On Gandalf Big Naturals, German Expressionism, and slopaganda as the hegemonic cultural artifact of our historical moment

When considering the adoption of AI slop as the official art form of modern authoritarianism it's important to remember that Hitler loved Henry Ford.

Henry Ford was a noted bigot and wild antisemite. Apologies if you're hearing this for the first time. Walt Disney was, too, pass it on. But he was a four volume antisemitic treatise publishing, sued for antisemitic libel, honored by the Nazi party with the highest honor granted to a foreign citizen for his 75th birthday level antisemite. And Hitler loved him. Possibly not in a create and publicize images portraying him as a thinly veiled Christ figure in a fit of textbook idolatry the likes of which would, you'd think, be incongruous with his other schtick to his followers kind of way, but it's hard to say what people would do given the technology. Regardless, he was a big fan and wrote of him, "We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascisti [Fascist] movement in America."

There's a concept in art history called kunstwollen or "will to art" introduced by Aloïs Riegl, who was a late 19th century Austrian art historian. It is often used to explain why certain motifs appear at certain times in history. Originally, Riegl conceived of this concept being independent of the techniques of creation, or the technological conditions of creation, but he died in 1905 - a time at which technological innovation and new forms of art and mimetic tendency were about to explode in a way previously unseen in living memory, and his concepts have evolved. Riegl never had to contend with Gandalf Big Naturals as an affirming classic of modern queer art or Fruit Love Island as a feared apocalyptic horseman of the death of culture and I feel like he would be willing to grant us license to flex his philosophical concept around the realities of the 20th century and beyond.

The Model T was introduced in 1908, closely tied to the creation of Henry Ford's assembly line and the modernization of mechanical production techniques, which would soon revolutionize the way the world saw technology and themselves as workers within the context of that technology. In the 1910s and 1920s the motifs of mechanization started to become ubiquitous in both popular art and in meta contemporary commentaries on popular art. Excitement around the novelty of many parts moving in seamless symmetry to create a much larger whole was inescapable in this time frame. If TV had existed every Super Bowl ad would have been for an industrial production machine. Germany in particular, as it struggled to recover economically from the first world war, became a rising center of cultural militarism, of sameness, of symmetry, of the rejection of anything objectionable to the dominant mainstream culture in any way, of the removal of anything nonconformist from society including gender diversity, disability, and anything else understood as a blemish on a standardized mold of human form and consciousness. Dance performance and socials, at this time a major form of mass appeal entertainment, in some regions often featured huge numbers of dancers doing the same precision movements as one, no deviation or focus on individuals. The infamous can-can, most associated with the exuberance of Belle Epoque, by the 1910s had settled into something less unbridled and more commoditized for international audiences. What's visible in these performances is not so much performers as their body parts - masses of legs, synchronous waves of arms. Disconnected pieces of the human form, all cogs in one perfect, perpetually moving, inevitable machine. Cultural expression from fine art to popular entertainment became fascinated with mechanization and the rapid arrival of more and more new technology.

Simultaneously arising during this time were counter art and dance movements that embraced feeling, imprecision, influence from less mechanized more agrarian cultures seen, though simplistically and paternalistically, as aesthetically purer and untouched by the ravages of the world's first highly mechanized large scale conflict. Some artists focused on the grotesque and marred, documenting the horrific injuries and living conditions for disabled veterans of the first World War, portraying the aftermath of the literal, violent disconnection of parts of the human body. Others attempted to capture the more abstract mental fragmentation of the traumatized combatants and civilian survivors, and the fractured identity of a humiliated and economically penalized German population. Expressionism and Dada rose from this undercurrent of disorientation, of the sense that everything was confusing and nothing felt concrete, and explicitly placed their movements in opposition to the obsessively militaristic, synchronous, and symmetrical characteristics of popular and politically approved art forms.

German Dadaist, Hannah Höch, exemplifies this commentary on the depersonalization of mechanized human bodies. Though not explicitly violent or displaying loss of limb or eyesight like some of her contemporaries, Höch's signature "photomontages" often featured dismembered body elements, legs, arms, eyes, and faces in an explicit bastardization of mechanized forms and political aims built on the human body, particularly women's bodies, as a disconnected pile of tools rather than a holistic, individual fully realized unification of form and feeling.

In 1935, Walter Benjamin published the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in which he addressed the rise of media forms that could facilitate the aestheticization of politics for the masses, and concerns about the ability of art to remain a foil to politics in a paradigm in which the advances of technology enabled art works to be divorced from the context that created them. In 1937, the Nazi regime explicitly labeled and acknowledged art as political via the "Entartete Kunst," or degenerate art show, which was introduced in Munich and subsequently traveled to many other cities in the country. It focused on "un-German" modern art taking particular aim at expressionism, surrealism, Dada, and other art movements considered politically dangerous. It was positioned as a polemic to a [less popular] show of Nazi approved German art, and many of the "degenerate" works shown in the Entartete were publicly burned - not before many more of these publicly objectionable but privately coveted pieces were pilfered for the private collections of Nazi officials. Ultimately Benjamin himself, a German Jew living in exile and fleeing the advance of German forces across Europe, was also destroyed by the Third Reich. In 1940, when his escape over the French border through fascist Spain failed he committed suicide rather than be delivered by Spanish authorities back to torment and death.

So what does this have to do with AI slop?

Big tech, whatever the technology of the day may be, has always held hands with authoritarianism. Part of the reason is that it is consistently in the interest of big tech to shift the way that people, workers, think about themselves and contextualize themselves in the world and to crush any alternative "will to art." It is in the interest of every industrialist from Henry Ford to Elon Musk to ensure that the worker class remains fascinated with their technology and the ease and entertainment it promises to bring them. It is in their interest to sideline and punish, whether by force or by subtler structural shift, artists who push back against a social tide that places the human being as a whole secondary to the machine.

My friend Rachel Hoffman, the author of beloved cult cleaning and organization blog and book Unfuck Your Habitat, has spent the last several years repeating the unfortunate and always jarring experience of seeing her thoughtful, kind, mental health and neurodivergence informed advice and methods stripped of their context by short form video content generators and compressed into unattributed bite-sized pieces for the algorithm-led audience. In 2020, when pressed by her publisher to create her own short form video content she declined on the basis that doing so would not be able to adequately reflect her intentional, process over progress brand, disrupt her privacy, and superimpose her own personal cleaning habits on a system that is designed to work for anyone in any environment and to provide a place to start for people who may be struggling when comparing their spaces to others'. She made this decision with the informed knowledge that this would likely lead to the decline of her sales and brand presence. Nuance isn't trending. Context doesn't sell. Now, in what seems like an escalation of this trend, she is part of a massive class action lawsuit of thousands of authors who allege that AI corporations stole their work to feed the creation of LLMs.

On the most simplified, fundamental level, large language models are a sophisticated probability machine that chops up all language into chunks called tokens. Then, based on massive volumes of ingested text - a black box filled with primarily Reddit posts, definitely other publicly available data, possibly stolen copyrighted works, and who knows what else - some baseline directives from engineers, in some cases a layer of instilled values to inform more ambiguous decision-making, many rounds of human testing and rating of its responses to tune the output, and the context window supplied by the user's prompt, the LLM wagers what the most likely next appropriate token is and places one after another until it completes a response. As a technologist, I appreciate the elegance of this process and am amazed on a daily basis how fast it is improving and evolving. I am not by any means an AI doomer, and on some level how could I be as an amateur art historian? How could I attribute to any past, present, or future invention the death of human creativity and intellectual output? How can I believe in the imminent demise of art when I know even the Nazis prized and preserved "degenerate art" when they thought no one was looking? When I have seen the beautiful landscape photographs created to honor Walter Benjamin's journey? But I do wonder what it means for our culture that we are willing to so quickly gamble away our nuance and depth of understanding in exchange for time and the supposed lubrication of our productivity - our cognitive assembly line churning forth output for consumption for our bosses, our followers, our friends and families. I drive a Ford and pay for a Claude subscription, but like Benjamin I mourn the implications of divorcing creativity from its context. Like Hannah Höch I find it disturbing to see human beings dismembered into parts in a machine.

Today we watch as all of human knowledge and creation is fed unpaid for into LLMs to be chopped up, remixed, refined by often exploited and nearly always unacknowledged workers, and filtered into engineered and approved summaries based on opaque assigned value structures and invisible rules and rulers. We see writers, artists, musicians, and even journalists and researchers protest the hijacking of their creative pursuits as fully realized humans to have their art and innovation ground into sanitized sausage, divorced from its context for the alleged betterment of the world and ease and comfort of the consumer. So when you look at today's titanic figureheads of technology and hear their proposed version of an idealized future customized for human "optimization," I want you to think about how much Hitler loved Henry Ford. And I want you to think about what you can do in your personal creative endeavors to be degenerate.