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In 1859 Baudelaire stood at the Paris Salon and delivered a verdict on photography that he mistook for a description: too easily made, by too many people, for the medium to be anything but the death of imagination. He was not describing photography. He was managing his exposure to it, and the exposure of a class of producers whose authority rested on distinctions the new medium made difficult to sustain.
The “slop” consensus performs the same operation with the same speed. It names four real properties — no stable author, repetition without evident intention, production outside institutional circuits, a volume that offends any economy built on scarcity — and then converts those properties into an exemption from evaluation rather than a basis for it. Every one of those properties also describes the ex-voto, the prayer card, the memorial daguerreotype, and the vernacular archive that art history spent two centuries declining to catalogue.
Two recent pieces on this site describe the same fault line from opposite sides. Danielle Ezzo’s Finding Photography's Pulse shows that "post-photography" is not a period but a recurring symptom, revived whenever the apparatus drifts far enough to provoke disquiet — "the anxiety is the point." @primavera’s Off-Grid Aesthetics makes the same claim from inside the model, arguing that the "promptable latent space" is a semantic jail, since "if something has never been named, it can never be reached by a prompt." Read together, the thesis which convenes suggests that what circulates as slop is not a failure of originality but a symptom of statistical prevalence, i.e.the archive showing itself, in the registers — devotional, elegiac, comic — it was always disproportionately made of.
Szarkowski's 1964 defense of vernacular photography did not ask for the snapshot's admission to the canon on the canon's terms; it replaced "does this qualify as art" with "what is this, and what does it do." No equivalent methodology yet exists for what is being dismissed as slop, and the scholars equipped to build one, folklorists, historians of devotional material culture, media anthropologists, are not the ones currently setting the terms of this conversation.
So the question I want to put to this forum: what is the analogous work required now, and does it belong inside the art institution at all, or is it already happening entirely outside it?
6 comments
When we started Right Click Save, we wanted to encourage precisely this kind of vibrant scepticism of prevailing arguments in order to ensure that the contemporary evaluation of image cultures is always informed by historical awareness. Thank you @praxitelean for responding so sensitively, respectfully, and incisively to two of our recent articles.
Yes, absolutely, archival survival is a real issue with AI imagery! As an artist, some of the models I used to produce work back in 2021/2022 are now gone, which is such a shame.
Thanks @axel :) I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts on whether you see “slop” as a useful critical category at all, or whether the term forecloses the kind of looking it claims to describe?
As someone who is always exasperated by neologisms, the entry of “slop” into common parlance is undeniably important as it captures the widespread revulsion many feel against the reduction of art to an average. However, the history of images has often been about more than a search for original or “emergent” outcomes. As I try to argue in my Byzantine Prehistory of Digital Art, Western image cultures have just as often invested cultural, indeed spiritual, value in the familiar.
Love your thoughts here @praxitelean...As a side note, I adore Szarkowski (I was lucky enough to study with him in the 90s), and consider his ‘Photography Until Now’ a photography bible. I wonder how long it will take until there’s a similarly thoughtful history and analysis of images created with the assistance of AI...
oh my goodness- definitely jealous @danielle —what an extraordinary person to have studied with!
I wonder whether the difficulty is not only critical distance but archival survival: AI images are already becoming detached from their prompts, models, makers and original contexts of circulation. What would we need to preserve now for that future history to be possible at all?