Things to share this weekend (11/23)

AI turing test, people like kitsch, that Clock movie, bands take up space, honest artists + reading notes

Gauguin’s “Entrance to the Village of Osny”

How did you do on the Art Turing Test? at Astral Codex

• Everyone thought the above painting was AI, and all of the AI impressionist paintings were deemed human-generated

People prefer AI art b/c people prefer bad art by

Max Read

• About the test and article above

• “Like any LLM output, A.I.-generated images are designed to please, not to provoke. I’ve argued before that these images are, by their nature, almost unavoidably kitsch--comforting, straightforward, accessible, flattering. And people love kitsch!”

• Thomas Kinkade has crushed it with this aesthetic (not that he used AI, but slightly appealing knock-off of the greats)

Interview with Dan Campbell from Wonder Years (the band) at Anti-Matter

• I like this thought about taking up space creatively, so make it good:

• But also, I think a lot about our band and the space that we take up. Like, I truly do not believe in music to be a zero-sum game. I think there’s room for a lot of people to succeed in a lot of different lanes. At the same time, I understand that resources are finite, right? So even resources like clubs: If we want to play a city on a certain night, that means that club is occupied and we’re the ones playing it—and that takes up space that other people could have. When I think in terms of making a record, if you’re working with a record label—especially indie labels—they only have so much money to put out records that year. And if they’re dedicating a certain amount of resources to your band, those are resources they can’t use for other bands.

How I grew my Substack at Writing In The Dark

• This one is worth posting in this forum, b/c she’s a literary writer writing about writing

• Good insights for sure

• I came to Substack prepared to work hard, and in the end, it might be the combination of a clear vision, a tenacious work ethic, and a very warm heart that have helped this newsletter grow as it has.

Graphic Novelist Adrian Tomine on Building an Artistic Career at Lit Hub

• All of which is to say I think it’s important for aspiring artists to be honest with themselves and really think about what they’re aiming for. In hindsight I can see that I took a very scattershot approach to my work, often wasting time pursuing something I didn’t want or ignoring the thing I did. If someone wants to simply be an artist, to express themself, to create work that they love, then really the only way they could possibly fail is by not sitting down and doing the work. If someone wants to make a career of it, that’s another story.

---

Notes on reading/watching:

• Finished reading:

  • This House of Grief by Helen Garner

    • Finished right before writing this

    • A true crime story set in Australia, things are different there, their words are slightly different

    • The crime? Did a father intentionally kill his children by driving off an overpass into a dam?

    • Garner is great at little asides and small details, and it moves fast without being salacious, more like a courtroom drama than a true-crime retelling

    • I also liked the small Australian flourishes (they played “footy”)

• Started reading:

  • Health and Safety by Emily Witt

    • Author feels a bit too old to be going out to warehouse clubs in Brooklyn, and also a lot of drug talk, not really sure why I’m reading this, kind of a modern writer’s life I guess

---

• Watching

  • went to that Clock movie at the MoMa and watched it from approximately 1:05pm to 2:35 pm on a rainy Thursday

  • If you don’t know the project, video Christian Marclay found clips of people looking at their watches, looking at clocks or timepieces appearing in scenes and the time in his movie is synced to the real time

  • The clips are more than just the exact time, it hangs with a clip for about 30 seconds give or take

  • I had fun explaining that to my kids

  • I only knew about it because I’m somewhat obsessive about 10:04 by Ben Lerner and he mentions going to see it when it first appeared at MoMa several times in the book

  • The movie was released in 2010, meaning most of the clips are without smartphones and so the clocks you see aren’t mostly digital, that was comforting

  • A lot of the clips are from shows and movies I didn’t recognize, but here’s a partial list of what I did recognize during the timeframe I was there

    • Taking of Pelham 123 (Denzel and Travolta)

    • First Spiderman (with Tobey Maguire)

      • This was good because it’s when he’s trying to deliver a pizza on time, so the Clock movie cuts in and out of him leaving and arriving

    • 2 DeNiro movies

    • An ER ep w/ Noah Wylie

    • Rushmore

    • When Harry met Sally

    • Election w/ Broderick

    • The Sixth Sense

    • Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino?)

    • Robert Redford (the sting)

    • XFiles ep

    • Buffy the vampire ep

    • a few French films

Not sure if I’ll make it back at a different time, but I’m glad I went for awhile. The editing and sound mix was also great, he blended a few together and the cuts naturally fit together.

A masterclass in editing and pastiche and postmodern storytelling.

Ok, keep going—

-Josh Spilker