Good Artists Copy

In my post on A.I. art, I tried to create a picture in the style of Roy Lichtenstein, which gives me the rare chance to use the sentence,  "Speaking of Roy Lichtenstein..."

If you're not familiar with him, he was a pop artist whose paintings were in the style of comic book art. I've always liked his work, but now I've seen some criticisms off him online. 

See, when I said his works were, "in the style of comic book art," that's only part of the story. In some cases, they were almost directly copied from comics. 

For instance, here's his much-celebrated painting, "Whaam!"

And it was based on this panel by Irv Novick, from "All-American Men of War." in 1962.

Later, comic artist Dave Gibbons (of Watchmen fame) made this spoof.

I suspect that some of this re-evaluation of Lichtenstein is due to the changing place comics take in our society. When that painting was made, I doubt anyone would have cared that it was copied from a comic book. To my knowledge, no one ever complained that Andy Warhol ripped off the anonymous graphic artist who designed the Campbell's Soup can. At the time, that soup can design was probably esteemed as much or more than the comic artist. I wasn't around for it, but I'm assuming that part of the impact of Lichtenstein's work was the audacity of proclaiming a selection from a comic book as art, just as it was with a grocery item. 

But today, it's quite different. It's not a universal feeling, but most people see comic artists as, well, artists. Copying from them doesn't seem like audacious recontextualization, it just seems like stealing from another artist. 

Toe Beans Of The Apocalypse

Recently on Facebook, I saw a cutesy picture of a cartoon kitten carrying some flowers. It was one of those pictures that was so adorable that it transcended even its own cliched nature. So I'm sitting there thinking, aw cute widdle kitty, when something struck me as a little odd about it. The slightly soft-focus CGI looked eerily familiar...

Then I noticed it: the kitten had six toes on its paw!

What, that wasn’t a dramatic revelation for you? Oh, well, if you're not familiar with that implication, A.I.-generated art is becoming a big controversy, and - despite its leaps-and-bounds in recent years - it’s notorious for getting fingers wrong. So this picture was evidently created by one of the new graphics services that can create a picture for you based on a simple text description.

A few years ago, A.I. art programs just made weird nightmare images. But recently, they’ve been making great strides, and can now do convincing pictures of a wide variety of subjects using just about any style you can think of. But they still have their flaws, including their difficulties with hands and fingers.

That’s kind of a good thing; in the midst of the A.I.-pocalypse, this whole extra-fingers thing is kind of exciting, because it's exactly the kind of contrived plot-point they'd throw into a science-fiction story for convenience, which the fans would forever be complaining about. It's like on Star Trek, where Data couldn't use contractions. 

By the way, I used to think Data’s contractions thing was pretty unbelievable, but then I learned that the laws of contractions really are quite cryptic. They’re a lot more complex than people think they’re.

I've experimented with some of the A.I. art generators, and learned some things about them. There’s Midjourney which is quite powerful, but only free for a limited number of uses, and can only be accessed on the Discord social network. 

"Elephant playing basketball" by Midjourney

Then there’s Stable Diffusion, which is free to use, though limited in its functionality. For instance, you can’t refine pictures, you can only ask it to try again. Overall, I found its first attempts were a lot better.

"Elephant playing basketball" by Stable Diffusion

I’d seen some amazing A.I. art on social media, so I enthusiastically tried it out. But I found out that it doesn’t always work. Here’s some of my successes (done with Stable Diffusion.)

"Steampunk motorcycle"

"Chocolate hippo"

"Humanoid nerdy bunny"

"Cow playing hockey style of Pixar"

"George Clooney made of lego"

But a lot of times the results leave a lot to be desired. Here's some of what I've learned:

• They take refinement. Generally the programs work by producing several attempts. The (human) user can then choose one of those pictures to improve upon. And improving on the pictures, slowly getting closer to the desired outcome, is usually necessary. The impressive examples you see are never the first efforts. Those first attempt are usually half-formed nightmares that look like Scotty's first try working the transporter. 
• On the other hand, they're great at styles. I've seen them imitate everything from Monet to Rankin-Bass Christmas specials. Even in instances where the application flubbed the content, it usually got the style right.

"Business man driving convertible style of Roy Lichtenstein" by Midjourney. Nailed the style; content, not so much.

Anyway, the deformed kitten was an example of how A.I. art is making its way into the mainstream, and a lot of people are unhappy. For one thing, it’s taking work from artists; though many of the A.I. art programs require a subscription, it’s still pretty cheap, and it’s easy to imagine a small firm opting for that instead of paying an artist every time they need a picture. Then there's also the use of styles. No one is really upset if ol' Monet is getting ripped off, but it can also be used to copy the style of artists and cartoonists that are working for a living today.

"Elvis style of Gorillaz" by Stable Diffusion

The whole thing is reminiscent of NFT's. On the one hand, you have people who are enthusiastic either because it's an intriguing new technology, or because there's money to be made. So they jump on the new bandwagon. It was weird watching businesses make big announcements about getting into cryptocurrencies or NFT's, only to have howls of protest from customers. The business was then caught unprepared, because they’d spent decades working on the assumption that they had to get into new technologies as fast as possible or be left behind. 

And now it's happening again with A.I. art. Worse, some of the companies that are making the mistake are in the creative industries, and thus supposed to be allies of the artists who are most wary of the new tech. Companies like Adobe and book publisher Tor have had to go into quick damage-control mode.

But there is one way this might work out well: if Big Media starts to protect its intellectual property. For instance, one of the most impressive A.I. pictures I made was "Mickey Mouse in a cafe, painted by Monet." But I’m afraid to put it on this post for fear of getting sued out of existence. That’s one thing that could stop the art-pocalypse in its tracks: some decisive court case, or a strict new law, like how the DMCA was an overreaction to MP3’s. 

Interestingly, using A.I. art for memes, like that kitten, is probably the least controversial use of the technology. It’s not putting anyone out of work. And as I’ve pointed out before, Facebook memes are often hacked-together pop-culture references that completely contradict the creator’s intentions.

So for now, I find the whole thing interesting, but I'm much less enthusiastic, learning that has unpleasant imperfections and implications.

Paintdrop On The Wall

I recently came across a strange news release in my Facebook feed. (Warning: Gen-X age marker ahead!) Massive Attack, the British Trip-Hop group, is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their classic album Mezzanine. No surprise: they’re issuing a re-release of the album. Big surprise: it’s on paint.

No, this isn’t an effect of my first post-pot-legalization post. They had the album encoded into DNA, then mixed that DNA into a spray paint. So it’s not just paint, it’s genetically-engineered paint. I don’t know of any technology to read the information in DNA, at least, DNA on a wall. So it could be ordinary black paint for all we know. Or perhaps it really contains “Never Gonna Give You Up” in a truly epic Rickroll.

Of course, I have plenty of reactions to this. First is a scientific amazement at the storage capacity of DNA. Then there’s the amazement at their initiative in doing something so unusual. But then that leads to the question of whether this is the best use of music-paint possibilities. It’s black paint, and Massive Attack’s music does have a darkness to it, but I’d really rather tell people that my black paint has Goth in it. Others would, I assume, prefer “Back in Black,” “Back to Black,” or either Black Album. But really, among music paints, I’m sure Purple Rain Purple would be the biggest seller. You could also have White Album White, and other colours would be mixtures of:

• Simply Red
• Orange Crush
• Coldplay Yellow
• Reverend Al Green
• Joni Mitchell Blue
• Indigo Girls
• Violet Femmes

Just remember to use Primus Primer.

But putting all this aside, there’s the subtext that Massive Attack member Robert “3D” Del Naja is rumoured to be infamous graffiti artist Banksy. So a big graffiti-related announcement from the group was greeted with snickers and knowing winks. To be fair, Del Naja is an admitted graffiti artist that Banksy has acknowledged as an influence, so Massive Attack spray paint is not necessarily an indication of nefarious culture jamming.

Of course, you could argue that once you’re using expensive gratuitous technology like this, we’ve left true rebellion and anarchism behind. And that’s something people have been asking about Banksy lately. His previous caper was the auto-shredding painting. That seemed like a great statement against the monetization of Banksy’s works that so often misses his point. But afterwards there were some questions about just how unexpected it was. For one thing, Sotheby’s usually puts paintings on an easel to auction them, which would have prevented the shredder from working, yet this one was conveniently on a wall at the side of the room.

I guess you could say that it’s subversive to talk a major auction house into risking its reputation by participating in performance art. Similarly, you could argue that conning people into buying expensive graffiti implements is a great satire of the economics of music memorabilia. Particularly if it turns out to be ordinary black paint. But even if it is real, memorializing electronic music with genetically-engineered vandalism is some quality cyberpunk.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #40 & 41

#40:

Superhero movies are more popular than ever. That's right, Batman made people forget about Superman IV, and it's been all success from there. Except Batman and Robin, you'll want to skip that one.

Anyway, the point is that now it's not just the biggest names that are getting their own movie franchises, even the more niche characters get big budgets.

#41:

You know Bob Ross, the super laid-back artist with a show on PBS? Sadly, he dies in 1995. But he is still well remembered, and is as much a pop-cultural icon as ever.

Anyway, put those two facts together, and, by 2018, this happens and it doesn't even seem weird:

Who Ought To Be In Pictures

What's the deal with these posters featuring Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Humphrey Bogart?  A local diner has several, as they seem to see them as the way to get their 50's vibe on. (That previous sentence involved a collision of the slang from at least three decades, I apologise for it.) I thought maybe it was one artist with a weird fixation, but I've found at least two artists making them.

You can get them playing poker, singing karaoke, even working on an anachronistic stock car. Which is at least less morbid than Dean with the car he died in.  And perhaps most famously, you get get them replacing the original subjects of Edward Hopper's classic Nighthawks.

But I have to wonder, why them?  If you want to evoke the fifties, there are plenty of other choices. Even if you specifically wanted to show bitter-sweet heroes embodying America's lost innocence, you could have used, say, Buddy Holly.  The page I linked to at the start of this post also included a number of suggestions.  I'm guessing that the reason is that descendants of celebrities may have a problem with how they are depicted, and perhaps these four have less legal problems.

I also wonder what people other decades might turn into poster stars.  I need to know for when I go into business with my retro 80's fast food joint.  Michael Jackson is an obvious choice.  Madonna and Prince have probably stayed around too long to represent the era. Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon would work as an 80's symbol, but is probably not well-known enough as an individual. Who else? How about:

• Michael J. Fox
• Boy George
• Corey Haim
• Molly Ringwald
• Cindy Lauper
• Mr. T
• Brooke Shields
• Pee Wee Herman
• Max Headroom

Those are my suggestions. Painters, get to it; I'll be by in a few years to pick up my painting of four of the above playing Trivial Pursuit.

In The Future, Data Will Be Lost For Fifteen Minutes

This news came out yesterday that they’ve recovered a bunch of graphics files from Andy Warhol’s old computer. That may seem weird, since he’s more associated with the sixties. But he did live into the eighties, and used a computer. 

And get this, it was an Amiga. How cool is that?  Well, it's also frustrating, since that means they can't just load it up on Photoshop. It's not going to be in a format that is still used, so some computer students had to get creative to access the images.

This jumped out at me because years ago I read an article warning against this very situation: what if some famous person (in their example, an author) left behind potentially historic works on an obsolete computer system that is no longer used. Are they lost forever?

At the time, I didn't think the concern was warranted. Yes, technologies and file formats may come and go, but it's not like they are completely unique or undocumented. That is, a word processor file for, say, the TRS-80, may no longer be used, but it will be on a standard 5¼" disk, so someone will be able to read it, and with some knowledge of how word processors worked, you would likely be able to translate it into something modern. It won't be easy, but if it's for some important person, they'll be willing to put in the work.

Once again, because I'm living in the future, I can now rule on the accuracy of these concerns. And it looks like I was vindicated. Given sufficient motivation, people were able to make sense of a no-longer-used graphics format. And were rewarded with the surreal moment of loading a file called "campbells.pic".

On Canvas, From Los Angeles

I was just looking through the artwork from a Saturday Night Live art show in L.A.  As with anything that retrospectives the entire SNL history, I'm ready to get angry if they've over-emphasized something I hate (I just know there's going to be too much Mary Catherine Gallagher and not enough Church Lady.)  But in this case, I wasn't left angry, just surprised.  What did I learn?

• There's way less mythologising of the original cast than I expected.  (How could you not do a Samurai Tailor poster?)
• People really loved "Toonces the Driving Cat" and Matt "van down by the river" Foley
• And that one-off sketch where Chris Farley tries out for the Chippendales against Patrick Swayze made a big impact.  
• Stefon is the most popular current character, which is fitting because an art gallery that would have an SNL art show is just the sort of place he'd like.
• Christopher Walken is more popular than most of the cast members.
• Kind of off topic, but where was Father Guido Sarducci during the Papal change?