AI writing and drawing

While it's good to have "le mot juste" immediately to hand, I enjoy composing the words myself, even if it takes a little longer to polish. I’d like to be the one other people quote, thank you very kindly.

On the other hand, my drawing skills are at the “Is that an elephant or a race car?” level, and so there’s a strong temptation to (if I could afford it) have AI create the illustrations. I haven't done so – the free versions gave me ugly and irrelevant slop last time I tried them, and I'm disinclined to throw money at it.

I'm a lousy photographer

My wife has a much better eye for composition. She's been trying to teach me the basics.

Beyond the basics: I like this man's take on the profession.

Science and art

Patrick Kurp posted some thoughts on science writing and literature. He quotes Chappell: "Poetry celebrates visual appearance while disciplines like chemistry and particle physics plunge below appearance into a universe often impossible to visualize, a void punctuated by brief pulses and intermittent bleeps of electromagnetic energy. There is, besides, the dread problem of accuracy:"

One could quote Dirac on learning that Oppenheimer wrote poetry:

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say ... something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.

That's probably not being entirely fair to Oppenheimer, though it may depend on which poems Dirac was thinking of. (I don't think my wife would be thrilled to receive such an Epithalamion.)

But in the general case Dirac was wrong, the poetic ideal is to be understood.

"True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind."

True, in the sciences and in math precision is vital—a statement should mean one thing only, while in poetry a phrase can stand for or allude to many things—preferably compactly, memorably, beautifully, and rhythmically. "In size, a node; in swing, more anti."

Dirac was convinced of the importance of beauty in physics, that the clumsy expression of the details of reality could be underpinned by simple and beautiful equations.

The language will be unfamiliar to many, but surely this is also a kind of poetry too.

(And it's better poetry than when we try our hands at more traditional versions.)

AI and copyright

"Human authorship and creativity remain essential in the quest to obtain copyright protection"

The famous work "Notes towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare" is not copyrightable because the macaques were not human. (Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 2: Copyrightabbility (2025) (Part 2) at 7-8)

The work must contain "some degree of originality and cannot be merely the result of time and effort." Randomness isn't really originality, so I guess "Notes" fails on both counts.

And I suppose if the experiment had been "successful," copyright on the original expired long ago.

More seriously, the office's conclusions seem pretty straightforward: AI-generated stuff (pictures or text or music or whatever) isn't copyrightable. A human has to make substantive contributions. Likely we'll require some case law to square away what "substantive" means, and case-by-case reviews are probably in the future--but we have some of that already. Taking an AI-generated image and redoing it, or moving sections around and changing size--that should probably be copyrightable. However, I'm told that making a good picture still requires artistic skill--the AI, for that artist, merely makes gives her the raw materials to organize and modify.

Not alone

From an essay by E.E. Doc Smith, found and posted by J.C. Wright

I have found motivation the hardest part of writing; and several good men have told me that I am not alone. It takes work—plenty of work—to arrange things so that even a really smart man will be forced by circumstances to get into situations that make stories possible. It takes time and thought; and many times it requires extra words and background material whose purpose is not immediately apparent. To refer to an example with which I am thoroughly familiar, what possible motive force would make Kimball Kinnison, an adult, brilliant, and highly valued officer of the Galactic Patrol, go willingly into a hyper-spatial tube which bore all the ear-marks of a trap set specifically for him? I could not throw this particular episode into the circular file, as I have done with so many easier ones, because it is the basis of the grand climax of the final Lensman story, “Children of the Lens.” Nor could I duck the issue or slide around it, since any weakness at that point would have made waste paper of the whole book. Kinnison had to go in. His going in had to be inevitable, with an inevitability apparent to his wife, his children, and—I hope and believe—even to the casual reader.

and

From the first quarter of the broad, general outline, only a few pages long, I made a more detailed outline of “Galactic Patrol;” laying out at the same time a graph of the structure, the progression of events, the alterations of characters, the peaks of emotional intensity and the valleys of characterization and background material. Each peak was a bit higher than the one before, as was each valley floor, until the climax was reached; after which the graph descended abruptly. My graphs are beautiful things. Unfortunately, however, while I can’t seem to work without something of the kind, I have never yet been able to follow one at all closely. My characters get away from me and do exactly as they damn please, which accounts for my laborious method of writing.

Gleam again

We went to Gleam again this year. The "Star Stuff" exhibit needed to be dynamic, and with more lights shining on their metal stars, but the rest were good. The dragonflies glowed with colors as wild as real ones, the illuminated trees were beautiful, and the pond with the fluctuating strings of lights was great. My favorite was "Yield": a "corn maze" of glowing corn stalks, with colors changing in ways that seemed almost seasonal (and bright white flashes to go with the thunder sounds).

The only downsides were my forgetting a cap, and the mandatory word salad on the signage explaining why looking at this exhibit will make you a better person. Why can't an artist just say "I thought this would look pretty"?

There were interactive exhibits too, and foxglove blossoms 14" high, and they made sure the interactive things were kid accessible.

Simple cell-phone cameras do not do it justice--they haven't the dynamic range of the human eye. And anyway, it seems better to just stand and take it in.

Allegheny cemetery

One feature not frequently remarked on is the groundhogs, who leave surprise holes here and there to twist the unwary ankle.

Many of the older stones were eroded by acid rain, and are difficult to make out, but there's a great deal of what is essentially public artwork honoring the memory of people you've never heard of (and some you have). I gather that the Winter mausoleum is the most famous. Winter copied the design of the Woolworth mausoleum: a pseudo-Egyptian temple with busty Greek-style sphynxes and heiroglyphs that mixed real phrases and gibberish, and doors showing the proprietor being aided by de-animal-headed Egyptian gods.

Many of the mausoleums have stained glass within, which you can view through the front door's grating--Winter's has 3 panels. Oddly, even the good Father Pitt/Dr Boli only mentioned one of them--which shows Winter as Pharoah enthroned. Modesty seems not to have been Emil Winter's most prominent virtue.

Yes, the noses of the bronze figures on the door show signs that visitors have been rubbing them, and the snooty sphynxes show similar signs, though not on the nose.

It isn't just rich businessmen who are buried in the cemetery, of course, a friend and confidant "of the illustrious Washington" is also buried there. Daniel O'Niell's statue shows him still at his editor's desk, and the (presumably recopied) stones for Ebenezer Denny and his wife Nany Denny ("Stop, Passenger! and here view whatever is admirable summed up in the character of Mrs. Nancy Denny...") tell of older ways of memorializing.

Many plots had a little walled flower garden above the grave--sometimes a painfully small grave with small numbers on the stone. Once there was a fashion for headstones shaped like scrolls, which, combined with the flower-garden cavity gives the impression of a giant sardine can being opened with a rolling key.

Karl Lennart Gronros from Finland had a stone paid for by his friends so that all would know that the 24-year-old was a mechanical engineer.

It is a bit disconcerting to see so many headstones for people younger than me.

Olympic tempest

Drag queens (those I've seen pictures of) create a caricature of femininity and mock it. The point of mockery is to offend. They were used in the Olympic tableau to mock and offend. So I conclude the the Olympic organizers' non-apology's claims that they regret that people were offended and that it was meant to be "inclusive" are both false. This would remain true whether or not the designers were as innocent of Western art as they imply they were.

MAM

As you can probably could guess from the previous post, we went to the Milwaukee Art Museum yesterday. Other people with you notice different things.

Some pictures tell a story, such as Grutzner's The Catastrophe and Waldmuller's The Interruption.

Others illustrate a story, and need explanation, such as Brocas' The Death of Phocion. I didn't recognize the situation in the picture, had no idea who it was, and had to have the story explained (in the label at the side). We explained the Sacrifice of Isaac to a young woman.

Others do neither, like Jawlensky's Landscape. Sometimes the technical aspects of a modern work showed considerable skill and care, but often they didn't.

Many things, such as much of the glasswork, had no meaning and didn't need it--they were just fun to look at. Which is pretty much what I usually want.

Art that wasn't supposed to be interactive

Exhibit at MMOCA defaced.

Sounds bad--there wasn't anybody keeping an eye on the area in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

In March, a white staff member at the adjacent Overture Center for the Arts aggressively confronted Gee, who is Black, on her way back inside the building after retrieving art supplies from her car because she was entering a door not generally open to the public.

The experience led Gee to halt work on her mural, intended to "give light to Black girls who have been silenced and erased," and display it unfinished, she said.

Gee's interrupted art installation looked like a workspace, with half-finished circular canvasses lying on a white table, a blank mural, paints, brushes and a video in which Gee recites an open letter she read aloud at the exhibit's opening.

A mother and 2 kids came in and did some painting of their own.

They tried to take their little canvasses home with them, but museum staff noticed them and stopped them. There was some unspecified "escalation" but nobody was arrested.

As of Thursday, however, there was no sign instructing visitors not to touch or interact with the piece.

The point of the museum "is to break down barriers for participation in art," said Karin Wolf, the city's arts program administrator. While she stressed she hoped the incident would not create new barriers, Wolf said the museum should only open the area if it has staff to "facilitate" visitors' interactions with the art.

"Artists of color are more likely to be mistaken for not being artists, and to have their work taken less seriously," Wolf said.

"I want to know: How does this change how Madison views MMoCA?" Gee said.

I don't know about Madison, but you can probably guess how I view an art museum that displays skill-free art.

Let's see if I know enough of the lingo: If a political statement identifies as art, why is its purely verbal description privileged over its non-verbal semiotics?

Modern Classical Music

Why is modern classical music so bad?

We've good composers--everybody knows John Williams, and there are plenty of others writing in classical styles, but they generally write for movies or play--and probably ads too. Not for concerts. I've not found much recent concert classical music to be memorable, even when it isn't unpleasant.

A review of The War on Music finds the book's thesis inadequate (postwar suppression of music the Nazi's liked and things they disliked), but its critique accurate:

About one thing, though, he is absolutely right. He writes with derision about the “trinity” of postwar music: the donor (usually the government), the critic (not infrequently an idiot) and the institution (the university that employs the composer, the orchestra that commissions his music). It’s a nice arrangement, Mr. Mauceri remarks, but it “leaves out something quite significant: the audience.”

Wright has a somewhat polemical attempt to understand why recent efforts in books and movies have often been dull. Painting and sculpture have been famously weird for decades, and "performance art" seems to delight in nonsense and chaos. An old joke says that "Modern art is what we got when painters quit painting women and decided they had a better idea."

Francis Schaeffer suspected that the modern world slowly came unmoored from Christianity, from tradition, and finally from reason, with the disconnect starting with the more rarified disciplines (philosophy) and working its way out through the rest of culture.

It's hard to see how to maintain a connection to tradition and roles when you're hooked on novelty. After a while novelty-hunger corrodes everything else: nothing else matters as much.

Hat tip to Maggie's Farm

Chesterton and monuments

I think he would have had choice words for our iconoclasts.

It is not enough for a popular monument to be artistic, like a black charcoal sketch; it must be striking; it must in the highest sense of the word be sensational; it must stand for humanity; it must speak for us to the stars; it must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the longest and blackest catalog has been made of all our crimes and follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed.

Passing time better left unpassed

Our eldest was given a Dr. Who Exploding Tardis jigsaw puzzle. Do I need to say that it is not complete yet? When I went to look up an illustration for the post, I changed my mind about the subject and started to rejoice that it wasn't "The Lines" or a solid color one.

I've heard of an abstract puzzle that included extra peices, of ones that didn't include edge peices--were there double-sided jigsaw puzzles with pictures on both sides? Yes.

I don't start jigsaw puzzles myself, but if one is already out it tends to exert a diabolical fascination...

FWIW, Prado Museum has a collection. If you want to put together the Garden of Earthly Delights...

Art?

Althouse noticed that an acrid description of a "tasting menu" had "gone viral". "'We’ve infused these droplets with meat molecules,' the server explained, and left." Perhaps the fast was in observance of Advent?

Fair is fair; let's hear the other side. The chef replied in a series of images with artwork (sometimes) and text. The text is his defence, which includes "What is art? What is food?" and "Contemporary art does not provide you with answers, but offers you great questions. Contemporary cuisine should do the same. A chef should not offer easy answers, but challenge you with interesting questions." and... "How can we respond? Only with our menu. Because we are better with food than with words." (Assumes facts not in evidence)

The first definition of "art" in the OED is "Skill; its display or application". I'm not seeing how questions or answers fit into that--or the other definitions either.

Surely they didn't look quite like that...

I grew up thinking Greek and Roman statues were mostly plain white, though even back then they knew some had been painted. We now know most of them were painted, and this is a nice collection of examples. But the reconstructions, pretty much one and all, looked like cartoons. Some of those statues have amazing detail and texture--would the sculpter have been satisfied with the flat colors we've tried to slap on? Granted, those flat colors are the color of the residues we found, but I'd bet that at least some of the more realistic statues got additional detailing and shading on top of that base. The author of that peice agrees with me.

John Deandrea does painted sculpture now. I'd bet the Greeks, trying to immortalize (almost literally--e.g. an Olympic winner carved to look like Zeus) their model, would have gone in for all the detail they could.

Of course, over time the detail would fade or erode, and maybe some of them planned for that.

Financing great art

"Gambling saloons supported the great Italian opera houses, from Naples' St. Carlo to Milan's La Scala. These were vast halls of roulette and faro-tables adjoined by the theatres. Rossini, the most famous composer at the time, got 200 ducats a month as musical director of San Carlo, but received 1,000 ducats as his share from the house tables."

Performance

Ann Althouse has a post about Sven Sachsalber's death. I'd never heard of him before (surprise), but one of his oeuveres was "performance art." "In another performance, he ate a species of poisonous mushrooms to experience the particular and unique effect of his vision turning green for two days. And in a performance that became a video work, Sachsalber spent 24 hours in his bedroom with a cow."

I think I can live a contented life without becoming more familiar with his work. I have an almost instinctive aversion to "performance art," but on reflection, the idea doesn't seem entirely crazy.

Lord Byron wrote She walks in beauty, like the night, which is poetic art, but perhaps the lady was an artwork herself. He wrote as though she was. Some of us can write a glorious novel, and some of us seem to live through one.

If you'll excuse the metaphors and stipulate that living is a kind of art, what is the difference between that kind of art and picking through a haystack in a museum looking for a needle? If everyday life can be performed beautifully, are those individual actions, stripped of context, fairly called art?

Maybe my reaction to "performance art" is due to its purpose. The performer isn't kicking the can down the road for the joy of it, or to see which of his buddies can kick it farther. Those are, for want of a better word, "organic" to the performer. But is trying to impress a classmate different in nature from trying to impress an art critic? Perhaps it has to do with the latter being unhindered by any rules.

Maybe I'm wrong, but so far I still think that children kicking cans down the road for fun is a good performance, and an artist doing it for £12,200 is bad art.

Languages and logos

I think they did an interesting job with the logo. I assume there are legal requirements for three languages, and to provide symmetry they add the fourth.

Getting past politics

I read Mark Steyn's tribute to Herbert Kretzmer this evening. (his "songs of the week #391") I'm lousy with names, and I'd no idea how many songs he'd worked on. One was "Hier encore" ==< "Yesterday When I Was Young;" not a translation but an inspired-by; and better than the original.

One sad thought is that I know several people who would love the article, but wouldn't be able to get past his politics on the sidebar.

Maybe there's sampling bias involved, but it seems that this "unable to get past his politics to appreciate his other work" belongs more to the sociopolitical "left."

Not entirely--I am not interested in John Wayne Gacy's poetry, no matter how good it may be (assuming he wrote any). I was curious about Hitler's paintings in a "What if?" way, but I'd be revolted if somebody were trying to market them. And I don't think I could read Marion Zimmer Bradley's work the same way--or perhaps even again.

I can see being unwilling to give money to people who hate you, but the effect extends to cases where there's no cost involved.

One could use a flattering description, and say that the left are more "integrated" and the right more "partitioned", and that an "integrated" life finds evil anywhere unendurable. Or you could try flattering the other direction and say that conservatives are more "just" and willing to give credit where due.

Maybe one could better say that "evil" attitudes and ideas more often have importance equal to evil actions for the "left" than they do for the "right."

Or maybe "the worst believer is better than the best unbeliever."

Looking for meaning in a bit of art

The other night I watched the New York Metropolitan Opera's stream of The Tales of Hoffmann.

I'd heard it before, but being able to see what was going on made a huge difference.

Two of my daughters had discussed what the meaning of what some of the characters was (the opera is somewhat surreal). I had opined that Coppélius, Dr Miracle, and Dapertutto were all Hoffmann's dark side. After seeing the peice, I still think so, but I'm strongly reminded of the rock band who's members were asked what one especially obscure song meant. They admitted that they didn't know--it just sounded good so they went with it.

Your muse isn't always consistent. Sometimes I start in on something, and throw in what sounds good, and at the end there's a nice logic and flow; something I didn't plan. Sometimes not. This includes blog posts, in case you hadn't noticed.

You could claim the opera shows how dangerous a muse is. At the start Hoffmann's muse explains that she wants him devoted to her only, and hang the rest of his relationships. Antonia's muse is the ghost of her mother (from whom she inherited a beautiful voice and a bad ticker), and even Spalanzani serves his muse (in this case a muse of technology) to the point of committing fraud and bringing disaster on himself. The third act doesn't fit the theme well, but who promised us that Offenbach was going to be consistent?

It's another form of "fans proposing complicated theories that make different episodes consistent." (star-dates, anyone?)