purpleflashing

I didn't. Berger himself was a Marxist and his analysis was often political (he wrote a lot but none of it made the impact as the Ways of Seeing which did become influencial in media and art criticism), but the Ways of Seeing largely talks about the methodology. He cites studies in the first essay to demonstrate how the context of a visual piece changes based on where the person sees it. His analyses didn't become mainstream and stayed confined mostly to Marxist circles (and he still didn't make claims about sexual preferences being formed by the culture), his methodology did though.

You can apply a scientific method for the analysis itself if you wish to. It doesn't conflict with Berger's ideas from these essays.

If I had to simplify Berger's thesis, I would say that there cannot be a complete objective interpretation of the image, "what it means" is context-dependent, where what's displayed, who's looking at it, what they experienced in life, and what mood they're in can change what they "see" in the image. Traditionally, image locations were relatively stable, so at least that aspect of "seeing" was controlled, but with the advance of technology, we can replicate images and embed them in different contexts with different purposes, and so art criticism and analysis should focus not only on the image in isolation but also on who and how distributes it, because that part of art (where it's displayed, by whom, to whom) carries meaning in itself. As I said, he was an art critic, so he focused on the methodology of how art can be analyzed.

I really don't know where you got the idea that he was saying that one can divine some knowledge from a painting or that paintings and culture influence our sexuality.

Edit: Spelling and punctuation. God, I really should enable a spellchecker. I'm a terrible speller, I apologize.

Berger doesn't claim that.

What does anthopology have to do with Berger's work? He was an art critic and an artist, what makes his work unfit for being used in film/media studies that overlap with film criticism as a disciplince that, when looked from a broad perspective, is just a brunch of art criticism? I think the connection is pretty straightforward.

John Ruskin's ideas are also used in film studies even though he formulated them before film as a medium existed.

He elaborates on that but you can replace "seeing" with "perceiving" -- it would be a little easier to understand what Berger means, imo.

I don't doubt you don't. Why is my judgement clouded and not yours? DA was p bad, it was for amateurs so it was expected. Never had a chance to use AS.

Case in point, I guess.

Interesting. I am one of the people who adores visuals. Instagram and Tumblr used to be my favorite places, I had my own pretty pictures curation blogs, my way of relaxing was creating Pinterest boards. Now, I also like "serious" art but I wouldn't scroll museum galleries when I just needed to feel a little whimsy, I went to Pinterest and often didn't care about the author behind them in many cases because the pictures were derivative enough to not feel "special" (but sometimes I would and then I would discover new artists).

I don't engage with this hobby anymore since the platforms got flooded with AI-generated content. Now, I do like some early and cheeky AI-generated images (mostly pre-ChatGPT), but not after -- and not because of corporate and social politics -- I'm honestly largely out of the news cycle and don't know what terrible or amazing thing some AI company did this week. And yet my hobby completely died and it was strangely disorienting because I struggled to find something else that could replace it, I don't have social media and didn't have feeds except for on those three platforms (I deleted them all now).

I am an outlier from the general population in how I engage with visuals, and I do think that it's likely that all of the commercial visuals in the future will be AI generated, now, I don't think they will be pretty, though. I think they will be largely ugly. I think the majority of people don't actually care about "pretty pictures" at all and are content with very ugly things surrounding them all the time. And the rest can't help it.

It works both ways. There are plenty of people who fake orgasm. :)

I see. What do you think people seek in art? Why do they engage with it?

That's not the answer to my question but fine, why is the split important in any way? Some people hate jazz, some people love jazz, and it follows that... what?

There are plenty of human consciousnesses whose output people can't stand. If AI is conscious, it's perfectly in line with how human art works -- sometimes someone's creative output is offputting to a great deal of people.

So why is it "irrelevant who else likes it"? If it's made for the public and the public doesn't like it, then it's pretty relevant. What if people do care how the Skyrim character models were made? What if they do hate once they learn it's AI?

That wasn't my question. The poster above said that snobbery towards AI art is "bad for art" and since you supported their general pro-AI arguments, I assumed you were the same poster. Sorry, I didn't look closer.

So do you think AI is OK for throwaway stuff but not OK for "production" so to speak?

Why is it "bad for art" if someone dislikes AI art then?

>That last part is what I just said. The original post is saying nothing aside from something that's already true of everyone, and has nothing to do with whether AI can or does make interesting things.

Well, your post, following your own logic, just says that you like AI-generated stuff. You cannot judge what's good or bad for art, you can't call someone preference "snobbery" because the only property of art is that someone likes it. Interesting things is also then completely subjective.

I do prefer OSS over proprietary software because to me, at least prior to GenAI, OSS was the label that was "software made by Humans" where proprietary was "made by corporations". It didn't make OSS win commercially, of course, and I personally don't think that human-made art will win commercially.

After reading multuple discussions in this thread and a bunch of others, I feel like people on HN think about art skills in the same way as they think of their software skills.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but skills that allowed one to make software largely made one pretty employable in the last few decades.

Now, art skills do not make you employable. There are narrow industries where you can make money but throughout the entirety of human history, being an artist rarely provided any sort of economic security. Some artists did and do make money. Sometimes it was prestigious but the barrier of entry was insanely high. And yes, getting to their level of skill and sometimes even getting access to the tools (look up how much a decent harp costs) was yet another enormous obstacle. Out of the entire pool of people who had artistic abilities, very few got access to tools and resources to be able to express their abilities. Out of those, even fewer could make money off of it while also doing artistic work that was deeply fulfilling and aligned with their talent. Occasionally, the stars would align and you would be lucky to be born in a time and place where you could get the schooling, the tools, the job that paid well enough and that didn't makwe your soul die because it alined with your natural creativity.

There are a lot of people who (I think) speak of AI as if democratizes access to the tools and therefore in their mind it should follow that there must be some market for their newlyfound creative expression. But if you ever seriously considered art as a career, you know that you will likely not have a market for your skills. It is difficult to make money even as a traditonal artist (as in a painter) or, say, a musician, god help you if you want to do mixed media, if you want to play avant garde jazz, prog rock, or Barocco music, if you want to be an actor, a playwright or a ballet dancer.

Some people (I assume those who are excited about the idea of being able to express themselves) seem to be bummed that the world rejects AI art as 'slop'. I am not going to say anything about effort, laziness, etc, I believe anything can be used to make art, even a toilet put in an exhibition hall (I like Duchamp, I like modern art, I like post-modern art, I like whatever-the-paradigm-we're-in-now-art -- metamodernism? I love art, I did see early pre-ChatGPT experiments with neural networks that moved me), but I have to say something that any aspiring artist must know -- you will not make money off your art. The people who will be making the 'human premium' that the article talks about, will be few, just like there are few of them now. AI artists will not make money of their art. Art is a terrible career choice, now and tomorrow.

It's still worth pursuing, in my opinion (as I said -- I love art), but there is little point of talking about its commercial viability. It will always be shit.

I don't think this is necessarily true. My personal belief is that any functional thing can be turned into art if it is made with deep respect and intimate knowledge of the telos of the object. You make something so well that you see something really beautiful or important in it/with it/through it that you can't help but capture.

Technical communications serve mostly functional purpose but there were technical documents that ascended their pure function. One of the most famous drawings in the European art history is, in fact, a technical document[0].

I also really love looking at arcitectural drawings, there are a lot of architects and drafters whose technical drawing carries so much artistic quality to it (and not merely quality of execution) that I personally call them artists[1].

And before I get mocked about whether code that makes a spreadheet software is art now -- I don't know, I am not a programmer but I think it can be -- surely there is something else to code than just the software it produces? Speed? Efficiency? Balance? Elegant architecture of ideas that says "yes, I know you, the next maintainer of this codebase, will need to extend it one day, and this is why I made it very simple for you"? It might not talk to an accountant who ends up using the spreadsheet but it can talk to another programmer.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Mahony_Griffin

I am so fascinated about this angle -- whether programming is art or not. This is one of the things that got me to HN recently and I love reading these discussiong as a non-programmer.

While I love art, I am not an art historian or critic, so the definition I have for it is highly subjective -- in my opinion one of the functions of art is communication with other people (often through time and space). For art to fulfill its telos, so to speak, the message that it carries must also be read (heard, perceived) by somebody and then, if it's great art, eventually someone would want to respond to it.

The message can be simple, complex, subversive, stupid, clever, it can be an observation about world, a joke, a profound truth, a memory, a question, a snapshot, a curiosity, a trick, and a ton of other things. And sure, the message can be distorted, misunderstood, twisted, forgotten, lost, etc, but if no one "reads" it and no one "talks" to it, it might as well be glossolalia.

So my question for folks who do consider programming art -- do you "read" other people's code like this? Do you exchange ideas through code? Have you ever trolled great coders of the past through your code or tried to prove them wrong?

I hope my question doesn't come off as complete nonsense.

P.s. I know that there are programming manifestos which to me sounds like there is a layer of meaning that the code carries and this meaning goes beyond pure machine instructions or software functionality, but I'd love to read answers of actual programmers.

I suppose it really depends on how you see light/heavy and what you consider "diaspora writings" or "LGBT themes", whether you refer to text or subtext. For example, Han Kang writes a lot about alienation which is a thing that people in diasporas do experience but people experience it in many other contexts. When looking at her texts on the surface, most of her books are set in Korea and are about very Korean things, e.g. Jeju Massacre, Gwangju Uprising, etc.

I started to enjoy small talking when I stopped thinking about it as some special ritual. E.g. I have friends who are for the lack of a better word "weather nerds" and their interests rubbed off me. Since I now find weather interesting, every time someone starts a small talk about the weather, it is a chance to either learn some data point, check on my own knowledge of the subject, etc. I love when older or well travelled people start to reminescence about weather in different times or locations -- I can immediately try to solve a small puzzle in my mind -- "wait, why exactly is there so much cold wind in this region exactly?"

I can find many things interesting, the world is fun to explore.

Tbh, I haven't read/watched much of explicitely far-right art but that sounds reasonable. IIRC nazis (as in NSDAP and whoever made art during that time) heavily focused on the idea of vitality, physicality, health, and the beauty of masculine strength which sounds like it is almost destined to produce homoerotic effect. I mean, if you encourage men to depict beautiful male bodies, you will get depictions from and for men who are really, realy into beautiful male bodies. :D

2025: Krasznahorkai -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2024: Han Kang -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2023: Jon Fosse -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2022: Annie Ernaux -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah -- there are homoerotic themes in some of his work but the characters are not gay in terms of their identities, and homoeroticism has more to do with the ideas of power rather than sexual identities

2020: Louise Gluck -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2019: Peter Handke -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2018: Olga Tokarczuk -- I think her work is the one that fits your description best

2017: Kazuo Ishiguro -- no LGBT themes explicitely AFAIK, but queer readings of his work are a thing

2016: Bob Dylan -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

Gurnah is an immigrant (a refugee to be more precise) who can be considered living "in a diaspora" and his work does focus on the topic prominently. Ishiguro is a British citizen who thinks of himself as British, I believe, his parents moved when he was very young IIRC. He didn't visit Japan until his adulthood. I don't think his works are "disapora-adjecent" thematically but I only read two of his novels, so not completely confident here.

The rest write in their native languages and live in their birth countries.

I believe when you mention Carson's LGBT text, you refer to Autobiography of Red, it was written in the late 90s, not this year.

Edit: fixing typos, punctuation, and wording

Fascinating. Thank you or sharing.

I just quickly tried Covet and I can imagine how the act of comparing and picking one of the two options can feel fun. I can see myself just voting on outfits in the game without creating my own when I need some really simple "mindless" fun. Not a productive effect but also not addictive enough AFAIK to be a big problem.

I think teams can work as a concept but you need to design them with a great deal of care so that mechanics are pro-social and fascilitate friendships -- there's a nice article about it: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/game-design-patterns-fo...

What's a good voting system? I remember checking out Dress to Impress (not a mobile but an incredibly popular Roblox game), and it had a somewhat unpleasant, imo, voting system -- players vote for each other's outfits and the score is a sum of the scores your co-players' gave you which incentivizies players to give everyone the lowest score. The game tries to "punish" this behavior by detecting "unfair" voters and lowering the weight of their votes, but I feel like you could tweak the original incentives instead by changing the mechanic. Having to rank outfits instead of giving each outfit a score could work I think? But there are probably other problems I'm missing. I dnn't play too many mutliplayer games.

(On the other hand, while I believe thinking about "gaming" the ranking takes away from the fun of the game, Dress to Impress is massively popular, so maybe this frustration is what makes it popular. IDK if kids play it because there are no competitors in the genre or because some competitive toxicity is addictive.)

Oh man, the state of dress up games is a personal pet peeve of mine, poor onboarding tutorials is just one problem. The art direction is often simply atrocious, proper game loops barely exist (let alone creative ones), the microtransactions are the default business model. I honestly don't know what causes it, perhaps the games are just not that profitable so they don't attract highly skilled or at least conscientious game developers? I came to accept that they are just made by people who either dislike/don't care about games in general or dislike dress up games specifically. The best dress up games are normally made by Nintendo who have a strong game design and gave development culture in general.

P.s. As a side note, I started making small dress up games that I draw myself to scratch my own itch. I am not a programmer so they are absolutely horrendous and I only show them to friends. Making videogames is not as easy as making paper clothes for paper dolls like I did as a kid, but it is so fun and I feel 30 years younger somehow. :D

The Nobel Prize in literature is given for a body of work, not for a specific publication. The book OP quotes does have gay characters but Anne Carson's body of work is hardly about LGBT issues specifically. Writing it off because of one sentence in an antagonistic comment is a bit strange. The Guardian article lists many other quotes of people describing what's compelling about her work.

I wish I could see a nice spoken performance of Autobiography of Red some day, it should be read out loud, imo. Her writing is very physical if that makes sense.