Arts

"I Don’t Like ****, I Don’t Go Outside" is the sophomore album by Odd Future Alum, Earl Sweatshirt. Despite maintain a level of darkness in his tone and instrumentation, Earl is distinctly alien from his former self. Gone are the edgy shock-lyrics of cannibalism and murder, replaced instead by a vulnerable young man drowning in depression reliant on drugs and alcohol to keep himself going.

What is it to be a celebrity? A chosen one at that, to be the idol of millions of people you’ve never met while isolated from your friends and family. The album speaks to the thin veneer of happiness success can really be.

Earl was often a center piece of the fandom from the "FREE EARL" days and yet it doesn’t seem as though the freedom was very liberatory. The lack of hope and overwhelming sense of abject bleakness from Earl speaks to the hollow nature of what was gained by his fame and his regrets seem innumerable as each song on the album falls further in further into an inky blackness of despair.

That then begs the question, what does this album serve? Is it just a self-exploration or can there be some universal message garnered from the album? What can be said of Earl and his developments as an artist? What of the raised awareness about depression and how it can shape and distort a person’s view not just of themself but of the world around them.

Art in its classical sense and form has a soul. A human puts a part of their soul into something that later can be highly appreciated by society. Digital art, where all images generated by neural networks can be attributed without direct human participation, is soulless. It will acquire a soul only when it is created by artificial intelligence. One can be sure that the first picture painted by AI will be costly.

In the 19th century, Oscar Wilde wrote in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life… results not merely from life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of life is to find expression, and that art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy." According to Wilde, what people find in life and nature is actually not there, but what people find is what artists have taught them to find through art. So, does life imitate art or does art imitate life? In light of these questions, is it possible for art to predict the future? Which artwork by which artist do you think predicted the future?

Ever since Schubert abandoned his 8th Symphony in 1822, six years before his death, after writing the first two movements, composers, musicologists, and general lovers of classical music, have wondered why the symphony was left unfinished – was Schubert ill? Was he distracted with other compositions? But mostly we have wondered about what the final two movements would have sounded like.

In 2019, Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, answered this conundrum by completing the famous "Unfinished" Symphony by feeding thousands of Schubert’s works into the software that would hopefully produce material in the style of Schubert – as he would have thought it himself. This process was guided by the film composer Lucas Cantor, but still the result was heavily criticised.

AI has since been used in music to generate pop songs, many of which are indistinguishable from human-made hits we hear on the radio. Is the use of AI in musical composition just like any other technological innovation in that it aids the composer in their process, automating tedious tasks, and so on? Or are we facing a real fear of being stuck in a ‘loop’ of the same musical tastes, without the extra push of human creativity and invention, since AI runs on analysing pre-existing examples?

The author could further discuss the differences and similarities between AI software recognising patterns, and how humans often compose from well-studied patterns also.

The art world is current having a bit of a controversy about the nature of the soul in Art with the rise of programs like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Craiyon that allow for the submission of prompts to generate visual media. While many laud this as another innovation of the digital age others such as traditionally defined artists view it as not only "soulless" that is to say made without the efforts and passions of a creator but also a form of stealing as the A.I. typically process art and art styles without credit and attribution only to then to produce something that is given credit as though it was wholly unique. This brings up the ethical questions of the generators and that immortal question, "What IS Art?"

Consider examples of literature or film that have had theatre adaptations (e.g. Dorian Gray, Sydney Theatre Company; Cyrano, Melbourne Theatre Company, and analyse how these works have been shifted and/or restructured for a live performance context.

The Met Gala, an annual fundraising event for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York, invites famous actors and actresses, artists, designers, internet personalities, and even athletes to walk the steps of the Met in usually very elaborate themed costumes.

Some of the most iconic past Met Gala themes include “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” (2022), “Camp: Notes on Fashion” (2019), and “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” (2018).

The internet explodes with praises, critiques, and even mockeries of Met Gala attendees’ fashion every year. So why are we so obsessed with it? What are its impacts artistically, historically, socially, politically, etc.? What is its place in art history?

September 11, 2001 changed the world as we know it. Mere weeks after the terrorist attack that destroyed the Twin Towers, artists from all mediums responded to the tragedy with forms of self-expression that gave themselves and their consumers safe, multifaceted outlets to express their complex emotions. September 11 is now the subject of everything from hard-hitting documentaries and touching memoirs to gentle, yet serious episodes of kids’ shows and perhaps controversial country-western songs.

Analyze and discuss some of your favorite, or least favorite, tributes to September 11 within the arts. What makes these tributes powerful, or conversely, disturbing or controversial? Which pieces do the best job of honoring the 9/11 survivors and victims? Do we need more 9/11 pieces, and if so, what should their focus and goals be? Can new pieces be tied into more current tragedies, historical ones, or a mix of the two?