Items of Interest, Creative Elitism Edition
"Intentionally mediocre art isn’t useful to human beings."
Isaac Simpson, AI and the Return of Creative Elitism. “The rise of AI presents an opportunity to escape from the Longhouse. It heralds the fall of the snowflake and the return of creative elitism. Intentionally mediocre art isn’t useful to human beings, which is why we call it ‘content.’ It hypnotizes us, placates us, but it does nothing to stimulate or inspire. Put another way: the fact that a machine made a Drake song doesn’t show that the machine has a rich inner life. It shows that Drake doesn’t.”
Carlos Dengler, A Farewell to Armbands. “I didn’t want to admit it, but NME’s coverage of my look, though obviously sensationalistic, was nevertheless apposite: I needed to be real with myself. Indeed, why was I doing it? Of all the dark looks I could’ve chosen, why did I pick a version so influenced by Nazi style?”
Max Borders, The Constitution Is Dead. We’re Giving Away $20,000 to Create a New One. “[If] people treat our foundation of law as an object of reverence, then our social operating system can work. But if enough people are willing to treat that foundation as an obstruction to be overcome—whether those in power or partisans locked in the conflict machine—then we have reached a critical mass of dead souls. And we need to separate from them.”
, Museum Reparations. “For years the campaign was to get African art into Western museums (and out of ethnographic collections) so that it would be considered on the same level as fine art from other parts of the globe. But now, in less than a generation, there has been a shift to demand this art be moved out of those museums again.”Samuel Biagetti, The Story of O. “[T]here are several important points of commonality linking the woke landscape of today with cults of the late Cold War period. These include the obsession with one’s own internal psychology, to the point of elevating it to the central theater of struggle; the striving for an unattainable perfection of the self, fueling endless rounds of confession and self-criticism; and the rapid proliferation of jargon, code words, and obscure acronyms, which both separate the initiates from outsiders and keep the adherents perpetually off balance and confused.”1
, Sacrificed on the Altar of “Racial Equity”. “Simply put, KCCD knows that they don’t need a winning case to triumph. College school boards only need to lay siege to dissenters until their children go hungry. The district can rely on its taxpayer-funded war chest to grind on us until we can no longer finance a resistance to even the most ridiculous charges.”2Nick Gillespie, Peter Bagge: From Adam Smith to Punk to Grunge. “Born in 1957, Peter has been drawing professionally for over 40 years and contributing to Reason for the entirety of the 21st century. I talk with him about Adam Smith, material and moral progress, and what it's like to be an ardent libertarian in a creative space dominated by liberals and left-wingers.”
Rob Jenkins, Paying the Price for Campus Closures. “Adding 18 years (the average age at which young people start college) to 2008 takes us to 2026. That’s when enrollment was expected to drop precipitously due largely to demographics—namely, not as many high school graduates. By their irrational, unscientific, panicked response [to Covid], colleges and universities only succeeded in speeding up that decline by five years.”
Aaron Kheriaty, The Censorship Hegemon Must Be Stopped. “Prior government censorship cases typically involved a state actor unconstitutionally meddling with one publisher, one author, one or two books, a single article. But as we intend to prove in court, the federal government has censored hundreds of thousands of Americans, violating the law on tens of millions of occasions in the last several years.”
Out now: The Light of No Other Hour by
.Out now: Noguchi and Greece, Greece and Noguchi.
Closing soon: “John Walker: New Work” at Alexandre through June 23.
RIP Astrud Gilberto.
RIP Françoise Gilot.
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During the week of June 26 we will begin the Asynchonous Studio Book Club reading of Anne Truitt’s Yield. Obtain your copy soon.
This essay links the current woke workplace to cult scams of the recent past and reduces it to a scheme to extract capital from disadvantaged workers. Go forth and read.
Garrett, a tenured professor at Bakersfield College, has been the target of a dishonest campaign by its administration to fire him for questioning the school’s DEI initiatives. His case has been taken up by FIRE, FAIR, PEN America, and the National Association of Scholars, as well as his union, but costs mount. He has a GiveSendGo fund.