Category: Culture and anti-culture

Today’s quote

Mr_Sherman:

Using AI to generate images does not make one an Artist ….

AI image generation is clever, but it is not creation. I have spent years mastering the demanding craft of watercolor and claim the right to call myself a true Artist. The word artist implies depth of creativity, skill, and craftsmanship — qualities not fully exercised by typing prompts into a machine. Many participants here, with no training, practice, or esthetic discipline, effortlessly generate striking images. Platforms like NightCafe boldly call them ‘AI Artists,’ but they are, at best, Conjurers with DigitalMagic wands. Prompt-writing does take some imagination and skill, but it cannot compare to the work of those who paint, work with wood, stone, cloth or clay, with human hands. Comments like ‘Brilliant!’ or ‘Amazing Creativity!’ ring hollow when the skill belongs to the tool, not the operator. AI image generation is fundamentally the curation of output from a machine trained on the scanned labor of millions of artists.

All that said… using NightCafe is damned good fun — and I’ve been happily addicted for four years.

A note on Dilbert

James:

From time to time I had reason to stroll through some of the engineering buildings, or chemistry or math1, and now and then the business school. Fifteen/twenty years ago Dilbert was all over the place in physics (I had some) and computing and engineering, but not at the business school. Other cartoons appeared there, so it wasn’t a department dictum on decorum….

Since Dilbert so often skewered pointy-haired bosses and HR, it’s no surprise that the strip wouldn’t pop up on grad student doors so much in those regions….

From the speed with which the strip was dropped I suspect there was great relief in the relevant management and HR corporate quarters at the excuse for revenge.

I expect everyone visiting here has a collection of Scott Adams’ books in his library, so I don’t need to post my favorites. The Silicon Graybeard posted some of his here.

Hmm …

Ted Gioia:

After three decades of total connectivity, here’s where we stand:

  • Four movie studios still control Hollywood.
  • Four subscription platforms account for two-thirds of home movie streaming.
  • Three major record labels own most of the hit songs.
  • Five publishers account for 80% of the US book market.
  • Just one company controls 60% plus of the US audiobook business.
  • Etc. etc.

It may not be a coincidence that I don’t watch recent movies either in theatres or online, don’t stream music or listen to radio, seldom read recent books, or listen to audiobooks. If Gioia’s schoolbus plunges off a cliff, it would be a net gain for civilization.2

Beauty and Catholicism

Point:

Because of Catholicism’s insistence on beauty as a theological necessity, as a manifestation of divine order in sensible form, it has, surprisingly, sometimes even been adopted by gay creatives from Oscar Wilde in the 19th Century, Karl Lagerfeld in the 20th, to Dolce and Gabbana today. The elaborate liturgy, the vestments, the architecture, the music; these weren’t decorations applied to worship but constituted worship itself. Beauty was the form truth took when it entered the world.

Counterpoint:

Many of the characters in Converts, like Graham Greene, explicitly characterized their Catholicism as intellectually rather than emotionally motivated. Lord Alfred Douglas claimed that “The ritual, although I had always liked it and thought it beautiful, did not influence me in the very slightest degree”; Maurice Baring was “less interested in the aesthetic aspects of the faith . . . than in the rational arguments” and declared that “candles and incense never did . . . affect me”; Evelyn Waugh, according to his friend Christopher Sykes, had a “rational” approach to his faith, “remarkable for a lack of emotion”; similarly, Muriel Spark insisted that her faith was “dogmatic rather than emotional.”

But is it art?

Archival photograph of a Victorian era chess automaton in use

Dr. Boli on A.I. art:

Here Dr. Boli’s long memory gives him a different point of view from that of the average Internet blitherer. Dr. Boli’s own blithering is informed by a better acquaintance with the past two centuries or so, and in this case he remembers that we have faced exactly this question before. It took us more than a century to answer it, and it was never answered definitively. But the consensus of opinion has been that, yes, a machine can produce art, when that machine is a camera.

To anyone who has lived through both revolutions, the resemblance is hard to miss.

Previously, making a picture had been a skill learned with long and laborious practice. Then along came the machine, and the skill was irrelevant. Why learn to draw when the machine can make perfect images for you? There was much grumbling about whether such laziness ought even to be allowed, and much hand-wringing about the future of Art.

With no alteration at all, the paragraph above can be made to apply to the coming of photography in the early nineteenth century or the coming of artificial intelligence two centuries later.

Continue reading “But is it art?”

Laus Deo

A portrait of a typical “rebel, monster and rule-breaker”:

There was no dazzling youthful breakthrough followed by decades of self-indulgent coasting. Haydn published his first truly revolutionary string quartets at the age of forty-two and is generally held to have written his best music in the two decades before his death at the age of seventy-seven. There was no oppressed wife patiently enabling the Great Man. (Haydn’s estranged wife derided his music and low social standing, though he supported her financially until her death.) His reputation was not the product of posthumous mythmaking. (It was fully formed within his lifetime.) Haydn upheld the social order, credited his gifts to God, and was widely described as a modest and compassionate man. He made generous provision for his servants in his will.

War, values and pianos

David Dubal:

During the Civil War, a Union general and his troops marched into Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the intention of destroying the little Confederate town. Looking at a beautiful mansion, the general walked in, saw a fine grand in the parlor, and began playing. Upon hearing the music, a beautiful young woman descended the long staircase. After a few minutes of conversation, the pair discovered that they had both studied in New York with the same teacher. The very next day, he again came to her home and they played duets. On taking his leave he said, “You and your piano take the credit for saving Holly Springs.”

I am amused by present-day politicians who mourn the death of what they call “family values.” I would tell them to call for the return of the piano in the home. Before the endless proliferation of canned music, mothers played for family and friends a variety of music, from hymns to sentimental popular songs, while feet moved to the current dance craze, and many a romance began near a piano. There may even have been flashes of radiant beauty when mother played the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. D. H. Lawrence describes almost unbearable nostalgia for a mother playing to her child in his magnificent poem “Piano”:

Softly in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

Today’s quote: God’s language

Bonald:

I’m sufficiently annoyed to facetiously propose an alternative: that a proper Christian education should be centered on abstract algebra (groups, rings, vector spaces, etc). Reasons:

  • Deep exposure to math inclines students to the true philosophy: Platonism. Humanities pay too much attention to words, which inclines to nominalism.
  • Ability to manipulate people (rhetoric) has greater moral hazard than ability to manipulate things.
  • Unlike the classics, modern math has large contributions from Christians (Euler, Cauchy, Riemann, Cantor, etc).
  • Scientists and engineers are hard-working nerds. Writers and artists are bohemian degenerates.
  • Math does a better job than rhetoric or grammar in promoting clear thinking and rigorous reasoning. In math, one can’t win arguments by manipulating the meanings of words. True, classical students might study Euclid, which has the virtue of being proof-based. However, it lacks the breadth and profundity of modern mathematics, its training in abstraction, the recognition of identical structure in disparate systems, exposure to deep concepts like generators, homomorphisms, cosets, etc.
  • The level of memorization required for a Latin-based education is an unnecessary barrier that math-based education evades.
  • Math is God’s language.

Memo to Arlo Guthrie

The dump still closes on Thanksgiving.

A thousand years ago, I persuaded my homeroom at high school #2 to nominate “Alice’s Restaurant” for our class song. It inevitably lost out to “The Impossible Dream,” which was the song every class picked during that historical period, but it’s pleasant to imagine my classmates sashaying into the auditorium singing “You can get anything you want / at Alice’s Restaurant, excepting Alice.”

Alice Brock, who ran the restaurant in the song (which restaurant, as Guthrie notes in the song, was not actually named “Alice’s Restaurant”) died a week ago. It sounds like she was an interesting person, though we probably would have agreed on very little.

Today’s quote: books for children

Madeleine L’Engle:

Sometimes I answer that if I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children. This is usually good for a slightly startled laugh, but it’s perfectly true. Children still haven’t closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth.

Today’s quote: the pedant as hero

Joseph Epstein:

The only time I have been able to impose my pedantry upon a group larger than a room of 15 or 20 students was during the time (chiefly the 1970s and ’80s) when I edited the American Scholar, the intellectual quarterly of Phi Beta Kappa. First day on the job, I outlawed from the magazine’s pages a number of words or phrases popular at the time. Among them were “input” and “feedback,” which together always sounded to me a linguistic version of peristalsis. “Charisma” was not permitted to apply to anyone of lesser stature or influence than Gandhi or Jesus. “Lifestyle” was strictly verboten, so, too, weasel words such as “arguably” or “interestingly.” “Author” used as a verb, poof!, was gone; “supportive” was never allowed in the game. “Intriguing” was permitted only if it referred to spying or diplomacy, and “impact” exclusively to car crashes and dentistry. “Caring,” “sharing,” “growing,” “parenting,” “learning experience,” and other psychobabble words were excluded.

Today’s quote: Weirdos

Jeffrey Burghauser:

Great thinkers are often great weirdos; since every constellation of traits now constitutes a bona fide “identity” deserving federal protection and universal huzzahs, the weirdos ought to get into the act…. During Weirdo Appreciation Month, we’d celebrate novelist Marcell Proust (who lived in a cork-lined room), pianist Glenn Gould (who reflexively sang along to whatever Bach keyboard work he was playing), and literary Swiss Army Knife Samuel Johnson (an immense, lumbering figure who, owing to what would today be diagnosed as OCD, Tourette’s, and God knows what else, would alarm the uninitiated with his bizarre gesticulations and involuntary bird-noises). Mathematicians would be robustly represented, including Paul Erdös, who was challenged by a colleague to abstain from chemical stimulants for one month; upon successfully meeting the challenge, Erdös famously said to his colleague: “You’ve set mathematics back a month.”