Humanness vs. pictureness

Google in print, Kurt Vonnegut on the need for humanity, the return of Steve Leard’s Cover Meeting, and other hyperlinks.

Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Daniel Benneworth-Gray

— 2 min read
Humanness vs. pictureness

Google – Volume 2

Twelve years ago, Felix Heyes and Ben West’s book Google volume 1 replaced thousands of words and their meanings with the first image that appeared when the word was searched for on Google Images; a testament to the visual culture of its time. Google volume 2 updates the experiment with 25,000 images on 1368 pages, and an introduction by Douglas Coupland. It’ll be interesting to compare the two books (and hopefully one day a third), to see if/how AI-generated sludge has infected culture. 

Pictureness

John Self recently bloosked this passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1997 novel Timequake, which feels exceedingly relevant to the current state of creative affairs:

People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes? There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France. I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer’s mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game. Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness.

Might get that last line tattooed on my face.

Cover Meeting

“I’m into the idea of making stuff that doesn’t look like a book cover … something that doesn’t look like it fits perfectly in” – Steve Leard’s Cover Meeting podcast is back with a second season of talks with book cover designers, kicking off with one of my favourites, Jack Smyth, talking about working with art directors as a freelancer, the growing scourge of design-by-committee and why we don’t need more quotes on covers; followed by Sarah Wasley, Production Director and Design Director (aka “the bossy person that sets deadlines”) of Granta Books, on the importance of developing a thick skin by working in-house before going freelance, and how she collects freelancers like Pokémon. 

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