What does anthopology have to do with Berger's work? He was an art critic and an artist, what makes his work unfit for being used in film/media studies that overlap with film criticism as a disciplince that, when looked from a broad perspective, is just a brunch of art criticism? I think the connection is pretty straightforward.
John Ruskin's ideas are also used in film studies even though he formulated them before film as a medium existed.
Sexual preferences are a subject well within the realm of anthropology, especially if the claim is that they arise from contemporary culture, art, ritual, etc.
Yeah, you're right, but there is much literature that does, largely stemming from the supposition that we can divine such knowledge from a painting. And that supposition is Berger's.
If I had to simplify Berger's thesis, I would say that there cannot be a complete objective interpretation of the image, "what it means" is context-dependent, where what's displayed, who's looking at it, what they experienced in life, and what mood they're in can change what they "see" in the image. Traditionally, image locations were relatively stable, so at least that aspect of "seeing" was controlled, but with the advance of technology, we can replicate images and embed them in different contexts with different purposes, and so art criticism and analysis should focus not only on the image in isolation but also on who and how distributes it, because that part of art (where it's displayed, by whom, to whom) carries meaning in itself. As I said, he was an art critic, so he focused on the methodology of how art can be analyzed.
I really don't know where you got the idea that he was saying that one can divine some knowledge from a painting or that paintings and culture influence our sexuality.
Edit: Spelling and punctuation. God, I really should enable a spellchecker. I'm a terrible speller, I apologize.
I'm reaching way back here so correct me if I'm wrong.
Berger discussed the nude as a convention that tells you about ownership, power, and who the picture was made for.
Claude says that's chapters 3 and 5, so I'm fairly sure my memory serves.
That said, your summary is accurate. These claims aren't the primary topic of his work, so maybe I am being overly harsh on Berger.
Still, the claims have been influential. They do belong to him. And they've led to all manner of supposition about art, history, feminism, and human behavior.
I didn't. Berger himself was a Marxist and his analysis was often political (he wrote a lot but none of it made the impact as the Ways of Seeing which did become influencial in media and art criticism), but the Ways of Seeing largely talks about the methodology. He cites studies in the first essay to demonstrate how the context of a visual piece changes based on where the person sees it. His analyses didn't become mainstream and stayed confined mostly to Marxist circles (and he still didn't make claims about sexual preferences being formed by the culture), his methodology did though.
>That last part is what I just said. The original post is saying nothing aside from something that's already true of everyone, and has nothing to do with whether AI can or does make interesting things.
Well, your post, following your own logic, just says that you like AI-generated stuff. You cannot judge what's good or bad for art, you can't call someone preference "snobbery" because the only property of art is that someone likes it. Interesting things is also then completely subjective.
That wasn't my question. The poster above said that snobbery towards AI art is "bad for art" and since you supported their general pro-AI arguments, I assumed you were the same poster. Sorry, I didn't look closer.
So do you think AI is OK for throwaway stuff but not OK for "production" so to speak?
Its okay for anything. I don't care if the pixels and vectors for a character or landscape in Skyrim was made by humans completely, by humans in heavy collaboration with AI or almost completely autonomous AI. For some art eg live music I would prefer a disclosure, but that's not because I hate the use of AI rather it is false marketing.
So why is it "irrelevant who else likes it"? If it's made for the public and the public doesn't like it, then it's pretty relevant. What if people do care how the Skyrim character models were made? What if they do hate once they learn it's AI?
People can have any reasons they want no matter how insane. By revealed preferences, the split has already occurred between those who hate AI and those who don't mind AI art.
That's not the answer to my question but fine, why is the split important in any way? Some people hate jazz, some people love jazz, and it follows that... what?
People are generally emotionally weak and hate to think in ways they are in fact simple physical systems and not special. Humans have been knocked down a peg several times over the history by natural sciences. Nothing new.
There is also the generational factor. Digital art, printing press etc all of it had a generational factor to it before gaining acceptance. So who knows what the future holds.
For most art they just like the picture, caring about the artist is inasmuch as one was required to make it. Already before AI, if I selected a random photo from a given genre in DeviantArt or ArtStation it would be hard to make deep philosophical queries about the artist like the original starter of this thread tree was thinking is necessary for art. Most of it was surfaced when people searched for xyz wallpaper, they click Save and set it on their phone or desktop.
Even for pure picture lovers, I will say beyond philosophizing about the creator, the content of the picture itself is subject of thought and analysis as far or as little as one wishes.
People care a bit more about the creator in music, because musicians have built up a lot of image and fake mystique. But then again, for some genres, its much less relevant to people especially those that got grew natively or thrived on the internet eg noise rock, hardcore electronic.
Some of course want deeper analysis, seeing the artists blog/thoughts etc.
Ultimately the actual revealed preference is that most people just want "pretty pictures" and couldn't care much about anything else.
Interesting. I am one of the people who adores visuals. Instagram and Tumblr used to be my favorite places, I had my own pretty pictures curation blogs, my way of relaxing was creating Pinterest boards. Now, I also like "serious" art but I wouldn't scroll museum galleries when I just needed to feel a little whimsy, I went to Pinterest and often didn't care about the author behind them in many cases because the pictures were derivative enough to not feel "special" (but sometimes I would and then I would discover new artists).
I don't engage with this hobby anymore since the platforms got flooded with AI-generated content. Now, I do like some early and cheeky AI-generated images (mostly pre-ChatGPT), but not after -- and not because of corporate and social politics -- I'm honestly largely out of the news cycle and don't know what terrible or amazing thing some AI company did this week. And yet my hobby completely died and it was strangely disorienting because I struggled to find something else that could replace it, I don't have social media and didn't have feeds except for on those three platforms (I deleted them all now).
I am an outlier from the general population in how I engage with visuals, and I do think that it's likely that all of the commercial visuals in the future will be AI generated, now, I don't think they will be pretty, though. I think they will be largely ugly. I think the majority of people don't actually care about "pretty pictures" at all and are content with very ugly things surrounding them all the time. And the rest can't help it.
I don't mind ai at all, its the same for me except occasionally I get to express my own idea. Prompting is still not easy for getting a very specific idea so wanting art as a proxy for someone having done the work, I don't mind finding someone's AI art for a specific composition or idea. For stuff that was made with generic prompts too, as I said before, it is like seeing the AI's vision and thought process. I don't mind either way. Again even if a full AAA game was made with AI as long as the result looks coherent and nice I don't mind.
I don't find it ugly. Its equal to average or better than the low end of wallpapercore. If you think AI is ugly in this specific genre then its your bias clouding your thinking. If AI art in this genre is bad then most of DeviantArt and ArtStation was also bad.
I wish time machines existed so we could do blind testing of AI generated art vs purely manual art to people around say 2019.
I don't doubt you don't. Why is my judgement clouded and not yours?
DA was p bad, it was for amateurs so it was expected. Never had a chance to use AS.
There are plenty of human consciousnesses whose output people can't stand. If AI is conscious, it's perfectly in line with how human art works -- sometimes someone's creative output is offputting to a great deal of people.
I do prefer OSS over proprietary software because to me, at least prior to GenAI, OSS was the label that was "software made by Humans" where proprietary was "made by corporations". It didn't make OSS win commercially, of course, and I personally don't think that human-made art will win commercially.
After reading multuple discussions in this thread and a bunch of others, I feel like people on HN think about art skills in the same way as they think of their software skills.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but skills that allowed one to make software largely made one pretty employable in the last few decades.
Now, art skills do not make you employable. There are narrow industries where you can make money but throughout the entirety of human history, being an artist rarely provided any sort of economic security. Some artists did and do make money. Sometimes it was prestigious but the barrier of entry was insanely high. And yes, getting to their level of skill and sometimes even getting access to the tools (look up how much a decent harp costs) was yet another enormous obstacle. Out of the entire pool of people who had artistic abilities, very few got access to tools and resources to be able to express their abilities. Out of those, even fewer could make money off of it while also doing artistic work that was deeply fulfilling and aligned with their talent. Occasionally, the stars would align and you would be lucky to be born in a time and place where you could get the schooling, the tools, the job that paid well enough and that didn't makwe your soul die because it alined with your natural creativity.
There are a lot of people who (I think) speak of AI as if democratizes access to the tools and therefore in their mind it should follow that there must be some market for their newlyfound creative expression. But if you ever seriously considered art as a career, you know that you will likely not have a market for your skills. It is difficult to make money even as a traditonal artist (as in a painter) or, say, a musician, god help you if you want to do mixed media, if you want to play avant garde jazz, prog rock, or Barocco music, if you want to be an actor, a playwright or a ballet dancer.
Some people (I assume those who are excited about the idea of being able to express themselves) seem to be bummed that the world rejects AI art as 'slop'. I am not going to say anything about effort, laziness, etc, I believe anything can be used to make art, even a toilet put in an exhibition hall (I like Duchamp, I like modern art, I like post-modern art, I like whatever-the-paradigm-we're-in-now-art -- metamodernism? I love art, I did see early pre-ChatGPT experiments with neural networks that moved me), but I have to say something that any aspiring artist must know -- you will not make money off your art. The people who will be making the 'human premium' that the article talks about, will be few, just like there are few of them now. AI artists will not make money of their art. Art is a terrible career choice, now and tomorrow.
It's still worth pursuing, in my opinion (as I said -- I love art), but there is little point of talking about its commercial viability. It will always be shit.
I started to enjoy small talking when I stopped thinking about it as some special ritual. E.g. I have friends who are for the lack of a better word "weather nerds" and their interests rubbed off me. Since I now find weather interesting, every time someone starts a small talk about the weather, it is a chance to either learn some data point, check on my own knowledge of the subject, etc. I love when older or well travelled people start to reminescence about weather in different times or locations -- I can immediately try to solve a small puzzle in my mind -- "wait, why exactly is there so much cold wind in this region exactly?"
I can find many things interesting, the world is fun to explore.
2025: Krasznahorkai -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2024: Han Kang -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2023: Jon Fosse -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2022: Annie Ernaux -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah -- there are homoerotic themes in some of his work but the characters are not gay in terms of their identities, and homoeroticism has more to do with the ideas of power rather than sexual identities
2020: Louise Gluck -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2019: Peter Handke -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
2018: Olga Tokarczuk -- I think her work is the one that fits your description best
2017: Kazuo Ishiguro -- no LGBT themes explicitely AFAIK, but queer readings of his work are a thing
2016: Bob Dylan -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots
Gurnah is an immigrant (a refugee to be more precise) who can be considered living "in a diaspora" and his work does focus on the topic prominently. Ishiguro is a British citizen who thinks of himself as British, I believe, his parents moved when he was very young IIRC. He didn't visit Japan until his adulthood. I don't think his works are "disapora-adjecent" thematically but I only read two of his novels, so not completely confident here.
The rest write in their native languages and live in their birth countries.
I believe when you mention Carson's LGBT text, you refer to Autobiography of Red, it was written in the late 90s, not this year.
> there are homoerotic themes in some of his work but the characters are not gay in terms of their identities, and homoeroticism has more to do with the ideas of power rather than sexual identities
Heavily anti-gay cultures (like Nazi and far right) produce surprising amounts of homoerotic art for some reason. I think it goes with certain kind of masculine supremacy - you need to convince boys they are better off with masculine boys only and somehow end up homoerotic as a result. Plus, I guess, once everybody is obviously not gay, people stop clocking those things as what they are.
Edit: not trying to imply that the book is like that, just want to support the point that homoerotic does not imply gay culture.
Tbh, I haven't read/watched much of explicitely far-right art but that sounds reasonable. IIRC nazis (as in NSDAP and whoever made art during that time) heavily focused on the idea of vitality, physicality, health, and the beauty of masculine strength which sounds like it is almost destined to produce homoerotic effect. I mean, if you encourage men to depict beautiful male bodies, you will get depictions from and for men who are really, realy into beautiful male bodies. :D
I suppose it really depends on how you see light/heavy and what you consider "diaspora writings" or "LGBT themes", whether you refer to text or subtext.
For example, Han Kang writes a lot about alienation which is a thing that people in diasporas do experience but people experience it in many other contexts. When looking at her texts on the surface, most of her books are set in Korea and are about very Korean things, e.g. Jeju Massacre, Gwangju Uprising, etc.
John Ruskin's ideas are also used in film studies even though he formulated them before film as a medium existed.
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