[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.