Beauty and content
The Electrician from the "photography competition" link below (keep reading for the context)
Welcome back and a happy belated Thanksgiving. I took the last iteration off due to not only the holiday, but also preparation for travel on both work and vacation. As I was considering what to write about for this newsletter, I've been thinking about the role of beauty and its interaction with the muddling of it by "AI" image-generation. I have a few thoughts to share, some pieces to place in conversation with each other, and probably, some questions.
To set the stage, I've been reading Makoto Fujimura's Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life slowly over the last month or so (I haven't yet finished the book, so this is not a review), and among many points that he makes is the idea of "beauty as food for the soul." While sitting in my work meetings this past week, I suddenly had a real craving for beauty, the same way someone would for a hamburger or milkshake. We were on the 19th floor of a building overlooking the San Francisco city line, and as I stared out the window, it became apparent which of the buildings had been conceived with beauty as a feature, and which were built more in the name of utility. Since the curtains were then drawn across the window, I spent more than a few minutes of my breaks revisiting some of my favorite poetry in order to satisfy my craving for beauty.
Anyway, in the book Fujimura makes the same sort of analogy of beauty to food, specifically the difference between a hearty meal and convenience (fast) food, saying:
… when feeding our souls we dare not substitute surface attraction—that which is effortlessly appreciated and soon exhausted of virtue—for true beauty. Instead we need to cultivate an appetite for the best soul food, whole and unprocessed, requiring time to absorb and digest. (pg 50)
While not necessarily the entire focus of the book, this, I think, makes an interesting point relating to debates about machine-generated images. One one hand, I don't think anyone can argue that machine-created images like these are unprocessed, and an argument can also be make that these are too "effortlessly appreciated" and have no virtue in themselves to speak of, and therefore cannot be classified as true beauty. On the other hand, an argument can be made (one that I don't necessarily agree with, but it can be made) that these generators are but tools in the hands of an artist, the same way a brush is a tool, and therefore the real artistry still lies in the human skill, and true beauty can be generated by these tools. I fall much closer to the former opinion, and I'm happy to see some of the recent controversy about using these tools for photography competitions and fine-arts competitions is raising this, at least a little bit. Ben Sixsmith makes a short case that AI will not satisfy, but I'm still left wanting a more theological and philosophical case.
What do you think about AI-generated works? Do you think they are, or could ever contain real "beauty"? Will they be works to which people can turn to feed their soul, or will that forever be relegated to non-mechanical creators? Where do you turn for thinking about these things, and what helps you frame and lead a conversation about them? What works of beauty feed your soul? I'm keenly interested in your thoughts.
As far as the conceptual opposite of beauty goes (besides ugliness), I think the word "content" fits the category. Om Malik writes about this, and the mind shift that takes place in The Problem with Content:
You can tell a lot about a person and how they think about their work based on whether or not they use “content” to describe what they do. A photographer who says that he is creating “content” for his YouTube channel is nothing more than a marketer churning out fodder to fill the proverbial Internet airwaves with marketing noise.
"Content" is not the word I'd place next to "Beauty", in fact for me thinking of a work as "content" precludes its ability to be considered as partaking in beauty. The call at the end hits the crux of the matter:
But words matter, and we can choose which ones we use to talk about what we produce and the things we admire and cherish.
I think I'll choose to use beautiful words for beauty.
That's it for this fortnight, take care.