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.”

Further fun with the art machine

Feather tigers

Working with AI image generators is both addictive and frustrating. You can get pretty pictures, but it takes persistence. It’s like working with an idiot savant, emphasis on “idiot.” If a model can misinterpret your prompt, it will. It generally takes between six and twelve tries to get a satisfactory image, and the final result is always a compromise.

Precious one

I mostly play at NightCafé. Sometimes I take part in the “challenges,” in which participants submit pictures they “made” and vote on the entrants. Consequently, I need to quickly evaluate a lot of pictures, too many of which look exactly like other pictures. I’ve developed some criteria for scoring:

Catches my attention: +1
Holds my attention: +2
Is a generic headshot: -1
Includes a kitten: -1
Includes a fox: -1
Includes a dragon: -1
Includes fairies: -1
Includes pointy ears: -1
Includes angels: -1
Includes Batman: -1
Includes Wonder Woman: -1
Includes Catwoman: +1
Is a generic landscape: -1
Is a generic cityscape: -1
Is a generic dystopian cityscape: -10
Features a knight in armor standing on a precipice looking out over a vast wilderness under a dramatic sky: -1
Includes islands floating in the sky: -1
Includes women in boob-plate armor: -1
Is imitation Klimt: -1
Is imitation Art Nouveau: -1
Is imitation Thomas Kinkade: -10
Relies on vulgar humor: -10
Is intentionally grotesque: -10
Includes Donald Trump: -10
Has a message: -10
Has a political message: -100

The astute will notice that many of my own pictures would be down-voted by these criteria. Don’t ever accuse me of consistency.

Continue reading “Further fun with the art machine”

Timely note

If you reuse old calendars, those from 2015, 2009, 1998, 1987 and 1981 will work for 2026, though the dates for Easter will probably be wrong. Those from 2020 and 1992 will work from March on.

Quote of the day

Severian:

As we say around here, infinite Information Velocity effectively = zero IV. You have access to all the information, instantly… but it’s all AI slop and none of it can be trusted, not least because AI is just Reddit but faster (probably trained on Reddit).

And actually this is great from a Dissident perspective. In a world of nothing but AI slop, what can you trust? Nothing but what is told to you by a real person, whom you know well, with an ironclad rep for honestly. The endpoint of Globalization is, as it turns out, extreme localism.