New Writing: Algorithmic Beauty, Bad Reality TV, Artist Magazine Covers
My writing on Trevor Paglen, bad reality television, and painters making fashion covers.
Hey! After my recent few newsletters of algorithm-essays, I had to get back to my normal work of freelancing for other publications. But I tend to write about the same few topics all the time anyway! Hope you check some of these out; each blurb here has a little background on the story or just random thoughts.
Algorithms Can’t Automate Beauty — Art in America
I reviewed the artist Trevor Paglen’s new exhibitions at Pace Gallery and the Carnegie Museum of Art (experienced virtually). Paglen’s work comes back to a core question for me: How do machines and algorithms process experiences that are inherently human, like consuming art or music or trying to gauge visual beauty?
Paglen’s recent work, in which algorithmic equations process imagery of cliche beauty — blooming trees, mountain landscapes — shows that machine vision can only ever be an approximation of how we humans process beauty. It’s an estimation or a miscalculation: We don’t enjoy a photo of mountains just because perfect circles hide in it. In the end, human art goes beyond numbers.
“The Home Edit” Is Infomercial Reality TV — New Yorker
Sometimes the most fun part of a criticism assignment is just committing to experiencing the subject you’re writing about. In this case, I watched approximately six hours of “Get Organized With The Home Edit,” a terrible reality show on Netflix in which cleaning-agency Instagram influencers organize the closets of both celebrities and normal people. There’s almost no drama to the show, a quality I normally like, but in this case it just felt like product placement or an infomercial for the company.
However, it underlined a quality of streaming-era TV that I find interesting: Many shows seem designed to be played as constant on-demand background noise. You don’t need to pay attention to them; they’re just pleasant moving images. (An evolution of soap operas or daytime cable TV game shows?) Here, at the end of every episode, you get to see an organized closet. It’s vaguely satisfying. But I’ve been watching many more of what I’ve been thinking of as “B-Roll Shows”. They’re often about food. “Taco Chronicles” is a show of slow-motion b-roll of tacos being made, and it’s narrated by an anthropomorphized taco voice (“Yo soy el taco de chorizo”). “Street Food” is another good one. You can learn things from these shows but that doesn’t seem like the point.
Artists Take Over Magazine Covers — ARTnews
An interesting thing happened when photography got much harder during the pandemic — magazine editors turned toward artists and illustrators in more traditional media instead. It was like we went back to the early 20th century, before Conde Nast and others made photos the default mode of magazine art. Artists don’t have to schedule expensive shoots or have clothes shipped in; they can create safely from their own studios. In particular, collaborations with Black painters, like Jordan Casteel, Kerry James Marshall, and Amy Sherald, have become a way for glossy publications to demonstrate engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement and bring in new voices.
I think it’s a really cool new approach, and the flood of photography that we all experience now on Instagram or our own camera rolls makes visual art feel more special or unique. I hope this engagement goes beyond giving artists the superficial space of the cover, though.
I’ve been caught in an absolute slew of deadlines and work lately, so I won’t be publishing as many original essays on here in the next few months. But I want to use it as a space for more casual observation. I think sending more frequent updates on algorithmic culture would be cool, as would just keeping track of what I’ve been watching and listening to. Feel free to email me if you have any requests for this newsletter: reply or send to chaykak@gmail.com.