Dispatches from the present
Prodigies and abominations stalk cyberspace: images of Trump as a professional wrestler; of Trump as Rambo; of alligators wearing ICE hats; of prominent men in ill-fitting suits and prominent women in clownish makeup. Such things were born beneath the confluence of three ill-fortuned stars. Two, high in the heavens, have already been frequently remarked upon: the personal tackiness of Trump the man and populism’s innate affinity for kitsch. The third has just crept up into place in this syzygy: AI-generated art, which facilitates the effortless production of tacky pictures on a new scale.
During Trump’s second term, more writers have turned their attention to the aesthetic features of his movement, seeking some political insight from MAGA’s affinity for AI art, women with obvious plastic surgery and pro wrestling—in short, from its poor taste. Katy Waldman draws up a lengthy rap sheet of Trump’s offenses in the New Yorker, concluding that “the hollowness of his aesthetic is twinned to the nihilism of his politics.” Others are more heated; a piece by Gareth Watkins in the New Socialist titled “AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism” argues that Trump’s imagery “looks like shit and that’s the point. It is a display of power and a small act of cruelty.” Amanda Marcotte, in Salon, concurs: “Being deliberately ugly, for MAGA, is an act of contempt. It’s polluting other people’s field of vision just to make their day worse, in a petty display of dominance.”
Yet presumably Trump & co do not think that their decor and their outfits, even their AI memes, look bad. They probably even like them. That’s the problem with judging aesthetics according to some utilitarian schema of pleasures and harms: one person’s pleasure is another’s pain. While Trumpist kitsch burns the delicate eyes of our socialist writer, it is not hard to find others of different political persuasions who loudly condemn the damage that, say, brutalist architecture or abstract painting has inflicted upon them. We come to an impasse: some like Rothko, some like an AI-generated image of Donald Trump riding a lion; de gustibus non est disputandum.
How, then, to proceed? For all the supposed crimes of AI images—that they plagiarize, or drink down too much water—the most obvious reason for the scorn heaped upon them is that they are incredibly kitschy. Consider a recent image posted to X by the White House account, which is captioned with Teddy Roosevelt’s “the man in the arena” quote. Donald Trump is standing inside the Colosseum, taking a step toward the viewer. His defiant gaze is set toward something to our right, outside of the frame. Sunlight pierces through the heavy clouds above to illuminate his head. His wrinkled suit glistens as though it were made of polyethylene. For some reason, tattered American flags hang from the tops of the ruins, which are filled with spectators—it is difficult to say much about the latter as, characteristic of cruder AI art, they have congealed into a great shiny mass of angles and flesh pouring down the stands into the arena. From what I can make out, they seem to be soldiers in WWI-style helmets.
It is exactly as ugly as you would expect. Being forced to stare at it to write my little ekphrasis almost made me believe that it had been planned out in the bowels of the White House as a torture device just for me. It relies partly on the ostentatious details—the oil-slick shininess, the swirling dust clouds—but it primarily exists as a vehicle for a message, nothing more. Why is Trump in the Colosseum? Why is it full of American flags and soldiers? It has no internal logic, because its purpose is to convey one thing: Trump is a man in an arena.
The idea that this kind of kitschy art is politically baleful is hardly novel: art critic Clement Greenberg gave the canonical expression of this argument in 1939 with his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” “The encouragement of kitsch,” he wrote, “is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.” Kitsch is ingratiating for the same reason that it is, to Greenberg, bad art: it offers the spectator easy, unreflective enjoyment that is derived from non-aesthetic values present in the art, such as “the vividly recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic.” The easiness of kitsch makes it popular, and the centrality of meaning over form makes it an apt vessel for propaganda.
The complete subordination of image to intended meaning is a proclivity of AI art. Without AI, one would need to pay some hack artist to paint Trump in a gladiatorial arena if they wanted a visual to go along with that quote, which obviously nobody is going to do for an X post. But because AI can freely and rapidly produce an image to a user’s exact specifications, any point can now be underscored with a stimulating visual, one that does nothing besides recapitulate the idea in color. All such images will inherently be kitsch, and, if the point is political, propaganda.
So, while MAGA’s bad art may not be an intentionally ugly “act of cruelty,” it can be condemned quite easily on aesthetic grounds. The problem with condemning it on these grounds, however, is that a taste for kitsch is not confined to MAGA. The same aesthetic deficiencies that drive commentators to ridicule MAGA AI art can be found not only in, say, the blandly popular paintings of Thomas Kinkade, but also throughout any American city: I write these words across the street from a mural of a tropical sunset and cheery, diverse faces, complete with the legend “You are welcome.”
It is not hard, meanwhile, to see why the administration is happy to have its taste criticized. There is an elitist logic implicit in every haughty condemnation of kitsch, and progressives who call out MAGA for its vulgar aesthetics inevitably play into the motivating emotion of populism: the sense that elites look down on your way of life, your habits, your morals and, yes, your taste.
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Greenberg shows that it is possible to be both a defender of high culture and an egalitarian—a political egalitarian, at least. He was a socialist who believed in the material uplift of the working class but nevertheless held that true art relied on “the rich and the cultivated” and that mass culture was artistically bankrupt. Thus, he inclined to a sort of esotericism, wherein the elect few would gather in dim temples to converse upon the mysteries of formalism out of view of the mindless crowds, at least until dawn breaks on the happy day when socialism resolves every contradiction.
Well, dawn is still a long way off—longer, we now suspect, than Greenberg’s generation had hoped—and it has proven hard to maintain distinctions while sitting in the midnight dark. The old dichotomy of highbrow and lowbrow has virtually collapsed. The prevailing critical criterion is, simply, popularity. (The latter can now be measured precisely by algorithms, the judgement of the masscult distilled into digits.)
This leaves defenders of high (or higher) culture in a thankless position. To defend standards means, in some sense, to acknowledge that what is right or good is not reducible to what is popular. But when faced with the conflict between egalitarianism and standards, liberals appear mostly to prioritize the former, which means being wary of submitting art to any aesthetic criterion beyond personal preference. Hence the habit of attempting to tie MAGA’s aesthetic deficiencies to its political ones.
Criticism seems destined to fall into its predetermined role in the latest political drama. In response to the countrywide “No Kings” protests earlier this month, liberal intellectuals argued over the politics of criticizing the movement’s aesthetics (“Is #resistance cringe?”), while the president posted yet another AI video: in it, Trump sits in the cockpit of a fighter jet, wearing a crown and a pilot’s suit, complete with an oxygen mask which—in a masterful nod to the niceties of COVID-era political signaling—leaves his nose completely uncovered. The jet wheels over a city and begins to, somehow, defecate on it. The clip cuts to a hyperrealistic livestream of a crowd of protesters, getting splattered with said brown sludge. Dutifully, the press noted its disapproval of the video. But to what avail? Trump is still in the cockpit. No matter how much critics may protest against MAGA’s degradation of our culture, all it takes is the push of a button to flood us with more shit.