Adam “Experimental History” Mastroianni :

Guys who work in bike shops like to joke about bicycle-shaped objects—sure, that mass-produced hunk of metal and plastic has a seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bike. When the materials are so cheap and the construction is so slapdash, it deserves another name entirely.

This terminology comes in handy, because it turns out there are also movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects, art-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects. Just because a series of pictures flickered across the screen and the credits followed, that doesn’t mean it was a movie. Just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard, that doesn’t mean it’s a book. There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing, and the difference between having and lacking that essence is the difference between a corpse and a person.

OK, that’s a keeper. I feel like I should have heard that snowclone before—and maybe I have? But better late than never.

Friend-of-the-show Jay Springett has written about slop as having been a thing long before the advent of generative models, and Mastroianni is making a pretty similar argument here, though leaning more in what he’s happy to describe as a pro-elite, pro-snobbery direction, partly as a counter to his sense that we’ve hit Peak Poptimism. I think we’re probably past the peak already, myself, and driving hard into enantiodromia territory; the headlines are full of it, if you’ve eyes to see with.

Much like Mastroianni, I’m fairly sanguine about the long-run prospects for what he’s calling “thick” art, though I’d be lying if I claimed I wasn’t hungry for the ongoing revaluation of values to hurry up and sweep away the worst of the crap.