[gizmo]

I think the sad reality is that modern art is largely trash. Perhaps because painting/drawing/sculpting with excellent technique is too much of a commodified trade already. Perhaps because it's too hard to be original. A new oil painting of a tree, no matter how well executed, won't draw people to an art gallery. So artists take refuge in social commentary: A banana taped to a wall. A naked person holding a trash barrel. Two bicycles welded together upside down. Or your example of undocumented people holding up a wall.

But do these artists have anything insightful to say about inequality or exploitation? No. It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal. The truth is that "statement art" is, almost without exception, just bad art, but people wrongly believe that: (a) there must be a deeper meaning to it that they don't understand or (b) people who say art is bad are philistines. And if art is just supposed to make you think, even when the artist didn't have any deep thoughts themselves, then SD art can easily meet that benchmark.

SD art will be good enough to decorate your home and office with. SD art will hold its own in art galleries, if it doesn't already. That's much broader than stock photography.

[sinenomine]

Trash, but trash minted through an entrenched network of art curators, directors and connoisseurs - this is what makes trashy modern art scarce and valuable, not to mention the tax breaks!

What I and some insiders consider the real art - that is, applying rare well-developed talent to production of unapologetically high-quality sensual artifacts of art - is mostly commercialized by now, with best people employed by the media corporations to produce assets for high-value games and movies. I have nothing but respect for the talent it takes to create something that is valuable on its own (contrast with modern art, not valuable without of the context of its social network), and feel a tinge of sadness seeing that SD will move the equilibrium here.

The real crux of the matter is that we should provide artists with some decent UBI guarantee, and this should be a humane solution to impending poverty, for each of the professions that are going to cease being commercially viable in the near future.

[munificent]

> I have nothing but respect for the talent it takes to create something that is valuable on its own (contrast with modern art, not valuable without of the context of its social network)

All art is only valuable within the context of its social network. If you leave the Mona Lisa in the woods, the only real "value" it will hold is as a shelter for bugs.

I think what really bothers you here is about which social networks define the value for certain kinds of art. High technical skill art in service of mass media artifacts like videogames and films is sort of the most "democratic" of uses of art. Almost everyone can perceive its value and it asks little of the consumer in return.

Contemporary art, the kind of stuff people here on HN hate, is different. It is deliberately created to provide value only to the small set of people with the context to appreciate it. It's sort of a continuation of a very long conversation that if you haven't been on the inside of, you miss out on. That leads naturally to valid claims of elitism. (The fact that it's also used as a large scale money laundering enterprise by the very rich certainly doesn't help.)

The unfortunate part is that the collateral damage this inflicts on the general idea of niche art. Anyone who has ever created can tell you that the more specific of an audience you target, the more deeply your art can move them. If you're trying to write a song that a billion people will like, it can only be about the most banal of platitudes. Now write a song about what it's like to lose one's spouse to alcoholism and turn to drinking to deal with it. Few people can relate to it, but the ones who can, well, you can pierce their soul.

The idea that you need context to understand a piece of art is totally valid and one of the most important tools an artist has at their disposal. Likewise, it's not a failing when a piece of art only aims for a small targeted audience. Don't let the snobbery and elitist trash of the contemporary art scene taint those concepts.

[sinenomine]

> Contemporary art, the kind of stuff people here on HN hate, is different.

Let's notice the elephant in the room: HN commentariat is a biased sample with an obvious overrepresentation of autistic people. I'm likely not too much ahead of the curve here, as you can see.

I hope this pretext will add to your charitable interpretation of what I have to say. As they say "autism speaks, it's time to listen". Consider this a hypothesis.

I cannot say this condition is overwhelmingly beneficial - honestly I can interpret it as a bit of a handicap, something that, among other effects, makes the child disinterested in people around him in his early formative years (yes it's most commonly "him"). Instead the child is made to focus on the world and things in it on his own terms, as a one-of-a-kind being starting from the almost pure blank slate - with the blank slate here, perhaps, being an overgrown PFC full of fresh synapses. This makes learning one's world and one's inner depth harder compared to normal individuals - which have the right set of biases and heuristics to start imitating other people early on, standing on the shoulders of giants right away, learning the behaviors that passed through many aeons from parents to children and quickly arriving to a socially-bootstrapped form of self-awareness. And for the autistic One the world (and, apparently, the self) is an alien world which is being conceptualized for the first time ever, and the society is an alien configuration of beings which feel and behave quite differently from how one would expect them to, if they were kin to the autistic. Even when one grows up to like it, it's still like being an eternal foreign student everywhere you go - yet your relationship to the world you found yourself in becomes deeply personal.

What I'm trying to say is this predicament makes one much more likely to learn the world on the world's terms, same with oneself and one's feelings - beauty sense included. Having developed in this way, the social concept of beauty you describe is a vastly alien thing to me - I can understand it, but it's like understanding physics of some abstract phenomena. Myself, I just feel beauty, as it developed inside of me as a palette of feelings resonating with certain structural patterns in the world's percepts I come across - something having to do with information-theoretic regularization in primate neocortex, as I may guess. No social reinforcement was necessary to arrive to this feeling, it has a sense of finality and self-referentiality to it - something basic and indispensable, something valuable.

Does it sound scary, cold and alien to you, or simply incoherent? That's how your idea of socially mandated value sounds to me - shallow repressiveness of one's social graph pushing supervised learning examples into your very soul, re-flashing it with the weights of the collective simulacra, of the lovecraftian entity - a disembodied communal sense of value (can't even call it "beauty" as in the limit it's completely arbitrary, a value-language defined by social custom) - to make you one of them, a part of the eusocial organism? This is 1984-level scary, reeducation camp-level, basically.

... And with these new neural networks I immediately felt some sense of commonality, as if they were from the same metaphorical planet I came from - tiny blank slates learning compressed sense of the world as it passes through them, their beauty and my beauty approximating the same information-theoretical Eidos.

[solomonb]

I'm happy for you finding resonance in art produced via stable diffusion and friends.

However I must reject your claim that your experience of Autism gifts you with some sort of objective view of the world, art and aesthetics that allows you to judge all contemporary art as 'trash.'

[throwaway_l33t]

Contemporary art always has felt to me like an “the emperor has no clothes” enterprise. It’s appreciated and valued because this marks you as not part of some out-group.

[munificent]

Almost all artifacts carry some amount of group membership signal. I think the more interesting question is whether an artifact carries anything in addition to that signal. And, while I agree that a lot of contemporary art leans way to heavily towards in-group signaling, I think it would be unfair to dismiss it entirely.

[echelon]

Literally none of the existing world matters anymore.

Period.

We're watching the Third Industrial Revolution unfold live and in front of our eyes, and it will only take a few short years to fully sweep into all aspects of society.

Yes, Picasso and Banksy will continue to have value. But that's an infinitesimal sliver of the value that is about to be unleashed upon the economy.

The real value is that startups like mine will give anyone the power to generate new Taylor Swift songs [1].

New movies, new music, new games. All tailored to the nichest and most exacting of interests.

You want the steampunk vampires of Cloud City, featuring Sean Connery and young Eddie Murphy duking it out while riding on the backs of space whales? You'll have that in just ten short years.

If you think TikTok adequately captivates the minds of the population, you have no idea what a finely tuned search for people's true interests will do.

Humans won't be good enough at satisfying other humans anymore. Not without aid.

The new world is going to blow our minds, and it's already beginning to unfold.

In about a year, I don't know why anyone would dare work for Google, Amazon, or any of the other legacy businesses. They're going to be swamped and struggle to stay afloat amid the biggest single act of the Innovator's Dilemma to ever happen in our history.

[1] This is happening. My startup does it.

Eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_0JjYUe5jo --> https://vocaroo.com/1hgjjnVNqWjk

(We'll have the Obama and Taylor Swift versions up on our site soon.)

Our video stuff is under development, but I'll show you something analogous that a skilled competitor is doing in the open (though they're underselling themselves) : https://imgur.com/seBTPG8

The whole world is about to be carved up and reallocated.

I'm going to get back to work. See you on the other side.

[trention]

>In about a year, I don't know why anyone would dare work for Google, Amazon, or any of the other legacy businesses. They're going to be swamped and struggle to stay afloat amid the biggest single act of the Innovator's Dilemma to ever happen in our history.

Well, at least your drug dealer is apparently supplying you with the good stuff. I'll bet 10k any day that the combined value of all companies purely in the generative space will not exceed the value of a single FAANG company in 5 years. Yes, including Netflix.

[enord]

What the… do you think the artist you and your clique dismiss as not making «the real art» are peddling in trash? Wasting their efforts clamoring for recognitiom from «an entrenched network art curators, directors and connoseurs»?

That the gilded creators of «the real art» want your pity? To be construed as without agency in all of this?

You elitist buffoon, you know not of what you speak. You know what you like, but you dislike and question the motives of that which you do not know nor care to. Keep it to yourself.

[enord]

You have convinced me quite thoroughly that you have not availed yourself much of what modern art has on offer.

If I am right, it would behoove you to not speak so surely of that which you do not know or care to understand.

[laingc]

I have tried, through a very good friend who is an artist. She has exhibited at some major galleries in Europe, and I’d say she knows her stuff.

Much as I love my friend, after the exposure I’ve had to modern art I have to agree that it is almost without exception meaningless trash.

Look, let’s just be real for a moment here. Take a step back and ask yourself what’s more likely: that (A) there really is something deep and mysterious about the banana-on-the-wall or (B) most actual artistry disappeared with the invention of photography and modern artists are LARPing, sustained by taxpayer handouts and the financial fumes of the money laundering and tax evasion that high end art is used for.

Modern art is a joke, and everyone including the artists know it.

[hnhg]

I've seen those kinds of art friends too, and it's possible that your friend has terrible taste, and has been directly or indirectly responsible for filtering out anything you might actually like. There's definitely a lot of noise to signal out there, and you definitely need people who can filter through it for you.

[enord]

Oh A for sure! People are not idiots (generally). It is in fact not just us, the cool smart guys, who «see the world for what it really is» or «don’t like to waste our time with pointless sophistry». Everybody does!

I can tell you’re the kind of thoughtful serious guy who likes good, tasteful and neccesary things, and yet! You dislike bad, tasetless and unneeded things. I do too, and so does everyone else, on balance.

Ps: I feel obliged to remind you to not say the quiet part out loud. Not because the elephant in the room might trample you, but because at least one reader had to muster heroic amounts of good faith to not dismiss out of hand the substance of your post due to form. And even still, I could not abstain from this disclaimer.

[robertlagrant]

You're not justifying your premise, so those two sentences are essentially free of content.

Mind if I use them in my gallery's modern art exhibition?

[enord]

If you do not see how you are subverting the very argument that states your position, I don’t know what to tell you.

If you do — touché; well played to you Sir!

[robertlagrant]

Ha! Real talk: I still have no idea what you're saying. I wish you did know what to tell me.

[monkeynotes]

Art isn't about skilfully painting a tree. That's artistry. Art is more than that, it's about feeling, evoking thoughts, and yeah, commenting on society.

> It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal.

This is simply untrue, modern art is not "always" anything. And who are you to judge what is going on in the mind of an artist?

I don't know what decade you deem to be "modern" art, but there is a huge amount of 20th - 21st century art that is jaw drop. You are the same as generations and generations of people who have been wrong and stuck in the comfort of the status quo. I hate to refer back to Van Gough, but you are a version of the people who missed the point there. And I suppose the social commentary of Pop Art is just trash too?

AI art will hang in a gallery if it evokes a feeling, not because it's a bloody good execution of a painting of a tree. This is how ALL art has been since we moved beyond painting wealthy people. It has to capture an emotion, thought, idea, or whatever else is intangible. Being able to get that intangible feeling across to the viewer is what is special. Not the quality of the craft, that's artistry.

I truly feel sorry for you not having been moved by something more than a beautiful oil painting.

[dan_mctree]

> but there is a huge amount of 20th - 21st century art that is jaw drop

What would be some examples of that? Not disagreeing, would just like to have my jaw drop

[vineyardmike]

> The truth is that "statement art" is, almost without exception, just bad art, but people wrongly believe that: (a) there must be a deeper meaning to it that they don't understand or (b) people who say art is bad are philistines. And if art is just supposed to make you think, even when the artist didn't have any deep thoughts themselves, then SD art can easily meet that benchmark.

If the art made you think about a deeper meaning, is it better the artist put it there for you to find, or that it enabled you to freely think? I think too many people have “High school English class” syndrome. There’s no single right answer to extract from looking at art to give you that A+. It’s about self reflection, reflection on the experience and context of the art, and learning about the world around you. Everyone has a different experience and a different perspective and everyone gets something else out of it.

Can this be accomplished with SD art? Yes, but the curation of the model, or exact wording put into the model is still needed to provide some expected output that evoked the emotion. Artists may even modify an output as a starting point or inspiration, but “gallery” type art isn’t consumed for simple entertainment value like an Instagram photo feed, but as a destination experience (for sufficient expense to fund human artists too).

[mejutoco]

> Or your example of undocumented people holding up a wall.

I remember this specific example because the artist was paying the workers to do a pointless job. Technically, she was breaking the law. If only for that I thought it was interesting. I am not saying I always like this kind of performance art, but sometimes it reaches you in a way that a painting could not.

[stavros]

I don't know if SD is art or not, but it has already generated one of my favorite ever photos/paintings:

https://phantasmagoria.stavros.io/images/RSXTZVMjYhTdyTmE/

I want to hang this on my wall.

[BeFlatXIII]

The absurdity that statement art highlights is how artistic merit is assigned more so on the artist than on any inherent quality of the art itself.