In 1937, in Munich, Adolf Hitler gave a speech about the arts. Specifically about what he, and the Nazi regime called Degenerate Art. He said that the art world was full of “swindlers” who showed an “absence of adequate manual and artistic skill”¹.
Actually, I’ve gone and done it again. I’ve started this post in the wrong place. It’s too soon for my Hitler hot take.
Lets wind back in to 2013, and the Blackpool magic convention.
One of the star guests was a man many of you may have heard of. A man named Dirk Losander.
Dirk Losander invented the floating table[citation needed]. We know this because he said so in his lecture. When you buy a Losander floating table there’s a long article on the website about the process of his invention in 1997, with a timeline amd everything.
Indeed there was an occurrence I heard about at Blackpool Magic convention where Losander learned of a dealer selling a non Losander table and Dirk went to the dealer and smashed it up in front of him, calling it a knock-off and a fake. However in the darker corners of the internet there are rumblings of an earlier floating table, as long ago as the 80s invented by a now forgotten designer, who’s plans fell into the hands of a magician called Wladimir. Wladimir made his own and performed it for a show that his local newspapers reported on, making the resulting article and the photos within the only piece of proof left that this predated Losander’s designs by 15 years².
On some level I think Losander knows this, which is why he has the insane gambit of a hearts and minds campaign to convince people that not only are other props knockoffs of his, but that your magic will suffer if you know you’re using a cheap prop. I know this because I bought his CD that year, full of advice on magic theory. One theory is that you will literally perform worse if deep down you know you didn’t stump up for the more expensive prop. I bet the people who invent expensive decks of cards would like to promulgate that particular infohazard. In fact a lot of magic trick producers are very heavily invested in this idea, with the aim of getting people to buy original props and effects, rather than identical Chinese copies at a fraction of the price…
But if people are that concerned with the authenticity of their props, the question swings back round to this: Why AI? Well, it all depends on what your attitude to high quality is.
In 1937, in Munich, Adolf Hitler gave a speech about the arts. Specifically about what he, and the Nazi regime called Degenerate Art. Oh this is where we came in.
So what is degenerate art?
The speech was read at the opening of an exhibition of work which was said to weaken the German spirit and enfeeble the citizenry. Modernist, dadaist and surrealist works, with such famous names as Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso, as well as many others. Their crime? The work was insufficiently realistic. Though now recognised as the greatest artists in history, their masterpieces were held up as signs of mental sickness. They were said to have “lost the self-control needed to produce coherent works”. Similar fates befell jazz music, as well as films and plays of a non traditional nature.
What mattered was coherence, realism, and idealised forms. Basically Hitler would have fucking loved AI. I’m not the first person to theorise that as a failed artist himself he probably strived for lifelike creations, failed to produce them, and then resented seeing other artists who (from his perspective) had also failed to meet that standard but were successful anyway. If you’d given Hitler a machine where he could type “Hyperrealistic HD beautiful blonde girl with musclular mustacioed german ubermench at sunset trending on art station” and gotten an image out of it, he might not even have gotten into politics³.
Fascism, you see, has one key defining feature: It is a violent yearning for the familiar. Nostalgia for an imagined past, traditions with the corners sanded off. Idealised recognisable culture, people and art.
So if you ask what makes quality art, different people are likely to give different answers, and when you look at AI generated products, I don’t think it’s s huge stretch to say their art style is reflective of recognisable forms, often rendered in a traditional style such as oil paintings or classic cartoons⁴. Even text in AI generated images is rendered like the highly illuminated sign painting of a pub sign or narrowboat siding. AI generated music mimics the sound of highly produced popular arrangements and styles.
Of course in these enlightened times we recognise that the Nazis were wrong. Wrong about the whole pure Aryan nation shite, yes, but also wrong about art⁵.
Those artist I mentioned before (Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Vincent Van Gogh) along with all the others from that exhibition⁶ are now recognised as some of the greatest painters of their age. Even some of the Nazis knew this fact, as the more valuable works were spared the pyre in favour of entering their private collections. Presumably when they denounced it before they were just following orders.
So perhaps someone with the right… let’s say “mindset”. Someone with the right mindset could indeed, as Losander said, perform more confidently because they believe their props with AI generated art “exalt the blood and soil values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience.”⁷
However
Modern audiences largely fucking hate AI and people are becoming highly sensitive to the subtleties of AI generated images. So I think Losander’s advice needs an extra clause.
You may perform better if you feel confident in the quality of your props, even if that confidence is misplaced. However it may not matter if your audience can tell your props are (to put it bluntly) fake.
The audience may not know if a gimmick or prop is an expensive original or a cheap fake. But if it looks AI generated they will know it looks like it was cheaply made, and probably by the magician themself. It’s arguably more important that a prop looks high quality to the audience than to the performer.
This whole chain of thought began in my previous post where I mentioned a friend had used a stable diffusion image generator to make designs for a set of large cards with surreal imagery. The art style was somewhere between a photocollage and a Robert Gonsalves painting without any of the intentional structure or clever ambiguity. Honestly there’s probably a more apt painter I could have referenced there but I really like Robert Gonsalves. Maybe Gyuri Lohmuller is a better match. The point being I had to just google hyperreal surrealist painters and scroll until I found one which was kind of similar to the style.
Anyway, thats on the front of the cards. The back of the cards had the logo for a card game called Dixit, which was the origin of his idea.
The trouble is, Dixit cards look like this:
You know, degenerate art. Beautiful, crunchy, stylised. Not very blood and soil. I’m sure his generative AI was capable of emulating this style but he didn’t want cards that actually looked like the game. He wanted “quality”.
You know, like Hitler did⁸.
¹ Thank you Wikipedia.
² Dirk Losander’s addition to the design, and its one advantage over the Albanian original, is the little box on top which allows the performer to let go of the tablecloth for one phase of the routine. So he didn’t do nothing.
³ Just so we’re clear, I’m not saying AI would have stopped Hitler or The Holocaust or World War II. However if you’re looking for a modern equivalent of Hitler, they’re likely to make heavy use of AI generated propaganda images, probably depicting themselves as Jesus or something.
⁴ Even as I write this there is a trailer live on YouTube for an effect where the big revelation is an image drawn in the style of a Simpsons celebrity cameo.
⁵ Incidentally if you’ve ever watched a video where someone decries the state of modern art as a bunch of unskiled nonsense, unlike the classical art of the past, that was probably an onramp for fascist propaganda, and you should immediately read up on any examples of the “rubbish” they cited in order to better understand the work. You don’t have to like it, but knowing why it is the way it is will help you insultate yourself against conspiracy theories about Jewish post-modern cultural Marxism or whatever they’re blaming now. Probably woke, because skinheads can pronouce woke.
⁶ Though the vast majority of the works were destroyed in a huge bonfire, a catalogue of them is kept at the V&A, and is viewable online.
⁷ That last bit was from Hitler, not Losander. Thanks again Wikipedia.
⁸ The thought occurs that in the off chance that my friend ever finds this and realises I’m talking about him, I shoudl really clarify that I do not think he is even moderately aligned with the ideology of the Nazis of old or with their sharp suited modern equivalents. He has just fallen pray to the notion of what makes quality. Also he’s got some African art and figurative sculptures in his house which Hitler would have hated.