Beauty Will Save The World Pt. 2 (featuring AI)
Before I begin, I’m sure that this will come off as holier than thou so please bear with me. I should also note that my opinion on AI Art has not changed and that I’ve maintained the correct position. I’m trying to write this as an amalgamation of ideas I explored in other blogs. In my post about Newman, I argued that art that angers people should be considered ‘good art.’ In my post on Olitski’s ‘Harlow Flow’ painting, I tried to exemplify what it looks like to examine what a painting itself can do and reveal without its connotations being implicitly intended by the artist. In both my AI and my Urban As A Verb post, using my limited experience as an art history student, I wanted to point to the depth and humanness that lays behind artworks, and, stealing some words from a friend of mine, to show how artworks are literal time capsules of the artists’ positionality and the zeitgeist in which they existed.
All these posts are made to encourage you to look behind and beyond the canvas. Something that I’ve been learning this year is that talking about art isn’t an A-to-B thing. It’s not always about finding the sign and signifier-ed ‘hidden meaning’ behind the work, and I hope that I exemplify this when I write about art. Something that I wish I would’ve written more about in my last post on AI is that we should acknowledge the fact that AI is the byproduct of a ‘microwave-epiphany’ type-way of digesting media which has become way too pervasive in our culture. Because of the sheer speed in which culture moves, there is virtually zero incentive to sit with any piece of media, and even less to make media that is worth sitting with. This is so clear with the AI shorts videos that have been colonizing Youtube and other video-sharing platforms. Have you ever noticed how quickly AI music rushes to climactic moments? It’s supposed to feel grand, but its emotiveness comes off as formulaic because of how over-engineered songs like these are in order to fit within the algorithm. Or have you noticed that the voices in videos with AI text-to-speech lack emotion, but their tone and speed is calibrated just enough so that you’re hearing what they are saying without thinking too much about the eery voice? (shout out to Beatrice Warde’s A Crystal Goblet essay) It’s slop, but the slop comes from a series of calculations of what would best feed the masses. They know exactly how much (or dare I say, little) is needed to quench the thirst of viewers, especially when music is simply treated as filler noise and videos as something to keep us stimulated.
My call-to-action for this is to use abstracted art as the antidote. Sitting with artworks that feel like nothing forces you to sit with yourself. I know that this is a very hard thing to do, especially in a world where you can counteract that boredom instantaneously. But in trying to string together thoughts about something non-representational, you are left with no choice but to build your own anchor points. Trying to find words to describe the ways a Rothko makes you feel is very difficult, but by the end you’ll have new words in your vocabulary. Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly abstraction have fundamentally changed the way I look at design, and they have given me hundreds of gestural precedents that I can use (and have already begun to use) in architecture school. I’ve learned so much about Nietzsche and Greek tragedy through Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly’s work. I can recognize, compare, and contrast my positionality versus that of my ancestors by looking at both of our art respectively. My theory of history is vast and unforgiving because art history has fundamentally changed my definition of what it means to be human.
This is all coming out of the mouth of a quasi-art historian who loves abstract expressionism, so maybe I’m just shoe-horning my own taste into the equation and calling it the answer to our problem. But one thing is for certain; media literacy is incredibly low at the moment – meanwhile, there is a plethora of whole new ways of seeing that are waiting for us if we’re willing to just sit with media for a little longer. Just like reading, sitting with a piece of art for extensive periods of time can be exhausting, but it always replenishes you; and more often than not, it can change the way you see the world. I recently heard someone compare reading to eating, in that we often forget that every meal we’ve ever had has contributed to the body we have today. This is similar to how your mind, as it is today, is built up of everything you’ve ever seen and read. You can be far more than who you are right now, but it’ll take you so much longer if you’re reaching for that version of yourself through AI and Kitsch. I have hope that a revolution through abstraction could overturn our media crisis in ways that AI simply cannot compute, and can make the the world even more beautiful.
Pictured above is Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-1951).
