Some Nightmares Before Christmas Or Thereabouts Pt 2

The seasonal countdown of horror movies continues, with werewolves as romantic metaphor, the horror of adolescence, and a bunch of films whose place on this list is real unstable.

Some Nightmares Before Christmas Or Thereabouts Part 1

Over the last few years, I've watched close to 100 horror movies.

Now, to escape the nightmare of the holidays, I'm ranking them. All of them.

Parafiction and the Bluecheck Crisis

A single joke tweet dropped pharma giant Eli Lilly's stock value by $15,000,000,000. Inside the aesthetics and strategies of Parafiction: the hoax as activist art.

Content warnings for: discussion of anti-queer violence, chemical spills, medical oppression, corporate malevolence.

A Nightmare On The Brains Of The Living: Prometheus and the Undead

Prometheus was supposed to be Ridley Scott's triumphant return to making films about Aliens. Instead, we got a film full of necromancers, ghosts, and zombies. What can we make of this frustrating, tantalizing film?

Give Me Wings: Dance Dance Danseur and the Craft of Gender

The anime Dance Dance Danseur dwells on the angst of conforming to standards of performance--of art, and of gender. Why does its protagonist seek out the pain of classical ballet training?

To Watch All My Heroes Sell A Car On TV

As generations age out of our youth valorizing culture, but find no purchase in our political gerontocracy, what form does the art of those too old to rock and roll and too young to die take?

Art Beyond AI

AI art is here. How the hell are artists actually supposed to respond? If proposed answers all feel like dead ends, maybe it's time to look beyond art: to politics.

AI Dreams of Genies: AI Art and the Fantasy of a World Without Workers

As AI advances, the hype machine advances faster. Its boosters and detractors agree: AI Art can grant all your wishes. This hyperbolic discourse hides the truth about our tech-mediated culture: we're being sold cheap knockoffs of our desires.

Autonomous Dreams: AI Art and AI Agency

Throw out the science fictions about intelligent robots. To understand AI art we don't need to get lost in press release fantasies, we need to understand the century-old art that paved the way for Dall-E.

Dreaming With The Machine: The Art In AI Art

AI art programs are taking the internet by storm. But can the products of GANs like DALL-E or Midjourney ever be more than a cool tech demo? Where is the art in AI art?

A Gothic Tomb for Meaning: The Batman

The Batman tries to find stark moral black and whites in a world of muddy greys. Why is the film's script so frightened of the ambiguity its cinematography creates?

An Objectively Better Square: Beyond Cryptoart's Aesthetic Field

NFT boosters try to claim the Blockchain is for every kind of artist. But what practices lie off the edge of the cryptoart map?

 

A Fleshy Pink Gradient: Inside Cryptoart's Quest for Aesthetic Definition

As cryptoart defenses get just a little bit smarter, a new narrative emerges: NFT artists are diverse outsiders, but conveniently are all on the same side! What does the actual range of NFT aesthetics look like, though, and just how aligned are their interests really?

 

The Corniness Is The Point

As celebrities sell out to NFT schemes, mutual hostility with the skeptics boils over. How can we keep our heads as cryptoart now achieves a seemingly impossible level of corniness?