Understanding the aesthetics of oligarchy can help us to see where their power comes from and maybe even do something about it....
@cindyweinstein @AmandaMarcotte You made my day! 
"The visual equivalent of a burned steak covered in ketchup" 
I think that's exactly why we shudder *and* laugh loudly about that "car crash" principle of #aesthetics" in Europe!
Germans have a great word for faces like T, M, Z & Co: Hackfresse. Translated as sh*tface, it's a mixture of a derogatory word for an ugly face (fresse) and minced meat (hack or hackfleisch).
It makes me sick to look at these people. 
Understanding the aesthetics of oligarchy can help us to see where their power comes from and maybe even do something about it....
Was thinking about the cool and aloof Coen Bros, and here’s why I think their films bear up so well on rewatching: in their films there is always distance between the director & the characters, the characters & the audience, & the audience & the director. And distance makes the multidimensional shape of the work art actually bigger. It just encompasses more range. No doubt could still be done poorly tho. #aesthetics.
Sprawl is one of the reasons I dislike living in the USA.
What does Maga-land look like? Let me show you America’s unbeautiful suburban sprawl | Alexander Hurst | The Guardian
#Sprawl #LandUse #USCulture #USPolitics #Aesthetics
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/19/maga-america-suburban-donald-trump
HUP publishes three #openaccess journals. One of them is 'Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics', which has just released its newest issue!
The issue features three critical notes and four research articles. Check it out at: https://estetikajournal.org/40/volume/62/issue/1
"If art is the establishing or breaking of aesthetic rules, then AI art, as practiced by the right, says that there are no rules but the naked exercise of power by an in-group over an out-group. It says that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting somebody. That hurt can be direct, targeted at a particular group (like Britain First’s AI propaganda), or it can be directed at art itself, and by extension, anybody who thinks that art can have any kind of value. It can often be playful – in the way that the cruel children of literary cliché play at pulling the wings off flies – and ironised; Musk’s Nazi salute partook of a tradition of ironic-not-ironic appropriation of fascist iconography that winds its way through 4Chan (Musk’s touchpoint) and back into the countercultural far right of the 20th century."
https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/
It's official: I'm on a Frutiger Aero high like I was with Vaporwave back in the late 2010's 
This isn't me, but there's enough of me in this AI rendition of "Adamas Nemesis as a European aristocrat on a date", it makes me wonder if some of my future kids would look like this. Sure, it's a template, but this blonde, tan, blue-eyed look is *gorgeous*.
Understanding the aesthetics of oligarchy can help us to see where their power comes from and maybe even do something about it....
Centering Black technoscientific aesthetics in science and beyond https://www.byteseu.com/827799/ #aesthetics #BlackScientists #ChandaPrescodWeinstein #Cosmology #Physics #Science #SojournerTruthLecture #WomenScientists
I was really happy for having this article accepted for the Evomusart conference. It talks about all the aesthetic problems in the training of the first stable diffusion models - only SD1.5, since after that no completely open model came out. In short, the taste that got imprinted in the model represent a very small slice of society, in particular some white, male, rich techbros from the West.
https://works.hcommons.org/records/g917m-xrj41
#stablediffusion #generativeai #aesthetics #ethics #diversity #opacity
I find it disturbing, the lack of classic California blondes on the coast...or *anywhere*. Plenty of over-40s who *were* that, but they're not making any new ones. If that's what you want, then at this point you'd literally be better off in Utah.
