Art and artlessness

Accessing a spoof movie trailer someone made using procedurally generated voice technology

There is a great deal of conceptual confusion around the terms we use to describe the world around us. Art, like culture, is a verb and not a noun. It is a relationship between objects, not an object.

Culture is not a book or a movie or a song or a dish, but a relation between any two of them. Although more precisely it is a relationship between any two people, and these objects we confuse for the thing-itself are just layers of abstraction between said people. Opera is not “a culture”, but two people watching an opera together, is.

So to, an opera is not "an art". But there is art inside it.

The very idea that art, the concept of “high art”, is a category unto itself, separate from other skilled labor, is literally a cia weapomized emperors new clothes psyop to launder money, by trading worthless piece of painted canvasses.

Much like the democratisation of politics have not produced a higher politics, and the democratisation of other tools have not produced “higher” outcomes, the new tools at our disposal today, to create funny jokes, do not produce funnier jokes, and it does not even produce them faster or more efficient.

The subject of this text is a spoof of a movie trailer I saw on the internet yesterday, produced with new so-called “ai” voice generation technology. It is a spoof of the upcoming “oppenheimer” movie, but presented as an 80’s movie trailer, set to the “gangnam style” music of meme fame, changed to “oppenheimer style”, and the whole thing rewritten to sound like a movie from a different era.

By lowering the barrier to access of creating something like this, you only lower all of it, make it artless. The barrier to access was the reason these things spoke to us in the first place: the work and skill and effort put into the expression, is the point of it. the expression itself is meaningless. Remove labor and you are left with nothing.

This is not some mere call to value someone’s effort out of pity. It is a claim that the effort was always the point, and the outcome was always secondary. And I intend to prove this by showing that now that we can mass produce the “outcome” with little to no effort, everything is miserable and no one likes anything.

It a confusion of signifier and signified. The reason these things, pictures, movies, music - or making a funny voice, parodying someone - resonate with us in the first place, is not because of the signifier - "doing a voice" - but the signified, which is effort, skill, or, "directed Will". When we see something we recognize as skilful, it thrills us because it reflects a self - a soul, a being. Which we recognise through the Hegelian mutual self recognition of recognizing the Other-as-self by recognizing the self in the recognizing, etc, and it provides a basic psychological existential relief, through an experience of meaning, purpose. As opposed to our baseline solipsistic terror at the random chaos of the natural world.

By removing the barrier to access to creating a “parody” with technology that replaces "being able to edit video" and "being able to do funny voices", this is not going to cause an explosion in "good content", art that makes us feel good and inspired and uplifted and connected to the world -soul and each other. It is going to cause an explosion in bad art that misses the forest for the trees, makes you feel isolated, anxious, and makes your brain itch. "Content" is not called "art" for a reason.

We dont enjoy a ironic parody for its accuracy to the thing parodied, "look how close the voice sounds alike!", this is a means to an end. We enjoy it because it is a reflection of the ironist, who we experience a social connection with, through a mutually shared - reflected - experience, and we admire him for his skillful, precise expression, that opens the path of connection between us. Most people are utterly incapable of any higher communication, and when we meet someone who is, we triangulate each others position in the darkness of pure being, by measuring us, respectively, to a common, shared point.

What these things are becoming, is a parody of Parody. But a meta parody is not fun. Its very, very sad. That’s just how the math works out.

This Oppenheimer trailer is not a parody of the movie, but a parody of parodies. Its reference points are all outside itself, the jokes are all jokes about the internet, not about the movie. And despite the technology that now allows you to generate an "“80’s trailer voice guy” that sounds just like the real one, the whole thing just leaves you like any other mass produced internet media content: you just stare at it drowsily, and only engage with it on a conceptual level. It doesnt overwhelm your senses and provoke a physical response, you have the exact same physical response to it, as you would have reading a text description, a tweet with the words “okay what if it was oppenheimer style”.

You might say, bah, you curmudgeon, its in its infancy and new tools no one has had time to master - who are you to say there wont be a master of these new tools in the future, who makes great things with them?

And to that I say, I am a guy who recognizes that the tools are explicitly designed to prevent this. They are designed to make you dumb, lazy and anxious. And I am a guy who recognizes patterns. And all of this has happened before.

All of this excessive detail does not make our art better, it only makes it shallower. Just like spending 500 million dollars on “CGI” to produce a big mishmash of people running at each other in purple space at the end of every movie have not made movies more engaging or inspiring or fulfilling, so too will this not make our internet fart jokes any funnier.

Nothing

In our efforts for ever more detail, higher definition, to replicate reality and create "immersion", we tragically reproduce exactly Nature as we experience it in our daily lives: Indifferent, overwhelming in it’s complexity, chaotic, and meaningless.

The attempt to generate meaningful pictures through ever higher definition is a Greek tragedy: The human eye does not produce photo realism. It produces impressionism.

Realism and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race.

Something