Table Of ContentA R T
A (THAT)
R
W O R K S
T
(
T
H
SYSTEMS OF FIT
A
Beauty Is Fit Sarah Perry
T
Chords and Maps Gabe Duquette Mills Baker
)
Generic Fit Suspended Reason Gabe Duquette
W
ART AS ENGINEERING Peli Grietzer
Art as Engineering Gabe Duquette, The Sublemon O Gwern
Objectivity and Art Mills Baker John Nerst
R
Compressiveness Peli Grietzer Sarah Perry
K
WHERE ARE WE NOW Suspended Reason
S
Belonging > Innovation Gabe Duquette Sam Rosen
A Letter About Art Peli Grietzer
But What Are Birds Really? Sam Rosen
Voices on the Genius of the Bit Artists John Nerst
Culture Is Not About Esthetics Gwern
PB
AA RR TT
((TTHHAATT))
WW OO RR KK SS
FALL 2020
NOTNOTHING.OOO
WHAT IS FIT?
Beauty Is Fit 13
Sarah Perry
Chords & Maps 20
Gabe Duquette
Generic Fit 23
Suspended Reason
ART AS ENGINEERING
Art as Engineering 41
G. Duquette, The Sublemon
Objectivity & Art 57
Mills Baker
Compressiveness 73
Peli Grietzer
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
Belonging > Innovation 83
G.Duquette
A Letter About Art 87
P.Grietzer
But What Are Birds Really? 92
Sam Rosen
Voices on the Genius of the 99
Bit Artists
John Nerst
t
Culture Is Not About Esthetics 112
Gwern
Preface
This the first entry in what will hopefully become
a series, each entry attempting to capture and pre-
serve a subcultural conversation happening outside
of traditional knowledge-work institutions, and to
export that conversation beyond its original bounds.
The aesthetics blogosphere is a loose network of
bloggers on the perimeter of the rationalist and
postrationalist scenes. They include The Sublemon,
Gabe Duquette of Liposuction, Sam Rosen of Saner
than Lasagna, and Peli Grietzer of Second Balcony.
Other writers, whose body of work is not primar-
ily about aesthetics but whose ventures have been
discursively influential, include Sarah Perry, in her
writings on mess, order, and wholeness; Owain
Evans, in his work on compression; independent
reserachers Kevin Simler and Gwern; and John
Nerst of Everything Studies.[1]
Many of these writers are united by an interest in
the successes of traditional, evolved “anti-design”
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approaches, where the discovery of working solutions
builds and compounds on itself over generations; this
in opposition to the modernist mode of revolution and
reinvention—cults of failed planners and top-down
interventionism buoyed by hubris or idealism, foist-
ing non-working principles on their publics.[2] They
argue that, whereas traditional design is voluntarily se-
lected and transmitted over generations for its “fitness”
with human life and flourishing, the modern emphasis
on style, innovation for its own sake, and the persona
of the genius inventor have led to misfit and ugliness in
the modern built environment, from our cities to our
visual arts. This skepticism of experimentalism as prac-
ticed—of its level of rigor, its success at generating and
accumulating insight, its constant flights to cosmeti-
cism or an aesthetics of “experimentation”—carries
over into Rosen’s critiques of modernist painting,
Duquette’s “Belonging > Innovation,” or Sublemon’s
“How We Frame the Value of ‘Experimental’ Art
Badly.” (Grietzer is more bullish on avant-garde work;
see “A Letter About Art,” as well as his dissertation
work on vibe in modernist literature.)
Beauty is considered, explicitly and implicitly (as in the
case of neuroaesthetics), as more objective, or at least
less “subjective,”[3] than is typically assumed in main-
stream or academic art discourse, in the sense of there
being a regular, innate relationship between formal
qualities and viewer experience. As Simler points out
in his writing on the attraction of pollinators to plants,
or the intricate nests of the bowerbird, there is good
evidence that an aesthetic sense is both biological and
non-unique to human beings. The psychological, ex-
periential dimension of aesthetic encounters is always
at the forefront, allowing the spiritual humanism of
Christopher Alexander and the information-theoretic
ideas of Jürgen Schmidhuber to coexist—both being
merely perspectives, or levels of zoom, from which to
view the same phenomena. On the question of wheth-
er it is possible, or productive, to define art,[4] the
essays are divided, some attempting to advance better
or broader factorings, other renouncing the project en-
tirely (see Rosen’s “But what are birds, really?”).
Alexander and Schmidhuber are perhaps the two pri-
marily intellectual sources of lineage here. Alexander,
an outsider architect, believed that humans, like many
other species, evolved patterns of architectural orga-
nization over millennia which were uniquely suited
to human flourishing, and that these patterns have
been largely left behind in the West in favor of mod-
ern prestige aesthetics. Strong design, to Alexander,
comes down most centrally to a fitness between parts,
an interrelation and harmony between components at
many levels of scale, as Perry unpacks in the essay that
opens this collection, “What Is Fit?” Schmidhuber,
meanwhile, is a cognitive scientist best known for
his essay “Driven By Compression Progress,” which
theorizes that aesthetic beauty (along with jokes, cre-
ativity, science, surprise, attention) is a property of
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