Guess which planet /
I know some favor Prada but I like shopping at the dollar store /
Tonight I marvel at the treasures of European painting at the Met. Literally makes me dizzy /
I can't live without beauty, everything else I can pretty much live without.
I marvel at the treasures of European painting at the Met.
The astonishing beauty of art.
I've been missing European painting at The Met so much it almost hurt. Now I'm reminded why.
2100 years old Roman Wall paintings from Pompei, below.
New York City is my teacher on the human condition, you can't really study it at school /
And of course art, art and museums and galleries are an enormous part of New York City and that's why although it's a total and utter shithole it's still worth it.
MoMA the museum of modern art has turned into a citadel of Polit Think /
MoMA the museum of modern art has turned into a citadel of Polit Think.
Wait a minute, I recognize this thought police landscape, wherever you turn it's the same directed thoughts.
I grew up during communism and dictatorship, I could recognize totalitarian think from a mile away.
Systematic algorithmic suppression of free speech. Systematic algorithmic dehumanization of society. Automatic algorithmic monopolization and synchronization of thought. The Fourth Reich /
Systematic algorithmic suppression of free speech.
Systematic algorithmic dehumanization of society.
Automatic algorithmic monopolization and synchronization of thought.
I call this the Fourth Reich.
Nothing to do with Germany of course but the dehumanization of society through corporate speech. Corporations are not people and do not have the inherent kindness of human beings. Their speech left unchecked via algorithmic proliferation creates the environment where human beings become less than the sum of their parts.
The Fourth Reich - the proliferation of social media videos where tech bras finger point at homeless people. A disgrace for the human race. /
The proliferation of social media videos where tech bras finger point at homeless people. A disgrace for the human race.
I know exactly what I'm talking about because I spent 10 years in Silicon Valley and still worship the brains that operate and create in silicon valley.
Why these perfect smart human beings have become the Fourth Reich?
The only reason for this in my opinion is the isolationist nature of the California car culture. If you are in the car and only interface with its interior rather than human beings you become a creature who sees the world through the windshield.
Take a fucking walk.
Every time I see a tech bra point a finger at a homeless person, I'm like they've become so attached to the algorithm that they can't see the forest for the trees. Glutton for a GPU.
And I'm reminded why poverty is rampant in Oakland and East Palo Alto. Because the tech bras don't want to face their humanity and mortality. So they point to it and giggle.
I call this the Fourth Reich.
Heart of the city /
Asteroid, baby II, and why art is beautiful /
Why is this canister with charcoal beautiful? It's just a metal thing with a bunch of rocks in it, right?
Well, it's because of what's behind the picture.
For only those who know though. We know that a bunch of really smart people at NASA had this crazy idea, and then some of them sat down and engineered a really difficult spacecraft, devised procedures, machined elements, and tested and tested again. Then they had to launch it into space and make sure that it got to some faraway place in space and execute a series of absurdly crazy series of steps to scoop a sample from an asteroid. Get back, crash to Earth but stay intact for them to collect what's inside. This is as insane engineering as it gets. Now when you look at this object you already know all of these things otherwise this object is not going to be meaningful to you.
Imagine that it is the same with art.
Perhaps not everything but most of the great art is a product of a series of great decisions that started when the artist was probably five. Maybe there is a lot of art out there that is just not to our taste or we don't understand well which is totally perfectly fine. A work of art is a product that is often judged against the entire body of work of the artist, this is the reason why we have what we call collectors of art. It is just difficult to know what you're looking at unless you know the processes involved, the materials, a bit of history of art, the artists themselves, and many many other things. You have to understand the materials on a fundamental level. You have to understand why oil paint is beautiful and what is a successful use of materials. You have to be competent in the kind of message the artist sends. Because no artwork appears in a vacuum. There's a lot of motivation behind work.
You have to be versed in art to understand it or to create it. You have to be versed in engineering to engineer.
I miss the time when the internet was cyberspace, it was a frontier now controlled by a monopoly /
Visa probably knows me better than I know myself, thinking the thousands of bits of data they collected about me over the years, they probably know how often I brush my teeth and worse /
They know when I sneeze or have a headache cuz I'm directly at the store buying something. I wonder if they have a vault somewhere where they watch carefully and clapp and giggle whenever they get a card chirp. Or they would go “oh she's one size up underwear”, or “stop the cheese”, or I can't believe you just ate your weekly groceries.
I guarantee you if it is just a JPG it's not art - for the same reason if you divide your pocket change by zero it's not gonna make fifty trillion dollars /
The AI art tech bros /
One of the biggest problems with the tech bros is that they've never actually seen a work of art in person. Even if they've seen it they never understood it cuz it requires an investment. Art's kind of arcane so you need a lot of time on your hands to get to know it, and it's not a profitable hobby.
It's like if you have only seen a picture of a laptop on the internet would you know how to operate it? You got to get your hands on it and put some time in. You wouldn’t even know which side is up.
It amazes me that all the AI tech bras think that they're making art simply because they do some adult coloring book type of exercise. They have no clue how difficult it is to move color-reflecting molecules on a canvas and make it not look like an ass. Cuz they've seen pour paintings on youtube and pencil sketches on Instagram.
Not only it is difficult to make it look like something other than an ass, but to get people to keep it around for 500 years is like a fucking miracle.
Don't forget that the tech bras were into the monkey JPEGs. But it is a very very rare JPEG!
People often confuse the JPEG of a monkey with an actual monkey, like if you download it it’ll jump out of the screen and start scratching its balls. It's not the same, brah.
Hey Tech Bro I don't need 50 engineers to Photoshop Mona Lisa /
Tech Bros wanna be creative so they sweat and tears AI cause they wanna show how easy it is to shit on the sweat and tears of artists and smear fluorescent paint all over their round bellies /
Tech Bros wanna be creative so they sweat and tears AI so they can one click Photoshop famous art and feel like great artists and slap each other and go like, see, it's easy. I will allow you this little pleasure.
The ugliest pieces of shit I've seen in my entire life /
https://twitter.com/ARTiV3RSE/status/1748519975659151597
Only a dumb tech bro could think that this is in any way outstanding. I wouldn't even put it the bathroom of a gypsy disco. I'm kind of glad that tech bros don't understand art, they think that art is some colored areas. Art is beating yourself up everyday about the emotional things that eat you up and that keep you up at night. But none of the tech bros ever took any meaningful paths in fine art or music to understand that art is not about perfection but art is about profound flaws, and art is the artist and has nothing to do with coloring pixels. For the same reason you cannot design and build a Tesla overnight, you cannot make an art piece overnight by clicking a few times on the keyboard.
For the same reason that all of the tech bros will be forgotten and all the great art will live forever or for as long as humanity exists. And they can absolutely do nothing to change that fact. Because art pieces that carry on for a few hundred years are very very difficult to make and you have to put on sweat and tears for years. But hey you can indulge the eyes of the other tech bro idiots sitting on their toilets in between sucking each other's souls.
I'm really glad that all the tech bros are not skilled enough to put the abominations they create in the physical world, and their extasms will only last a few seconds, unlike the hundreds of years of the art that they so poorly Photoshop.