But there is also something soul-crushing about it. People spend decades learning a craft and then see an A.I. make something in a few seconds or minutes that other people see as comparable to their own work.
And it will be widely misused: to create ripoffs of copyrighted works without giving credit, to generate billions of pages of low-quality content in order to game search engines, to make hyper-personalized spam and commit phishing and fraud, to mislead the public with misinformation and customized persuasion and outrage bait, and to create even more intense social media and video addiction.

Then, there are the longer-term consequences of this kind of technology, which are hard to predict but may be truly catastrophic (even according to some of the leaders who run these very companies).

Humanity sometimes creeps along cautiously – as with the development of new medicines, where we (arguable) allow millions to die based on the fear of releasing something unsafe (which is, to a meaningful extent, a legitimate fear – getting the tradeoffs right is hard). And in the case of nuclear power, where regulation impedes its development due to (mostly) ungrounded fears.

Yet with A.I., humanity plunges forward into the abyss at full speed, with no breaks, with the train conductors announcing to the passengers that we can’t predict where the trains are going, that this all may end up a disaster, perhaps cataclysm, as they shovel exponentially more coal into their white-hot furnaces.

This piece was first written on April 11, 2024, and first appeared on my website on April 16, 2024.

More specifically, I suspect that art is created mainly for four reasons:

1) Urge: many artists seem to have a compulsion to create (sometimes, to create oddly specific things). They make art to satisfy this urge. In this category, I would also include art that is mainly motivated by helping the artist achieve the flow state that they are seeking, as well as art that is made to help the artist process their own experiences. For instance, “The Race Track” is a 35-inch painting that Pinkham Ryder spent literal years working on, “building up layers of paint, resin, and varnish…He used unorthodox materials such as candle wax and bitumen. In his urgency, he wouldn’t wait for each layer to dry and was often painting into wet varnish or brushing fast-drying paint into slow-drying paint” (the Washington Post reports). He painted it in response to an experience he had: a friend told him he planned to bet $500 on a horse and then died by suicide when the horse lost. This kind of work is the artist making something for themself, or because they feel like they can’t NOT make it. Sometimes, art created out of compulsion appeals to art lovers, but sometimes, it only appeals to the artist themself. 

2) Beauty: people love Monet for the stunning beauty of his paintings (often landscapes). If there is a deeper meaning beyond “I’ve captured something of great beauty and done so in a beautiful way,” I can’t figure out what that thing is. More often than not, I think that the sort of art that regular people and art lovers (as opposed to art collectors) buy for themselves is simply what they find beautiful or what they find that creates a pleasing vibe.

3) Emotion: lots of art aims less at beauty and more at stirring emotions or provoking interesting thoughts. Examples include the Fountain by Duchamp (a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt”) or the Treachery of Images by Magritte (a painting of a pipe with the French phrase, “This is not a pipe” written beneath it). This can be the deepest form of art, but it is often hard to distinguish it from bullshit: the line between deep and bullshit is a thin one. But even if you think works like The Fountain and The Treachery of Images suck, it’s hard to deny that they at least provoke thought (though this cannot necessarily be said for the endless derivatives that now exist that riff on these themes). I would also put political art, as well as art that just aims to amuse, in this category of art that is about generating emotion or producing thoughts in the viewer. Another more specific example of art that appears to be about emotion rather than beauty is Artemisia Gentilesch’s painting Judith Slaying Holofernes (which depicts the assassination of a general by the Israelite heroine Judith). Even if you find the painting heinous, it’s hard not to feel something when you look at it. Note I had originally used Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son as an example here, but as Gwern pointed out, that was actually an example of painting done out of obsession, not for stirring emotions in others. Much of this kind of art is aimed at producing visceral emotions rather than intellectual thoughts. Art that evokes emotion is sometimes beautiful, but often it is ugly, shocking, or confusing. 

4) Playing Status Games: Art is a way for people to show off that they are in the know about what’s cool, that they have sophisticated and refined taste, and that they have lots of money. For instance, a member of the Saudi royal family purchased a Da Vinci painting (Salvator Mundi) for $450 million. As another example, Bored Ape #4580 (an NFT linked to an image of an ape wearing 3D glasses) sold for $1.9 million. Obviously, these were not purchased due to the great emotion or beauty evoked by these images. People buy these things because they want you to believe something about them (or, in some cases, less cynically but more pathetically because they are trying to convince themselves that they are cool). Collecting artworks is especially well-suited to status signaling because it better enables claims of connoisseurship and sophistication compared to buying, say, a yacht or private jet. Like everyone, artists want to make money, and some will lean into the social signaling aspects of art rather than creating art that they feel the need to create or rather than trying to make something deep or beautiful.

But, considering just these four motivations for making art, how do they work against each other?

Well, since most of the money in art comes from very wealthy people who are trying to signal status (to others, but also, sometimes to themselves), this warps the art market (especially what gets attention). For instance, it appears to have a really negative influence on what is shown in some galleries and museums (showing art that is about what it signals about the owner and viewer rather than art that is about the artist, beauty, or the emotion it creates in the viewer). 

I suspect that most people who go to museums and galleries want a combination of (1) learning about the interesting minds and lives of the artists, (2) seeing things of great beauty, and (3) seeing things that move them or make them think. 

Unfortunately, more often than is ideal, they see a lot of status signaling (sometimes it’s of the form “look how one-of-a-kind this is,” “sometimes it’s “look how expensive this is,” “and sometimes it’s “look how incomprehensible this is; if you were more sophisticated, maybe you’d understand”).

Most artists who toil away at making whatever they feel the urge to create, or whatever they find beautiful, or whatever they think will make people feel and think, are typically not going to make works that are effective at status signaling. So there is a subworld of artists producing works for wealthy people to use to signal status, and this stuff gets way overrepresented in museums, galleries, and the media relative to its value as art (as opposed to its monetary value in terms of what people will pay for it).

If what you want is beauty on your walls, you can simply get an inexpensive print or replica of your favorite works of all time. But people who play the art game would rather spend a lot of money on something unattractive than spend a small amount of money on something far more beautiful. In fact, ugliness makes something BETTER status signaling because lots of people can appreciate something beautiful, but only those most in the know (with the most evolved and sophisticated taste) can appreciate something that is shit. 

Sometimes literally. Piero Manzoni filled 90 tin cans with his own excrement. Christie’s auctioned off tin number 51 for $161,000 (unfortunately, the artist had already passed away, so I don’t think he got to experience his shit being worth more than gold).

So if you suspect that a lot of art that gets famous is bad, you’re honestly probably right, but that’s mainly because a certain kind of bad is good status signaling, and this crowds out attention from work that is more beautiful and more thought-provoking.

Thanks to Hunter Muir, Barry Galef, and Gwern for their comments, which were especially valuable in helping me improve this essay.

This piece was first written on November 11, 2023, and first appeared on this site on December 16, 2023.

1. Narratives Serve Power – powerful groups do tend to have a substantial influence on narratives, beliefs, and what’s “normal.” Something “obvious” or “objective” or “a fact” may just (invisibly) be a part of the narrative you’re immersed in and subtly be serving those in power.

2. Categories Bleed – just about any dichotomy or grouping will be leaky and imperfect (e.g., male/female, straight/gay). Some won’t fit any categorization, and there’s a subjective choice of where to draw boundaries. Yet we often treat categories as reality, forgetting their arbitrariness.

3. Intersectionality Can Matter – being perceived to be part of two categories can cause different treatment/perceptions than the sum of the effects of each category alone (i.e., there is non-linearity). A Chinese woman’s experience isn’t just Chinese experience + female experience.

4. Truth Is Elusive – many assumptions are baked into our interpretations. The truth is incredibly complex; epistemic modesty is warranted. Many have attempted to (or claimed to) use “science,” “objectivity,” or “rationality” yet have come to conclusions that were incorrect and harmful.

5. Values Differ – it’s very hard to argue in a principled way that one set of common intrinsic values is superior to another. For instance, if one culture values honesty and loyalty more than other values, and another values freedom and happiness instead, who’s to say one of those cultures is “right”?

6. Word Choice Can Have Consequences – for instance, suppose person P takes action X, and person Q dies. It matters if society calls that action “murder,” “manslaughter,” or “an accident.” Beyond legal questions, it matters socially (for the victim’s family and the perpetrator).

7. Universals are Rare – people claim to find universals (in economies, societies, individual psychology), yet almost none of them stand up to scrutiny as being actually universal. Truth turns out to be contextual with lots of variation. Even our theories of physics get supplanted.

8. Normal Is Not Better – what’s “normal” is often considered superior, and yet normal in one place and time may be weird in another. Much of human behavior is trying to fit in/be normal/be in fashion, which can help you to be liked, but normal is in flux and is not inherently better.

9. Art Is Arbitrary – stories tend to be linear and to follow the hero’s journey, architecture has a certain look based on location, and paintings in one era tend to be in a similar style to each other. But stories, art, etc., can still be compelling when fragmented, non-linear, convention-violating, or subversive. A much broader range of things can produce the effects of art than the limited array we usually see created.

10. Our Qualia are Unique – it is genuinely extremely hard to know what it’s like to be another person or to have had their experiences. We tend to overestimate our ability to relate. Those who have had an experience often do have unique information critical for understanding it.

11. The Oppressed Should Be Helped – some people continue to be oppressed, and those who are should obviously be helped. It’s important to remind ourselves of this oppression and try to stop it.

12. Context Often Matters – knowing who was saying something, what point in history they were saying it, who the audience was, the history of people saying similar things, and so on, can substantially change the meaning of what was said.

13. Some Things Are Said Without Being Said – meaning can be implied without saying something directly (e.g., through dog whistles, euphemisms, and by hinting at something). Even the omission of an idea that one would expect to have been said can imply a meaning.

The elements I listed above related to postmodernism are those that I find most helpful or useful. On the other hand, while I’m far from an expert on the topic, my perspective is that a number of aspects of postmodernist thought are quite unhelpful or mistaken.

Here is what I most dislike about the postmodern way of thinking (and related ways of thinking, like through the lens of critical theory):

1. It can ignore genuine progress made towards truth and a better society.

2. It can assume that word usage/language choices are more powerful than they are.

3. It can deny useful categories.

4. It can be self-undermining (if you apply its critiques to itself).

5. It’s not (I think) that effective at changing the problems it points out (since its proposed solutions to these problems seem, in my opinion, unlikely to achieve their own aims).

6. It can overemphasize the importance of certain problems over other equally or more important ones.

7. It uses obscure language/complex sentence structure that makes it confusing or even impenetrable.

8. It can be overly cynical about society and human nature.

9. It can seem to be in denial that many valuable things were discovered using reason, rational thinking, science, etc., and some of these have greatly improved people’s lives.

10. It can view society through too much of a zero-sum lens, not sufficiently acknowledging the importance of the many opportunities for positive-sum interactions.

11. It can overemphasize the value of information gained from the personal experience of individuals relative to aggregate information and scientific evidence.

12. It can treat large groups as monoliths, as though there really is an “X” perspective (for some large group, X).

13. It sometimes uses non-standard definitions for common words in a way that leads people to draw confused conclusions (assuming the conclusion applies to the common-sense meaning when it only applies to the non-standard one).

14. It can sometimes come across as idealizing those who are oppressed, creating weird incentives for some people to emphasize (or, in extreme cases, exaggerate) the oppression they experience in order to gain social points, or it can even create competition over who is more oppressed.

15. It can act as though feelings are facts, and that person A being upset by person B’s actions or words implies that A was wronged by B.

16. It doesn’t do a good job of summarizing itself, meaning that it can take a large time investment to begin to have a sense of what it even is.

17. It can fall into moral relativism and so runs the risk of being too reluctant to condemn harmful cultural practices of some societies (e.g., a practice of sometimes killing people for having premarital sex).

Overall, while I think that postmodern thinking contains some important ideas, I also believe that reliance on it tends to make things more confused rather than less and that many of its proposed methods and solutions don’t stand up well to scrutiny.

This piece was first written on March 29, 2021, and first appeared on this site on July 2, 2023.

Within the limits of my ability to model my own preferences, I think my ideal fine art museum would be what I’m going to call “The Museum of Questioned Quality.” I suspect lots of people would find this museum concept distasteful, to say the least. So before describing what the museum is, I’ll explain why the idea is appealing to me and what the idea sprouts from.

The Museum of Questioned Quality is premised on a few observations:

Observation 1: the visual experience we have when looking at a very well-made replica of a piece of art is indistinguishable from the visual experience we have when looking at the real thing. The only substantial difference is a psychological one (our beliefs, whether true or not, about the history of a set of atoms compared to other atoms that look the same to us).

Clearly, we human beings are not defined by our exact configuration of atoms, as our atom configurations are constantly changing, and moreover, as we age, many (perhaps most?) of the atoms that we consist of will be replaced. So we are patterns, not exact atom configurations.

By analogy between what we consist of and what art consists of: if we think of an artist as someone who invents a pattern, rather than someone who sticks together a particular clump of atoms, then the distinction between an original piece of art and its replica fades. The artist is the original cause of both – they create patterns rather than only clumping atoms together.

Plenty of people won’t perceive a piece of art to be as meaningful if it looks indistinguishable from the original without BEING the original. I would ask them to consider why.

Observation 2: by only showing original (rather than replica) works of art, museums end up showing people way less high-“quality” art.

Is it worth sacrificing the quality of visual experience for the “originalness of atoms”? Very much so, many people seem to implicitly assume. But if museums were willing to show replicas, their budget would no longer limit the quality of the work they show. 

Observation 3: there isn’t an agreed-upon definition of quality. We can reasonably construct multiple definitions of quality and debate what quality means. A curator’s notion of “quality” will not be the same as what your own notion of quality is, and neither will it be the same as an artist’s notion of quality, etc. Quality is to be questioned and debated, not assumed or determined by an authority figure’s proclamation.

Observation 4: by keeping almost all of their art locked away in their storage facilities, typical museums have only a tiny fraction of their value accessible to the public. Is this inescapable? I don’t think it is.

How the Museum of Questioned Quality works:

(1) As a precursor to constructing the museum, a huge survey is conducted of four types of people that have different relationships to art (from all over the world):

• artists (defined as people who have been making art on a continual basis for at least five years)

• collectors (defined as people who own at least 30 works of art that are originals, which must have been created by at least ten different artists)

• experts (defined as non-artists who work in the art world full-time, including academics, art critics, curators, etc.)

• enthusiasts (defined as people who say they really like art but who don’t fit any of the other categories)

Each such person is asked to list what they think the 20 “best” works of art of all time are (specified by finding them in an online search interface of hundreds of thousands of well-known works, indexed and searchable by the name of the work, the name of the artist, the category, the year it was made, etc.). They would also be asked to attempt to explain each answer given in a few sentences. All types of art are fair game, including painting, sculpture, pottery, installation, etc., so long as producing a physical replication of it is possible.

(2) The survey results are used to find those works of art listed most often, and five sets of winning pieces are created. Each set of winners corresponds to one of the five wings of the museum.

The largest wing of the museum, which is housed at the center, is the “Quality” wing. It houses the 100 overall winners when each of the four groups (not each voter) is weighted equally. That is, it has the pieces of art most often listed as being among the greatest works by artists, collectors, experts, and enthusiasts.

The other four wings, “Quality According to Artists,” “Quality According to Collectors,” “Quality according to Experts,” and “Quality according to enthusiasts,” each house those 50 works that were most often listed as being the best by that specific group and that were NOT among the 50 most often listed by the other groups (and not among the top 100 overall). The layout of each such wing is curated by members of the corresponding group (e.g., artists are charged with curating the “Quality According to Artists” wing, collectors curate the “Quality According to Collectors” wing, etc.).

Certain types of art would have to be excluded due to infeasibility (such as some performance art pieces, large installations, and pieces with existing copyrights where the owner wouldn’t agree to a replica being made).

(3) The works of art in the museum are replicas. But they are really good fakes, such that at a distance of three feet, even an expert with good eyesight couldn’t identify it as a fake. Hence, looking at those pieces should produce no discernable difference in visual experience for the visitors compared to viewing the originals.

(4) Old, decrepit items are replicated not in their decaying modern form but as our best guess for the form that the artist created them in. So, for instance, if a Greek statue makes the cut, it would likely be garishly painted (http://bit.ly/2jzTWi1) rather than being a boring white, and the brownish yellows associated with some of the early modernists would be restored to their radiant yellows (https://dailym.ai/2HYEfLQ).

(5) Each piece of art would have two plaques near it. The first plaque would contain a summary of why those in the survey said it should be considered one of the greatest works of art of all time, including a few insightful quotes taken from people’s explanations of why they chose it in the survey (i.e., Zagat review style). The second plaque would contain a vicious attack on the work of art from an artist, collector, expert, or enthusiast saying why they think the original work of art on which the replica is based is lousy, derivative, ugly, or at least greatly overrated.

Visitors can vote for whether the art the replica is a copy of is of high-quality (or not) by touching either the plaque that argues it is (or the plaque that argues it isn’t), and the percentages of people that agree it is of high quality are on display below the plaque for everyone to see.

(6) Visitors are allowed to touch all those works of art that are not easily damageable (e.g., robust statues).

(7) The museum would always contain exactly one non-replica (i.e., original). Visitors would be told this upon entering, and they would be encouraged to try to figure out what the one non-replica is, but the answer would be a carefully-guarded secret. So (other than for those works that are restored pieces or pieces where the owner is well-known), you could not know ABSOLUTELY FOR SURE if you are looking at an original or replica.

(8) Every year, the survey would be re-conducted, with new pieces added and old ones removed based on changing results. The museum would have no long-term storage for art. All of its pieces would always be on display at all times, and when a piece falls from the top of the survey in its rankings, it would simply be given away to one of the survey respondents (chosen at random from among those that listed it as one of the greatest works of all time).

(9) When visitors enter the museum, they are given a token with a symbol of death on it. Each piece of art has a corresponding slot nearby where such tokens can be inserted. On December 31st of each year, whichever work of art has amassed the most votes of death is destroyed in a grand ceremony in the central wing. Visitors are invited to help destroy the work of art, taking turns with various implements of destruction (while wearing appropriate safety equipment): for instance, by means of a crossbow, flamethrower, or battle-ax. Once destroyed, a huge party ensues.

If the work of art selected for destruction by the visitors was the one original work of art (the only non-replica), so be it. Its atoms are lost to the world forever.

This essay was written on July 21st, 2018, and was first released on this site on November 5th, 2021.

LOOK make eye contact when people are talking to you (but look away occasionally so as not to be creepy, and look away for a greater proportion of the time when you’re talking since that’s what people do naturally)

REPEAT reflect back to people what they’ve said to you (e.g., “So you’re saying that…”)

ASK get people talking about themselves by asking questions, and follow up to their responses with further questions (e.g., “It sounds like you don’t like your work, why is that?”)

DISCOVER figure out what the person you’re talking to really cares about and talk to them about those things (e.g., “How did you originally get interested in painting?”)

MIMIC copy the body language of the person you’re talking to (e.g., if they sit up tall, you sit up tall)

COMPLIMENT give genuine compliments and make the person feel liked

REWARD make sure the other person feels good during the interaction and enjoys it.

I think this advice is largely accurate. People would tend to be more liked on average if they did more of these things. Very specific and explicit advice like this can also, I think, be very helpful for people whose social instincts are not well-tuned or who find socializing especially difficult.

But this advice can also sometimes come off as robotic (“generate these inputs to the system to cause a certain response output”) or even manipulative when used in pursuit of personal gain (“run this social algorithm and people will come to like and trust you so that you can get what you want”).

I think there is a simpler and more genuine distillation of the above advice, namely:

Give the person you’re interacting with your complete, genuine, interested attention.

That means paying attention to nothing but that other person during a conversation; letting go of any distracting thoughts that pop into your mind and not paying attention to other things happening in the room. It also means adopting a genuine interest in the other person (e.g., curiosity about them, or a desire to know them or see the valuable things in them). I’m not advocating simply appearing like you are giving your complete interested attention. I’m suggesting that you actually be focused and interested in the other person. This is not necessarily easy to do.

To understand the mindset I’m referring to a bit better, consider this metaphor. Imagine you’re going to an art gallery that you’ve heard (from a reliable source) has incredible, complex art that requires effort to understand. In that circumstance, you might approach each piece of art with “interested attention.” You’re assuming there is something worth seeing there, so even if, at first, you don’t “get” a piece, you’re going to keep focussing on it with interest to try to uncover its value. This interest is genuine before you even know what the value is because you’re giving the benefit of the doubt. If you start thinking about what you’re having later for lunch or glancing ahead prematurely to the next piece of art, it’s going to interfere with the experience. The “interested attention” causes you to notice more that’s of value, but also, potentially to value more of what you notice.

Contrast this with a situation where a friend dragged you unwillingly to an art gallery, and you’ve heard the art is terrible. You may pay little attention to each piece and view the art with little interest. If you don’t understand a piece right away, you may immediately move on to the next one. This is the opposite of “interested attention.”

While interested attention does not necessarily cause all the “likable” behaviors listed above, I think that it does tend to make them significantly more likely. Hence, I think it will tend to make you more likable.

Here’s why:

LOOK the more focused attention you have on someone, the more of a tendency I think you’ll have to look right at them, and therefore to make eye contact.

REPEAT if you are interested in someone, you’ll want to actually understand what they’re saying, and repeating back your current understanding is a natural way to confirm that you got it right.

ASK if you’re truly interested in someone, you’ll tend to ask them questions rather than spending most of the time talking about yourself.

DISCOVER interest in a person tends to make us want to understand them, and figuring out what someone really cares about is an important part of that understanding.

MIMIC while full attention on another person may not cause you to cross your legs when they cross theirs, it will presumably make you more likely to notice what they are feeling, and therefore to respond to it appropriately. So if you notice the other person is somber, with a sunken posture, you may well adopt a more somber tone and posture to adopt.

COMPLIMENT if you are giving someone your interested attention, you’re assuming there is something worth knowing about them, which presumably makes it easier to see their positive qualities, setting you up to give compliments.

REWARD it usually feels good to have another person be genuinely interested in us and even to have someone pay deep attention to us.

So if we give our genuine and complete interested attention, I expect it will tend to cause others to like being around us for a variety of reasons. And it’s good for both us and those we are around. Plus, it feels less icky than ticking a bunch of charisma boxes, especially if we replace the goal of being likable or charismatic with the goal of deeply connecting with others.

But how do we actually give interested attention to someone?

– try to make sure we are actually fully focused on them when they speak
– try to make sure we understand what they are trying to communicate
– let stray or distracting thoughts go when they occur during conversion
– not let ourselves become distracted by whatever else is happening in the room (unless it is something we can bring into the conversation) by returning focus to the person we are speaking to
– avoid checking our phones around others
– give others the benefit of the doubt
– assume others have true value even if they haven’t shown it to us yet
– foster our curiosity for what other people are like

Now, of course, it’s not always appropriate to give someone interested attention, for instance, if that person seems to themselves lack interest in continuing the interaction, or if that person seems to be responding negatively, or if there is limited time for the interaction. Maybe the other person wants to be left alone, and if so, we should go away.
Furthermore, there are, of course, many cases where we don’t desire to forge a deeper connection with a person, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We may not be in the mood, or not like the other person, or think that giving too much attention would signal something we don’t want to signal, or simply need to end the interaction soon.
But when we do want to create stronger connections, I think we should strive to give each other our complete and genuine interested attention. It’s not easy, but it’s probably worth it.