slop
Please call shitty things shitty. There is bad content and a lot of it. There is a widespread norm that justifies the existence and value of any and all aesthetics. As existentially revolting as it is, the rise of AI-generated audio-visual content (or, slop) has led people to cherish human-made art. Audiences are concerned with the process and labor of art, not just the product. Perhaps this will lead to a renaissance of "certified human" content... Or maybe our defiance will be slowly whittled away by slop's vast onslaught.
Kitsch is a great word to describe AI output. Clement Greenberg, in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," argued that mass consumerism trivializes art. Kitsch is "vicarious experience and faked sensations," art that is predigested and so rendered in gaudy, garish, and excessive form. As the reaction to slop attests, art is as much about the effect as the cause, about the reaction as the cognitive and aesthetic labor. Kitsch is not failed art, but an "ersatz" art, a simulacrum that insidiously mimics art. No wonder why fascists have been quick to adopt AI content production. Besides harming artists and intellectuals, it mass-produces provocative propaganda at zero marginal cost.
Greenberg, though, was snobbish and classist with his love of the avant-garde. Haute couture can be as much a bulwark against brutish right-wingers as it can be proof of leftist arrogance and condescension. Enter Pauline Kael's "Trash, Art, and the Movies" and Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp." The former is a 15,000-word (sorry) stream-of-consciousness slog, almost entirely criticism and almost no definition. However, Kael argues that, in short:
"The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies."
In other words, seemingly lowbrow art can be just as masterful as high culture. A discerning person, with full awareness and articulate reasoning, need not abandon low things. In the latter piece, Sontag describes camp as connoisseurship of "bad" taste. Camp is knowingly loving the exaggerated and the off-kilter. In that way, I'd argue it is the opposite of kitsch, as it demands that we know why we love what we love and be able to defend our tastes to others. The ERUDITE can explain their love of gas station hot dogs with hearty, staunch conviction.