Art — Codex North

Of arts and dark arts

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

People can tell that what they call “modern art” is bad, but when asked why, their critiques often fail miserably. In fact, people seem to not know what art even is, let alone what makes it good. So, let’s explore what art is by seeing what it is and isn’t. Therefore, also what is bad art and what is good art.

The art remains with the artist

This is something we once knew, but we’ve become confused about in modernity. You can see traces of it in our language when we say the art of bookbinding, the art of poetry or art of dance.

The word art means the “good putting together of things”, of the Latin word ars, which means skill, craft, workmanship, which is again of Proto-Indo-European origin, something like *h₂er-¹, meaning to put together. This was essentially synonymous with *tetḱ-, meaning to create, from which we get the Ancient Greek word τέχνη, tékhnē. This is the source for our word technique. Our Germanic word for art, kunst, derives from Proto-Germanic *kunnaną, meaning know, be able to, which is the source for our modern word can. All these, as you can tell, refer to the process, never the product. It’s the making of the thing, it is not the resultant thing. A song is not art. The art of music is your ability to create, express and perform the song, not the song itself. Art is used to make, not made nor held. Great works work on the artist as much as the artist works on it. Difficult and great art forges you into a sharper, more aligned, more Good person. What matters is not the resulting mp3 file, what matters is after making it, how did you change? Did you get better?

Thus if it involves no skill, method and technique, it involves no art, and the work is not a work of art. It is merely an object. As we’ve drifted further and further from the idea of art as technique, art as method, as skill, our art has drifted with it, and thus our modern works have drifted too. Suddenly, art and skill are disconnected, and anything created “is art”. No need to be good, you can just do something and call the product “art”, pretending like calling it “art” is still a compliment, like that gives it value. Moderns desperately want their works to be considered as that which requires great skill and technique, as works of art, entirely without any art. They steal valor from the true artists long past, and in the process dirty the name of art.

Note, before we move on, that this trivially answers the trite question of “Can AI make art?”. No. AI “artwork” is not artwork, because there is no art involved. Nobody worked, nobody improved, nobody was honed. Simple as.

Good, bad and evil

The good chair becomes a worse chair the less it resembles the concept of chair. Take a chair, and remove its back, it is now a slightly worse chair. Remove one of the four legs and it is now a significantly worse chair. Replace the seat pillow with tuna, and it is now a stinky and broken table, which makes for an awful chair. A “chair” devoid of its chairness is a bad chair, because it is barely a chair at all. There are infinite ways to make a bad chair. Most objects are not chairs, and most possible changes to a chair make it a worse chair. Conversely, there are very few ways to make a good chair. It requires focused attention, ordering and skill to shape something into the good chair. It requires art.

Thusly, supposed artwork devoid of any art and work is bad artwork, because it ceases to be of art. Thus, the artless works of slobbered random colors your toddler could surpass by accident, are bad artwork because they’re barely artwork at all.

Calling this sort of thing artwork is a lie, for it involved no art. It is a subversive lie, too, because it undermines the value, goodness and virtue we ought to expect from artists. The very point is that it renounces all need for skill, technique, and thus art. To call the artless “art” is a contradiction in terms. They want you to say 2+2=5. They push entropy and chaos into your life, while demanding you call it order. This is confusion, decay, and destruction. They openly state this as well, when they talk of “challenging the concept of what art is”. Remember that art is “the good putting together of things”. When you work to challenge and destroy that, you are not doing the good putting together of things. You’re doing the bad pulling apart of things. This may seem obvious, and it should, but the thing made to destroy the very concept of art is not art.

Common critiques

Let’s look across what people often say when critiquing modern works. As always, it is easy to know when something is bad, and much harder to know why, and harder yet how to fix it. Luckily, us honest men have an aesthetic sense we can rely on. We know and can say what is and is not great art when we see it. Once we exhaust the list of things that we know don’t make art bad, maybe we’ll be left with what does.

“My toddler could do something better than that!” “It’s meaningless noise!”

This simple critique is true, valid, and largely overlaps with what I covered previously. When no skillful shaping and putting together is involved, then no art is involved. I suspect your toddler could do better, and the resulting work would be better than whatever the thing displayed above is. Do not let long-scarfed snobs with expensive shoes trick you into thinking otherwise. The emperor has no clothes. This criticism is valid.

“The meaning is so shallow and on-the-nose!”

Artwork is not made bad by the fact that the meaning is immediately apparent. If you look at any of the examples of good art these people will cite, there will be plenty of meaning immediately apparent there, and many of the greatest pieces aren’t really that deep. The great Greek sculptures for instance, are some of the greatest works ever made by human hands, but they aren’t exactly deep. Here’s a victorious athlete! We like victory, fitness, health and beauty! That’s about it. It’s very simply venerating the good and beautiful.

“You always have to go digging to find any meaning!”

Artwork is also not made bad by the fact that the meaning isn’t immediately apparent. If you look at any of the great works these people will cite, there will be plenty of meaning deeply hidden inside, only to be found if you dare dive. The image of Christ on the cross certainly doesn’t seem all that meaningful on the surface. Some malnourished guy got crucified? Ok?

“There’s nothing new about this! Michaél du Binglebobbeux did that in the 1700s!”

Modern artwork is not bad because it isn’t innovative enough. If you judge by “Is it new? Has it been done before?” you’re already lost. Novelty is the opposite of good art. The modern focus on newness is perhaps its chief sin. In shame, it hides from critique behind shock, novelty and mere abuse of contrast. The desperately contemporary, current and temporal is loudly here today, but gone tomorrow. This, all honest men recognize is not the case for great things. Good art is good because it is aligned with and aiming towards the ancient and timeless, the infinite and the eternal, the beyond, the ideal. This is the opposite of the novel, it is the eternally out-of-reach idea of the good, true, and beautiful. Κᾰλοκᾰγᾰθῐ́ᾱ does not go out of date.

“It’s self-indulgent! Just about me, me, me! Aren’t I so interesting and depressed!”

Your eye is supposed to see the world, not itself. If you see your eye, rather than the world it aims at, something must be wrong with the lens, it is failing to be an eye. If you taste your tongue, there is something wrong with your tongue. If your mind is occupied with itself, that’s depression. Just like the eye is best when seeing unseen, the tongue is best when tasting untasted, and the mind when thinking unthought, the artist is best when expressing unexpressed. The Lord of the Rings films are great because every single person on set was passionately trying to do the source material justice. They were channeling Tolkien and his stories. They were faithful to expressing Lord of the Rings. They did not try to express their own modern political and social opinions, like is the case with the later productions by Amazon. When the artist tries to express himself, he fails at his role, which is to shape himself and his art in service to what he is to express.

All artists can tell you about this experientially, as well. We’ve all felt that moment of no longer needing to try, and instead directly connect to something above that just “flows through you”, as it is often described. This is not merely the flow state. You can get into flow doing your taxes or homework, but it never feels like you’re channeling a truth from far beyond yourself in the same way. This is why artists used to not sign works. They recognized that the work was not solely their own doing, and it would be wrong to take something eternal and stick their own name on it.

“It’s blasphemous! It’s ugly!”

Importantly, this critique is not the same as saying it’s meaningless noise. This is an accusation of malevolence, rather than meaninglessness. Modern art is often practiced to intentionally tear down ideals, goodness and beauty. Not by insidiously making you call the artless “art”, but by employing great artistic skill for evil means. To invert the moral order, make heroes out of villains, conjure sympathy for evil, and fear of the kind. These are the dark arts.

The dark arts, and power

Line dance and folk dance is an artform which exists through you, which you and the entire community participate in and are shaped by. In this way it is powerful.

Many modern arts are made powerless. We’ve segregated it to galleries and concert halls, where we passively observe it as separate from us. They’re boxed in, framed, hung dead on a wall, away in a museum. Many practitioners of the dark arts want to break out of this. They want more power, they want to impose themselves on you.

In all these violations of the public, they invoke the power of architecture. Your participation in architecture is not voluntary, like with dance. It defines the space around you. It defines what you call home and away, what you call inside and outside. It’s all around you at all times, and defines the very ground you walk on. However, these invocations of architectural power are never as permanent or powerful as what a true dark-arts architect can achieve.

The Royal Ontario Museum is a classical old stone building, decorated with subtle ornaments and quiet details. Now, much of it is obscured by an ugly polygonal outgrowth of glass and metal. This polygonal outgrowth is not simply boring from being functional and utilitarian, like the gray glass boxes a merely artless architect creates. No, this is intentionally both ugly and dysfunctional. It’s loud, novel, drowns out the subtle finesse of the original building, proudly and permanently abusing contrast to display how it rapes the Royal Ontario Museum. This is the work of a dark-arts architect.

The man who imposed this on the public of Ontario did so to impose his pain on others. He was clearly not trying to express the soul of the Royal Ontario Museum. He was not trying to faithfully channel royalty, nor Ontario, nor the original architecture of the museum. It’s unintegrated, intentionally out of place. He was not trying to fit the proper thing in its proper place. He rebelled against this idea, instead choosing to express himself, and the ugliness of his own soul. Openly, he will describe how it is meant to make you uncomfortable, and invoke trauma. He is skilled at this, a master of the dark arts.

It seems we’re getting to a key aspect of good art here, by opposition to the dark arts. There is an art of putting things in their proper place. To have them participate in the good dance and pattern we already have going, rather than bomb the hall. Participation, of both the artist and the artifact in the good and beautiful patterns makes the art, artist, and artefact good.

Your toddler’s drawing of your face is an attempt to express you. It falls short from lack of skill, but it is an honest and faithful attempt. When stuck to the fridge with a cute magnet, it integrates into its rightful place, and makes your home more beautiful, good and true.

Thus, know that good art is not a category of object, unreachable by the common man, like the lords of lies would have you believe, but rather is method, technique and skill combined with honest faithfulness to what you are to express. If your work involves the creation of anything at all, strive for skill in making it good, beautiful, and true to its proper place. This is the fight against the dark arts.

This weird notation is how linguists write Proto-Indo-European. The * means it’s reconstructed, not officially attested. The ₂ on the h colors the e to be a little more a-ish. Finally, the dash at the end means it’s a root that needs a suffix to be an actual word. ↩︎

Fiction is a fiction

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“You don’t speak to people’s minds. You speak to them physiologically. You speak to what’s underneath the mind.”
— Jonathan Bowden

When people think of midsommar, they largely think about people smashing the heads of elders with a sledge hammer, and people getting drugged, killed and/or raped in a terrifying rural cult full of nice-looking Swedish people dressed in white. I have spent considerable time reassuring non-Scandinavians that Sweden and midsommar is not creepy.

This is not because they think Midsommar, the film, is a documentary or based on a true story. They know it isn’t. It is usually not because they don’t know midsommar is a real tradition in Sweden. They know. If you ask them “Do you really think that’s what it’s actually like?” They’ll say no. However, if you ask them “Do you want to go?” you’ll also get a no.

Film is an incredibly impactful medium. It assaults your most important senses with very strong emotional impressions. Many people judge a film mainly by how strong of an emotional reaction it was able to trigger in them. So naturally, many films today seem created specifically just to evoke emotions. More crying, fear, tension, et cetera, equals more good. The film art we have ended up with as a result is refined emotional rape on disc. It will force emotions into you. A “good” film will be as impactful as humanly possible. The brain is not built for this. It doesn’t actually have any way to distinguish between the impression of a film, and the impression of a real experience. Both will shape you. Consciously and subconsciously.

After that film, when people see the midsommarstång or a white girl in a white dress with flowers in her hair, they get a sting in their chest, and a rush of negative emotions. This is important, because your conscious thoughts around things matter far less than the emotions they cause in you. Your conscious thoughts are mostly the foam of rationalizations on top of a river of intuitive and aesthetic decisions.¹

Taking something as beautiful, pure and holy as the Swedish tradition of midsommar, and corrupting it this way is spiritual vandalism. Curse those who do it. I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit about how “good” (read: emotionally impactful) the film is, if it corrupts and twists people’s intuition around what is good, and what is creepy. We should not give funding and power to people who see something beautiful, good and pure, and think: “This would be great to corrupt and undermine on film”, instead of “This is great, more people should see how great this is”.

Midsommar isn’t the only film to do this, either. There are plenty of films that take something pure and good only to corrupt and destroy it for emotional effect. You could look at the same directors earlier film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, where he takes the beautiful and sadly rare image of the black family with a father in the home, and connects it with rape and incest. “When you see a well-dressed black family, think incest!”

This is evil.

Conversely, this power of film can also be used for good. It can be used to uplift and lionize the good of the world. Lord of the Rings does this. Yes, it is full of gross and negative things, but they are portrayed by characters that are correctly and truthfully dark. Their opposition, correctly, are a beautiful and glorious band of brothers and friends. True heroes.

Such art shapes and hones your aesthetic and moral intuition in a good way, rather than corrupting it. It doesn’t make enemies out of friends, and friends out of enemies. It doesn’t portray the orc horde and poisonous spiders as the good ones, and the human sword-wielders as the evil ones. It doesn’t undermine the image of family with incest, or the image of brotherhood with closeted homosexuality. It doesn’t impose lies on your subconscious.

This is a key aspect to whether something is truly good. If it damages you and your moral intuition, it is not good. Doesn’t matter how “impactful” it is, how many views it got, nor how many tickets it sold. What corrupts and destroys is evil, not good. If it adds beauty to the world, if it hones your moral and aesthetic judgement correctly; only then can it be good.

Films can obviously still fail along the normal technical lines, such as being badly paced, having awkward dialogue, a bad sound mix, and so on. Among those criteria, however, should be if the film is or is not bad on a spiritual level. Does it corrupt and undermine the good, and the human, or does it lionize it?

Nobody thought Jaws was a documentary, however, it caused a massive drop in people going swimming. ↩︎

Islander Magazine #3 is ugly

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I bought it fully knowing it would be ugly, but we’re in the magazine’s early days. I want to help them get through this initial phase of cluelessness. So, if you’re one of the Lotus Eaters reading this, or even Carl Benjamin himself, I say this: I like you guys, I’ve been with you since GG, and this whole article will be full of exceedingly tough love. Know that it is love, though, even if I am harsh. I offer guidance and construction, not mere destruction. That’s not we do on our side.

Ok, enough ass-kissing, time to get harsh. You can tell by the garbage “artwork” the Lotus Eaters have sold before, and by how sloppy the trailer for Issue 3 is, that these Englishmen sadly have zero taste or skill in art. Hopefully, they eventually find someone who does, and gives them power over Islander.

Now, who the hell I am to say this? I am a competent individual who has been doing graphics, art and typography all my life. I am the son of two book binders. I grew up with this stuff in my hands and in my blood. I have a deep appreciation for the art of crafting great items of literature.

The cover is beyond unworthy

First of all, it is obvious digital AI slop, with a little guy drawn in. The artist might’ve had to draw the guy by hand or at least retouch him, because he’s the most coherent and detailed element of the scene, even though, less coherently, he has managed not to leave a single footprint in the snow! Impressive!

It is very out of character to involve any AI slop here what so ever. Carl is the creator of The Metaphysics of Slop, but then he turns around and plasters Fiverr-level AI slop on the cover of his magazine? Sad.

In the art world it is known, Khaleesi, what a terrible crutch it is to juxtapose a small guy with a massive object. It is a cope junior artists use when trying to replace the difficult work of creating a good composition and story, by assulting your senses with sheer scale. Wow, look it’s so epic! If you had commissioned a great illustrator to do art for the cover of the magazine, he would not have made that, unless he’s absolutely phoning it in.

There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it.

In this clip (which I recommend you muster the attention span to watch in full before reading on) legendary illustrator Feng Zhu shows a good student portfolio, and then demonstrates how easy it is to make the “epic” slop he is tired of seeing. It’s almost feels uncanny how accurately he describes the cover of Islander 3. Some big central shape, “epic” 45 degree sunset lighting coming from behind the big shape, bright background, dark foreground, the big shape is a ruin because that’s way easier than making it pristine, and a little guy to add “story” and scale. On the Islander cover they even made the little guy into the traveling stick merchant! The traveling stick merchant is an inside joke in the art world, when the little guy you put in for scale and “story” has a stick. It is so far beyond generic that it’s a joke.

The logo on the cover doesn’t fit the artwork or theme, and is mismatched with the font on the spine, though that may be intentional. Having a big © after ISLANDER was a big mistake. The © grabs more attention than your traveling stick merchant! And you even wrote your website URL on the front page?? This stuff is back cover material, not front cover material. And of course, in typical amateur “zine” fashion, they didn’t actually utilize the back cover at all. It’s blank. At least put a blurb about who you are and what the goal of the magazine is there.

All-in-all the general style of the cover doesn’t fit the content, nor does it properly represent the quality of the written work within. This is extra sad, because as far as I’ve red, it is pretty good. It’s decidedly not AI slop, and doesn’t deserve to be represented by AI slop.

I will say, though, that the print quality seems pretty good, and the paper is alright! Looking at it with my father, we were concerned that the plastic laminate used to make the front cover matte might eventually peel off, but can’t say for certain.

The graphical elements

In the trailer Mr. Benjamin says “it is rendered in a beautiful revivalist medievalist style”, which is mostly true. It is medievalist and revivalist, and sometimes it even is beautiful. What they seem to be chasing is the style of illuminated manuscripts… sometimes. Most of the time they seem to be going for something post-Gutenberg, but we’ll get into this.

In this little bit of Speculum Historiale by Vincent of Beauvais, from the late 1400s, we see an initial / drop cap, rubrics, which is a section of red text, and plenty of beautiful and colorful decorative marginalia.

Illumination is an artform that evolved over many hundreds of years. It is an aristocratic and expensive process. Back before the printing press, this work was done by hand, by experts, and only the richest in society had access to books, let alone the ability to even read them. This is a grand and high tradition that we are completely detached from. Not just because because this required skill and method which is not passed down to anyone in today’s society (In fact we seem to be deliberately destroying it), but also because the tools used for creating these items of literature have long been replaced. Therefore it is very easy to get the fundamentals of this work wrong, which they do. I don’t blame Mr. Benjamin, the Lotus Eaters, nor the editor R. C. J. Cranstoun for this, of course. It is not their fault that our civilization and art is completely disconnected from the tradition that built us. They’re at least doing great work to mend this divide to the past!

You will notice from the examples above that these illuminated manuscripts are very colorful. Colors, especially blue, is a kingly and aristocratic trait. Something which initially fell more by the wayside after the introduction of the printing press. The general style of this survived, but usually not in color. It is much cheaper and easier to print only black ink. That seems to be the style they’ve gone for in Islander. Except when they didn’t.

Sometimes they use colorful marginalia. That’s fine in and of itself, but look at this page. It is so clearly a product of moving around PNGs and SVGs in an unbounded computer program. When illuminating, the text is written first, with space reserved for ornamentation. This ornamentation will then be painted at the scale it is going on to the page, so the detail levels of the different elements will match. Here, however, we see some autumn leaf marginalia with big thick outlines which was clearly intended for a way smaller scale, a scaled down illustration of a child in the air which has a frame jarringly skinnier than the outline of the marginalia, and an initial that is suddenly extremely detailed because it is a massively downscaled image, with no frame. This inconsistency, could all be remedied by some handy work and judicious layouting. At least pass the leaves through an AI to give it more detail. Or drop them completely, and keep only the initial or main illustration, because it’s distracting from the main point, and doesn’t match the theme of winter what so ever.

What is very consistent though, is that the scans they got all the marginalia elements from are much too low resolution, and are marred by pixelation or terrible automatic vectorization artifacts attempting and failing to hide pixelation.

This is the one place where AI most definitely should’ve been employed, but wasn’t. I know you probably can’t afford to hire artists to paint original high-resolution marginalia for you. Even though that would be nice, because you could have it fit the theme of winter for the magazine, instead of all these random summery and flowery royalty free / public domain scans off the internet. So long as this is your only option, however, please run it through some AI upscaling before you try to convert it to vector graphics. These vectorization artifacts are awful.

The typography and layout

I will not be complaining about the font. Obviously they are not going to, nor should they, render the entire book in some historically accurate blackletter font. That would be awful and unreadable. Basic errors of visual hierarchy and grouping such as this, I will complain about, however.

On the left, you see the original, on the right is my very quick and rough edit. Notice how in the original there’s more space between the lines of the paragraph, than there is to the next title. This muddles the relationship and hierarchy between the different elements. Control your spacing, people!

On the note about space, looking at the style they’re trying to revive, you will notice that a key aspect of the aristocratic book is heaps and heaps of margin. This makes the text more comfortable to read, gives space for ornamentation, and also demonstrates a disregard for the cost of paper. They don’t need to absolutely maximize how much they can fit on a page, covering the entire page with text. They are above that. Compare that to this spread from Islander Issue 3. (Blurred, because you should’ve bought it, if you wanted to read it)

It’s practically marginless! You can barely even hold this without your thumbs covering the content. This is the column layout of most of the pages. This will change at random, however, so sometimes they get it right, and sometimes they put more margin between the columns than beside them:

Margins around the illustrations and ornamentation vary just as much. Sometimes it is comfortably generous, sometimes it causes blatantly amateurish separations, and sometimes it is unforgivably tight.

Despite all this, I do like the magazine. The few articles I’ve red so far are quite good, and some pages are very beautiful. Aside from those specific pages, however, it is typographically chaotic and inconsistent. You sorely need to find someone with better eyes to help with the next issue, or give your current eyes more time to polish it. And with that, I wish you the best of luck, and are you not a Lotus Eater, I hope this at least was entertaining or educational for you.