[HN Gopher] Art and Artifice
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Art and Artifice
Author : prismatic
Score : 35 points
Date : 2024-06-30 04:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (harpers.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (harpers.org)
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240628023958/https://harpers.o...
|
| https://archive.ph/PPvGF
| swayvil wrote:
| The artist sees. The 99% doesn't. Of course popular culture is
| utterly dominated by the 99%. Of course.
|
| There's more to do with this great seeing than to create art and
| rage that apes won't give you the respect you deserve. The seeing
| can free you too. You don't need them.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I can't agree with this article: "Instead, Martel echoes the
| great aesthete himself, Oscar Wilde, in his serene dictum that
| all art is perfectly useless. And yet, as Martel writes, "It is
| precisely the absence of political and moral interest that makes
| art an agent of liberation wherever it appears.""
|
| This seems like it's missing the point. Art deconstructs
| communication and therefore both creates the illusion of truth
| and represents the illusion of truth, showing us that it's an
| illusion. Art can easily use political and moral interests to
| seduce its audience and does so often.
|
| "Instead, the Real that art helps us come into contact with is
| something far more slippery, and far closer to what Walter
| Benjamin called the "true surrealist face of existence." This is
| not the surrealism of predictive AI--endlessly recircling within
| its own sidewindings and elisions--but the bizarre wide-open Real
| out on the edges of experience, which has a good deal less to do
| with the measurable, quantifiable, empirical world than with the
| unseen possible: whether hidden aspects of the future simmering
| invisibly in the present, or mysteries so giant and unpredictable
| that science can't begin to approach them."
|
| And what makes you think this is different than AI? Seems kinda
| like the author almost came to a valuable conclusion and then
| shook it off because they didn't like the implications.
|
| "But if true art is an instrument for transcendence and cognitive
| freedom, then artifice--art's look-alike--is a homogenizing force
| that blocks off possibilities and alternate modes of being"
|
| Now we get to the most boring and annoying tendencies of pretty
| much every piece of philosophy or criticism from the 18th/19th
| century: "hey guys I have a new philosophy. There is something
| that's perfect and wonderful but it's difference from this new
| thing I'm gonna define that looks the exact same but is actually
| evil and terrible. There's no way to differentiate between the
| two except by vibes. It's kinda just like God and Satan... almost
| like I just took my weird puritan religious values and recreated
| them in this other field of study for no reason. Also you know
| all those questions about my previous definition of art? All of
| them are answered because I'll just classify any exceptions as
| this evil and terrible thing."
| motohagiography wrote:
| Most of what you believe about the world comes from Art whether
| it's syllogisms and parables, geometry and architecture, symbols
| and the integrity of rituals, or even the consequences of war,
| these are all Art. AI really is different, as if it's made of
| language, we're going to be able to simulate it. A lot of what we
| called art is ceasing to cohere meaning when we can generate it
| as a representation for nothing.
|
| the question to me is, if art is a way for people to scratch out
| a bit of dignity and meaning in this life by finding and
| expressing something essential, what is it about AI that is so
| obviously in opposition to that value?
|
| we don't like to talk about dignity because it shows some
| materialist beliefs as hollow artifacts of narrative that we can
| now simulate with some python scripts- but it's becoming suddenly
| urgent. What is still Art in an age of AI will likely form the
| map of what is still essential human dignity and experience vs.
| simulated experiences.
|
| It sounds handwavy, but consider that if AI persuades people
| nothing is essential, then nothing is true or actually means
| anything, then there is no ethical backstop against atrocities
| and "state of nature," stuff. "Real Art" is the canary for that,
| imo. I'm not against AI or anything, but I do think it is
| suddenly on artists to get their shit together and demonstrate
| some essential humanity, or they will just be consumed by those
| with the reins of AI who would seek to deprive us all of it.
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