The New Aesthetics of Slop
Or what happens when vulgar technocrats control the arts
A century ago, the creative world was buzzing with exciting artistic movements. Everything was fresh, new, and vital:
You could be a Surrealist or a Futurist or a Post-Impressionist or a Cubist.
You could align yourself with Art Deco or Dada or Bauhaus or Fauvism.
You could proclaim your allegiance to Imagism or Verismo or the Harlem Renaissance—and dozens of other creative movements.
And what about today?
Pardon me while I yawn…..
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Instead of aesthetic manifestos, we get web platforms. They have machines to make big decisions—and the machines have invented the dominant art style of our day.
It’s called Slop. And it’s everywhere.
There’s Slop music and Slop visual art and Slop video. There’s Slop enough for all of us—because the machines Slop nonstop.
Anybody can be a Slop artist. You can Slop till you drop!
It’s easy: Just find an AI bot, and give it a prompt—the goofier the better.
So I created this image of Vladimir Putin and Taylor Swift on a motorbike, with teddy bears celebrating the couple’s impending nuptials.
Yes, I am deliberately creating something ridiculous. But that’s the essence of Slop.
A hundred years ago, Ezra Pound proclaimed: Make It New. But in the Age of Slop we have a different rule: Make It Whack!
AI image generation is boring unless the results are stupid. That’s the consensus view. And it’s why AI artists are in a race to make the most abominable Slop they can extract from the bots.
People collect and curate these images. Entire social media accounts are devoted to stupid Slop.
Or consider this:
Or this:
The supply is endless—because AI never sleeps.
We have come a long way from the days of Impressionism and Naturalism and all the rest. Those were serious movements. They happened because of dedicated artists committed to their craft.
Slop is the opposite.
It’s the perfect aesthetic theory for 12 year olds with no artistic sensitivty—but possessing a crude sense of humor and lots of pop culture detritus in their heads.
Tech companies embrace this—and even brag about the sloppiness of their Slop. Each generation of AI aspires to new levels of whackness.
Let’ get more specific. What is Slop, really?
The dictionary definition for the word slop refers to “tasteless food” or “garbage” or “excreted body waste.”
Okay, but that’s just a start.
The dictionary doesn’t yet recognize how these terms relate to the new dominant artistic style of the digital age. The general sense of tastelessness, garbage, and waste are clearly a big part of it.
But it’s worse than that.
In trying to define it, I created a Slop manifesto—and it puts everything into perspective:
A SLOP MANIFESTO
Long live Slop!
Slop is a creative style that emerged around 2023 with the rise of generative AI. Slop art is flat, awkward, stale, listless, and often ridiculous. Slop works are celebrated for their stupidity and clumsiness—which are often amplified by strange juxtapositions of culture memes.
These Slop works are widely mocked by the audience—and even by the people who create and curate them. Yet they are the results of hundreds of billions of dollars in tech investment.
Slop is all about wastefulness!
Let’s put this in context: In the current moment, there’s no money for serious artists—in filmmaking, fiction, painting, music, whatever. But there’s an endless supply of dollars to create Slop technology.
In fact, no artistic movement in human history has soaked up more cash than Slop.
This seems like a paradox. Why is so much money devoted to churning out crap?
Ah, that’s part of the appeal of Slop. The audience’s gleeful mockery is actually enhanced by the fact that a huge fortune has been wasted in creating pointless and bizarre works.
In other words, this mismatch between means and ends is a key part of our aesthetic movement. Hence a certain degree of cynicism is embedded in both the production and consumption of Slop.
So it’s stupid. It’s wasteful. It’s tasteless. It’s cynical.
And that’s all part of the plan.
Long live Slop!
“We will work at Slop jobs inside Slop buildings. And wear Slop clothes and get Slop hairstyles.”
That was painful to write. But none of this happens by chance.
AI does not possess a self. It lacks personhood. It has no experience of subjectivity. So any art it creates will inevitably feel empty and hollow.
Any human quality it possesses will be based on imitation, pretense, and deception. None of it is real.
AI doesn’t even have a direct sense of objectivity—its knowledge of objects is all secondhand, assimilated through data. This results in a lack of depth or felt significance in any artistic work it creates.
That why Slop is inevitable in an Age of AI.
But this will not stop it from dominating the aesthetics of our time. The billionaires who are funding AI will make sure that it shows up everywhere.
But the worst phase arrives when human artists start imitating Slop. That’s already happening.
The Slop aesthetic is so pervasive now that even realistic photographs of actual events are staged to resemble AI works.
Consider these images from the recent past. They were NOT created by AI—but they look like they were.
This represents the ultimate triumph of Slop. Human photographers strive to match the ultimate stupidity of generative AI.
So when I see a photo of a plane that lands upside down—I immediately think SLOP.
When a maniacal movie star jumps on stage at the Oscars and slaps the host—I recognize SLOP.
When a presidential candidate steps down from a private jet and drives away in a garbage truck with his name on it—I hail to the SLOP.
This is what aesthetic movements always do. They start by influencing creative works, but eventually they impact all of society.
And that’s why Slop will soon leave the web platforms and enter into every sphere of everyday life. Sooner or later, we will work at Slop jobs inside Slop buildings. And wear Slop clothes and get Slop hairstyles….
Is this what we deserve?
We actually deserve better, much better. But we won’t get it unless we push back against the Slopmeisters of Silicon Valley.
That would only be fair. Yes, they have the money. But we have good taste.
In a previous day, people who got rich quick but lacked good taste were called vulgar. I don’t hear that word much anymore. But maybe it should have a comeback.
Vulgar is certainly an appropriate label for the billionaire purveyors of Slop.
But even in vulgar times, a few people resist the vulgarity. Maybe that is the starting point for a different kind of artistic manifesto.
If so, I’ll happily sign my name to it.
By and large, people get the art they deserve. There's plenty of quality stuff out there, but if all you do is root around the internet on your phone with no intention, scrolling scrolling scrolling, then you will be served up an endless stream of shit.
As an active musician, I can only shrug and continue as I always have--cheerfully laboring in obscurity.
I think that the Slop aesthetic predates widely available AI. To me it has the same vibe as the many, many would-be wacky commercials that are odd but in no way funny or interesting, and that revel in those qualities. "Wink, wink, we know this commercial looks like a 6-year-old created it. Now howsabout some car insurance?"