this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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Socialism
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Im not going to litigate this because of a personal opinion on ai [i dont really care], but I think this argument misses material quality of the admirable aspects of "museum level" work [to use your terms] in agitprop. I mean obviously a random meme on lemmy doesn't need to be held to that standard, but the agitprop made by the USSR is iconic and survives to this day, even after it's intended audience is dead and outside of even the original language many of these were made in, for a reason.
I think there's survival bias. For every super cool meme they made (like the "chad worker"), there were probably thousands of others that weren't as cool.
I'm not equipped to argue the definition of art (I've read Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction twice and still don't know if I get it). It seems like the concept of art is going through another radical transformation, and I'm not sure what it'll look like on the other side.
I can see how usage of technology might reduce the artistic essence of a work (if we define it as something to do with human creation) but I don't think it necessarily eliminates it. A human had a concept, thought of a way to communicate it, and used a fine-tuned tool to create a representation of it. It makes little difference in this case whether they used a paintbrush or a digital program.
That's a pretty tangential response to your point.
I'd argue the survival of old agitprop has to do with its ability to resonate with people's experiences, and human input is essential for authentic understanding. This isn't precluded by the use of technology, but technology does make it easier for non-humans to pump out soulless garbage.
But it also can't be understated that the experience of art in the 1700s is different than the experience of art in the 1900s is different than the experience of art will be in the next decade. The printing press obliterated the value of written text but made it accessible to the masses. Photographs and mechanical reproduction did the same to painting.
Even up until the internet, people might see a little bit of art occasionally when they travel or in poor definition on TV (ignoring TV itself as a new art form), so some essence of the old form still persisted.
But now we are inundated by content. I like the idea of buying a painting to hang on my wall, but after a month it stays the same while I've seen a hundred thousand new images.
The memetic speed of ideas spreads so much faster than it did in Soviet times, people don't look at a single poster every day at their factory. They see a meme for five seconds and move to the next.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, just that it's new and unprecedented, so old tactics need to adapt.