Well done, and it's nice to see real attention paid to the products of AI. In art history, AI is mainly studied as a social phenomenon tied to visual literacy (and, of course, as a problem in pedagogy). But the images themselves are so far going largely unstudied, perhaps because they seem monstrously kitschy and therefore unrewarding. The closest I know, from the pre-AI period, is Alexis L. Boylan, ed. Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall, and (if I'm remembering correctly) none of the essays in that book engage in close looking, iconography, style, or other sorts of traditional analyses that would be applied to objects of art historical interest.
There's certainly much to think about regarding AI as an extension of the surrealists' randomizing techniques. I don't know why no one has been thinking of them from that angle. I can get AI to reliably produce Max Ernst-style monsters. This should be studied.
I hadn't thought about Kinkade in this context because it seems he was intentionally making his images to be kitschy. But now I'm going to read the Boylan book you mentioned. Regarding Grant Wood specifically, I'm mostly interested in how he used stylization and repeated patterning to put himself at an emotional distance from his subjects, especially in his pictures of generic farm folk and plowed fields. It's almost as if he is intentionally favoring the kitschification of his own work. He's also, despite all he says about the supremacy of regionalism, playing into the desires and needs of the urban audience of critics and gallery owners by giving them prepackaged images of rural America.
This essay made me carefully consider an aspect of art I had never really thought about before: the impossibility of my being able to see kitschified art in the same way as I would have without that pop cultural baggage. Bravo and thank you.
You're quite welcome. It's often hard, but it's worthwhile to peel back the kitsch-layer and think of the images on their own. Sometimes, though, the most interesting thing about an image is how it has become a kitschy symbol. Here's an amusing thing: my eleven-year-old daughter, who knows nothing of art history or theory, absolutely hates Mona Lisa with a burning passion. She says it is "boring." Her favorite paintings are Andy Warhol's soup cans!
Well done, and it's nice to see real attention paid to the products of AI. In art history, AI is mainly studied as a social phenomenon tied to visual literacy (and, of course, as a problem in pedagogy). But the images themselves are so far going largely unstudied, perhaps because they seem monstrously kitschy and therefore unrewarding. The closest I know, from the pre-AI period, is Alexis L. Boylan, ed. Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall, and (if I'm remembering correctly) none of the essays in that book engage in close looking, iconography, style, or other sorts of traditional analyses that would be applied to objects of art historical interest.
Thank you!
There's certainly much to think about regarding AI as an extension of the surrealists' randomizing techniques. I don't know why no one has been thinking of them from that angle. I can get AI to reliably produce Max Ernst-style monsters. This should be studied.
I hadn't thought about Kinkade in this context because it seems he was intentionally making his images to be kitschy. But now I'm going to read the Boylan book you mentioned. Regarding Grant Wood specifically, I'm mostly interested in how he used stylization and repeated patterning to put himself at an emotional distance from his subjects, especially in his pictures of generic farm folk and plowed fields. It's almost as if he is intentionally favoring the kitschification of his own work. He's also, despite all he says about the supremacy of regionalism, playing into the desires and needs of the urban audience of critics and gallery owners by giving them prepackaged images of rural America.
This essay made me carefully consider an aspect of art I had never really thought about before: the impossibility of my being able to see kitschified art in the same way as I would have without that pop cultural baggage. Bravo and thank you.
You're quite welcome. It's often hard, but it's worthwhile to peel back the kitsch-layer and think of the images on their own. Sometimes, though, the most interesting thing about an image is how it has become a kitschy symbol. Here's an amusing thing: my eleven-year-old daughter, who knows nothing of art history or theory, absolutely hates Mona Lisa with a burning passion. She says it is "boring." Her favorite paintings are Andy Warhol's soup cans!