In 1916, a trainee doctor befriended a wounded young soldier in a hospital in Nantes. André Breton was working in the neurological ward and reading Freud. Jacques Vaché was a war interpreter, moving across the front between the Allied positions and disrupting where he could; he once collected cast-off uniforms from different armies, including enemy forces, and sewed them together to make his own “neutral” costume. He sent Breton letters describing his “comatose apathy” and indifference to the conflict, though, he wrote, “I object to dying in wartime”.

Weeks after the Armistice, Vaché killed himself in a hotel room. Breton hailed him “the deserter from within” and one of the key inspirations for “The Surrealist Manifesto”, published in Paris in 1924.

This slim volume turned out to be the most influential artistic pronouncement of the century. Breton argued that rational realpolitik had created the catastrophe of the first world war. Championing the irrational, the subconscious, dream states — “pure psychic automatism” — he called for a revolution of the mind: “thought dictated in the absence of all control exercised by reason.”

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  •  jarfil   ( @jarfil@beehaw.org ) 
    1•9 months ago

    AI-generated art has about the depth of the prompt… which is curious by itself, because while it often has less depth, it also sometimes manages to have more depth; it’s up to the artist to choose, a choice that’s another artistic act.

    As for commercially-driven art… let’s not forget Santa CocaCola Claus, or that most classical art portraits were sold as a way to “snap a photo” in an age without photo cameras (and a bunch of now famous artists “cheated” by using a camera obscura). Any kind of art can have the same lasting power as any other, it just depends on the skill and time budget of the artist.

    •  frog 🐸   ( @frog@beehaw.org ) English
      1•9 months ago

      I’ll concede that the very best examples of AI-generated pieces, when given a sufficiently deep prompt by someone who knows what they’re doing, may have more depth than the shallowest examples of traditional art. But it certainly doesn’t have more depth than the most meaningful human-made artworks. And it’s not representative of the typical output of AIs. Human-made art is almost always deeper, because the human has to make conscious choices about every single thing they include. AI doesn’t do that, and most of the time, neither does the prompter.

      And again, the same goes for commercially-driven art. You’ll note in my previous comment I said “a lot of”. There are some that stand out and have genuine lasting power… but the vast majority of it does not. It exists to sell a product, and is forgotten in a year or two.