Maybe I'm missing some sarcasm here, but it would be worth asking what the consequences of this situation are for the people who actually make all the music/books/films you get to consume for a "comically small amount of money".
I think it's interesting that practically every time this point is made (and it is made so very often), the examples that are used to prove the point are objective and easy to measure. A 100m sprint time or a calculation of Pi is not the same as a work of art, because they can be measured objectively while art cannot. There is no equivalent in art-making to running a 100m sprint. The evaluation of a 100m sprint is not subjective, does not require judgement, does not depend on taste, context, history, and all the other many things the reputation and impact of a work of art depends on.
As ever, the standard defence of LLM and all gen AI tech rests on this reduction of complex subjectivity to something close to objectivity: the picture looks like other pictures, therefore it is a good picture. The sentence looks plausibly like other sentences, therefore it is a good sentence. That this argument is so pervasive tells me only that the audience for 'creative work' is already so inundated with depthless trash, that they can no longer tell the difference between painting and powerlifting.
It is not the artists who are primarily at risk here, but the audience for their work. Artists will continue to disappear for the same reason they always have: because their prospective audience does not understand them.
There is at least three major art markets: 1) pretty pictures to fill in a void (empty walls, dress up an article...), 2) prestige purchases for those trying to fill that void in their imposter syndrome, and 3) fellow artists who are really philosophers working beyond language. The whole reason art is evaluated with vague notions like taste, context, history and so on is because the work of artists left their audience's understanding several generations ago, but they still need to make a living, so these proxies are used so the general public does not feel left out. Serious art is leading edge philosophy operating in a medium beyond language, and for what it's worth AI will never be there, just like the majority of people.
There’s an even deeper issue, not just for art, for all things.
The majority of artists, and of all other groups, are in fact mediocre with mediocre virtues, so enough incentives would turn most of them into Whatever shillers like the post describes.
So a non expert cannot easily determine, even if they do stumble upon “Serious art” by happenstance, whether it’s just another empty scheme or indeed someting more serious.
Maybe if they spend several hours puzzling over the artist’s background, incentives, network, claims, past works, etc… they can be 99% sure. But almost nobody likes any particular piece of work that much upon first glance, to put in that much effort.
The example might be bad but the argument still stands. Painting hasn't disappeared when photography was invented. Drummers still drum after the invention of drum machines.
Music is actually a terrific counterexample to your point. It perfectly demonstrates the culturally and artistically destructive power of the steady march of progress in computer technology -- which really has led to fewer drummers.
Far fewer people make their living as musicians than did even thirty years ago, and being a musician is no longer a viable middle-class career. Jaron Lanier, who has written on this, has argued that it's the direct result of the advent of the internet, music piracy, and streaming -- two of which originally were expected or promised to provide more opportunities for artists, not take them away.
So there really are far fewer drummers, and fewer, worse opportunities for those who remain, than there were within the living memory of even most HN users, not because some specific musical technology advanced but because technological advancement provided an easier, cheaper alternative to human labor.
what's your basis for this claim? please provide some data showing number of drummers over time, or at least musicians, over the last fifty years or so. I tried searching and couldn't find anything but you're so confident, I'm sure you have a source you could link
I’m one of those statistics. But I still play. It’s fun to imagine myself with a full time studio career but instead I’m a database startup founder. (I got into databases by building a web crawler to recommend how musicians could promote themselves on mp3 blogs.)
How many musicians or artists are finding their need to explore similarly met by opportunities that simply didn’t exist in 2002? If art is expression than we should expect the people who might have wielded a brush or guitar to be building software instead.
If this is you, I recommend Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. It’s as pure an expression of the way I like to work in music, as it is aligned with how I think about code and product design.
>How many musicians or artists are finding their need to explore similarly met by opportunities that simply didn’t exist in 2002?
Given the current job market: very few. They didn't become SWE founders, they were thrown into dead end jobs as a means to survive. At best, maybe they became music teachers to try and keep the spark alive.
The survivor's bias is pretty strong here.
>If art is expression than we should expect the people who might have wielded a brush or guitar to be building software instead.
everyone expresses differently. Too bad that not all expressions lead to a career that sustains oneself. If you really believe AI will take over programmming, what's the next frontier after building software?
Secondly, most software is product, not art. Most people aren't going to feel like they are expressing anything as they pump out CRUD widgets. That's just modern day pencil pushing.
I know the writings of Jaron on this and I think he is mostly wrong.
What he is comparing was a brief time in history that the music industry was at the absolute peak.
We have just gone back to normal that most people can't make money being a musician just like being an actor is not really a viable middle class career option.
Sure, when I graduated high school you could have just made a living in a local rock band because everyone wanted to be in a band to be the next Guns n Roses.
To me, it is like how even Hitler wanted to be a painter because everyone wanted to be a painter at that time. The way everyone wanted to be a rock star when i was a teenager.
Times change and the collective artistic taste change with them. So many musicians are doing better than ever before because of youtube too.
I play the baroque lute and I can tell you that it is much tougher to get a gig in a bar today than it was in 1650 in France.
The best lutenist though are killing it on youtube with Bach videos.
> What he is comparing was a brief time in history that the music industry was at the absolute peak.
Could you provide data defending this claim? Without it, and even with it, all I see in your comment is that you're begging the question or shrugging your shoulders at the data and saying, "so what," not actually or substantively disagreeing with anything Lanier has said or written.
What caused the decline? You seem very sure you know the answer, and yet your answer basically seems to be to stop asking the question or investigating: "music was at its peak, so obviously it declined." If music was at some absolute peak, why was that? "It was at its peak" isn't an answer. It's a restatement of the question.
And can you show me that there were fewer musicians per capita, making less money in adjusted terms, twenty or thirty years earlier?
And do you have any data showing that more than a tiny, miniscule fraction of musicians are doing "better than ever before" thanks specifically to YouTube? "So many" is slippery and frustratingly difficult to quantify in a manner that lets me evaluate its accuracy.
>We have just gone back to normal that most people can't make money being a musician just like being an actor is not really a viable middle class career option.
And we want to normalize that? We can also go back to the times were 8 YO's worked in teh mines and humans worked 7 days a week for 12+ hours.
>The way everyone wanted to be a rock star when i was a teenager.
Everyone wanted to be an astronaut growing up at one point too. That trend faded... but it turns out astronauts can get a living wage. Or at least, I sure hope so.
To the extent this argument holds, it then fails for something like writing code, as well as any visual art style when works are created on a computer if their original aesthetic derived from the material-world limitations of tools and materials under which it arose: no human skill, no countless hours of labor has gone in to producing digital works in styles or colors where their perceived beauty was rooted to the rarity of seeing, ever in one’s life, something like the shade of blue derived from lapis lazuli. Now? Any child with a screen can produce it.
Why would anyone care what, say, Charles Babbage was trying to do, when he didn't actually do it in any sort of useful way? Surely this is largely how knowledge is produced—over time, with lots of false starts, and language and technique that is not yet adequate to the problem at hand.
> Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?
I think there is a very serious argument going on here. The nub of it is in this paragraph:
> I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pedagogical path to the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby interferes with one’s experience of the essential. I don’t believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from what’s wrong to what’s right. Artistic experience always consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of process.
Adorno is basically saying that the distortion of the experience of listening to music inevitably caused by dressing it up for mass broadcast results in a dilution of what is 'essential' in that music – roughly speaking, the capacity for revelation. The attempt to make the music more 'accessible', usually by cloaking it in cliché (what he calls here "the whole Salzburg phantasmagoria"), divests it of the potential to be revelatory. It actively lessens the chance of experiencing one of the "qualitative leaps" of understanding he's looking for in music—something beyond words, beyond discourse; an experience of the sublime, of something both absolutely beyond us and yet, afterwards, constitutive of us. Something that cannot be learned (no "pedagogical path"), but which can be known. It's obviously a high bar to set (almost insane, certainly irrational, to most people today) but it's worth engaging with, I think.
I think you're right that Adorno would despise most YouTube musicians. After all, there is hardly a better example of the fetishisation of technique, equipment, and process (not to mention the unquestioning habituation to cliché) than what you'll find on the average YouTuber's channel. (I say this as a regular watcher of many YouTube guitarists, some of whom I really like.) The idea, totally general on such channels, that you can follow existing patterns and paths to mastery (where the satisfaction comes from memetic reproduction of the already known) is obviously antithetical to the view of art and revelation outlined above.
Finally, I don't think there's anything conservative about Adorno's argument here. He is ultimately arguing against holding up what already exists (the Western classical tradition, in this case) as a fixed symbol of greatness, ready to bestow its gifts of historical authority and sophistication on anyone intelligent enough to encounter it. Adorno is saying the greatness of a work cannot be divorced from the nature of both its presentation and the audience's engagement with it. It is a sometimes subtle but I think fundamental difference of perspective to the conservative view of 'the canon'.
They don't have everything when it comes to tech or more niche material, but Kenny's (https://www.kennys.ie/) is very good and offers free (and often fast) shipping.
That also looks like a good alternative for the EU and some other countries, with delivery at €1 per book. (Just not the USA, which is €9.50 for some reason.)
The same Nobel prize that was given to Peter Handke in 2019? I like Handke's work an awful lot, as I do Tokarczuk's, but he's certainly not someone who furthers any "progressive-left agenda".
It's not a CMS thing, it's a Chrome thing.[1] It highlights the text in the URI fragment when you click through to the page, and also auto-scrolls to that text.
It appears that Google Search has started to add those text fragments onto URLs in search results. Is there a setting or a browser extension that allows me to get rid of them?
Or you can just stream the movies with less friction more options and a wider catalogue. People thought netflix would en being the spotify of movies. They were wrong, so now watch a robust pirate scene to re-flourish.
As a counterweight to the other opinions here, I'll just say that I think these chairs, particularly when grouped together, are immensely beautiful. I understand they are not intended as chairs one sits in for eight hours a day, but as lightweight, easy-to-make occasional furniture. There are other examples of Judd's furniture, mostly the desks[1] and tables[2], that are more 'practical' in the traditional sense, and which could even be described as approachable and warm.
I actually made a copy of his library bed[3] out of plywood last year, and intend to make some of these chairs (and maybe one of the desks) when I have some time this summer. I believe this is what the furniture was intended for: easy DIY replication, minimum of fuss with the maximum aesthetic impact. Easy to understand if one is familiar with Judd's work as an artist/sculptor, which is obviously the biggest influence on his furniture. You could also look to Gerrit Rietveld, Enzo Mari, and Shaker furniture as background for Judd's designs. I'd recommend reading his 1993 essay "It's Hard To Find A Good Lamp" [4] and seeking out a PDF of his (very rare) 'Furniture Retrospective' book[5], which places this work in its proper context. As he says in that essay, "Conventions are not worth reacting to one way or another."
As an aside, it is frustrating to read (over and over again) that one could only like this work, and work like it, out of some cooler-than-thou pretence. This is a very common bad faith response to art and design that does not (and does not seek to) conform to traditional expectations. As someone whose tastes run very much in a modernist direction, I find the assertion that "since it's so ugly, it must be avant-garde so I'll pretend to like it" ungenerous and shallow. Is it that difficult to accept that there are other ways of looking at the world, other traditions and other intentions? I'm not saying it's all good (when was it ever?), but the assumption of bad faith in those who respond to it is wrong.
'Dialectic of Enlightenment' might be a good place to start when it comes to thinking about thinking. If you want something a bit more fragmented/playful/debatable, then 'Minima Moralia' would be interesting. 'The Culture Industry' is well worth reading too.
