michael-dean-k/

"While great artworks can be produced in isolation, art movements — which organize disparate works into coherent scenes and sensibilities — are what contribute to a feeling of progress. If we assume that innovation can be measured by new artistic movements, and those movements are facilitated by a critical culture, then a weakened critical ecosystem will lead to the “blank space” that W. David Marx describes, where art and culture feel stagnant." —Celine Nguyen, Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

I like this definition: "a movement is about organizing disparate works into a coherent scheme, scene, sensibility." It means literary movements are just on the other side of ambitious curation projects. This resonates with me more than the forward-looking battle cries, with pleas like, “we need to start a literary revolution!” I mean, maybe that helps some people, but even if it did, they wouldn’t be legible until someone retroactively made sense of them. So basically, the challenge is having a tight feedback loop where critics and curators are able to make sense of, assemble, and mythologize the immediate past. Scene-making is retroactive.

Throughout history, I think it’s relied on self-elected individuals to do this work; that will always be important, and I’m excited to step into this role (starting with this year’s $10k essay prize). But as we enter a future with delirious volume: included human art, human slop, machine slop, and machine art, I wonder if it will be the scope of things to consider will grow way beyond the scope of what humans can handle. This might be an example of how we need to use algorithms for good. Our current “discovery” algorithms are based on popularity and interest, more optimized to alter user behavior than to curate a contemporary canon. 

Our challenge, or at least the challenge I’m excited about, is to program algorithms that can process inhuman volume, while having a reliable signal on humanity (quality, perspective, theme, etc.).