purpleflashing

I didn't. Berger himself was a Marxist and his analysis was often political (he wrote a lot but none of it made the impact as the Ways of Seeing which did become influencial in media and art criticism), but the Ways of Seeing largely talks about the methodology. He cites studies in the first essay to demonstrate how the context of a visual piece changes based on where the person sees it. His analyses didn't become mainstream and stayed confined mostly to Marxist circles (and he still didn't make claims about sexual preferences being formed by the culture), his methodology did though.

You can apply a scientific method for the analysis itself if you wish to. It doesn't conflict with Berger's ideas from these essays.

If I had to simplify Berger's thesis, I would say that there cannot be a complete objective interpretation of the image, "what it means" is context-dependent, where what's displayed, who's looking at it, what they experienced in life, and what mood they're in can change what they "see" in the image. Traditionally, image locations were relatively stable, so at least that aspect of "seeing" was controlled, but with the advance of technology, we can replicate images and embed them in different contexts with different purposes, and so art criticism and analysis should focus not only on the image in isolation but also on who and how distributes it, because that part of art (where it's displayed, by whom, to whom) carries meaning in itself. As I said, he was an art critic, so he focused on the methodology of how art can be analyzed.

I really don't know where you got the idea that he was saying that one can divine some knowledge from a painting or that paintings and culture influence our sexuality.

Edit: Spelling and punctuation. God, I really should enable a spellchecker. I'm a terrible speller, I apologize.

Berger doesn't claim that.

What does anthopology have to do with Berger's work? He was an art critic and an artist, what makes his work unfit for being used in film/media studies that overlap with film criticism as a disciplince that, when looked from a broad perspective, is just a brunch of art criticism? I think the connection is pretty straightforward.

John Ruskin's ideas are also used in film studies even though he formulated them before film as a medium existed.

He elaborates on that but you can replace "seeing" with "perceiving" -- it would be a little easier to understand what Berger means, imo.

I don't doubt you don't. Why is my judgement clouded and not yours? DA was p bad, it was for amateurs so it was expected. Never had a chance to use AS.

Case in point, I guess.

Interesting. I am one of the people who adores visuals. Instagram and Tumblr used to be my favorite places, I had my own pretty pictures curation blogs, my way of relaxing was creating Pinterest boards. Now, I also like "serious" art but I wouldn't scroll museum galleries when I just needed to feel a little whimsy, I went to Pinterest and often didn't care about the author behind them in many cases because the pictures were derivative enough to not feel "special" (but sometimes I would and then I would discover new artists).

I don't engage with this hobby anymore since the platforms got flooded with AI-generated content. Now, I do like some early and cheeky AI-generated images (mostly pre-ChatGPT), but not after -- and not because of corporate and social politics -- I'm honestly largely out of the news cycle and don't know what terrible or amazing thing some AI company did this week. And yet my hobby completely died and it was strangely disorienting because I struggled to find something else that could replace it, I don't have social media and didn't have feeds except for on those three platforms (I deleted them all now).

I am an outlier from the general population in how I engage with visuals, and I do think that it's likely that all of the commercial visuals in the future will be AI generated, now, I don't think they will be pretty, though. I think they will be largely ugly. I think the majority of people don't actually care about "pretty pictures" at all and are content with very ugly things surrounding them all the time. And the rest can't help it.

It works both ways. There are plenty of people who fake orgasm. :)

I see. What do you think people seek in art? Why do they engage with it?

That's not the answer to my question but fine, why is the split important in any way? Some people hate jazz, some people love jazz, and it follows that... what?

There are plenty of human consciousnesses whose output people can't stand. If AI is conscious, it's perfectly in line with how human art works -- sometimes someone's creative output is offputting to a great deal of people.

So why is it "irrelevant who else likes it"? If it's made for the public and the public doesn't like it, then it's pretty relevant. What if people do care how the Skyrim character models were made? What if they do hate once they learn it's AI?

That wasn't my question. The poster above said that snobbery towards AI art is "bad for art" and since you supported their general pro-AI arguments, I assumed you were the same poster. Sorry, I didn't look closer.

So do you think AI is OK for throwaway stuff but not OK for "production" so to speak?