I can’t agree with this article: “Instead, Martel echoes the great aesthete himself, Oscar Wilde, in his serene dictum that all art is perfectly useless. And y

I can’t agree with this article: “Instead, Martel echoes the great aesthete himself, Oscar Wilde, in his serene dictum that all art is perfectly useless. And yet, as Martel writes, “It is precisely the absence of political and moral interest that makes art an agent of liberation wherever it appears.”” This seems like it’s missing the point. Art deconstructs communication and therefore both creates the illusion of truth and represents the illusion of truth, showing us that it’s an illusion. Art can easily use political and moral interests to seduce its audience and does so often. “Instead, the Real that art helps us come into contact with is something far more slippery, and far closer to what Walter Benjamin called the “true surrealist face of existence.” This is not the surrealism of predictive AI—endlessly recircling within its own sidewindings and elisions—but the bizarre wide-open Real out on the edges of experience, which has a good deal less to do with the measurable, quantifiable, empirical world than with the unseen possible: whether hidden aspects of the future simmering invisibly in the present, or mysteries so giant and unpredictable that science can’t begin to approach them.” And what makes you think this is different than AI? Seems kinda like the author almost came to a valuable conclusion and then shook it off because they didn’t like the implications. “But if true art is an instrument for transcendence and cognitive freedom, then artifice—art’s look-alike—is a homogenizing force that blocks off possibilities and alternate modes of being” Now we get to the most boring and annoying tendencies of pretty much every piece of philosophy or criticism from the 18th/19th century: “hey guys I have a new philosophy. There is something that’s perfect and wonderful but it’s difference from this new thing I’m gonna define that looks the exact same but is actually evil and terrible. There’s no way to differentiate between the two except by vibes. It’s kinda just like God and Satan… almost like I just took my weird puritan religious values and recreated them in this other field of study for no reason. Also you know all those questions about my previous definition of art? All of them are answered because I’ll just classify any exceptions as this evil and terrible thing.”