But unfortunately, also extremely ugly.

I've had analogous opinions about experimental and computer generated music. It's all so bleepy and disjointed. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to make something visually or auditorily (word?) appealing, but it must be. Or perhaps these artists want their work to really stick out?

Anyway it's a cool concept.

Yeah, we talked about that music problem a while back when I blogged about an album made of music generated from stock-market data. It was all very atonal, I couldn't figure out why they simply didn't use the data to generate activity within a diatonic structure, to make it sound more "musical", as it were.

Robot, there are folks (friends of mine!) who listen to secert recordings of anonymous short wave recordings from the 50s like they were Beethoven's 5th. Isn't it related to the idea of "uniqueness" as the pinnacle of a cultural obsession with "authenticity"? So in that caee, the ugliness is a feature. not a bug, because who will want to follow the same path -- if that's where it leads.

I think the "complaint," for severe lack of a better word, is that people who are making computer generated art are giving up out of the box on the goal of using their tools to improve upon human-made art, and instead are uniformly pursuing weirdness. Computer scientists have developed chess programs that can beat the world's best players, so why not try to make an art program that produce a breathtaking painting/score/sculpture/etc?

A while back there was an article in The Walrus that argued that something very similar to what Peter said; except that they were talking about architechture. Bulidings aren't constrained by anything anymore, and so reather than serving some aesthetic purpose or function purpose, they are just made infinitely weird, simply because the technology allows them to be designed that way.

Speaking of which, when will you be writing for the Walrus again, Clive?

I've thought about this a lot over the years, but I just had a new take on it now. Maybe the reason that conceptual art is so often ugly is that, in fact, it's mislabled.

The ideas that generates the "art" can often be beautiful, it's the physical execution that fails.

So maybe we'd be better off calling them ideas and not art. Then the beauty would be more apparent. In a way, conceptual artists are just asking for punishment by labeling their work as art. And I have a strong suspicion that they like that.

Still, I don't think there's really an excuse. I've made a lot of very pretty things from literal trash, as have many other artists. And some of the best photos I've seen are of messy stuff, from murders to landfills. It's possible to make almost anything beautiful or sexy given the desire to do so.

Arg, chiming in *really* late here -- this is a very cool discussion!

Moxmas, sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder! I'm sure there are many who totally dig these pictures. But, it's also true that normative standards of "beauty" do more or less exist in different modalities of art, hackneyed and/or culturally privileged as they might be ... and hardcore experimental art virtually never attempts to be, in a middle-of-the-road way, beautiful. I think it's a vestige of the hip-versus-the-squares problem that plagues so much art. As for a simple definition of mainstream beauty, hey, how about using this experimental technique to produce a picture of ... a kitten? Because hey: Who doesn't like kittens?

Peter, that chess analogy is excellent!

Steve E., yep, this complaint emerges constantly within architecture: Someone slaps up a building that satisfies some concept of shape and geometry that is intellectually intriguing but totally unusable by everyday people. As for when I'm writing next for the Walrus, I'm not sure!

John, great point about experimental art being more of a thought process than a typical "product" of art, as it were. But yeah, your stuff is virtually always aesthetically pleasing even when its very idea-heavy, so that's precisely my point! It's harder to do conceptual art that's purty, but you do it.

Clive,

aw, shucks. Thanks!