I think there's a strong consensus that the idea of an "AI art scene" is a misnomer. There's an AI slop scene, and some of the prompters sure do call themselves artists.
Consensus among whom? AI is a tool, that can be used differently and AI art is well-recognized, admired and exhibited the same way as any other art forms.
Is someone selling their impressionist paintings today on a fair more an artist than someone who has put equivalent or more effort in creating prompts, references, final renders, image curation and postprocessing etc? The latter may at least have more audience.
I disagree with this assertion. I don't think it's at all well-recognized, and in fact derided and shunned by the general public.
> Is someone selling their impressionist paintings today on a fair more an artist than someone who has put equivalent or more effort in creating prompts, references, final renders, image curation and postprocessing etc?
Emphatically, yes. Considering the latter is not an artist at all.
Please review the above comments. I have not made a single statement that leads to exluding either of those. My comments did not seek to define art, or the artistic process, only to exclude a specific category of media.
I have instructions to combine style of Brooks, Steven King and Economist Style Guide, while avoiding anything that may put wrong emphasis („genuinely“, „load-bearing“) does not contribute anything meaningful („X rather than Y“). The output is quite good* so far even on Opus 4.7-5, when it concerns product requirements. The key is to identify the pattern and focus on the meaning of the undesirable language.
I've tried controlling it via fine-tuning Claude.md and in-session messages/instructions. It always results in failure and then "Yes, guardrails are already there. I still failed" and it feels like "I am like this. Deal with it". I've even tried languages that avoids negatives e.g. "Don't.." "never.." etc. Nope. Just doesn't work.
Few more tips to make failures more rare:
1. interactive orchestrator just ensures that process is followed and the progress towards North Star objective is steady and with predictable quality.
2. Agents use specific skills which have output gates, one of which is always quality of writing and reasoning. Orchestrator accepts work only if gate criteria are met.
This is going to make work much slower and token consumption higher. ROI from fixed rate subscriptions is still quite good. ROI from volume-based subscriptions needs to be watched carefully.
I‘m seeing this classification for the first time, but it sounds very reasonable and feels like it should have been like that. Is it your idea or is there any story behind it?
We already have the terms "rocky planet" and "gas giant" that pretty much cover it. The only thing missing is an official IAU decision which, well, would have even less effect than the Pluto thing I'm guessing, since it would just be introducing a sub-division in the category.
Many people use it, but it is not something codified formally by an international organization, like in the IAU definitions of "planet" and "dwarf planet".
OOP is not about doing things harder, it‘s about doing them efficiently. The key elements of software engineering are abstraction and encapsulation: we, humans, cannot load the entire domain into our memory and reason about it at all levels of detail at once. We need to zoom in and zoom out, decompose problems into smaller pieces, then reassemble, treating those pieces at surface value. OOP isn‘t rocket science, it just adds one more piece — the hierarchy of concepts with inheritance and polymorphism. And it‘s just a technique: most programs are written in a mix of styles anyway. The foundational style is procedural, because that‘s how computers work. FP and OOP just build on top of it and translate to it.
Attribution should be opt-in, but they already support it. Via CLAUDE.md where you can specify how exactly AI contribution should be documented. Relying on whatever convention your vendor will establish isn‘t a good idea. Vendors are replaced, project conventions stay, so it‘s better to state your expectations in writing, instead of assuming that someone guesses them right and maintains conformance forever.
It‘s „bear service“, and context is slightly different. You do bear service to someone, and Verschlimmbesserung is on something. Both signal intent to do something good, but doing bear service is an act of screwing up while doing that, no prior condition required, and Verschlimmbesserung is the outcome of such attempt applied to something that was ok before.
Not the first time when the Default Country thinks they invented everything. The title is almost comical.
Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe inspired by technological advances, globalization of trade and cultural exchange. Japanese art made huge blast, photography pushed to seek new forms of expression, social progress demanded new messages and new images. We had impressionism, post-impressionism, then the whole explosion of artistic forms and ideas in 1910s-1930s. All of that was Modern Art.
CIA was founded in 1947 and CIA-sponsored soft power projection was a relatively short period in the world history lasting just a few decades, a part of the bigger game played between the USA and the Soviets, which did exactly the same (and thanks to whom we have now e.g. Studio Ghibli).
> But those making the claim are not talking about that
Which is exactly the problem. If you're going to make an argument that depends on analyzing one very specific thing detached from its surrounding context, you have to actually address that context, and justify why you're ignoring it.
The claim that 1950s pop art was deliberately engineered by a CIA conspiracy for geopolitical purposes can't be sustained without explicitly arguing for why it isn't a natural evolution from the existing trends in art and design that were already prevalent at the time.
It's the art of understanding terms have different meanings based on context and use, not one based on some definition handed down by the Gods that's applicable everywhere, that we should not let die out.
Not its about using correct words with specific meanings instead of vague terms that at the end have incorrect claims, even you had to resort to that to get your point across.
'Humans are horrible', oh no I meant only that subset of 3 individuals, you should understand my context... thats weak excuse to be polite.
They arent redefining terms. They are pointing out that "modern art" can refer to "modern art" from the 1890s or it can refer to "modern art" from the 1940s, because both being "modern art".
There is a language comprehension issue in this thread. At no point does the title imply its invention, it does however imply it is about the CIA and it's a huge tell identifying the injection of personal bias into meaning through either lazy reading, internal personal grievances, or a lost in translation misunderstanding.
"modern art" is of larger scope than CIA; thus "CIA" is the stronger relevant subject matter which narrows the secondary subject and should be understood/read as "modern art in the CIA era" or " CIA era modern art". The "era" is derived by applying "CIA" to "modern art".
This is probably where the mis-read/mis-translation happened. Since "era" is not explicit, modern art narrowed to all things within CIA scope could imply the CIA had a department full of alternative lifestyle bohemian spys creating and spreading modern art (not far off though, they commissioned works and funded related entities). A basic knowing of the CIA would dismiss this as absurd.
However, a translation error happening here can turn "modern art created by the CIA" into "modern art invented by the CIA".
Actually some say “modern C++” dates to 19th century Europe. Ada Lovelace provided some of the earliest examples of undefined behavior that C++ programmers still love talking about to this day.
I agree that it is incredibly stupid to call something from 1870 "modern". The word modern has a a clear meaning of "just now" / "contemporary". Not two hundred years ago.
It shouldn't be attached to anything that can age out of this meaning.
The more relevant term is Modernism, which was a wave of anti-realist abstraction in the arts and sciences.
It's more than a century old now.
"Modern art" in the 1950s/60s post-war sense means extreme abstraction with no realism at all.
Ironically abstraction can work in two directions - evocative messes like Pollock, or clean geometry and abstract functionalism in design and architecture.
The CIA liked the former in art because it was bold, challenging, abrasive, and individualistic. And the artists were drunks and addicts who were easy to own.
The other direction became domestic and corporate design.
It is clear, and millions of people have been using it in the way the TFA uses it, just as historians of art has used other definitions.
What it is not is obvious to derive from first principles ("says modern, so much mean current") or stuck to a single definition ("but historians call any art after the middle ages Modern").
But it is still trivial to pick the context in either use, and trivial for someone to read at least 1 paragraph about the "CIA psy-op" claim, whether it's true or not, and figure what it means by modern art there (it doesn't mean Van Gogh or Monet). People just want to comment without bothering.
But I was trying to reach the person who left the parent comment.
And hitting them with a phrasing that is directly poststructuralist seemed to be the wrong approach since they appear to operate in a structuralist framing.
This doesn't change the meaning of the word modern, though. It just uses a different scale. The same way the Moon is "right next to" the Earth.
However, when you tie the word "new" or in this case "modern" to a time period that was over a hundred years ago you are just setting yourself up for failure and have to make do with calling things "after new" or in this case "post modern". But then where will this end?
What was wrong with calling periods proper names like Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic?
> Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe
As someone who is active in the German art scene, the understanding is not that clear-cut. Modern art, as I learned it, is "art in the modern period". So everything after the middle ages. Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles. What started in the 1860s is "modernism".
The term used more often (at least in Germany) is "contemporary art". Which translates to "everything after WW 2". I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.
The 1860s as a starting decade is a popular conventional definition in English, in other languages "modern art" may be defined differently. But you are absolutely right, it makes more sense to call post-WW2 art the contemporary art or just postmodernism, because something that happened long before the birth of the half of the population of the planet isn't really "contemporary".
I think this may be a translation issue, as I would always have understood "modern art" to refer to the movement that began in the 1860s, and (English) Wikipedia appears to back this up. Like others have said, "contemporary art" means art of the current time.
> I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.
My experience is the opposite, I have seen plenty of modern art museums, most famously (probably) the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Some modern art museums also feature contemporary art but nevertheless their main focus and brand is modern art (eg, the Tate Modern).
No, Modern or Modernist art (with a capital m) is a specific period of art history. So yes it doesn’t tend to have museums but there are shows dedicated to Modern art.
Contemporary art always refers to art from the specific period the speaker is living in, ie our present moment.
>Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles.
We drew vastly more art. The kind you describe was just more likely to be preserved as the institutions they were on about and the buildings they resided in persisted.
Surely people created a lot more art, but you're eliding the dynamic of professionalism. Art is ludicrously labor-intensive and so the vast majority of professional art (i.e. most art worth saving) would have been done for rich people.
I am indeed eliding the dynamic of professionalism. I don't think it has to be "ludicrously" labour intensive and I think "professional art" is overvalued and an absolute minority of all art ever created.
It just so happens that a lot of the modern/contemporary art talked about is mostly the domain of professional art (and examples that say otherwise are often not even thought of as such like hippy tie dye clothing.)
> So everything after the middle ages. Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles. What started in the 1860s is "modernism".
Ok, but you are reinforcing parent's point (which I agree with TBH).
I've never been there, but the German Wikipedia says it houses "modern and contemporary art". I'd assume that in their vast collection, you might even find stuff that's older than the 1860s.
According to my understanding on the usage of "contemporary art", this is a "time relative term", meaning it describes usually "what was usually/common around a given time/period"?
I think it a reference to "default city" from the russian internet, when people noticed that people from Moscow never specify the city when talking about topics which would normally require knowledge of which city are they residents of
Eventually it evolved, sometimes people say "hey, I'm from DC" or "hey, I live in DC2" (that means the second largest city, Saint-Petersburg)
I think you might be reacting to the title only. The claim in the article is better phrased as “the Modern art was psy-op-ed by the US govt, especially through CIA”. They didn’t invent it, they may not even liked it personally. The very same artists making these paintings were not too far from being left leaning and sympathizing with regimes and ideas US government fought against. Nevertheless, it was still worth it, the sponsorship was seen as a counter to the Soviet art and culture. If anything a least as a “look you can even create these crazy paint splatters in a free society and nobody sends you to gulag” kind of angle.
Jain. If you leave only the facts, it becomes a bit boring, because everyone did that and continues doing so via various institutions. But the article pitches with the title and first paragraph a different story. And I doubt that e.g. Picasso was aware of the battle for his mind.
Reduction of modern art to abstract expressionism is the same as reduction of cinema to MCU. Acceptable for a talk over couple beers, disqualifying factor for pretend-to-be intellectuals, mainly because it is cherry-picking based on the scale of a scandal rather than genuine interest in the history of art.
No, those are not the same. You might say it's like reducing superhero movies to "superhero movies made in the last 20 years", which actually most people do, and it's mostly understandable. Maybe those people wouldn't have what you'd call a "genuine interest in the superhero genre" but who cares? They weren't trying to demonstrate that, and what they were saying didn't require it.
Most of the significant works of modern art were created before CIA was founded. The title is factually incorrect and intellectually dishonest. But "who cares" question points to something different: indeed, who cares if the knowledge acquired by the reader will be shallow and misleading? I do care. You may not. It's a matter of attitude. People are free to choose their chewing gum, right?
Yes, perhaps you're right. I think people think of "banana nailed to wall" as the outcome of modern art, and that I think is more recent. But there are works older than the CIA that look younger than it, such as Kandinski, and perhaps that is indeed misleading.
Not really absurd. That scene nearly dominated the art scene in the post war / cold war period, and for layman casual uses (and even for several critic treatments), it was almost synonymous with modern fine art in general (not "modernist" art, modern, as in contemporary).
The only thing where "American" art scene dominated was the auction space. And significant part of it was imported from Europe (no tariffs applied) and continued to feed from there later. The rest of the world lived it's own life.
It's not just about the "American art scene". Western European artists in the same "genre" also got funded in similar ways.
>The rest of the world lived it's own life.
Perhaps, but this is not about what happened in Mongolian or Indonesian art scenes, but mostly focused on the cold war theater of US and Western Europe.
First of all, what "genre"? I assume, abstract expressionism?
Second, why would anyone fund specifically abstract expressionism and for what purpose given the diversity of art movements of that time?
Third, what do you even know about contemporary art of Europe to make such bold claims?
Yes, abstract expressionism, but also other mostly US-led scenes like pop art to a degree.
>Second, why would anyone fund specifically abstract expressionism and for what purpose given the diversity of art movements of that time?
It had a US lead at the time, easier to explain US institutions promoting and do cross-continent exchanges and sponsorships, and conveniently apolitical compared to other art movements of the time.
>Third, what do you even know about contemporary art of Europe to make such bold claims?
Quite a lot, being from here, and familiar with both their history and the relevant literature.
A hardly a bold claim at all, it has been studied and reported in books such as "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters" (The New Press), "How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War" (University of Chicago Press), "Pollock and After: The Critical Debate" (Harper Collins) and others, and of course the topic of TFA.
So, on the question about your knowledge of European contemporary art you reply with the list of books about American art history, written and published in USA for American reader. Ok.
We're discussing the role of CIA, an American organization, in the Cold War era promotion of abstract expressionism ("modern art"). The books cover that, and have references to both the US and European side, artists and institutions.
The first book, which is also the canonical one on the subject, is not "written and published in USA for American reader". It's a book by a British historian, first published in the late 90s in Britain, then republished in the US (and all over Europe, there's German, French, Spanish etc versions).
The second book explicitly concerns the transition of power in the art scene and the interplay between Europe and the US in the same cold war period.
The third is broken in different essays, including one explicitly on "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War", and how it was used internationally.
All three are academic books, not some fringe conspiracy theories.
And these books, and others, have been translated, read, and discussed in Europe. I've read them, and hundred more on European 20th century art, which is besides the point, as most of the others are off topic, we're not discussing say Dada or Cubism or Arte Povera here, but something specific.
Anything to contribute besides being ad-hominem, wrong, and rude?
'modern' is such an omnibus of a term. I was recently looking at Jasper John's American Flag and it hit me that the stars are weird---because it is from 1955 so before Hawaii and Alaska, and so it has 48 stars in even rows. It was amusing to realize that this epitomy of modern art is quite ancient :)
'Mid 20th century' is when the explosion of mass media happened, and these concepts were globalized.
It's worth studying for sure, and frankly, it seems the CIA came to a reasonable conclusion. The backed art for literally the right reasons. Good on them.
Both Hitler and Stalin only respected/allowed representational art. They both hated abstract art. Any promotion of non-representational art was in effect a rejection of Stalin (and Mao and Kim).
Socialist Realism was the name for the representational art promoted by Stalin, Mao & Kim. It was always a propaganda piece.
Smells like „product engineering“. So a product or an engineering lead gets a task to reduce risks of specific abuse by preventing someone from sending email from yahoo or web.de clone. As a quick solution they add this filter without „overthinking“ it. The impact is low, a few customers in a million, so its stupidity gets unnoticed and, once first complaint reaches them, quietly deprioritized to death. Removing it is cheap: the justification for taking that work is likely the show stopper. Google is an old large corp that hires and fires at a scale. Owning removal of abuse filter to increase revenue by Planck-sized amount is an impossible thing.
Chip makers may be fully booked now and have extra revenue because of AI, but that also creates deferred demand elsewhere. The prices will not fall immediately because of the crash of a single company. The scarcity has probably negative impact on the economy in general, so stock market should recover after that quickly or at least stay near a healthy valuation level.
when market sees huge storm of un-bought devices, prices will drop, companies waiting on the line will also drop their contracts because they don't want to buy chips with pre-crash prices and renegotiate their prices
Yes. Those on the demand side will benefit from it. And that‘s the whole point. It is much healthier situation economically than current, very distorted market.
That‘s Dutch, and the same sentence mentions Netherlands. Equivalent of LLC exists everywhere, but business insurance still makes sense if you want to stay in business after paying damages.
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