The look of extreme artificiality
Welcome to the 113th edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
If Patreon is not your thing but you enjoy what I'm doing, feel free to send me a little something via Paypal. I'll use the funds to pay for the fee the service provider of this Mailing List charges me every month. If there's money left, I'll invest it into the Japanese green tea that fuels much of my creative work.
Well, I got the numbering wrong again. I thought I had a fool proof system in place to avoid such problems. The real issue might be the fool who is writing these missives and who apparently can't count.
Regardless, I have a lot of links for you. So without further ado, here they are...
The so-called Superbowl is the biggest sports event in the US. I don't want to comment on that because other people have already done so. I basically ignore the Superbowl and everything that comes with it.
This time around, though, something interesting happened that has to do with photography. Given it's the Superbowl and given it involves one of the ads and given that the ad was made for some of the most unsavory people in the US, there already is a neat write up:
The ad, simply titled “Foot Washing,” depicts a variety of modern contexts, from immigrants exiting a bus to clashing protest groups, in which one person washes the feet of another. Why foot washing? Per the ad, it’s because “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.” While this is technically biblically true, as depicted in the commercial, this is a far weirder ethos even than it sounds on paper.
But there's more:
The group’s website explains that all the photos for the shoot were staged by photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten, whose work shares an affinity with the bizarre surrealism of AI-generated art. This ranges from the unnatural expressions on the faces of some of the subjects to the uncanny nature of the settings themselves.
(My emphasis.)
This is really interesting, isn't it? Roland Meyer, the most astute observer of all of that AI imagery, had a great observation (which is where I came across this stuff in the first place):
The look of extreme artificiality almost automatically associated with AI today is, in fact, much older. Variants can already be found in what @jmcolberg has analyzed in a brilliant essay entitled »Photography’s Neoliberal Realism«, for example in the work of Gregory Crewdson (which almost looks like a blueprint for the Super Bowl ad, with some Watchtower vibes added for Christian flavour).
You know, that did not occur to me until Roland pointed it out: AI imagery is now making work by Crewdson et al. look even sillier. And it sounds like a lot of people are already really tired of looking at AI imagery.
If you wanted to (and why not), you could view Crewdson's or Fullerton-Batten's work as proto-AI. If Crewdson montages his final images from a number of source images, the only difference to what AI does is that he doesn't rely on other people's work.
You now might as well ask yourself why these artists still stage their images in an elaborate fashion, when they could simply write prompts for some AI generator...
"Ironically," Roland writes, "the most expensive and the cheapest images today look almost the same, and a photograph that took days of work can be mistaken for an image created in seconds by a machine."
In my book, I urged readers to see past the way Neoliberal Realism looks, to focus on embedded codes. But in light of the AI development/convergence, maybe there is some insight to be gained from its absurd artifice.
At the other end of the photo spectrum you find people like Don McCullin. I've honestly never understood why anyone could possibly think that their photographs can change the world. But I do admire the aspiration behind it.
Here's a very long interview with McCullin that comes with a bunch of photographs of pretty gruesome scenes. This might or might not be a worthwhile read for you.
I have mixed feelings about a lot that is being said. But at least it's not trying to sell us how great neoliberal capitalism is. So there's always that.
I'll never tire of people writing about (meaning: justifying) criticism. Here's John Doran (The Quietus) writing about what music criticism does and why we need it:
When we lose the independent spirit of sites such as Pitchfork we lose something crucial of music itself, because to assume that record reviews only exist to help you buy music is a fundamental category error. Criticism is never, ever, just about the music. When we talk about music we’re often talking about everything else in life that is important besides.
When I was applying for jobs, I wrote in my CV how I'm writing about any number of societal or cultural topics using photography as a springboard. So when I came across Doran's words, I felt that I had encountered a kindred spirit.
You probably heard about Philip Guston and the kerfuffle around a delayed retrospective. Or maybe you have not. Either way, this essay by Paul Keegan is absolutely worth your time.
if a wealthy person aspires to be more than just another Kardashian, one asset transcends all of this and changes the very identity of its owner, notably in the eyes of society. That luxuriously special, quintessentially refined asset is art.
Very little in this article about billionaires/oligarchs buying art is really surprising.
Speaking of billionaires/oligarchs, this article about the US tech ones is also insightful (and pretty scary).
I might as well throw in a recent photograph from around my new apartment (the house is hidden behind the barren trees).
And with that I will conclude for today.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg