No real personal skill involved . Nice key selections though. Haptic skills too.
I think Skip's nailed it here.
What's troubling to those of us who have labored to create stuff that is interesting, artistic etc, is probably the ease with which AI can crank out ideas and turn them into something that, unfortunately for me and Skip, can be objectively really smart and thought provoking and sometimes just really good. But it ain't as good as this:
I like it because first of all I know Skip did it and I like to think of his brain getting weird and thinking through how he's going to make this. I gotta think there is some kind of layering, but to me that's just Skip Magic. I like it because when I try and do an underwater fist-sized boulder with watercolors that suggest progressive changes in depth alls i will get is something smudging towards black or brown. Plus the paper wrinkles into its papery version of cellulite. So there is some technical excellence that is, frankly, stunning and that probably took years to get remotely close to what he has up here. I like it because at some point the water layering vanishes and makes me think the fish on the top right is going up into the sky. You and I know those are fish on a breeding run, maybe there's a second meaning to them, maybe they are oozing death and blood. And maybe at the time Skip painted this there was stuff going on that was beautiful and horrible that inspired him to do this one that he channeled into an idea that combines death, sex, water, stone and blood, maybe sky too. There are small imperfections here and there that make wonder if they were or were not intentional, so it has a human element, then again, like every single watercolor ever, it has bled, so there is pain and fallibility in it, this ain't Vermeer precise..... and Some of those imperfections might be in Skip's mind the way the water layered and reflected color but in my mind might be a ghost of a tree or a logjam or a stump either in the water or reflecting an overhanging branch above. I like the idea he framed his piece cutting right through the heart of one of his fish, was it intentional? I like that there is no answer to that question and I am not even sure I want to know what the answer is from Skip, in case it's super mundane. Then again I like thinking that Skip had an answer for that question when he painted it, but now the answer is different, or that the reason for the framing is perhaps now different to how Skip views the effect of the framing. I like that his version of this piece and what it means to him may have changed over time. I like that Skip put this up like laying out the best card hand you could ever have as if to say "this, you ingrates, is M-fucking art" because I am in 100% agreement with him and that his ballsy hand cleans house and wins the internet..... I like thinking about Skip having done
this painting and his crazy beard and the things he had to quit and his giant garden and masses of vegetables and maybe him painting this with just some crazy eclectic music in the background in perhaps some greenhouse that also is humid and smells of amazingly rich potting soil and like wet clay pots or old vinyl or some well worn boots or something.
So yeah, AI might give someone who has never had an artistic tendency a taste of how fun that can be, which is frankly really cool. But, when I look at Jim's fish pics from page one, alls I am thinking is, "this looks like AI generated content of what a fish would look under a boat in gin clear water with a fisherman above."
And then I look again and think... fuck AI is so lazy, the same stupid log keeps coming up in the same dumb angle with goddamn milfoil all around it like we somehow want milfoil in
art:
There's no pain, there's no suffering (ok maybe the insult of milfoil and the same log IS paining me), there's no second or third or fourth meaning. there's no context, motive, there's no humor, there's no sense of what kind of smell was in the studio where it was created. Alternatively maybe it smells like a server farm. Or a crypto wallet. So part of me feels kinda ripped off, it's like the diet coke of art. Appealing to some.
One of the things I've become more interested in, in terms of art, isn't writing fiction anymore, it's sculpture. So far AI can't do much there....I think I'm safe for now
Here's some claybabies/concretions worked into a 4-foot long version of a fossil fish...Hopefully one of you all thinks kinda like I did about Skip's art, something that gives some second story, maybe something along the lines of "Man, I hope Boot found some studs in his wall to hang what looks like 50 lbs worth of rock cos if that fucker falls on someone, someone's getting hurt...." That, to me, would be a win....
