AI Art Is Weird, Sad, and Ugly. Let’s Not Pretend Otherwise: link to an article by NIcholas Liu in Jacobin.

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AI Art

https://jacobin.com/2025/12/ai-slop-art-aesthetics-technology-capital/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOk3gBleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFzOXhhVktiQ0Nqd3o0MUxMc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHkNsDGXXEPm7zvd8pgwbLuwf2zifdbLJM2pxLz0zsaXzUn54_qqrN41xHIyU_aem_yV3p2uqDyUewnMgHZjMBNA&brid=W8EQ5-wkCM3-lmiCQRUD5w

I suspect the article would be better if it avoided the Marxist theorising, which does not add much to the critique of AI.

But a pushback against AI is very necessary: necessary as part of a pushback against sterility. 

This becomes very obvious when travelling, and one encounters similarity in places which used to be quite different from each other,

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Legs; link to youtube video by vongoval on weirdness

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Legs

"if you don`t reclaim your weirdness somewone will reclaim your life":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6UjwQyWmwY

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Pochades: an attempt at self-criticism

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A selection of pochades

I'm going through the pochades of the last three years, dating and titling the backs, varnishing them, deciding if any should be discarded (always a delightful feeling to paint over the dodgy ones, as if someone has taken an invisible rucksack from my back) seeing if I can draw any general conclusions from seeing them en masse.

My conclusions are:

1. The best pictures are not fuzzy. There is a clear focus. When first I began painting the pochades about three years ago I was somewhat under the influence of early photography. I liked the blurriness of those early Victorian images, and even more that of symbolist photographers as in the Camera Work group. 

On reflection, this influence was baleful: the dreamlike effects are a way, Ithink, of artists escaping responsibility, of saying in effect: "it is not up to us to direct you, all we do is provide a certain stimulus".

2. There is a minimum amount of work that the pochades have to show. That is, there must evidently be a transformative process on display, so that the viewer cannot dismiss the piece as mere.

3. The better pictures use clear, clean colours. Initially, I used often somewhat muted colours. I feel this was a mistake, and the result of cowardice: fear of colour

4. The best pictures are very rooted in direct experience, especially a sense of excitement with places or people. This has to be balanced with knowledge. If a place is totally new then it is often overwhelming, but this is better than if it is too familiar, because then it doesn't inspire at all. It is surprising how many of the best pictures come from being in a place for the very first time and I kick myself for not having pursued the delights of travel painting more vigorously before.

5. There is good attention payed to surfaces and textures.

6. There seems to be a maximum size in which I can give the picture sufficient attention within the hour and a half that one session lasts. So pictures larger than about 10cm sq in surface area are generally too large for the results to be satisfactory.

7. There is little gimmicky work. This is good.

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Cardboard fish, realised.

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Fish, above, made into cardboard manquettes from the designs of yesterday's doodle

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The figurine is there to show how the pieces might scale as playground sculptures. The clean shapes have something of the quality of tin-plate toys, and the next thing might be to experiment with painting these in the sort of bright patterns that colour such tin-plate toys.

The trick is in treading that line between the mimetic and the fully abstract: if the fish are too realistic, like Britain's toys, then they lack a certain mystery, because they fail to engage the imagination. If they are wholly abstract, they simply become as building blocks, and would inspire only the most imaginative.

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Forest and Swamp -stage 5; painting and tradition

“If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

To revive and sustain Western painting we have to ask, "What is it for?" "Whose ends should it serve?" How to revive it will follow as a consequence.

Too many painters are replying to these questions with, "it should survive because it has a glorious tradition", or "because I like doing it," as if these were ends in themselves, neglecting the obvious fact that the tradition is a creation of express political and social purposes. With their reply comes asceticism and aesthetic obscurity.

How painting can compete with speedier, noisier media is another question. Perhaps the best way for it to cope is to use the new media and to try to use its slowness and reflectiveness as a means of increasing viewer attention and concentrations, offering painting as an alternative to the frequent superficiality of faster media.

Bad art, discussion 2

Here are some criteria for judging whether a work of art is bad (it leads ultimately to the paradox that some bad art is better at being bad art than other bad art- i.e. "this is the best bit of bad art I've ever seen). I shall concentrate on painting, sometime venturing into other media for the hell of it.

1. Technical failure. The work cannot be seen. A film that has not been processed. It is disintegrating, toxic and will cause ill-health. It is a painting that is falling apart. Jackson's Pollock's work falls into this category.* A good work of art is not generally going to kill you or destroy itself or anything else (firework displays being an exception and of course some art is necessarily organic, such as garden design).

2. Technical failure. There are failures of execution which marr appreciation of the art piece: the paint is fugitive, the sound has gone, the record is so muffled it is unlistenable. Now, of course, some appreciate the crackles on old 78rpm records, and the cracks in varnish. This leads onto the question of what we should be appreciating. It wasn't the intention of Rembrandt, for instance, that we should like his work partly because of the yellowy varnish surfaces, or Fats Waller because the recordings have that muffled sound. Does that matter to anyone other than restorers?

3. Technical failure in execution. In painting, discernable errors in drawing, description of items, colours, tones etc. These are usually identifiable if the artist is obviously part of a school. If the artist is very "over there", it's hard to know how to judge: David Hume knows, however.**

4. Lapses in taste: ugly. Paintings with horrible colours, instruments out of tune. Lack of understanding of overall composition: imbalance, inharmonious. Ill matching colours, lack of sensitivity: a subjective category.

5. Lapses in taste: disgust. Can a painting of a turd be a masterpiece? As a Robert Crumb fan I hover in uncertainty. Salvador Dali attempted to make work that appalled the viewer- he is regarded with suspicion by critics but has mass appeal (apart from his Civil War paintings, where the sense of disgust has an obviously moral aim). Orwell does an excellent job on this unpleasant artist***

6. Lapses in Judgement: ethics. Is it possible to make a great, openly racist work of art? Norman Rockwell made some anti-racist art which is horribly patronising (but then, condescension was his forte). Generally negative sentiments translate uncomfortably into art. It's surprising how few works of art offer negative criticism of the ethical or political views of another group (political cartoons are another story). Books can do this more effectively, but there is always the risk that we start to feel sorry for the victim, because to be effective, a characterisation has to be built on an artists capacity for sympathy for his subject- good or ill.

The patriotism of other nationalities is remarkably irritating: American patriotism particularly so (or is that just me?- I think it's the sheer bone-headedness behind it- I've had conversations with Americans in which they plainly believe they were solely responsible for victory in Europe 1945, as if the Russian contribution was some sort of irrelevant sideshow. They also believe they invented television, the dolts****).

7. Too sexy. Porno is out. Even beautifully made porno images are out. I think this is because sexual stimulation denies reflective mental processes. I'm not against anyone beating the bishop or paddling the pink canoe but endowing those instincts with profundity is mere foolishness (see the abuse of dairy products in "Last Tango in Paris").

8. Moronism: the subject. The picture transmits stupidity. This is one of the defining qualities of the Daily Painters work (see yesterday). Stupidity is incuriousity: lack of interest in the subject : we get, slavish copies of snapshots. We also get subject matter that has an obvious quality- a tourist landmark, a thing that is already considered beautiful (paintings of roses are necessarily beautiful), it is a significant person, a significant place. It is a significant moment (paintings made from graduation photos), or even a combination of the three- a significant person in a significant moment in a significant place (!).

But the significant moment is always a positive, tasteful one. There are no paintings of the significant moment when grandmother drove her car off the cliff, or your sister’s appearance in court testifying against her ex-husband on battery charges, or, "my first amputation". This marks one of the differences between serious art and popular, which is that popular is so circumspect- it refuses to examine anything that might be a potential source of discovery or self-knowledge. It mollifies (there is an exception to this in the form of popular Catholic Votive paintings, which often feature sick people or people involved in tragedies).

9. Moronism: the medium. The medium is used uninventively, without delight. This is one of those "you can't define it but you know it when you see it" qualities: a superlative painter like Magritte used oil paint in the 20s with a deliberate heaviness, taken from commercial art. Again, see yesterday's Daily Painters.

10. Cliche.

11. Banality. The picture is unable to excite the emotions. Being sensibly brought up I was taught never to dismiss things as "boring", because usually that was merely an indication of my lack of energy or discipline in making the necessary effort to get into the book, film or conversation. Boring means lack of surprises and of emotional engagement. Looking at Daily Painters, I wonder, "why they are doing this thing?" I can detect no strong interest in anything: this is dispiriting. It suggests that for the Daily Painters art exists primarily as an activity to fill up remaining time before death (I think here of Bartlebooth, Perec's watercolourist hero, in "Life A User's Manual").

There's an argument here about alienation and capitalism a la Greenberg (see his wonderful essay on Kitsch*****). I think the argument is that the workers are so alienated from their labour that they are unable to spontaneously create anything, and even unconsciously seek to transform freely creative activities such as painting into a routinous line work, in which a certain amount has to be done each day for presentation to the line manager (in the case of Daily Painters, the electronic site host).


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*When I was 16 I was taken to the Kroller-Muller Institute in Holland by a colleague of my father's. My companion, a jolly Dutch woman, and I were discussing modern art, and it's value. Frustrated with my refusal to accept that it was all rubbish, and to indicate her disgust with Jackson Pollock in particular, to my horror she stretched her arm towards the Pollock painting in front of us, broke a piece off it and stuffed it in my pocket. The piece was about half a centimetre across.

I told this story to a friend of mine, and he said he'd had exactly the same experience with another person.

**http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20of%20art/hume%20on%20taste.htm

***http://www.george-orwell.org/Benefit_of_Clergy:_Some_Notes_on_Salvador_Dali/0.html

**** John Logie Baird, UK, 1925.

****http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html

Style

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Until a few years ago I believed that an artist should have one style. This was proof of something called authenticity, which I believed was the basis of good art. I believed in authenticity because I was quite serious, and because I had a puritanical streak, and because it was the cultural norm at the time.

This meant that art had also to be difficult, both technically and in terms of comprehensibility.

In the last few years my attitude has changed, however. It's not that my previous beliefs are invalid, it's more that I see the easy possibility of them existing alongside other beliefs- an artist can be playful, slight and entertaining or populist one day, serious and elevated the next.

This is by way of an explanation of the variety of styles and approaches I am using. They each allow me to express different things, and the one does not cancel out the other.

These statements may seem obvious, but it should be born in mind that until Post-modernism really set in - and in Scotland, where I trained, this was not until the late 90s- artists were expected to restrict themselves to one medium, one subject, so that if an abstract expressionist painter in acrylics decided to produce a figurative lithograph this was viewed with some suspicion. I suspect that some of the suspicion was led by marketing concerns- it's much harder to market an artist whose work varies enormously.

But given how little art most artists sell, and I include myself- worrying about providing a consistent product seems extremely vain, to say the least.