John Cook had an interesting post using LLMs to generate ASCII art - a tedious process by hand. His application was mathematical but my interests tended more to the aesthetic.
So I asked GPT-5.6 to produce an image of an ASCII-art rendering of an uploaded photo. Here's the result. ChatGPT seems here to have mostly used non-alphanumeric characters at fine resolution.
This is the original image.
It's 1984 and she's in her hometown. She's been married for six years with two crazily-active small boys aged four and five. Her husband has just got a job in a research lab - he's having to learn a lot of new stuff. He works long hours and it's a long commute from their new home in Essex.
Sometimes it's just good to be back where you grew up, enjoying a glass of wine. Several in fact.
Milan Kundera defined it best: kitsch is emotional manipulation masquerading as art; the comforting echo of feelings we already know. In 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', he dissects its mechanics with precision.
“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession,” he writes. The first tear: “How nice to see children running on the grass!” The second tear: “How nice it is to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”
Kitsch merely indulges our emotions, flatters us into self-congratulatory sentimentality, affirming our collective decency without requiring us to question or confront anything uncomfortable.
Kitsch is the wallpaper of the Overton Window, to thoroughly abuse a metaphor. No wonder governments of all persuasions adore it. Kitsch is their ultimate propaganda weapon, a velvet glove for the iron fist - peddling conventional unity and moral certainties while smothering critical thought under a disapproving, moralising blanket of sugar.
Kitsch is both relational and absolute, in the way that mathematics is both hard and easy. What is kitsch to the worldly adult might be a revelation to a younger person, or one less culturally attuned. Art that merely panders to a sophisticated viewer - repackaging familiar emotions with no hint of challenge - can still serve as a framing portal for someone seeing it with fresh eyes.
A banal love song may bore a seasoned listener, but for a teenager wrestling with their first heartbreak, it might feel like truth spoken from the mountaintop. Kitsch, then, is not the absence of impact - it’s the absence of growth.
Like the dimension which spans from prim to romantic to erotic to pornographic, kitsch inhabits a continuum. Artists differ in their positioning as well as in their attitude to their art. Worst are those jaded, cynical performers who know only too well what they are recycling.
The better an artist is, the more authenticity you may discern: once their act becomes over-familiar they grow dissatisfied and look into their own selves to find something new to say.
They may succeed, and - if so - they may additionally rediscover an audience. Many artists, like David Bowie and Robert Plant, go in and out of fashion: but never (at least in their own eyes) are they in the business of kitsch. They never try to emulate their own Tribute Bands.
But being original is not often the same as being popular.
So where does this leave Taylor Swift and her epic tours? For the discerning adult, they certainly seem kitsch: expertly produced spectacles, their emotional punch choreographed to the millisecond.
Her lyrics play it safe, her melodies stick to the tried and true, and her narratives revolve around themes we’ve all seen before - relationships, self-discovery, and empowerment, endlessly rinsed and repeated.
There’s no risk here, it appears, no challenge to the audience’s intellectual or emotional horizons. For adults, Swift’s tours can sometimes seem the pop equivalent of fast food: tasty, satisfying - and utterly conventional.
For her primary audience - young, mostly female, and navigating life’s emotional minefields for the first time - these performances are something altogether different. They are maps for uncharted territories, offering structure to feelings too raw to articulate. To a teenage girl experiencing heartbreak or self-doubt, Swift’s songs don’t pander at all; they resonate. Her art provides emotional scaffolding where none previously existed, and that scaffolding matters. It’s not kitsch for them; it’s an initiation.
I am about as far as it is possible to be from familiarity with Taylor Swift’s body of work. Yet it seems to me that underneath the machinelike-juggernaut there is an existential self-doubt, an awareness that what she does is time-limited, not least by her own maturation. If she kept with the teenage angst regardless, then that would indeed be the hallmark of kitsch.
Instead I think she will continue to try new things, taking the very real risks of falling out of fashion. And that is the mark of a performer who eschews kitsch.
Kitsch is art’s terminal state - the point at which creativity ossifies into convention, when the daring and disruptive becomes safe and sentimental. True art, by contrast, jolts and destabilizes. It drags us into the unfamiliar and forces us to confront what we’d rather ignore. But that kind of innovation is rarely appreciated at the time.
True art’s fate is to degenerate into kitsch: in the extreme, kitsch isn’t just the opposite of art; it’s where art goes to die. Its tombstone reads: “Beloved by all, challenging to none.”
In 2002 we were in the States, living west of Washington DC in Vienna, Virginia. I was employed as VP Architecture in the Office of Technology, Cable & Wireless Global, then on its slow descent into Chapter 11 bankruptcy (but that was the following year's drama).
According to our photo collection, in 2002 we indulged in a never-ending fiesta of tourism. In January and March we explored the Civil War circuit in Virginia, going down to Jamestown and Williamsburg then on to North Carolina. In April we did the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. May was Washington tourism and in June we visited New York.
Come August we did a driving tour around West Virginia, taking in the Blackwater National Park with the famous Falls, and then the Blue Ridge Mountains. In September we travelled to the other coast, touring Yosemite and then San Francisco. In November we were in Florida, in the Everglades, where the mosquitos are the size of dinner plates yet are protected by state law.
Come the turn of the year, 2002-3, I was back shovelling feet of snow from our driveway in Fairfax County, VA, just as I had the previous winter.
Somehow I got all my work done.
One of the many pictures from that year shows Clare at the Blackwater Falls. It's the 17th August 2002 - twenty-two years ago. It's a perfectly mundane image, although charming of course, which the current generation of art programs can transform into something like fäerieland.
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Clare at Blackwater Falls, West Virginia |
I give you these two examples (we will dispense with the original!) showing contrasting effects.
This is a portrait of Clare produced by the AI program Deep Art Effects. We were in Mallorca six years ago.
This is the version when I turned off the "Moonlight"...
