On AI and Fash Aesthetics

People just get uglier, and I have no sense of time

Laura Jedeed (who’s great, read her) had a Twitter question about generative AI and why Trump and his fellow fascists love it so much. A smart guy wrote something about “the historical parallels between fascism, unreality, and technology” that was pretty good, but having done the conservatives-and-art thing a few times myself over the years I thought I’d have a stab.

I think it goes back to American conservatives’ hatred of “abstract art” in the late 20th Century. (Well, in a sense it goes back a bit before — that whole “Entartete Kunst” thing in Germany, which I expect got more sympathy from American conservatives than even the Nazis’ anti-Semitism.)

I’m old enough to have seen it, people giving the whole “my two-year-old could do that” line seriously. (Those weisenheimers were the Greek-statue-avatar RETVRN kids of their day.) A lot of it was a felt thing, what the kids today would describe as vibes-based. I know there were a few serious critics fighting against the waves of modernism back then, though I can’t name any. (They lost good and hard, which may be why they remain obscure. Or maybe I’m just ignorant. Even Hilton Kramer liked Picasso, right?) But a show of disgust at any non-figurative art became a conservative signal, or more to the point a populist signal. Harry Truman made a lot of snotty remarks about it to show folks he was reg’lar.

Part of it was just the natural contrariness of the left-behind, like what your moldy-fig buddies on Facebook say about Music Kids Like These Days. No doubt some of it was affection for the old forms and a feeling that the new thing was not just new but a replacement. It was not mainly an artistic judgment but an emotional reaction. Among these folks, I think, it may have been something like what reactionary old men think about young women — not just at the present moment, but at any time since women began to have some autonomy and make decisions about their self-presentation that didn’t necessarily take men’s feelings into account. It was about the world passing them by.

If we want to get a little deeper, it may also have been about what they thought to be the purpose of art. We smart-alecks tend to dismiss the aesthetics of conservatives, particularly less-educated ones (of the sort who swell the MAGA ranks), as childish and limited. But the Old Masters and even magazine illustrators had, and still have, something for everybody, including nobs and snobs. We can still enjoy them but, like all followers of passé trends, we must accept that the world is just not with us, and enjoy them on our own terms.

That was more painful for some among the left-behind than others. Because it wasn’t just the existence of homey figurative art that mattered — it was its ubiquity. It was the vision of themselves, and the world they thought they lived in, that they could count on seeing, wherever they walked, reflected back at them from the canvases and pages and screens as they passed — not this new cracked-mirror thing.

That was gone, and it was the greater loss. Because for them the art was supposed to make their fantasies — from Biblical miracles to flattering portraits – seem real. And the new stuff was instead making the mundane fantastic.

That was a long time ago, and nobody has that exact argument anymore — I can almost guarantee that the RETVRN dudes’ entertainment and decorating choices are no more exalted than any other surly incels’. But I don’t think the pain of the split was forgotten. Sometimes I imagine I see it in the difference between the tomatometer and popcornmeter ratings at Rotten Tomatoes. But where I really think I see it is in all those bizarre pumped-and-oiled pictures of Trump, and the other, newer MAGA fantasies, that are now being generated by AI.

Partly they like it because gen AI can create the kind of effects it takes real artists some time to manage — it’s a shittier version, of course, but it does supply the rippling biceps, the massive crowds, and above all the detailing these cheapjack epic visions require. Where once an old-fashioned idea of verisimilitude was the Mark of Quality for art, now it’s how many pores and hairs and distinct trees or mountain ridges or other objects you can get in a small space. They just pile on those details. It’s like it’s the brute force of the rendering engine, rather than anything you could call artistic vision, is the new idea of craftsmanship.

And if there’s anything fascists appreciate, it’s the inappropriate and ostentatious use of power.

It’s instructive to look at the difference between these AI pics and hyperrealistic art. They’re both very detailed but, unlike e.g. Chuck Close, AI doesn’t make you re-examine reality — rather, it is made-to-order to inflate your fantasies.

AI is “realer than real” — that is, bullshit that has been declared real, very like Trump’s long, stupid stories that are obvious lies but (like AI) crammed with so many details they qualify as “true.” It’s the visual art equivalent of the more-is-more philosophy of Trump Tower. It’s almost as if our horrible era summoned it. And the punchline is, they can’t see that all they’ve done — in art as in everything else — is make reality that much uglier.