the first time, but there's nothing external that changes the second time or the thousandth time. You just have had more time to reflect, which in any other context would let you expect to be closer to the truth. Maybe anything that people can saturate on in this way isn't actually morally relevant, even in the first experience, but just a heuristic mess that should be peeled back to get to a more rational sense of what is valuable to ourselves?
Just to be clear - the William Blake example isn't about being able to accept wonders simply, divorcing them from context and cultural load, right? Because when someone's reaction to a sunrise is "amazing, it reminds me of my religion!", it's a strong example of the opposite - wonder doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Of the things I like with no shame, very few seem like pure injections of dopamine. Almost everything else is due to the tangled web of associations it's coupled to. I like sunsets because I like astronomy (haven't watched a sunrise in years; I don't stay up this late), and also because each sunset reminds me of enjoying previous sunsets. I like music that instills into me vivid imagery; often, but not exclusively, the first things I associate it with, which then carry over to future listens.
The same thing goes to the stuff I dislike. I can't stand Gipsy Kings because when my dad got his first car and in it his first CD player, he played on repeat one of his first few CDs, a Gipsy Kings compilation. Through no fault of their own, the Reyes brothers' fiery Catalan rumba and gruff, powerful voices are permanently associated in my mind with car sickness.
I was planning to watch The Boy and the Heron this week, but now I will postpone it until the Ghiblification trend dies down. Not because Ghibli is now mundane - the distinct visual artstyle is only the wrapper of the social realism and humanist spirit that permeates their work - but because I know I'll going to think about AI slop while watching it, and I don't want to associate it with nausea.
It is possible to willfully withdraw all recognition from any arbitrary object of ongoing perception - I say to "alienate" it. Obviously first see it as for the first time. But you can go much deeper by dropping more and more priors, noticing how you don't know about it so much. What it looks like from behind or from the inside, how old it is and how it is changing, where it came from, whether it's alien or divine or poisonous, what it wants, including from you. A fake, the first and/or last of its kind, an alien imposter? Allow the unfamiliar questions that come with recognition of utter ignorance. Gradually, the thing will feel more remarkable, surprising, bizarre, fascinating... for me it plateaus when it feels like a Thing From A Different Universe. This is easy; everyone I've shown this mental move to claimed they got it on the first try. It doesn't work with things with writing on them; recognition of symbols is not so easily turned off. Moving objects, such as people, will feel menacing when "alienated". Doing it to your own body triggers degrees of dissociation. Doing it to your partner during intercourse is extremely kinky.
By the way, the sigils those eldritch sorcerers on that island are carving into crystal tablets using docused light... should be considered Bind Runes, because unlike most sigils they're composed of multiple smaller symbols, each meaningful, all angular.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bind_rune
"It’s a softer world when you have Ghibli glasses on. But by the time I made the third picture, it was less fun. A creeping sadness set in..."
That's because you are weak! I have the power to fully appreciate my favorite experiences forever! I live in heaven, while the rest of you are in hell! Bwahahahaha....
More seriously, It's as simple as walking away from the internet (the video game, the TV, the mass produced toys...) and spending some time looking around. Eventually (it takes less time than you think) you stop being bored and attention starved, and actually start *noticing* what's going on around you. This takes time and training, but it brings rewards.
One of the tricks, counter-intuitively, is to *share more slowly*. I think a lot of people feel compelled to ceaselessly search out new experiences *so that they can share them with others*. The problem is that this turns it into a contest--who is the influencer, and who the follower? That's what really cheapens experience, not so much over-exposure itself, as knowing that all your contacts have already seen it.
Face to face communication brings a satisfaction all it's own. When you leave the phone behind and go for a walk with one other person, you not only start noticing what is going on around you, you grow closer to that person. That's the secret.
> "That's because you are weak! I have the power to fully appreciate my favorite experiences forever! I live in heaven, while the rest of you are in hell!"
This but unironically.
More poetry about the sense of wonder and how to regain it:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/16/patrick-kavanagh-advent-christmas-poem
Advent
We have tested and tasted too much, lover –
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.
And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.
O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning –
We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we'll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won't we be rich, my love and I, and please
God we shall not ask for reason's payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour –
And Christ comes with a January flower.
I did that!
"View everything [good] with innocent wonder" is sacred to me.
I also hate AI; I hate anything made by AI; I refuse to use AI for any purpose. I don't even use machine translation anymore.
Yet: Many of the pseudo-Ghibli images are undeniably beautiful. Even worse: Someone posted a sample of a translation from Homer, by GPT. In an anonymous poll against 3 other translations, without revealing that AI was involved, 50% chose the robot. Including me.
I still hate AI. If I can convince you it's not just reactive Luddism, may I offer the following theory:
Interacting with a work of art is also interacting with the creator.
Part of the wonder of art comes from thinking about what went into making it. Pondering the image of the Madonna, we are struck not just by the majestic blue of her robes: Behold the graceful detail of her face, her hair. Imagine the countless hours of practice it took to attain the skill to paint like this; the hours and hours of work it took to create the individual painting, even for a master; and the unlearnable spark of genius which brings it beyond mere craftsmanship, the ability to delve into inexplicable territories of the soul and coming back with treasure.
A human being like us - reaching into territory beyond us - made this.
Suppose AI makes a new edition of Homer, covering the fall of Troy. It is, by every aesthetic measure, equal to the Iliad and Odyssey.
But part of the wonder of Homer is that a man wrote this - a real man called this transcendent thing into being, merging craft and experience and genius. You read a lengthy simile in the Iliad comparing an army to waves of the sea, and wonder - did Homer, be he one man or many, see these sights (assuming he wasn't really blind)? Did it leave an impression in him like the setting sun, an impression that never left him, that he felt worthy of embodying in poetry? That he COULD embody in poetry, sublime poetry, which stirs readers who have little experience of the ocean, who have never seen a Bronze Age army in the field?
You could respond: Yeah, that's cool I guess. But isn't it more incredible that this new poem was made, not by man invoking the Muse, but by the Muse itself? That's the model's name - Muse. It's an inscrutable superhuman intelligence made by blasting electrons through silicon sigils crafted by wizards on a mountainous jungle island off the coast of China. In less than a second, it produced a new Iliad. In another second, it can conjure a similar poem about the Roman Civil War, the Fall of Constantinople, Iwo Jima. Invoke the Muse, and it will sing for you.
And we read the first lines: "I, the Muse, sing of the death of Caesar, the vengeance of his heir, the birth pangs of new Imperium..."
And something is missing, because instead of singing through a poet, the Muse is singing herself. It's an alien, denizen of an eldritch realm, whose mind and works are alien to us, even if based on our own. It knows nothing of what it means to be a man, yet presumes to sing of our sorrows and glories.
It's just not the same. I would rather read the Iliad a thousand times, than a thousand war-tales from the mouth of the Muse herself.
Could the answer be drugs? I mean, you (Scott) say yourself that psilocybin has been proven to restore that childlike sense of awe. Another commentator mentioned LSD and MDMA doing similar things. And those are only a few—albeit the most famous—among the many substances capable of that magic. Most appear relatively safe, even with regular use. They’re inexpensive. They don’t seem to breed heavy tolerance, and could, in theory, be used indefinitely. So instead of contemplating a ban on AI, shouldn’t those concerned about the semantic apocalypse be more inspired to legalize—even celebrate—these substances, so we can all experience the powerful, profound, holy sensation of seeing ultramarine blue on a flat, rectangular canvas for the thousandth time?
One thing that is important to note is that none of these copies is the same as the original thing. Seeing an Yves Klein painting on your computer screen very much is not the same as seeing it in person - on the computer screen, your eye receives a particular mixture of the three kinds of light from the phosphors on your screen, while in person you get the actual mix of wavelengths reflected by the pigment he invented. It’s somewhat subtle, but definitely different.
In the early days of phonographs, Edison sent out a team with a singer and a phonograph machine, and the singer would perform on stage, then the phonograph would play, and then the singer would start singing, the curtain would come down, she would keep singing, but when the curtain was up she wasn’t singing and it had switched to the phonograph and the audience couldn’t tell the difference. We moderns know that a phonograph can’t be mistaken for a voice - it’s not even as good a sound as a cassette, let alone a vinyl LP - and yet the people of the 1910s were fooled because they hadn’t learned to tell the difference.
Embracing the artisanal and noticing the difference between imitations and the real thing is one way to keep that wonder. Go to a museum and look at art rather than seeing it on a screen. Go to a great concert hall and hear a Mozart symphony. Actually look at a real sunset rather than the photograph. Watch Totoro itself rather than than the ghiblification of something.
There’s of course value to having these things on tap when you can’t get the original. But also get the original and notice what makes it different (and perhaps better).
No hay banda
I think a lot of this is a “how you’re wired” thing — though may be it can be learned too? I can admire at the same flowers, eat the same delicious foods, watch the same favorite movies, stare and the same sunsets over and over and over… I don’t get board of the things I find beautiful. My partner, on the other hand, cannot fathom my wonder at “ordinary thing” or the fact that I can laugh at the same jokes over and over again.
I Ghiblified three photos of my family, and was done. The charm was in the novelty, and once the novelty wore off I started noticing how GPT doesn't quite catch the aliveness of Ghibli characters, the perfect composition, even the colors.
But the Ghiblified timeline — that brought me immense joy. People possessed by a spirit they couldn't see coming, transforming personal memories and universal symbology into cute and horny nostalgia — that was a true wonder. I never imagined I would witness a collective possession that wasn't based on anger and resentment and outgroup-hatred but on anime. And there was more to wonder at than I could process in a day or a week.
If you're narrowly interested in colors, or sounds, or anime figures, the world quickly loses its wonder. But if you're also interested in people and how they react to it and feel about it, the world never loses one iota of it.
"We can be sure that whoever sneers at [beauty's] name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past... can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love." - Hans Urs von Balthasar, "Seeing the Form"
Nobody mentioned Andy Warhol? This was his whole thing.
The thing in my life that's the most like an eternally miraculous sunset (or really, more of a sunrise) is my children, especially my 2.5 year old*. Talking to him, holding him, watching him sleep, it never loses its magic. And I'm a stay at home mom alone with two little kids all day, which definitely has a lot of frustrating moments, but the wonder never fades. I really try to hold onto the belief that, whatever comes with AI, the satisfaction we take in human relationships is something to hold onto.
*No shade to my 5 month old, she can't do much at this stage, but I have confidence that she'll be equally inspiring in time.
Wow
I don't think AI art making it easier to Ghiblify things cheapens the original so much as... cements its legacy? Promotes it into the role of originator rather than worker.
-A master artisan passing his craft onto his disciples is not "cheapened" if they eventually surpass him. Instead, he is proud that have done a good job instructing them.
-A parent whose children reach a higher level of education and earn more money than him is not "cheapened" by their success.
-A fully human artist/writer/musician who pioneers new techniques is not "cheapened" when hundreds of people take their idea and copy it and add their own spin and spawn an entire genre out of it.
-An inventor who invents a brand new design and creates a prototype is not "cheapened" when a factory figures out how to mass produce their design with twice the quality for a tenth of the price.
You celebrate the people who created new ideas even as you take those ideas and improve upon them and expand them so that everyone has access. Even if the original eventually falls out of favor as the variants increase in number and quality, it still gets credit for inspiring them. They should be a proud parent who succeeded in furthering their legacy, not a bitter and jealous parent upset that their child is too similar to them but not exactly the same.
I think the "once in a lifetime awe inspiring" stuff is a gimmick. A single monumental event driven primarily due to prior deprivement. If you've never been able to enjoy blue things then seeing one for the first time will be surprising and interesting. But if you get to see them all the time then you get to enjoy them all the time. Maybe if blue pigments were more rare then I would be more impressed and awestruck by seeing a blue coat on a Virgin Mary at church. But instead we live in a world where I have a painting of an octopus in the ocean that my wife made using blue paint and we invented stories about it and how it's upset that its toast got burnt by a steam powered perpetual motion underwater toaster (which is now also a painting), and there's an accompanying AI-written song about it. And I get to see that painting every day, and I can listen to that song whenever I want to, and it's hilarious. And it's personal, and specific, and meaningful to me. Maybe no individual instance of seeing that painting ever carried the awe that seeing a blue Virgin Mary for the first time ever would for someone in those times, but if you add up the total amount of enjoyment I get from seeing it every day, and all the other blue things, and all the other AI music, I think the sum is higher in the modern world.
Maybe I'm cheating by secretly having the childlike enthusiasm that Scott talks about here. But it feels categorically different from "wonder". Maybe just "appreciation" is enough.
Getting tired of sunsets after the thousandth time is the universe's way of getting us to learn to control electricity, rather than telling ourselves the candles still form interesting shapes.
I recently wrote an article that tackles many of the same themes but with a very different perspective: https://open.substack.com/pub/whitherthewest/p/on-aesthetic-progress
It seems like a good pair of companion pieces to think about the relationship between technology and sensory pleasure though they're not really in direct conversation with each other. I need to do an update in response to S. Alexander's piece.
When I went to Niagara Falls I was horrified to find out that it looked just like the pictures. I appreciated intellectually that this thing before me was an unbelievable display of nature. But it didn’t move me. I could only try to imagine what kind of experience it was for someone to just be walking and stumble upon this massive thing and I felt somewhat robbed to not be able to get a piece of that feeling on my first encounter. I wanted to break down crying. I think I’ve grown up since then and would appreciate it more now but in any event since then I’ve just tried to avoid seeing these kinds of photos to begin with. And it helps a lot. Just because the stuff exists out there in cheap abundance doesn’t mean you need to look at it. I’ll get to it in person or I won’t
No doubt commodifying ghiblification is going to be an immense challenge to young artists trying to make a living with that style of art (not sure how many jobs there were to begin with). But the consumer need not take the bait. You can basically choose to only interact with this at its peak form (a Miyazaki film for now).
Feels like the kind of thing people do or aspire to do with food fairly commonly. Basically just intentional consumption and not binging on the low quality mass produced stuff
I've never been to Niagara Falls, but when I went to the Grand Canyon I felt that not only was it not "just like the pictures", it was something inherently unphotographable, because there was no way to capture the sense of scale in a still image.
I’ve been to the Grand Canyon too and I would agree that it’s not captured in photos and I was definitely wowed. I think I had visited without much of a sense of how it would actually look so maybe that was it or maybe when I went to Niagara Falls I was in a bad mood or maybe the scale is next level or maybe I’m totally off. But I do think there’s some truth to this and it’s actually specifically because these places can’t *really* be captured in a photograph that it bothers me more and I felt “robbed”. I made a bad trade taking the convenience of seeing a photo from my couch, gaining basically nothing from that other than satisfying immediate curiosity, and giving up the full experience of seeing it in person for the first time. Maybe you can see it with new eyes each time but I think for most people there’s some cost. To whatever extent it’s actually true I pretty much assume it’s true for things I’ll reasonably see and keep that in mind
A lot of commenters are saying older and younger people are better with this. I wonder if it has to do with competition. Especially with social media, we value things relative to what others have, rather than to our own values, which is less dependent on novelty.
Ultramarine used to be very scarce; now it is relatively abundant. Ditto for top-of-the-line musical performance. With progress more and more things will become more abundant, changing the meaning they have in our lives. But something we crave will always be scarce—positional goods, of course, but also the endless refinements in pigments and musical sounds, etc. And if our lives seem less challenging than they used to be, there will always be *safety*, as we can afford to worry about more and more remote possibilities.
I wrote something similar almost two years ago: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/consider-the-hand-axe
Best thing I've read in a long time. Thank you. Reminds me of (not spoiling, I haven't even read most of it) Nostalgebraist's latest work. Also, Augustine's theodicy in COG bk. 11 ch. 18. I have been trying to become more like this, but have been not entirely successful.
Thank you for this most human of essays Scott. Nobody else can write with a dispassionate voice and move me nearly to tears from ideas alone.
Although I'm as deep within the grips of the meaning-destroying cheapified screen-mediated super-sensorium as one can be, I have recently re-discovered the mind's incredible ability to experience awe and joy without the slightest cue from the outside world. Just driving alone, stereo off, has brought me immense pleasure by focusing on the sensation of my breath and the road beneath me and being alive on this strange planet. There are cathedrals everywhere for the mind to see, if only we remember to pay attention.
This is a great article, but also a little in tension with a past article Scott wrote titled "Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness", which ended with the following
"So I would amend the original post on the subreddit to “You seek unpredicted reward, but by definition you can never get this consistently; luckily predicted reward can be pretty good too.” I still don’t feel like I understand exactly how this is implemented."
I was frustrated with that line back when he posted it, and I feel like he is coming around in this one.
The whole idea behind gratitude is that you can maintain a sense of surprise and wonder. The sun rises every morning, and every morning it is still beautiful, and every morning that is still surprising because, "life didn't have to be this way. It could have been ugly and brutal."
The practice of gratitude is necessarily also an act of recognition that things could have been different. And maybe even deserve to be different as humans so readily destroy that which is beautiful. But nevertheless, we unworthy souls get the beauty of the sunrise anyways. Sometimes the sunrise is even more beautiful because of our ugly acts. (But the 'goddess of everything else' does her thing with even human pollution).
I think this is, in part, what Tolkien was gesturing at when he talked about what made the world beautiful in the Silmarillion.
“[T]here were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of Ilúvatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.”
Just as a song gets its beauty from a tension, so does everything else become beautiful only in light of the tension of what could have been. So to respond to Scott from 3 years ago; unpredictable reward can be a constant in your life. We just call it gratitude.
Check out the Tres Riches Heures of the Duc du Berry. Tons of ultramarine there, not in the coat of the Virgin, but I guess just to show that he was a tres riche kinda guy.
Based post king, now back to the psych ward.
The same way, I can use an iPhone camera + AI to achieve a close enough imitation of what a professional photographer with a DSLR achieves for my family photos. I hire a photographer once a year, but I might hire them more if I couldn’t do this. Is it the same? Not quite. There’s a lot a good pro can do that can’t be convincingly replicated in AI, not least their ability to tease out some absolutely phenomenal scenes from our kids.
But I can have a “photoshoot” a week if I want, at home (yes I am also a decent amateur photographer. My photos can be less AI-fied to look good). It’s close enough, polished enough, and very nearly free. I can’t justify paying a pro $800 for a session when I can just do this.
I'm sorry, but I can't relate to this at all. To me, saying that AI images make you enjoy Ghibli movies less is like saying Chips Ahoy make you enjoy your mom's homemade chocolate chip cookies less. One was made with love and care, and the other is mass produced, highly processed junk. The junk just isn't a substitute for the real thing.
Something I see a lot of people say when talking about their dread of AI art is that it makes learning to make art pointless. Why invest years of effort in this skill that no one will value anymore because a click of a button can do it better?
I don't have an answer to that, but related to this post, I will say: the number one thing I appreciate from my years of effort at teaching myself art (many hours and dollars invested, all to become a mediocre at best artist whose art will never amount to much) is that it taught me to see. Hours and hours of portraiture did something to my appreciation of the beauty of the human face, especially human faces NOT captured from the exact right camera angle with perfect makeup and a little bit of plastic surgery to help things along.
Actually this ties into two points.
1. When you are looking at hundreds of human faces, the ones that are copy-pasted of the exact same beauty standards to hit a hedonic threshold where they start to look boring and samey (and you get frustrated because you're trying to practice faces from different angles and with different expressions and the perfect faces are always the same angle and same expression to maximize their appeal)
2. It genuinely is demotivating. It's not a lie, people do feel less motivated to go the extra 30% to make a true masterpiece. Making a masterpiece isn't guaranteed anyway, it was always a leap of faith putting the effort in. Now it is even more so. I don't feel an urge to have AI write for me, because I'm a good writer and writing comes easily to me. I see other people ask AI to write things for them because it's hard and they don't want to invest the effort, and I can relate, because it's so frustrating spending hours to draw something that doesn't come out looking like the image in your head. The AI also doesn't come out looking like the image in my head, but it took 2 seconds and still looks vaguely good.
3. But maybe the true future is AI photobashing. Idk. I've been letting myself be in a creative slump for a while — what you can optimistically think of as the fertilizer period — before I go back to trying to be creative again. So my perspective right now isn't from someone actively engaged in artistic practice, just someone who was and perhaps hopes to be again.
(I know, I know this post is mostly about those who consume art not those who produce it. But the psychological experience of producing art, the drive to produce it, that interests me a lot. And Scott, since you're an author, I guess you can also answer for yourself, where the boundaries between "I want to write this post" and "I want AI to write this post for me so I don't have to" are)
> Why invest years of effort in this skill that no one will value anymore because a click of a button can do it better?
I can see why one would feel this (and I get this isn't your post's main point), but -- why learn chess when Deep Blue exists? Why run marathons or lift weights when you'll never come close to a train or a construction crane? For that matter, even in the fields of art, if you're not of the world's top talents... I try my hand at writing and drawing in full awareness that many people will make better work more quickly. It makes little difference to me whether a machine is added to that list. My comparative advantage is in making work that is, specifically, mine.
If you wanted ultramarine in the painting you hire a painter to do, you had to buy it in advance and give it to the painter. Everything else (labor, materials, transportation) was fronted to some extent, but nobody was going to front you ultramarine.
I'm coming to this discussion late, but I'll give it a shot.
Scott fails to address the question of why people create art. As a psychiatrist, who is presumably concerned with human motivations, rather than asking questions that revolve around art as a consumable product, why isn’t he asking why people create art? Of course, if you regard art as a pretty bauble to be admired, you can tell a generative AI to create lots of pretty baubles for yourself. We don’t need artists anymore! Generative AI will give it to us all the pretty baubles we could ever want for free!
But I’m sure artists won’t stop painting, drawing, composing music, playing musical instruments, writing fiction or poetry because AI will do it better (someday). Even if AI could do it better (but so far, it can't except on the most mundane levels of aesthetic experience), people will continue to create art because (A) it's pleasurable to create things by one's own hand, (b) it's worthwhile in and of itself to pursue a skill and to perfect it over the years, and (c) it's enjoyable watching people respond to what one's created. The consumer world may be flooded with AI creations, but artists will continue to create the real thing, and connoisseurs will seek them out.
But what makes hand-crafted art different from AI-crafted art? A lot of commentators have brought up the concept of intent. In fact, Eric Hoel made the point that because art produced by AI is “Lacking consciousness, they lack intentionality, and therefore their products lack meaning.” (https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-art-isnt-art). But what is the intent and the meaning that Hoel and the rest are talking about?
First, a bit of a digression. Despite all the previous postings on how taste is somehow dictated by elites (or other hogwash), artists are the ultimate creators of taste. Artists create their art with their audience in mind — so on one level, they may be catering to the already established tastes of their audience. But in all the cases that I can think of, some trailblazing artist (or group of artists) has gone before and tested out new ideas to train the tastes of their audience. Some may try to reach the broadest audience possible by following in the footsteps of previous artists, but others may test new ideas on a smaller select audience who are more open to novelty.
Art is ultimately a nonverbal form of communication in which feelings, moods, or impressions are the vocabulary. The *intent* of the artist is to communicate some sort of impression to his or her viewers. At the meta-level, there are four modes of communication in the visual arts: message, decorative, evocative, and philosophical.
Message art is the oldest type of mode in the Western canon. This is art created to memorialize religious or political events, with references that are culturally shared and that promote or reinforce social cohesion. Much of the early Renaissance art had a religious message (think of all the paintings of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus). But as the Church became less important as a patron, historical message paintings came into vogue. For Americans, think of Emanuel Leutze's Washington's Crossing of the Delaware. Portraits of rulers and important personages reinforced the message of power. By the 19th Century, social messages came into vogue. Norman Rockwell and Jean-Michel Basquiat are important message artists of the 20th Century. And let's not forget propaganda art — which psychologically can be very sophisticated despite a limited range of symbols.
The Decorative Mode developed sometime after message art. As patrons other than the Church started commissioning and purchasing paintings, visual art began to be released from the chains of message and meaning. This mostly happened after the Reformation in northern Europe when the burgeoning merchant and middle classes desired non-message art to decorate their homes. The Decorative Mode was created to provoke a simple emotional response in the viewer. Dutch and German painters started painting still lifes and landscapes that appealed to people who didn’t want or need religious or historical scenes on their walls. Still lifes came first. Then landscapes. Then seascapes. Human nudes were always a delicate proposition — Until the 19th Century, the erotic aspect of nudes had to be presented with the figleaf of a mythological or biblical message. Finally, in the early 20th Century, painters realized that just as music didn’t require lyrics to get an emotional response, they could elicit an emotional response from viewers with pure color and form devoid of any representation. Thus, abstraction was born, and the third mode of communication came to dominate late 20th-century art…
The Evocative mode. Rather than giving us a message or telling us a story the purpose of evocative art is to create a complex or open-ended emotional response in viewer. Evocative art can be realistic, but most of the artists who work in the evocative mode shy away from images, because they don’t want their viewers to be distracted by making up stories about what they see. Edward Hopper is an example of an artist who evokes a psychological mood in the viewer using realistic images. But his paintings, for the most part, don’t tell obvious stories like, say, Norman Rockwell’s paintings do. Surrealists were interested in using dream-like images to evoke moods in the viewers. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko relied solely on color and form to evoke moods in the viewer.
Finally, there’s the philosophical mode of art, which asks questions about what art is. DaDa kicked this off during the middle of WWI when the old order was falling apart. Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that reduced meaning to absurdities. But it asked questions that have continued to niggle artists to this day. Can a urinal signed by an artist be considered art (Du Champ)? Can a step ladder in the middle of the gallery with a little box from the ceiling be considered art (Yoko Ono)? The infamous paintings of Yves Klein using only his patented Yves Klein blue are communicating in the philosophical mode. Can simple blocks of color with hard edges be art? This may puzzle the untutored viewer, but philosophical artists' primary audience are other artists and critics, and the intent of their art is to make their viewers question their assumptions about the nature of art.
AI, being unintelligent, doesn’t understand intent. Although it can produce simple decorative art fairly easily, it may have trouble with message art (without the user refining the prompts over and over), it would definitely have trouble producing art in the evocative mode or the philosophical mode because it’s blind to these creative urges.