M○C△ Confessional: An Impassioned Defense of Shitty Generative Art
In so many words...
Here we are, back again with another incendiary edition of:
And this week, I want to wade dangerously far into a firestorm I have no business partaking in. But that’s what we do on M○C△ Confessional: Step blindly into a warzone for the sake of you, our wonderful readers.
Today’s newsletter is all about generative art, and specifically, about a post last week by the collector, thinker, and “gardener at @verse_works,” a lonliboy (@chilltulpa), a post which set off a chain reaction of discussion, outrage, and empathy. So that we’re on the same page, here is the tweet in its entirety:
Okay, I’m quite excited to jump into this one, because I have some strong emotions swirling around in me. Lonliboy’s post hinges on a couple of points that I think benefit from being distilled:
Much of the high-priced generative art market isn’t technologically impressive at all, which is the reason some of these “major” collections have seen price decreases (in an ensuing post, Lonliboy states that these pieces “would get 0 likes on Open Processing because it's a first week coding-exercise (literally).”
Few “big collectors” when these projects first released were educated enough to see the skimpy quality for what it was
A collection’s price always mattered more culturally than its technical backbone
Some of these artists engaged in purposefully-plagiaristic processes and acted vindictively in the aftermath of being called out, which is a pretty clear shot at Dmitri Cherniak (this is codified explicitly in a following tweet).
You can see pretty clearly why the Tweet got so much traction, as this feels like a giant, targeted conglomeration of so many irate Tweets I see that take on the state of the crypto art market, influencer tactics, auction house motivations, staggering sales, issues of quality etc.
Now I’m not going to say that our friend Lonliboy is wrong; in fact, pragmatically, I agree with almost all of their points. Much of the art we see flying off the metaphorical shelves around us is, to put it nicely, less than technically astounding. I have heard that criticism levied at basically every artist who has managed a five or six figure sale in the last few years, including but not limited to AlphaCentauriKid, Refik Anadol, Dmitri Cherniak, etc. Things like “This is grade-school Blender work,” or “This code is soooo simple” or “This is screensaver art.” Such criticism feels downright universal. If one’s work is in-demand or culturally-significant, it’s going to have detractors. And those detractors are generally going to have some pretty well-defensed and oftentimes sophisticated points.
And Lonliboy’s points are both well-defensed and sophisticated. That’s not what I take issue with.
My issue is more-or-less, like, well, come on.
Can we please…
Stop pretending…
That any of this art…
Or their price…
Or their significance…
Has literally anything to do…
With process?
Welcome to the 21st-century, my friends! The emperor has long since relieved himself of his clothes, the king is dead, the art-making cat has been long let out of its ivory-tower, and process has almost nothing to do with an artwork’s worth anymore. Hasn’t in a long time, either.
You want to blame uneducated collectors? Fine, but you have to take that same criticism and assault basically the last 75 years of contemporary and modern artistry with it. You want to say that price unfairly rules the art market? You’ve hit the nail on the head, my friend, but if you think this is bad, you’re going to hate finding out about the Medicis and the Guggenheims and the Rothchilds and their ilk over the past two millennia.
In an art movement, value will be assigned. And in art movements where there is rarely clear or obvious value, value can —and will— be assigned haphazardly.
Long-form generative art is a unique realm where the traditional art world’s favorite kind of nebulously-valuable minimalism meets the veil of digital processes. Digital processes which even today, even to someone like me, someone who has written hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of words about the topic, remain unknowable arcana. Putting Python code in front of me (let alone C, Javascript, Rust, whatever) and asking me to make sense of it is like sitting me down before an alchemical table and saying “Turn this lead into gold.” I’ve got no chance, but nor am I alone. For reasons of its unintelligible quality, the general public seems to have turned away from digital art —I say this a lot, but if you type “Is digital art…” into Google, the first suggested completion is “Is digital art real art”— just as many have turned away from contemporary and modern minimalist or conceptual art. In the former case, the process is simply too complex (even at its basic level) for the layperson to sift through in search of recognizable ingenuity or talent. In the latter, the compositions are often so glaringly facile that it’s hard to see the art in the thing at all.
When you combine those two things —digital processes and minimalist aesthetics— the collecting public has, like, zero chance at assigning anything approaching defensible value to an artwork or collection. I take special issue with this sentiment that—
“(Nobody is going to shake me on this opinion, you're not going to convince me works minted in 2021 from algorithms created decades ago were worth millions, never)”
—because it willfully obfuscates the truth about all this art and why it’s worth anything.
This shit is random.
Cultural and financial worth are —and perhaps has always been— based so much more on an artist’s social standing, their socioeconomic context, their gender, their long-winded conceptual explanations, and other seemingly-secondary factors than on artistic execution. It’s ridiculous that any artwork would be worth millions, full stop. Only visual art amongst the artistic spheres can command prices, where value is not created out of ubiquity, it assigns the value of ubiquity to an object itself. Honestly, it’d be even more ridiculous if an artwork were worth millions on only its aesthetics or composition. The Venus de Milo with its missing arms? The Mona Lisa, which is…fine I guess. Anything Jasper Johns has ever done? Let’s just put to bed the idea that artistry in the social sphere has ever been gauged worthy based on the contents of the frame or the work that went into filling it. And if it doesn’t have social value, it doesn’t have value, period.
During the Generative Art boom, a number of clever artists found an arbitrage opportunity in the knowledge gap between art folks and computer programmers. Perhaps this was cunning, perhaps it was opportunism, but if art people claimed to exalt aesthetics above all things, and if the art world in general has shown a long-standing lack of interest in spelunking through process (and if crypto people were going to chase first-mover advantage off every conceivable cliff), than why not take a six-week coding bootcamp and go throw some randomly-generated spirals and rectangles up on the latest generative art platform? I refuse to blame artists for being savvy (opportunistic is a negativistic synonym), and I refuse to blame collectors for being uneducated. I don’t believe there’s blame here at all; there is only the market, only the art world dynamics we all pretend we’re insulated from, and eons of history which made them into what they are.
Look, I don’t have the art historical background to know from whence came the first seeds of long-form generative art. I don’t have the technical knowhow to say “Oh, this artist stole this process from this person.” And guess what, I’m probably not going to get those things any time soon. That shouldn’t negate my taste, and it shouldn’t make me a poor collector on its face. Besides, most of the people buying these pieces are “art collectors” in name alone; investors is probably a more apt term, and I think we all already know the difference. This shouldn’t be news.
Sidenote: I definitely think it’s chicken-shit to run away from criticism or to block anyone who is critical of one’s work. Apply that to whomever you like.
But that’s a side issue. The main problem is that this argument demonstrates an inability to understand the art world in which we inhabit.
Please allow me a few analogies: Do you watch American Football? Because prospective National Football League (NFL) players, before they get drafted to a specific team, are invited to the NFL Combine, which is essentially a gauntlet different speed and strength challenges designed to get a sense of a player’s athleticism. And so, no, it doesn’t always matter how good a player played in college, they may nevertheless be judged more on how fast they can run a 40-yard dash, how many chest presses they can put up, how high they can jump, stupid shit which, at best, has limited relationship to on-field activities. Was Honus Wagner the greatest Major League Baseball player of all time? No, but his card is worth the most. Do NBA players time-after-time get multi-million-dollar contracts more because of their height or wingspan than their actual basketball ability? You bet your ass they do.
Being part of a world means recognizing how value is actually assigned therein. There is always a heavy dose of cultural and contextual elements therein. Many feel random at best, illogical at worst, but them’s the brakes. You can dislike it, but you must respect reality. I absolutely support dragging your generative-art-collection-of-choice for being half-baked or unoriginal (especially if you can back that shit up with facts), but if you think that’s somehow unique within the artistic continuum…
Well I invite you to walk through the GrecoRoman section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art…
The Minimalist exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art…
The god-damned Louvre…
Which is either going to simmer you down some, or make you a whole hell of a lot angrier.
-Your friendly neighborhood Art Writer,
Max
… made me think of:
“I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. i move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.”
~ written in 1923 by Dziga Veritov, the revolutionary Soviet film director
📰 https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ch1
Just great TY🥰