Cuts, Cans, and Calendars: Why I Study Painters to Write Music

 

Cuts, Cans, and Calendars: Why I Study Painters to Write Music

Bil Smith, Sound Morphology

I hold two degrees in music, a B.M. and an M.M., and I took the full sequence. I analyzed Du Fay's isorhythmic motets and the mensuration canons of Ockeghem's Missa prolationum. I traced Stravinsky's blocks and Scriabin's mystic chord, and I spent a long, productive year inside Ferneyhough's rhythmic architecture before moving on to the materiality of Rebecca Saunders and the bodily, ritual instrumental writing of Pierluigi Billone. I don't regret any of it. But when I sit down to compose now, the books open on my desk are more likely to be catalogues of Hanne Darboven, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, and Jeff Koons than scores.

This isn't a pose, and it isn't a rejection of my training. It's a response to a problem my training revealed.

Music theory, as it's taught, is a discipline of retrospection. It takes finished works and extracts their grammar: the voice-leading rules, the pitch-class sets, the formal schemes. That's valuable, and it builds real craft. But a grammar extracted from the past is, by definition, a description of what has already been done. Students who internalize it learn to produce sentences that the grammar recognizes as correct. Correct is the enemy here. Convention is self-replicating: you study the conventions, you absorb them, you reproduce them with small variations, and your students analyze your variations. The loop tightens.

The composers I admire most broke that loop, and they rarely did it by studying other composers more closely. Ockeghem wrote a Missa cuiusvis toni, a mass that can be sung in any mode. That's a conceptual work in the strictest sense, a piece whose identity lies in a rule rather than a fixed sound, written more than five centuries before anyone used the word "conceptual." Morton Feldman famously spent more of his formative time among the New York painters than among composers, and his music sounds like it: the scale, the flatness, the refusal of development. John Cage got more from Duchamp than from Schoenberg. Our tradition, at its best, has always been fed from outside itself.

So what do I actually take from painters and sculptors? Not their imagery. I'm not interested in program music about canvases. What I take are their operations: the verbs that define their work.

Fontana cuts. His Concetti spaziali, the slashed and punctured monochromes, aren't pictures of anything. They're acts performed on a surface, and the surface's response to the act is the work. When I treat a sustained sonority as a membrane and then rupture it, with a single attack, a sudden cutoff, or an extended technique that tears the tone, I'm not quoting Fontana. I'm borrowing his question: what is on the other side of the surface, and what does the cut reveal?

Burri burns and stitches. He worked with burlap sacks, charred plastic, and cracked earth, and in Gibellina he poured white concrete over the ruins of a town destroyed by an earthquake, preserving the street plan as a landscape of fissures. Burri taught me that degraded material has a dignity polished material lacks. A sound that is distressed, overblown, or made from a damaged or detuned instrument can carry history in its grain. Saunders and Billone know this too; Burri simply showed it to me first, and more bluntly.

Manzoni seals. His Merda d'artista cans, the Linee rolled and sealed in cylinders, the Achromes drained of color: these are works about containment, value, and the impossibility of verifying what's inside. A notated score is also a sealed container. It promises a sound it doesn't contain. Manzoni pushes me to make that gap part of the composition, to write scores whose visual life is not fully redeemable in performance.

Darboven counts. She filled thousands of sheets with calendar arithmetic, handwritten numbers, and quasi-script, and she translated those number systems into actual music. Her work is the clearest proof that a visual artist can arrive at musical structure from an entirely different direction: not through harmony but through time-keeping itself. She treats duration as something to be written out by hand, day by day, which is what composers do, except that she does it without pretending the result must please.

Ruscha and Holzer state. Ruscha paints words in deadpan typography and photographs Twentysix Gasoline Stations with no commentary. Holzer's Truisms and LED texts put flat declaratives into public space, where their authority becomes suspect. Both have shaped how I use text in scores: not as poetry to be set, but as signage. Language as an object, as typography, as instruction, sometimes legible and sometimes degraded into noise.

Koons polishes. He is the hardest case and the most instructive. His surfaces are so finished that they become a kind of aggression; the banal object, made perfect, stops being banal. I'm drawn to the uncomfortable question he raises about craft. When does technical perfection become the content? A flawlessly executed passage can be the most hollow moment in a piece, and I'd rather compose that hollowness on purpose than produce it by accident.

What are the ramifications of working this way?

The first is that the score becomes an object in its own right. My score Proproxasant; Indicated for Brugada Syndrome layers notation with typography, rendered imagery, and invented pharmaceutical language. A theory class would ask what the pitches are doing. That's a fair question, but it's not the only one, and it may not be the first.

The second is that the vocabulary of evaluation changes. If the operations come from visual art, then the relevant criteria include material, surface, scale, seriality, and context, alongside harmony and form. That makes some musicians uncomfortable, and it should. Discomfort usually means the frame is being tested.

The third ramification is a risk, and I want to be honest about it. Borrowing from other disciplines can produce dilettantism: works that gesture toward a painter's name without understanding the painter. The defense against that is the same rigor my music training gave me. I study these artists the way I studied Ockeghem: closely, chronologically, and with attention to how each decision was made. The discipline transfers. The conventions don't have to.

This brings me to the point I most want to make. My conservatory training isn't the opposite of this approach; it's what makes it possible. I can hear what Fontana's cut might mean in sound because I know what a sustained sonority has meant from Du Fay to Billone. The tradition gives me the fluency. The painters give me permission, and a set of tools, to say something the tradition hasn't already said.

Studying only within the discipline produces more of the discipline. That's how convention works. Without disruption, there is no innovation, and disruption rarely comes from inside the room. It comes from a slashed canvas, a sealed can, a sheet of handwritten numbers, a sign that says PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT. I've found that the best way to honor Ockeghem's restless intelligence is not to imitate his counterpoint, but to look where he would have looked if he were alive now: everywhere except the place he was told to look.

"Proproxasant; Indicated for Brugada Syndrome" for Piano

"Proproxasant; Indicated for Brugada Syndrome" 

for Piano

Bil Smith Composer

Link to Hi-Res PDF

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1phTZRKqIQRZXZIBSEUwiITrPZkpYzJAl/view?usp=sharing

Damien Hirst spent a good part of the nineties arguing that the pharmacy and the gallery run on the same faith. You walk into either one and accept, on the evidence of clean surfaces and confident labels, that the thing in front of you will act on you. His medicine cabinets made the argument with real packaging. The spot paintings made it more quietly: each grid of colored dots carries the name of a compound taken from a chemical supplier's catalog, so a canvas with no subject acquires the authority of a molecule.

"Proproxasant; Indicated for Brugada Syndrome" borrows that authority and then declines to cash it. The drug does not exist. Its name is built the way therapeutic brands are now built by the agencies paid to invent them (i.e. Brand Acumen), with hard consonants up front, a doubled syllable for weight, and an X planted in the middle because an X reads as science and sells as confidence. On the page the word has not yet settled into a logo. The P appears in several typefaces at once, one of them overlaid with a wire grid, and the X has swollen into a yellow field large enough to sit behind both staves. It looks like a naming committee's whiteboard at the point where nobody has agreed on anything.

That unsettled word matters because pharmaceutical neologisms are odd among invented words. They are coined to be spoken by strangers, often exactly once, at a pharmacy counter, and to be trusted on that single hearing. Below the title the score shows what happens to language held to that standard. "Andedase Trohotre" and its smaller companions look like names that failed trademark screening and were photocopied until the letters filled in. The bass staff carries text where notes should be, most of it too degraded to read, which is roughly how a package insert reads to anyone outside the profession.

The subtitle is where the joke stops being general. "Indicated for" is label language, the phrase that fixes what a compound is legally for. Brugada syndrome is a rare inherited disorder of the heart's sodium channels, most often linked to mutations in SCN5A, and it can cause fatal arrhythmia in otherwise healthy adults, frequently during sleep. No drug is approved for it. Patients receive an implanted defibrillator, and some are given quinidine, an old cinchona alkaloid, off label. It is exactly the kind of condition the orphan drug framework was written to address: few patients, real mortality, too small a market to attract development without incentives. Attaching a fictional compound to it points at a gap that is not fictional at all.

A disorder of rhythm is also a strange thing to prescribe for a pianist. The first half of the system is nearly empty. Staves run under the title with almost nothing on them, and whatever the performer does there is governed by fragments of lettering rather than pitch. Toward the right edge the notation packs itself tight: beamed clusters, nested rhythms, ties arcing over one another, accidentals stacked like structural formulas. Read against the subtitle, the layout resembles the course of the disease more than any treatment for it. Long stretches of apparent normality, then an event the page can barely hold.

I am less certain what to make of the rendered apparatus at the bottom center, with its chrome pipework, a red manifold running down past the staff, and a copper figure somewhere between a reactor and a reliquary. It could be the plant that would manufacture Proproxasant if anyone were willing to pay for it. It could as easily be the body drawn as plumbing, which is how cardiology diagrams tend to draw it anyway. The score doesn't choose, and I would rather it didn't.

Hirst's cabinets were full of real boxes. Here the box is empty and the indication is real, which is the more uncomfortable arrangement.

 

Unité: The Brutalist Tablature: The Raw Sonic Aesthetic in Contemporary Composition

 

Brutalist Tablature: The Raw Sonic Aesthetic in Contemporary Composition

I started calling it Brutalist Tablature because I couldn't find another way to say what I meant, which was that most notation lies to you. It promises interpretive freedom and then hedges that promise with a hundred small courtesies: dynamics that suggest rather than demand, phrase marks that invite rather than instruct. I got tired of the invitation. I wanted a score that told a performer exactly what to do and made no apology for it.

The architectural comparison came later, honestly, after a few people had already looked at the pages and said the word "brutalist" back to me before I'd used it myself. But it fit well enough that I kept it. Béton brut, raw concrete, means the material shows itself without finishing or disguise. That's the whole idea. A block of concrete doesn't ask to be liked. It holds weight because it is weight. I wanted tablature that worked the same way, where the notation isn't a symbol pointing toward some more refined musical idea sitting behind it. The mark is the instruction. There's no behind.

I should say what this isn't, since people tend to assume graphic notation automatically means loose, gestural, up-for-interpretation. Mine isn't that. It's dense in a specific way: thick blocks of directive stacked against each other, sometimes in gray tonal layers that read almost like a rubbing taken off a wall. Where a conventional score gives you room to breathe between phrases, I want the page itself to feel heavy in the hand, before a single sound has happened. A performer opening one of these scores for the first time usually goes quiet for a minute. That reaction is not an accident and I won't pretend it is.

The repetition in the notation isn't developmental, and this trips people up more than anything else. In most Western composition, when a figure repeats, you expect variation, transformation, some argument being built across time. I'm after something closer to how a modular housing block repeats a unit without each repetition meaning anything new. Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation is the reference I keep coming back to, not because I want the music to sound like architecture, but because the logic of stacking identical structural units without narrative justification is exactly the logic I wanted for the notation itself. Repetition here reinforces mass. It doesn't develop an idea, it just adds another unit of the same weight.

I cut ornament aggressively. No curved articulation marks, no expressive dynamic swells, none of the vocabulary that softens a score and makes it feel like an emotional confidence rather than a set of instructions. Some of this came out of frustration with how much conventional notation spends on telling a performer how to feel about what they're playing, as opposed to what they're actually supposed to do with their body and instrument. Brutalist architecture doesn't decorate its function. It leaves the structural elements exposed because hiding them would be a kind of dishonesty. I think most ornamental notation is a similar kind of dishonesty, dressing up a directive as an emotional gesture.

Performing this material is not comfortable, and I don't think it should be. Euphonium, contrabass, prepared piano, these are instruments that can produce a kind of heaviness other instruments resist, and the notation asks players to work against their own instinct toward legato, toward line, toward the things that make a phrase sound "musical" in the conventional sense. What I want instead is closer to labor. The performer confronts a block of instruction and has to physically get through it, and that physical difficulty is part of the piece, not an obstacle to it.

People who dislike this work tend to say the same few things. That it obscures nuance. That it's more concerned with how it looks than how it sounds. That it shuts out anyone not already fluent in graphic notation. I don't think they're wrong, exactly. I just don't think those are flaws, or at least not flaws I'm interested in correcting. Xenakis and Ligeti both understood that sonic mass could be a structural principle in its own right, not just texture in service of a melodic idea sitting somewhere above it, and I'm working in that lineage more than in the lineage of anyone who wrote a friendlier score.

If there's a single thing I'd want someone to take from looking at one of these pages, it's that difficulty isn't automatically a failure of communication. Sometimes a score that refuses to be gentle is communicating something a gentler score can't.

Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade for Trumpet and Cello: Notation as Infrastructural Fiction

 

“Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade”: An Aesthetic Technology for Trumpet and Cello

One does not read this score. One enters it.

Across its partitioned surface etched in chromatic vector and modular topology, we encounter not a composition, but a system of knowing. "Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade" refuses the linearity of conventional music notation and instead orchestrates a machine for time-experiencing, rendered simultaneously in data, metaphor, and myth.

It is written for trumpet and cello.  Two instruments stretched here not only across register, but across epistemic tension: breath and bow, metallic propulsion and fibrous resistance. The result is less a duet and more a semantic exchange, conducted across contradictory zones of presence and absence.

The first frame of the score is both ornamental and clinical. Brass-gold gradients clash against gunmetal blue fields. These chromatic fields do not merely stage notation; they perform an affective inversion. What glows with visual clarity obfuscates in meaning; what appears simple throbs with recursive complexity.

“"Luxtrapathy,"an invented compound of lux (light, radiance) and pathy (feeling, suffering) designates a form of illumination that blinds even as it seduces. Here, musical gestures are not written as commands but exposures. Notation blooms into calligraphic morphology, part architectural plan, part surgical interface.

Beneath the brass title “TOMIAVA 5” and its shadow-opposite “YALSIVO 9,” a field of spectral glyphs flicker: notated as if haunted, spectralized into the faint, the barely-there. The music becomes a technology of fading, where events are scaffolded on the brink of disappearance. What remains is not the phrase, but its residue.

In another discreet panel, we find ourselves among brands, syllables, and patented fragments: CHERILLISP. TYMAT. LINGSONN. CITO.

They are not names. They are vectors.  They are tokens of a para-economic language. The score here dissolves into corporate surrealism, where every name is both a claim and a veil. Graphically, these are arranged within radiant zones of silver and mauve: not neutral, but institutional. Bureaucratic gradients masquerading as elegance.

Each musical passage here is framed in quasi-algorithmic units. What looks like traditional staves is quietly dismantled by nested brackets, echo clusters, graphic interjections, and the occasional appearance of industrial iconography...a screw, a barcode, an architectural form.

What emerges is a kind of audit of musical labor. Each gesture must justify itself, not through expressive agency, but through diagrammatic consistency. It is the Capitalocene rendered in sound: a place where even breath and bowing technique are abstracted into value flows.

The third panel, perhaps the most elaborately designed, plunges us into the domain of the Logicade. Here the music becomes play, but a regulated play, with its own grammar of control, glitch, and surprise.

Let us define the Logicade as a ludic epistemology: a worldview in which logic becomes game, and the game becomes score. Across this zone, trumpet and cello are cast not as interpreters but as operators.  They become executors of sonic maneuvers inside a semiotic arcade.

Diagrams spiral. Notation stretches and recoils. Glissandi appear beside punctured spheres and orbital scripts. The Logicade rewards fluency not in reading music, but in navigating diagrammatic uncertainty.

Here, the musicians improvise not from instinct but from spatial coordinates. They do not perform; they simulate.

Towards a Lexicon of the Score

To engage with this system fully, we must name its parts.  To score is to invent grammar.  From this work, we derive the following terms:

• Luxtrapathy – The pathology of excessive visibility; when sonic form becomes overlit and evacuated of intimacy.

• Auditonics – The practice of rendering musical decisions legible to bureaucratic logic.

• Glyphonomy – The study of semiotic particles that carry neither pitch nor rhythm, but instructional aura.

• Value Drift – When notational form escapes its origin to accrue alternate meanings through placement.

• Logicade – A designed logic-as-game, wherein instrumental behavior becomes rule-determined action.

• Modal Ciphers – Sonic signatures encoded not as pitch collections but as spatial event triggers

• 
  

  
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Coda: Notation as Infrastructural Fiction

"Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade" is not a performance score. It is an infrastructural fiction. Its diagrams simulate the behavior of sound within regimes of control, visibility, and abstraction.

Trumpet and cello here are instruments of more than tone: they are epistemic agents.  They emerge as conduits through which the score’s operative logic becomes temporarily audible.

We are not being asked to listen.

We are being asked to navigate.

Taryn Simon and the Post Scriptual Event: A Continental Reflection on Notation, Apparitions, and the Theological Trace

 

Taryn Simon and the Post Scriptual Event: A Continental Reflection on Notation, Apparitions, and the Theological Trace

To consider Taryn Simon within the field of new music notation is to enter a zone where aesthetic form becomes indistinguishable from epistemic force. Her images and installations do not describe the world. They summon it. They summon it in fragments, in controlled exposures, in architectural containers that resemble vaults or sanctuaries devoted to a peculiar ritual of unveiling. Simon’s practice positions the viewer before a paradox. Everything appears to be revealed, yet revelation is never complete. The visible object announces its own insufficiency, as if the logic of disclosure were always haunted by what remains concealed.

This paradox aligns closely with the current displacement of classical musical notation. The script that once promised clarity begins to tremble. The composer no longer entrusts meaning entirely to symbol. A different mode of inscription emerges, one that draws on the density of matter, the opacity of photographic fields, the architectural distribution of space, and the speculative force of conceptual constraint. Simon becomes a figure whose methods illuminate this shift.

Appearance and Withdrawal

In continental thought, appearance is never stable. Phenomena arrive accompanied by a residue of nonappearance, a shadow that conditions the very possibility of presence. Simon’s work stages this relation with precision. A document is shown, but the chain of reference that gives it consequence remains hidden. A ritual object is photographed, but the breath that sustains the ritual slips away. A classified file is presented through its physical form, yet its content remains sealed behind juridical power.

Taryn Simon

New music notation can be understood through the same dialectic. The notational object appears before the performer, yet what it asks remains partially withdrawn. The score becomes an apparition. It arises as a presence that gestures toward something beyond itself. The performer reads not only what is presented but also the unpresentable horizon that surrounds it. This is a theological condition in the broad phenomenological sense. Revelation occurs only in the interplay of presence and retreat.

The Archive as Ontological Machine

Simon’s installations often mimic an archive. The archive is not merely a storage system. It is an ontological machine that creates the conditions under which entities may appear as legible or illegible. Continental inquiry has long recognized the archive as a structure that decides what counts as real or historical.

When notation adopts archival forms, it inherits this ontological power. The score becomes a mechanism that produces the reality of its own content. A sculptural tablet or a photographic score does not simply contain music. It forms the field in which musicality can arise at all. The archive, in this sense, is a theological construct. It generates the order of possible worlds.

Simon reveals that every archive is both a promise and a threat. It promises knowledge yet withholds the totality that would complete its system. In parallel, a post scriptual score suggests musical meaning yet withholds structural certainty. The performer is delivered into a world that is only partially disclosed. Interpretation becomes a negotiation with an archive that exceeds the reader.

Ritual, Gesture, and the Performative Threshold

Many continental thinkers treat ritual not as a religious leftover but as a fundamental mode through which communities produce meaning. Ritual is a threshold. It separates ordinary time from a time that has been intensified through concentrated attention.

Simon’s work often depicts rituals that govern political, biological, and familial existence. These rituals possess a strange double character. They seem both fragile and absolute. They expose the arbitrariness of institutions while also showing the deep dependency humans have on forms of ceremonial order.

For new music notation, ritual becomes an instructive model. Notation is no longer a neutral command. It becomes a performative threshold that organizes the body of the performer. A photographic score with spatial distortions or a material tablet with shifting planes invites a ritualized handling. The score asks to be approached in a particular manner. It creates a new temporality in which reading becomes a contemplative act.

In this sense, notation approaches theology. Not theology as doctrine, but theology as the study of how revelation emerges through acts of attention directed toward material signs.

The Fiction of Evidence and the Divine Remainder

Simon frequently constructs scenes that resemble evidence. They resemble it so convincingly that the viewer is compelled to treat them as forensic truth. Yet each scene is a fiction that exposes the instability of evidentiary authority. The work teaches the viewer to inhabit the gap between authoritative surfaces and the fragile constructions that produce them.

New music notation has begun to explore this gap as well. Scores that assume the forms of maps, pharmaceutical sheets, bureaucratic records, or scientific diagrams use the aesthetic of evidence to provoke a heightened intensity of reading. Yet the performer recognizes that the authority of the form is artificial. The score becomes a fiction of power that turns back on itself.

This fiction opens a theological question. If evidence is always incomplete, what remainder continues to condition meaning from beyond the visible structure The divine is not invoked as a supernatural figure. It is invoked as the name for the pressure exerted by what cannot be shown yet continues to determine the significance of what is shown.

Toward a Material Theology of the Score

Simon’s influence permits a new conception of the notational object. The score becomes a theological artifact in the sense that it gathers matter, image, and concept into a configuration that seeks to reveal more than it contains. It becomes a physical concentration of the invisible. A tilt shift photograph that shapes a performer’s perception, or a sculptural form that must be traced rather than read, carries a theological charge. The score becomes a site where the invisible forces of interpretation press into material form.

This does not imply that the work promotes religious belief. It invites reflection on the conditions under which meaning transcends representation. It asks how matter becomes luminous with intention. It asks how sound arises from objects that resist complete comprehension.

Conclusion: The Score as Event

Simon’s practice, interpreted through a continental lens, suggests that the score is not a text. It is an event. It arrives, confronts, withdraws, and leaves a residue that shapes the performer long after the reading has ended. It becomes a threshold where documentation and invention meet. It becomes an archive that cannot be closed. It becomes a ritual object that summons a new temporality. It becomes a theological inquiry into how the visible world holds within itself a trace of the ungraspable.

In this sense, Simon offers more than influence. She provides a way to think about notation as an apparition that carries both matter and mystery. The score becomes an instrument that binds revelation to material form and in doing so redefines the conditions of musical creation.

Clarion #44 - for C Trumpet

Clarion: The Theory Has Escaped the Notes

This page from Clarion may look like an unusually severe case of notational overpopulation, but its real subject is music theory itself. Not theory as explanation, but theory promoted to the status of sounding material.

The notes almost become the least interesting objects on the page. Around them accumulates a second composition: ratios rising and falling from individual events, numerical stratifications, counting grids, cumulative sums, isolated symbols, interruptions, black apertures and fragments that seem to belong to some alien analytical apparatus. The score behaves as though someone has taken the invisible machinery normally used to explain a composition and forced it back inside the composition.

That suggests a slightly perverse proposition: what if analysis could precede the music it supposedly analyzes?

Traditionally, theory arrives afterward. A piece exists; theory dissects it. Here that sequence seems reversed. The theoretical apparatus appears to have generated the conditions under which a note is permitted to exist. Ratios such as 7:5, 11:8, 17:5 and 13:8 cease to function simply as subdivisions. They become coordinates. A note is no longer merely when something happens. It is the temporary intersection of several numerical systems.

The result might be called polytheoretical counterpoint.

Instead of independent melodic voices, imagine independent analytical systems operating simultaneously. One layer measures proportional time. Another counts events. Another accumulates quantities. Another governs pitch displacement. Another seems to classify or annotate the residue left by the others. The performer encounters not one musical syntax but several incompatible theories of the same instant.

This produces the strangest possibility in Clarion: the score may contain more temporal information than time itself can accommodate.

A 7:5 relationship can be perfectly intelligible mathematically while becoming perceptually unstable when embedded within another proportional field, which is itself interrupted by yet another numerical operation. Continue the process and rhythm stops behaving like rhythm. It becomes something closer to number theory projected onto duration.

The performer therefore does not simply “execute” these relationships. Execution in the conventional sense may be the wrong model. The task is to preserve their differences. Seven against five must retain the idea of seven against five even when the surrounding temporal environment makes its exact perceptual identity nearly impossible to recover.

And this is where the page becomes atypical even for Clarion. Complexity is not being used merely to produce difficult music. Difficulty becomes epistemological. The notation asks how many mutually valid descriptions of a musical event can coexist before the event itself disappears beneath them.

The little black notehead remains.

But surrounding it is an enormous theoretical bureaucracy explaining why it has been allowed to occur.

Perhaps that is the joke buried inside the page. Music theory has finally achieved its ancient ambition: it has conquered the music.

Unfortunately, the music appears to be fighting back.

 

“I don’t like it, therefore AI.” AI: The New Alibi for Incomprehension

“I don’t like it, therefore AI.”

Don’t understand the image? AI.
Don’t like the music? AI.
The writing sounds too polished? AI.
Too strange? AI.
Too complicated? AI.
Too clean? AI.
Too unlike what you would have done? Definitely AI.

It is becoming the cultural equivalent of pointing at the sky and shouting “weather.”

The irony is that many of the people using “AI” as an accusation seem to have only the vaguest idea what AI can actually do, what it cannot do, and how much human direction, selection, revision, judgment, failure, and outright labor can sit behind a finished work.

AI can generate possibilities.

It cannot retroactively explain everything you dislike.

It cannot magically supply an artist with taste, intent, a point of view, a body of work, or years of accumulated decisions. It cannot turn confusion into plagiarism simply because the viewer would prefer an easier explanation.

And no, “it looks AI” is not analysis. Neither is “it sounds AI,” unless you can explain what specifically you mean beyond the fact that something made you suspicious.

There are perfectly legitimate arguments to have about authorship, originality, labor, training data, attribution, and the role of generative systems in creative work.

Those are interesting arguments.

But using AI as a synonym for “thing I don’t understand” is not one of them.

Sometimes a strange image is just a strange image.

Sometimes an unfamiliar score is simply unfamiliar.

Sometimes a complicated idea was made by a person who likes complicated ideas.

And sometimes the artificial intelligence in the room is not the problem.

It is the natural intelligence refusing to do any work.