A glut of undemanding works

September 23, 2024 12:40 AM

The neo-modernist faith in the future assumes the potentiality of the not-yet as an ideal; it credulously takes the bait of hype, assuming that technological innovation will continue to produce new aesthetic paradigms, and ideally market value. These cycles of hype go from boom to bust with predictable regularity—see, for instance, the spectacular death of NFTs—but to the believers, individual fads matter less than the stubborn insistence on the importance of each of them, which is unsurprising when you consider that every one of the faithful might also be a profiteer. from Gimmicks of Future Past [The Baffler; ungated]
posted by chavenet (12 comments total)

I'm not disagreeing with the overall point of the article, but someone who criticizes AI creations for having a number of things in common, and then includes flatly digital CMYK/RGB color palettes in that list should maybe try to have a slightly better understanding of imaging technology (not AI, just imaging technology in general) before they write, or at the very least get someone who has that understanding to proof their article for them.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:55 AM on September 23, 2024 [1 favorite]

My feeling is that the term "flatly digital CMYK/RGB color palettes" was used, among others ("amorphous digital blobs" and "sleek digital shapes with rounded corners, etc."), to convey the sense that exhibition had a very 'homogeneous' aesthetic; it looked flat and lacking in diversity of texture and challenges of physicality of an art exhibition that one would otherwise expect, despite the "gimmicks".

Given the parallel constructs in that sentence, I'm a bit suspecting that "flatly" was used where "flat" would have been expected.
posted by runcifex at 1:14 AM on September 23, 2024 [3 favorites]

My feeling is that the term "flatly digital CMYK/RGB color palettes" was used, among others ("amorphous digital blobs" and "sleek digital shapes with rounded corners, etc."), to convey the sense that exhibition had a very 'homogeneous' aesthetic; it looked flat and lacking in diversity of texture and challenges of physicality of an art exhibition that one would otherwise expect, despite the "gimmicks".

Yes, that's clearly the intention, but the author is using "CMYK/RGB color palettes" as some sort of gotcha, when, well, that's just all images that have ever been touched by a computer or printed on a four-color offset press.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:51 AM on September 23, 2024 [4 favorites]

I guess that's precisely the point, namely the author was suggesting that the exhibition felt like a web gallery or its color printout. Which, I think, is a plausible reading. I don't know enough to make an informed judgement of (what I take to be) the author's judgement, though, so I can't say whether my understanding is "right" or not.
posted by runcifex at 2:17 AM on September 23, 2024 [3 favorites]

I interpreted RGB color palettes to mean exactly those colors in their fully saturated forms. The sort of lazy demo pattern built into cheap color changing lamps where the LEDs flash red, green, blue in that order. Maybe red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, white if they are fancy and drive two channels at a time.
posted by autopilot at 4:37 AM on September 23, 2024 [2 favorites]

should maybe try to have a slightly better understanding of imaging technology

Mmmmm, I think they got it.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:46 AM on September 23, 2024 [4 favorites]

I'd like to take a brief respite from this fascinating discussion of a 5 word phrase to point out how the X-Men have so permeated the culture as to inform the title of this highly specialized, niche article.
You may now continue arguing about what precisely CMYK/RGB means.
posted by signal at 5:00 AM on September 23, 2024 [4 favorites]

Well, The Moody Blues by way of the X-Men.
posted by dragstroke at 5:12 AM on September 23, 2024 [6 favorites]

Wario is after the coins (Gameboy Warioland and onwards) so I understand the sense behind this inversion of totem-heroic Mario for Wario alongside a frankness of grifting art into "worth whatever people pay for it." We're not all Wario, though: I'm poor and aspiring to be Wario, and if that fails I'll become Waluigi, no personality beyond my sneering grin as I'm part of the forum-poster commentariat.
posted by k3ninho at 5:30 AM on September 23, 2024 [4 favorites]

I think the core of the argument is:

Bluntly, a doctrinaire insistence that art must concern itself with the past or the future is besides the point, because neither is any guarantee of artistic quality. Art is a continuum, and what is possible for one artists is as much determined by their own socioeconomic context, and the norms and beliefs of their age, which is to say that artists are intrinsically quite “free” to do as they please.

It’s an interesting idea, although not unexpected - I’m sure most people who would have read this far into an article about art have a loose grounding in the humanities and can understand what the author is saying. I’m not sure it is the defence for contemporary high end gallery art being so boring that it thinks it is, nor is it the nail in the coffin for digital art (although, oh lord, I wish it was).

Also getting hung up on a lame grammar argument is very metafilter.
posted by The River Ivel at 6:10 AM on September 23, 2024 [4 favorites]

Well, The Moody Blues by way of the X-Men.

TIL. I thought Claremont came up with it on his own.
posted by signal at 6:32 AM on September 23, 2024 [1 favorite]

> "Ewa Juszkiewicz’s woefully generic imitations of European portraiture"

This was a throwaway insult at the beginning of the article, and while I support the unhinged nature of popular art criticism and never want it to die, I think I speak for MANY when I say that Sean Tatol is stupidly wrong about Juszkiewicz.

Such that it derailed my personal appetite for continuing to read, but I ignored that -- thinking of "Critic as Artist," my personal irreverent and somewhat mean Oscar Wilde favorite.

>"In listening to a four-hundred-year-old Mass by William Byrd we make it contemporary and alive by the feeling it produces in us. His melodies are not beautiful because they adhere to a tradition or because they were innovative but because he used the conditions of composition of his time to write melodies that are beautiful to hear. Human experience is infinitely rich, but its categories are finite, and art makes those qualities of experience happen anew. An artwork only needs to be new so that it doesn’t repeat the old."

Oh no. I gave you my time, Sean. I tried. But then you went for the thing I know more about, and I realized that you are so angry at the power of the artist to potentially dupe you into thinking something old is "innovative" that you tied yourself in knots trying to pretend Byrd-appreciation is some kind of creative act, knowledge made "anew." You liked RETVRN, now you're ashamed, and the pendulum swung and you tried the FVTVRE [do people say that?] -- and your total incoherence belies an essential, banal fear of staking a single coherent claim.

The "art market" and those unfortunate people who happen to engage with the right "gimmick" at the right time deserve interrogation, but not from such lazy sources -- who undermine their whole thesis demanding special attention [entitlement!] for Rothenberg's horses, as if such attention becomes evidence of superiority to those who dare make their subjects Weyant's "blondes" and Sean's surety of the "emptiness" of the market, reflected in their "cherub" faces.

Artists do not have the privilege of ignoring most "gimmicks," retreating into "four-hundred year old Masses," retreating into ill-considered defenses against the obvious: Art is hard, and sophistry is easy.
posted by mathjus at 4:53 PM on September 23, 2024 [1 favorite]