Two thoughts about key art

1.

What’s the pur­pose of key art in a blog post or newsletter? Really, it’s just a splash of color. Some­thing to settle your gaze for a moment; starting point, foyer. Yes, that’s the right image: an inviting door, rather than a wall of text.

Over at Anthropic’s blog, the designers attach to each post a scribble set against a tasteful hue.

At OpenAI’s blog, the designers have given up and just use gradient blobs.

I think both approaches are Fine, Actually. The only option that’s not accept­able is AI slop, because, if the image doesn’t matter anyway (and it doesn’t), why not use some­thing real? There exists a vast trove of visual art in the public domain; it has never been easier to browse and search; and all of this art was made by someone, who lived and worked and dreamed. Some of it is so, so strange — in a way that AI slop never is, maybe cannot be.

I’ve used public domain art in my newsletter for years. Here are some favorites:

• the bogs of Kitty Kielland

• the psy­che­delic botan­ical art of Maria Sibylla Merian

• the beach­side scenes of Helge Johansson—splash of color indeed!

The art almost never reflects “the con­tent” directly, though I do tend to go find it after drafting the newsletter, so one hopes there’s sub­con­scious resonance. Sometimes, I add a short para­graph about the artist at the end of the newsletter; other times, I don’t. The point isn’t to be didactic or museum-ish; the art is really, truly just a splash of color … that hap­pens to summon, for a moment, to thou­sands of screens across the world, the vision of an artist long dead.

And if it catches the eye of a reader, and they follow a link to investigate, there is some­thing waiting for them. A whole life.

Where can you find public domain art? Chase McCoy’s Museo is a great starting point. The Cleveland Museum of Art’s online col­lection is fabulous, and they make it super easy to down­load high-resolution images. The Met is a trea­sure trove, obviously — especially for ancient images and artifacts. The Rikjsmuseum is packed with wonders, though you do have to make an account to down­load images.

Finally, I wish Artvee linked to its sources, but there’s no denying it is a vast, sur­prising archive—and it’s impor­tant to insist that the power of public domain art is that you can do any­thing you want with it, so their cruddy con­sol­i­da­tion is, in its way, an affir­ma­tion of the whole system.

2.

Rex Sorgatz’s trea­tise on key art for movies and TV shows is part of my internet canon: a gimlet eye turned towards some­thing you maybe didn’t realize was a genre, a craft.

Near the end, Rex con­trasts the finesse of good key art with Net­flix’s algo­rithmic presentation:

On Net­flix, each user now sees dif­ferent key art, based on their user activ­i­ties and ulti­mately their demographics. Which helps explain why you and your partner can never agree about what to watch. You are lit­er­ally pre­sented with dif­ferent options.

To illustrate, I loaded up my wife’s Net­flix pro­file next to mine. We got some of the same recommendations, but the art­work makes the shows look com­pletely dif­ferent:

Rex goes on to com­plain that the algo­rithmically-tuned key art is ugly … but/and this was 2021, and I wonder how the state of the art has advanced in the years since?

Is there any chance that Net­flix is now using AI models to guide and evolve these piv­otal graphics? (Yes, there is a good chance.) What about using AI image models to actu­ally generate them, and if the AI-generated tiles do not exactly rep­re­sent what hap­pens in the movie or show, well, the same has been true of movie posters for decades? (Here, too, there is def­i­nitely a chance!)

Nat­u­rally I’m now imag­ining that Net­flix might insert into the home screen, every so often, key art for a movie that doesn’t yet exist. When a user selects that tile, the system meekly reports, “Oops, this con­tent is not available”—not tech­ni­cally a lie — meanwhile tal­lying a vote for its production. Above some threshold of performance, a Net­flix exec­u­tive (or maybe it’s all soft­ware at this point) actu­ally green­lights the movie, ful­filling the prophecy.