After Art

Part 1: Oh, here we go again

1.

A few weeks ago, the ever-astute Rob Horning considered the question of “content” versus “slop:”

[Ryan] Broderick posits a “fear of the content void”¹ that is metastasizing through the body politic, but that “void of content” seems like an inside-out way of describing efforts to manufacture demand for media, to produce audience metrics for advertisers or investors. “Fear” and “desperation” and “slop” seem like loaded ways to describe how media companies go about their ordinary business of capturing attention, shaping it into measurable forms.

But why is some popular content “slop” and some content not? Without criteria for why certain kinds of attention paid on platforms are better than others — why some turn us into pigs, and others don’t — it seems like it reduces to a matter of personal taste: My commodified media products are health food; yours are pigfeed.

It is like when the popularity of any given pop cultural phenomenon is attributed to a conspiracy — as with the theories about Spotify pushing Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan on users described in this Vox piece. What is supposed to be the right amount of times those artists are played? There is no fair and correct distribution for media products, all things being equal and undistorted by socioeconomic forces; those forces constitute what pop culture is. It’s not a thwarted meritocracy in which the “right” songs are getting marginalized through the machinations of evildoers who hate aesthetic quality. It’s an industry that conjures and concretizes blocks of attention into profitable forms. Which of these forms of attention should be considered illegitimate, and why? Where does pop culture stop and coercion begin? Who gets told they are pigs in slop, and who gets to think they are engaged in something more dignified?

Bolds are mine, of course.

First Google result for “ai generated cartoon pig”

Let’s back up: before Content, there was Art, so let’s begin there.

2.

Alastair MacIntyre began his provocative opus After Virtue with a science fiction metaphor, asking the reader to envision a society which had suffered a cataclysm and had all its repositories of scientific knowledge and working scientists wiped out. Generations later, people can still recite E equals mc squared, and might even know what words the letters stand for, but don’t have a handle on what it means. They know enough about Newton to say that an apple landed on his head and he called it gravity, but no longer possess the Principia and fail to connect objects falling to the ground with the phenomenon of planetary orbits. Maxwell’s equations might be matters of arcane speculation, argued about by opposing camps the way the church fathers debated the meaning of homoousios.

This, MacIntyre says, is where the modern world (circa 1980) is at with regard to morality. I won’t recap his whole spiel here, but at the center of it is that our conception of morality is a teeming hodgepodge of jargon and ideas from Classical philosophy, Christian theology, Enlightenment rationality, and scientific managerialism. We are empiricists and consequentialists through and through. We speak positively of pluralism and of spectra as opposed to binaries. We often accept cultural relativism and some degree of environmental determinism when batting around questions about ethics. And yet—when it comes to the social and political issues we’re most passionate about, we snap into moral realist mode. If we listen to the Christian right excoriating abortion or the campus left railing against Israel’s Gaza campaign, we notice that neither group is saying they are of the opinion that these things are wrong, but that these things are wrong—absolutely, period—while insinuating that their opponents can only be motivated by vicious depravity and/or self-interest, and are intellectually hobbled from either too little education or trained incapacity.

Since the disputants in cases like these are usually arguing from completely different premises and incompatible principles, there’s nothing for them to do but talk over and past each other—unless they wish to get bogged down in futile talk about who’s got the better premises and principles.

In any case, it remains important to us that we can be assured we are “appealing to independent impersonal criteria”—or, perhaps, that we know we are perceived as doing so:

It is not only in arguments that with others that we are reduced so quickly to assertion and counter-assertion; it is also in the arguments we have with ourselves. For whenever an agent enters the forum of public debate he has already presumably, implicitly or explicitly, settled the matter in question in his own mind. Yet if we possess no unassailable criteria, no set of compelling reasons by means of which we can convince our opponents, it follows that in the process of making up our own minds we can have made no appeal to such criteria or such reasons. If I lack good reasons to invoke against you, it must seem that I lack any good reasons. Hence it seems that underlying my own position there must be some non-rational decision to adopt that position. Corresponding to the interminability of public argument there is at least the appearance of a disquieting private arbitrariness. It is small wonder that we become defensive and therefore shrill.

One could easily accuse MacIntyre of nostalgia—his most beloved philosophers are Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, he is an opponent of liberalism, and he believes the Enlightenment project was a failure—but in truth it is difficult to peruse something like the Divine Comedy and fail to conclude that Dante’s world existed in a much more lucid moral universe than our own, or to put down Anna Karenina before experiencing a tinge of romanticism about the essential goodness of the nineteenth-century Russian peasant and his simple, “natural” way of life.

Similarly: when we visit an art museum, it’s hard not to notice that prior to the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European and North American painting was possessed of a tantalizing clarity in terms of its values and sense of purpose. The collector or gallery visitor of the eighteenth century often had to be versed in the symbolism of Greco-Roman and Christian myth, and in the recondite visual “grammar” of the tradition to fully appreciate what a painter intended of his composition, but even a country bumpkin who’d wandered in wouldn’t need a 300-word didactic panel posted beside a canvas to explain to him why it qualified as Art, or as Good Art. (Also, it would not have occurred to him to suppose that when he went home to the village and played the fiddle at a wedding celebration, he might be doing Art himself.)

If we cared to look, we could surely find similar points of departure for Western popular music, architecture, poetry, sculpture, etc. I am not making any value judgements here—and what’s really at issue is that judgements of aesthetic value have become as aporetic as judgements of moral value. (See also: the arguments for and against an art museum putting on a Gauguin or Balthus exhibition.)

Given the linkage between morality and aesthetics articulated by the likes of Baumgarten, Kant, Burke, et al. during the early(ish) bourgeois epoch, it is a peculiar coincidence that our ideas about Art—or about what distinguishes Quality Content from Slop—are as muddled as our notions of The Good generally. It is less peculiar that when somebody challenges our commodified Content preferences we might become defensive—and therefore shrill—because we are often at pains to advocate for our own tastes according to an impersonal standard which we’re certain our detractor also abides by.

But let’s linger on Art for a while longer.

3.

Before the internet went into convulsions from Roger Ebert’s verdict that video games can never be Art, before the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition The Perfect Moment and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems were the subjects of obscenity trials, before a New York Times album review declared “There is nothing beautiful on ‘Sergeant Pepper,’” before Theodor Adorno called jazz “the false liquidation of art,” before “cubism” was first written as an epithet of disparagement, Leo Tolstoy asked the question What Is Art? in 1897. We’ll leave his conclusions alone for now; here I’m interested in how he draws attention to the confused arguments of his own time:

“What is art? What a question! Art is architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry in all its forms,” usually replies the ordinary man, the art amateur, or even the artist himself, imagining the matter about which he is talking to be perfectly clear, and uniformly understood by everybody. But in architecture, one inquires further, are there not simple buildings which are not objects of art, and buildings with artistic pretensions which are unsuccessful and ugly and therefore cannot be considered as works of art? wherein lies the characteristic sign of a work of art?

It is the same in sculpture, in music, and in poetry. Art, in all its forms, is bounded on one side by the practically useful and on the other by unsuccessful attempts at art. How is art to be marked off from each of these? The ordinary educated man of our circle, and even the artist who has not occupied himself especially with æsthetics, will not hesitate at this question either. He thinks the solution has been found long ago, and is well known to everyone.

“Art is such activity as produces beauty,” says such a man.

“But what is this beauty which forms the subject-matter of art?” Tolstoy asks. “How is it defined? What is it?”

As is always the case, the more cloudy and confused the conception conveyed by a word, with the more aplomb and self-assurance do people use that word, pretending that what is understood by it is so simple and clear that it is not worth while even to discuss what it actually means.

This is how matters of orthodox religion are usually dealt with, and this is how people now deal with the conception of beauty. It is taken for granted that what is meant by the word beauty is known and understood by everyone. And yet not only is this not known, but, after whole mountains of books have been written on the subject by the most learned and profound thinkers during one hundred and fifty years (ever since Baumgarten founded æsthetics in the year 1750), the question, What is beauty? remains to this day quite unsolved, and in each new work on æsthetics it is answered in a new way.

Tolstoy gets to heart of the issue—and to Art’s point of contact with MacIntyre’s diagnosis of modern morality—with the observation that conversations about Art and Beauty (although I notice that The Beautiful is increasingly absent from discussion) often smack of controversy regarding religious dogma that nobody really understands, though it is incumbent upon them to appear to understand.

How is the triune godhead of Christianity not polytheism, obfuscated? Methodically push the believing dabbler in theology far enough, and finally he can do nothing but shrug and make a pronouncement of “the mystery of the trinity”—and afterwards will resume speaking confidently of his belief in One God. Something similar may occur when we probe a vocal despiser of Midjourney about his distaste for AI-generated art.

Calvin & Hobbes (July 20, 1993)

4.

Tolstoy again:

But without even asking the ordinary man what differentiates the “good” ballet and the “graceful” operetta from their opposites (a question he would have much difficulty in answering), if you ask him whether the activity of costumiers and hairdressers, who ornament the figures and faces of the women for the ballet and the operetta, is art; or the activity of Worth, the dressmaker; of scent-makers and men-cooks, then he will, in most cases, deny that their activity belongs to the sphere of art. But in this the ordinary man makes a mistake, just because he is an ordinary man and not a specialist, and because he has not occupied himself with æsthetic questions. Had he looked into these matters, he would have seen in the great Renan’s book, Marc Aurele, a dissertation showing that the tailor’s work is art, and that those who do not see in the adornment of woman an affair of the highest art are very small-minded and dull.

…Such is also the opinion of the French writer, Guyau, who is highly esteemed by some authors of our day. In his book, Les problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine, he speaks seriously of touch, taste, and smell as giving, or being capable of giving, aesthetic impressions: “[If color is lacking to the touch, it nevertheless provides us with a notion that the eye alone cannot give us, and which has considerable aesthetic value, that of the soft, silky polish. What characterizes the beauty of velvet is its softness to the touch no less than its shine. In the idea we have of a woman's beauty, the velvety texture of her skin is an essential element.]”²

“[Each of us will probably, with a little attention, remember the pleasures of taste, which were true aesthetic pleasures.]” And he recounts how a glass of milk drunk by him in the mountains gave him æsthetic enjoyment.

So it turns out that the conception of art as consisting in making beauty manifest is not at all so simple as it seemed, especially now, when in this conception of beauty are included our sensations of touch and taste and smell, as they are by the latest æsthetic writers.

As influential as it was, Kant’s notion of Art and Beauty as involving disinterested, nonsensual pleasure had a brief shelf life.

Forget video games: is a fine dining experience Art? Is a bowl of potpourri on the toilet basin Art? (What if it’s homemade?) Is a Spotify playlist arranged to set the mood at a house party Art? Is what a high-end escort girl does for a paying client Art? What about the glamor shots of nude models we look at while we do to ourselves what we’d like a high-end escort girl to do to us?

Or—if a Walt Disney movie is Art and a print out of Andy Warhol’s Factory is also Art, why is an iPhone not Art? If it is, why isn’t my Sonim dumphone also Art?

If an addictive rougelike with procedurally generated maps is Art, why is an Instagram account with conscientiously selected Midjourney images not Art?

Where beliefs about the The Good, The Beautiful, and The Tasteful are accepted as purely contingent matters, anyone who would try to rigorously separate Art from not-Art with recourse to such concepts will be listened to by a small few and regarded by the rest as just one opinionated crank among a thousand.

For better or worse, we are a highly diverse society that lacks any institution functioning (or convincingly pretending to function) as a supreme moral authority and tastemaker. (And, to be sure, the moral and political dimensions of taste are even more transparent to us now than they were to Kant at the end of the eighteenth century.) An organization that would arrogate this role to itself today could expect to earn the ridicule and scorn of at least half the population.³

Rather than beginning from first principles, extrapolating general aesthetic “truths” from a survey of things people regard as Good Art or call Beautiful is more our speed—and probably most of everyone else’s too. But during an epoch of permanently accelerated technological and social change such as ours, the fortuity of values derived in this way becomes glaringly obvious.

Circa 1967, a father who enjoyed listening to his collection of classical records and luxuriating in the Truth and Beauty emanating from a recorded performance of a complex piece by Bach or Chopin may have been flabbergasted by his college-aged son’s obsession with the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix. That’s not music, it’s just vulgar noise, we imagine him grumbling.

His son, meanwhile, is certain that Truth and Beauty and Power reside in rock n’ roll. Sometimes it makes him sad that his old man’s ideas about Art and Music are too restrictive and too antiquated to understand what he and his generation peers know to be true. Moreover, his father’s records bore him to sleep. Where’s the passion?

Many years later, he passes by his own teenage son’s bedroom circa 1997 and grits his teeth at the noise emanating from behind the door. Rap? Those people aren’t even singing, they’re just talking against a drumbeat and a bassline—and the quote-unquote “lyrics” are so crass. And “electronica?” How can these charlatans call themselves musicians if they’re not actually playing any instruments? All they do is push a button! Our middle-aged rock n’ roll fan considers himself open-minded, sure, but he also knows what good Music and Art are. And sorry son, what you’re listening to is trash.

Whatever Dad, we’re sure he replies.

Now it’s 2025—our Xennial enjoyer of rap and electronic music (both of which have by now surpassed rock n’ roll in terms of critical acclaim and cultural relevance) has a teenaged son of his own, and reacts with dismay when he catches the kid listening to AI-generated tunes on YouTube. How? he inquires. How can you knowingly enjoy music that wasn’t even composed by a person? Where’s the feeling? Where’s the humanity in it? What? Bullshit, it does not take talent and skill to prompt an AI to crap out something listenable. Any idiot could figure out how to—hey! Don’t roll your eyes at me. I used to go to raves in the 2000s, and at least the DJs had to know how to match beats and read the energy in the room…

Four generations of music fans, and all of them are convinced that they recognize Good Art when they hear it—while the rest are hopelessly deaf to it. Do we suppose it’s possible to devise a metric by which all of their musical preferences can be judged as Good Art? If they possess a common virtue, what is that virtue?

Folk culture in the 2020s

5.

Anyone who feels he has a personal connection with literature, film, visual art, music, etc. might accept on an intellectual level the idea that everyone has their own tastes, which ought to be respected—but not in his or her heart.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to heed the dictum LET PEOPLE ENJOY THINGS, DON’T JUDGE! until…

…everyone around you is obsessed with a pop star who grates on your nerves and whose latest single Spotify insists on dropping into every playlist it generates for you.

…everyone you follow on your favorite social media platform and all the writers of your favorite middlebrow chatter sites won’t shut up about a prestige TV drama that, by your assessment, is just network-grade trash with a higher production budget and softcore sex scenes.

…you witness someone you hold in some esteem ugly-crying in response to a development on the Bachelor or Bachelorette.

…your fourth consecutive Netflix & Groping session with someone you met on Tinder has him/her choosing a movie that they’re excited about, but insults your intelligence.

…your assigned college roommate is heavily into furry media.

…Gerry Duggan is writing the flagship X-Men serial.⁴

…et cetera.

Moreover, an assertion that we don’t like what others do is liable to be viewed as evidence of a moral or intellectual failure on our part—even though the [disgusting] admonition not to “yuck somebody else’s yum” ostensibly presupposes that taste is contingent and every individual preference is valid.⁵

Over the last decade I’ve had work-related acquaintances who would have seriously thought less of me if I’d told them I never had any feelings about Lady Gaga one way or the other. I’ve read anecdotes about hetero couples getting into fierce and very personal arguments after the guy said he didn’t care for the Barbie movie or confessed to not finding Taylor Swift or her music very impressive. Many years ago, a friend of mine basically put an expiration date on his relationship after showing his girlfriend Dr. Strangelove and fighting a scowl when she shrugged and said she thought it was fine, but not all that funny. And yeah, if you come and tell me you thought the digressions in Moby-Dick were boring and pointless, I will respect you less—and I’m sorry about that.

Kant held that judgments of taste are subjective, but still demand universal assent as though they were objective. I don’t think we can argue with him on that point.

Separating the Artist From the Man, Expert Challenge

6.

“One definition of beauty is: aptness to purpose.”

So wrote Ezra Pound. Whether or not we consciously articulate it to ourselves in these terms, this is our operational definition of Beauty and the yardstick with which we judge aesthetic objects and experiences today.⁶ True, Pound’s moral and political sympathies were aligned with Fascism, but this is also an eminently market-oriented and technocratic criterion for Beauty and Art.

Beauty inheres in whatever gets the job done well. Whether we’re considering a pop song, a piece of classical statuary, an Apple device, a Blumhouse flick, a painting by Gainsborough or Kinkade, a poem by Walt Whitman or Amanda Gorman, a Dark Brandon meme, a Nintendo game, a dress from Forever 21, a “Live Laugh Love” wall hanging, an advertising campaign, or a Pornhub video, the selfsame metric applies: how well does it serve the purpose for which it was made? Thus are the braided concepts of Art and Beauty liquidated, made as applicable as a dollar value to any artifact devised for any end.

But after all of that—we’re not talking much about Art and Beauty anymore, are we?

Beauty, as was already said parenthetically, isn’t a phantom anyone seems seriously interested in chasing after and capturing lately. I feel I recall it was last a hot topic when the question of whether Lizzo qualifies as “beautiful” was under debate. We could substitute the word “attractive” (or even “fuckable”) for “beautiful” and most of that conversation would remain substantially unchanged.

The Art or not-Art status of Super Mario Bros., Magic: The Gathering, and glitchy YouTube collages assembled from Legend of Zelda CD-i FMVs was never conclusively decided by the public conversation. It didn’t have to be—for the same reason that if Homer, Milton, and Wordsworth were dropped from every university curriculum and their books were pulled from bookstores and digital distribution, the loss would go unnoticed by at least 90 percent of the population. (Old-timers might boo and hiss, but their noises would cease soon enough.) Games and memes have secured for themselves a place in our day-to-day lives. They possess cultural currency. Written poetry does not, except where people who have been trained to appreciate it are concerned.

As a matter of fact, it rather appears as though we’ve taken to heart Roger Ebert’s remarks on the Art-ness of video games, in spite of the snarls and bile with which they were initially received:

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?" Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.

I would venture to say yes, validation was precisely what they required—and they got it. A decade and a half later, nobody can say video games are trivial and without value when about 75 percent of the population are playing them and the industry that produces them is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. (Bigger than the film industry, in fact. Take that, Roger.)

Whether or not a cultural artifact qualifies as Art has become entirely beside the point. It is interesting that the is [popular thing] art? conversations seemed to taper off (at least from my vantage point) for lack of interest right around the same time poptimism was gaining in strength—and I don’t suppose that’s a coincidence. Nor is the fact that we no longer fetishize Art (insofar as we wish to be seen as appreciators of Art as opposed to uncultivated or even puerile players of games or readers of comics), but rather concern ourselves with Media and Content.

The linguistic shift is meaningful insofar as it quietly (maybe even unconsciously) acknowledges…

(1) that most of us are much more often engaged with digital artifacts delivered to us on our personal devices rather than viewing and contemplating physical media or in-person performances. Every culturally relevant medium is materially the same.

(2) that Art is an ideal torn from a social context which no longer exists and is too laden with cultural baggage and class chauvinism to remain palatable at a time when fans of popular spectacle no longer feel as though they must explain and justify themselves. It is finally enough that a popular thing is popular.

(3) that we now consider the privileging of one genre, form, or medium over another (again, yucking somebody else’s yum) to be repulsively elitist—or maybe even some other and even more offensive kind of -ist.

7.

Still: this leaves unanswered the difference between Quality Content and Commodified Slop Content, to which most of the unresolved questions about Good Art and Bad Art (or not-Art) can be conveniently transferred.

What constitutes an edifying and valuable aesthetic experience (or expenditure of screentime) is still totally open to question, and it’s a conversation I feel we’re decreasingly keen on having. I pinched the still from “Skibidi Toilet” up above from a Guardian piece and was totally unsurprised when the author gave the series a thumbs-up. Unless a pop cultural craze openly espouses culturally conservative or reactionary values, the Verified cognoscenti and culturati are typically reluctant to come out disapproving of it.⁷ Back when it seemed possible, even likely, that NFTs might have staying power and durable art-market value, writers for the Guardian, Slate, Vulture, the Atlantic, and other essay mills catering to well-educated liberals were all cheerfully suggesting that the uppity naysayers were misguided and blockchain thingos were actually pretty neat, maybe even game-changing. The Atlantic actually sold NFT art.

Since we’ve agreed that an elitist penchant for the kinds of cultural artifacts which Kant and Adorno endorsed is unbecoming, it very much appears to me as though most of the critics scribbling and chattering under the venerable banners of the Old Media stalwarts and the academy are now more inclined to follow the crowd than to presume to guide it elsewhere or indirectly accuse it of bad taste by criticizing the latest trends—whatever they might be. (Perhaps they wish to be seen as being on the right side of history and are shrewdly hedging their bets.)

Again, this is obviously linked to the poptimism phenomenon—but I don’t believe the relation is a causal one. I’ve got a pair of ideas about this, and I’m going to probe them in a Part Two.

1. The context is worth a small block quote:

When, in the early 2010s, sites like Facebook and YouTube began to morph from simple social networks and user-generated content platforms into genuine competitors of movies, TV, record labels, and news networks, the main problem they had to solve was having stuff people wanted to look at more than traditional media. To solve this problem, each app created its own algorithm, its own set of standards, its own incentives, and its own metrics to determine if users were meeting them successfully. And by the 2020s, not only did they successfully destabilize pop culture, they also offloaded their fear of the content void onto all of us. Now we’re the ones worrying if we’re posting enough. The malls convinced the shoppers to work there for free.

2. The translation of What Is Art? hosted on Project Gutenberg preserves the Guyau excerpts in the original French. I ran them through Google Translate.

3. The museums, the art market, the art schools, the world of fine art criticism, etc., are somewhat in the position of the Catholic Church today: running on ingrained custom, old but durable infrastructure, wealthy believers, and borrowed time.

4. Yes, this one is personal, and I’m still kind of pissy about it.

5. To be honest: I have not seen this one in use for a while, but when it reached me as it swept out the outer orbits of its circulation it made me want to vomit.

6. During the early stages of poptimism, you could expect to hear a variant of it whenever a pop apologist lauded the technical feat of engineering an earworm for heavy radio rotation.

7. This is not a grievance. It is an observation.