Author: Douglas McLennan

How AI Is Evolving As An Artist

“We have two streams of data: inspiration and aesthetics. The machine explores the space in between them. We’re giving artists more control of the process and pulling back on the autonomy.” The result is an assemblage of fairly trippy prints. Some show a face that’s blurred or swirling. Others look vaguely skeleton-like and macabre.  – Fast Company

When Fan Culture, Troll Culture, Believe They Know Better Than Artists (And Want To Change Art)

Online communities build campaigns around “correcting” what they see as artistic errors. “A depressingly large number of these campaigns are defined by grievances against women and minorities, and by fury at Hollywood for attempting to make long-standing franchises sustainable by amplifying their inclusiveness.”  – The Daily Beast

“Workism” – The Idea That Work Defines Us (And It’s Making Us Miserable)

The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism. – The Atlantic

Reading In The 1940s: Let’s Not Idealize it – But There Are Some Fascinating Lessons About Culture

George Hutchinson’s first chapter, “When Literature Mattered,” summarizes a brief era unlike any other, when Americans of all classes and backgrounds turned hungrily to novels, plays, and poems, provoked by a “need to recapture the meaning of personal experience.” Soldiers who had never picked up a book now read free Armed Services Editions paperbacks—more than a hundred million came off the presses from 1943 to 1947—first for relief from wartime tedium, then because the books offered them new ways to understand their relationships and inner lives. Educated readers, meanwhile, grew impatient with both the collectivist ethos and the formalist aesthetics that had governed intellectual life a few years earlier. Later, after the 1940s ended, literature lost its importance in general culture—it no longer mattered—partly because, as Hutchinson writes, “other media drew leisure-time attention,” but also because it “became increasingly (but not exclusively) a professional specialization supported by universities.” – New York Review of Books