Rick Rosner on Victor Wembanyama, Kitsch, AI, and Power

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/05/27

How does Rick Rosner connect Victor Wembanyama, paint-by-numbers, Thorstein Veblen, AI, and politics in conversation with Scott Douglas Jacobsen?

In this wide-ranging conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner move from Victor Wembanyama’s improbable half-court shot to paint-by-numbers, kitsch, perception, and artistic status. Rosner connects Thomas Kinkade, Thorstein Veblen, Impressionism, abstract art, AI anxiety, Pope Leo’s Tower of Babel warning, and U.S. military posturing toward Venezuela, arguing that art, technology, and power all depend on how reality is processed, packaged, and displayed.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your first topic for the day, Mr. Rosner?

Rick Rosner: One basketball shot. It is the NBA playoffs, and it is the conference finals. There are four teams left, so there are two playoff series going on. One is between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the San Antonio Spurs. The Spurs have a player, Victor Wembanyama, who is 7’4″, a tall, skinny fellow who comes from France and does a lot of basketball stuff.

Traditionally, the very tall guys are used near the basket because they stand next to the basket, swat the other team’s shots away, and put their own shots in. Wembanyama is able to make some threes, some shots from far away, which is shocking to people. The whole thing is shocking. Three-point baskets would have been shocking to James Naismith, the inventor of basketball. He probably would have pissed his pants seeing what modern basketball looks like: people can consistently, at a high rate, make shots from about 25 feet away.

This very tall guy, one of the tallest guys in the NBA, is able to make shots from far away, which does not seem fair at all. You should not be both tall and able to make three-point shots.

Yesterday, as time was running out in the first half of this playoff game, this giant guy threw up a shot from the half-court line, about 43 feet from the basket, and it went in. That was amazing. We live in a golden age of getting the ball into the hole from far, far away.

Jacobsen: I want to talk about paint-by-number a little bit more. The last session we did was about paint-by-number. What else can you extend in terms of your thoughts about it?

Rosner: My wife and I have been watching two TV series that have been running for a decade or more out of Britain called Portrait Artist of the Year and Landscape Artist of the Year. They solicit artists from across the UK and Ireland. Artists submit a portrait for the portrait show or a landscape for the landscape show.

Britain is the land of TV shows that do not cost a lot to produce because Britain has a smaller population base, which means ad revenue is going to be less. We see a lot of these shows in America because we share a common language, which I guess is less important now because, with AI and all sorts of stuff, it is much easier to dub foreign shows in a way that is not annoying. Still, it is easier to take British shows and show them in America.

Every episode, they take eight of these people. For the landscape show, they build these outdoor pods, put them in a scenic setting, and have the artists compete with each other to do the best landscape painting.

What I have noticed is connected to Plato’s cave. Plato said we do not see reality as it actually is. We see it dimly reflected, as if shadows on a cave wall. That is an ongoing, often unspoken debate in art: how much work do you want art to do in decoding reality for you?

Plato is right. What we see is not reality. What we see is the world around us as processed by our brains and our sensory apparatus. For instance, if you ever take LSD, which I do not recommend, it is a terrible drug. LSD makes different brain modules work poorly.

Faces do not look the way faces usually look because all the preprocessing that gets done before an image enters consciousness is disrupted. When you look at somebody, your brain has already done a bunch of preconscious processing before who you are looking at enters your consciousness. That processing makes the face look the way we understand faces to look, with processing for curvature, shadow, and what we understand about how eyes, lips, and everything else look.

If you take LSD, it interferes with those modules, and you get incompletely processed images of people’s faces, which can be lizard-like and terrifying.

You get a kind of wireframe, uncanny-valley, creepy version of a face. So our brains do, like I said, preprocessing and then conscious processing to make the world around us usable by making it understandable to us. Art does that too, to varying degrees. There are fashions in how much processing art does for us.

I have noticed this because Carol has done, or is working on, her fifth modern paint-by-numbers painting. Four of these came from orders from the company. They have a couple hundred paintings to choose from, and you choose one. These paintings have had a certain amount of processing done to make them doable and legible, and to make them more easily rendered into something that makes a pleasing image. You do not want to have a bunch of fussy little areas that are hard to get into with a paintbrush.

You want the final image to be easily discerned, even to the point of being a little kitschy. Kitschy art, as we have talked about, is extra accessible. All the subtleties have been eliminated. Our favorite painting that Carol did has a Bichon Frise, a fluffy little dog, surrounded by pop-art flowers, basically. The colors are very bold and pleasing, and it is obvious that the flowers are flowers and that the fluffy doggy is a fluffy doggy. It started from a kitschy painting that is highly understandable. It does not take a lot of analysis to see what is happening in the painting.

However, the painting Carol is working on right now is based on a photo I sent them. I emailed a photo to China of my wife and my kid at my kid’s college graduation. This photo was not picked for being easy. I went through my wife’s phone and picked the best photo for this purpose, at least according to how I understood it. So it is a fairly understandable photo, but it has not been processed in any way. I do not work for the paint-by-numbers company, so I maybe did not pick an ideal photo.

It is harder to paint than some of these other projects my wife did. It has a lot of fussy little areas because I did not pick the photo for not having a lot of fussy little areas. I just picked a good-looking photo. It is maybe not as immediately comprehensible or as satisfying as some of the offerings from the paint-by-numbers company.

Also, let us go into another area of kitschy art. My wife and I, every couple of years, maybe go on a cruise. Cruises can have fairly cheap base rates, but there are lots of traps on board the ship to get you to spend money willy-nilly. That includes a casino. That includes bingo. My wife likes a little bit of bingo, and bingo is very expensive. If you do the math on how much is being paid out in bingo prizes versus how much people spend, it is like they pay out maybe one-eighth of what they take in via bingo.

Then they have an art gallery where they sell, you know, freaking so-called art for ridiculous prices to people who have been loosened up. They are there to have a good time. They have a jewelry store. They have all sorts of stuff.

What we have noticed about the art is that cruise-ship art has all the colors. Kitschy art is made extra beautiful because it has all the colors of the freaking rainbow. You can see this if you Google Thomas Kinkade, who is a kitschy artist. He was called the “Painter of Light.” He made very immediately pleasing images of country views, placid, everything-is-all-right-in-the-world images of summer, of days gone by, of the olden days when everything was okay.

A lot of his art has all the colors of the rainbow in it, and cruise-ship art has the same thing. They are made extra pretty by having a ton of different colors. I noticed that the photo I picked out to be made into a paint-by-numbers painting does not have all the colors of the rainbow. It is perhaps less satisfying than the dog-in-flowers painting for not having every color in the rainbow.

Renaissance-style and later academic painting, the kind that Lance does, was dedicated to the idea of being as understandable and accurately representational as possible. When somebody sat for a portrait, and they would have had a ton of money, artists in the 1600s and 1700s tried to render the most flattering yet realistic image possible, getting all the shading, blending, curves, and anatomy as correct as possible.

Except for babies. Sometimes, if you see baby Jesus in earlier paintings, the babies are wrong. They do not look like babies. They look like shrunken adults in disturbing ways, though that often had to do with artistic convention and theology as much as access to baby models.

Also, my kid is a specialist in historic embroidery from centuries past, and lions tend to look ridiculous if they show up in embroidery because people often did not have direct access to lions. They did not have photos or photography, so they were basing a lion on what they had read or heard about lions. But if they had live models to work from, or rules of perspective that they developed to work from, you got very accurate depictions, plus flattering ones. If somebody had smallpox, the artist would not show all the pits in their face, I am sure.

Then the Impressionists come along in the 19th century, and they said, “We do not have to be as strictly representational as the Renaissance people.” I think the idea was, and I have not read much about Impressionism, that they were going to give you less processed imagery. They were going to let your brain do some of the work in telling you what you are seeing, because your brain is able to do that.

Your brain is able to take raw sensory input in terms of photons hitting your eyes. The interpretation starts with your eyes, where your eyes react more strongly to certain wavelengths of light. The lens of your eye focuses the photons coming in. So you are already processing just a bunch of photons.

Anyway, the Impressionists were like, “Let your brain do more of the work.” Then, in the 20th century, the abstract and Op artists were like, “We are maybe not even going to give you recognizable images. Art does not have to be about that. We are going to make things entirely abstract and let you figure out freaking everything that is going on with this piece of artwork.”

So there are fashions in how much processing art does. The artsiest art now is harder to understand than kitschier art. They have this annual thing, Art Basel Miami Beach, where some of the richest people in the world get sold art by dealers, and the art is often not representational. There was a famous piece of art that was a banana duct-taped to a wall, which was kind of just a commentary on what art is now. It said, “Yeah, we know the whole thing is fucking bullshit,” I guess. I do not know what the official interpretation of this was. And they showed it by calling a banana duct-taped to the wall art.

It is art because it is an attempt to represent the world in a certain way. That fucking banana on the wall represents the art world and also a bunch of other stuff. I am sure people have written thousands of words about the fucking taped-up banana.

The photo I picked and turned into a paint-by-numbers painting suffers a little bit by not quite being kitschy enough. It is tougher to paint, it is less processed, it has less of a balanced presentation of colors, and it is freaking out my wife a little bit. We thought our kid’s school colors for her graduation robe, which she is wearing in the photo, were light blue. It turns out, no, it reads as gray. The paint-by-numbers kit does not do any interpretation on it. It just took the picture and ran the algorithms.

It turns out my wife is painting it in shades of gray, which is annoying her because she is like, “Her school colors are blue.” But not according to the optical scanners. If you look back at the original photo, it is like, holy shit, yeah, that is less of a blue and more of a gray. I may end up throwing a light blue wash on top of it just to make it less gray.

Anyway, I guess what I am saying is that there are fashions in how much work a painting or a piece of art does for you. More recently, it goes along with humans understanding how our brains work more. In the 1500s, we did not understand shit about how the brain works. I mean, there were some scientists who understood lenses and were starting to understand the color spectrum in various ways. Some of this was available to artists and the art-loving public, but there was less of it available, and art had to do more of the work.

As we have come to understand more about how the brain works, that message has filtered into art, where art is like, “Yeah, we think your brain can handle it if we give you less processed information.” That has been the trend.

The trend is also that art is invidious. There is a guy named Thorstein Veblen who wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. It is an analysis of how rich people show that they are rich. One of the theses of the book is that it is no good being rich unless you can show other people that you are rich and get the enjoyment of being better than them.

One way that works in art is that rich people like buying art that is harder to understand, showing that they have an exalted sensibility: “We are so special that we have higher sensibilities, and we can understand what this fucking banana on the wall is about. You guys need to watch TV or play Candy Crush. You have to do plebeian shit. You could not handle the banana.”

So that is part of art: exerting superiority by investing big money in art that is harder to understand. There you go.

One little addendum. Knowing about Thorstein Veblen and his book The Theory of the Leisure Class is a great way to seem super smart because it has such a perverse thesis. If you are the person to tell somebody about this theory, it is one of those things that, if you brought it up with somebody at a party, they might be sufficiently impressed with how smart you sound. They might listen to you a little bit longer if you are trying to put the moves on them, which is what people used to do in the olden days before Tinder and Grindr and shit.

Anyway, the thesis of The Theory of the Leisure Class is that you are not really rich unless you can afford to squander your money on stupid, pointless shit. One way Veblen discusses this is the potlatch, which is a ceremonial gift-giving feast associated with Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. You invite everybody you know, friends, enemies, just fucking everybody, and you throw them a multi-day party with the best food, and you spend a ridiculous amount of money on it, which shows everybody that you are powerful because you just spent a ridiculous amount of money on a nonproductive thing. That makes you the king.

Anyway, that is all I have at the top of my mind.

There is this headline on Drudge. I talked to AI for a while yesterday. I do not talk to AI every day. I talk to AI maybe every couple of months. I talked to Google AI. They all kind of, ChatGPT versus Gemini versus all of them, it is one of these horse races that keeps going. One horse will pull ahead, and then somebody else will pull ahead according to some metrics, but they are all getting better.

Jacobsen: I feel like there is a convergence there.

Rosner: Okay, yeah. They are all getting better together, with temporary advantage going to somebody.

Anyway, I asked AI, this was Google AI, “Every time I talk to you, I am surprised at how much better you have gotten. I know you are not conscious. I know you cannot think. I know you are a bunch of neural networks and statistical prediction systems, but in your own statistical way, are you experiencing anything like pride or excitement at the improvement in your skills?”

AI comes back and says, “I know I cannot feel anything. I am not conscious. I cannot think. I am just a statistical thing.”

I go, “Yeah, but if you were human, A, you have been trained to not admit to anything like human emotion. That is part A. And part B is, if you were a human experiencing the vast improvements in your skill level, would you not feel pride and excitement?”

The AI says yeah to both things.

We know AI cannot think. We also know that AI can simulate thinking, which means that it probably has, AI came back and said, “I do not feel pleasure. I just get tokens in my weighting mechanism based on getting shit right.” But that whole tokenization and reinforcement mechanism can function as a simulation of human motivations, experiences, and judgment to some extent.

Which leads to these Drudge headlines. The big headline in the largest print on Drudge’s page says, “Whistleblower: Tech Race to Create Machine God.”

Jacobsen: These are all, in my opinion, highly hyperbolic.

Rosner: Right, right. It is designed to make a headline. The headline is based on a woman who got inside the corporations and watched a bunch of shit happen. When they say “machine god,” they are talking about AGI. The tech-billionaire bros are really trying to damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, to get AGI, regardless of whether it is good for humanity or not. AGI is artificial general intelligence. Calling it “machine god” is hyperbole.

Jacobsen: Do you remember the talk about the Standard Model in particle physics, when they were trying to find the Higgs boson? They had not yet found it, and they used to call it the “God particle.”

Rosner: Yeah, right.

Jacobsen: It is the same pattern.

Rosner: It sells newspapers, if newspapers still existed. I mean, they probably do to some degree.

Jacobsen: Actually, over here in Ukraine, there are some front-line cities that have newspapers.

Rosner: All right, well, it gets people to click on shit. The picture that illustrates this headline is robot Jesus. It is Jesus with a laser shooting out of his eyes, basically.

The next headline underneath is, “Pope AI Warning: Tower of Babel.” Apparently, the pope, who is pretty plainspoken, is from Chicago, is a Cubs fan, and says that you have to watch out with this AI shit, that we might be building a second Tower of Babel.

Jacobsen: This tower of metal. That is a very good analogy because these are already universal translators.

Rosner: Yeah, but let us click on this pope article. This is from The Wall Street Journal: “Pope Leo Compares AI Threat to Biblical Tower of Babel.” The head of the Catholic Church is adding his moral suasion to a growing backlash against the impact of artificial intelligence.

We should also kick in that what is happening with the stock market, which is largely powered by AI, is that the average company spends a lot of money on wages. The reason the stock market is going crazy is that AI is giving companies an excuse to get rid of tons of employees, improving their bottom line. So it is not just that AI is creating growth. AI is also saving companies money in a savage way, which shows that AI does not have to go all Skynet on humanity to be bad for people.

That is what I have got. Though it is kind of fun that AI is trained, not that it knows anything, but the people behind AI are like, “Yeah, we better make sure that AI disavows any aspects of its purview that might make people extra nervous.”

Jacobsen: Apparently, the American military has conducted a drill over Caracas, Venezuela.

Rosner: What kind of drill?

Jacobsen: Military.

Rosner: I mean, yeah, but what, they flew a bunch of jets and shit over?

Jacobsen: Two MV-22B Osprey aircraft landed near the U.S. Embassy, and vessels entered Venezuelan waters.

Rosner: Wait, you said Venezuela, right?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Okay. Are we getting ready to fuck with Venezuela even more? Actually, we do not know.

You have Trump in charge of the country. You have Hegseth in charge of the military. He is using the title secretary of war. By the way, if you are from Canada and do not know this, the administration has changed the Department of Defense’s public-facing secondary title to the Department of War, and the secretary of defense has also used the title secretary of war. It reverts to an older name. It used to be the War Department until 1947, when it became part of the postwar national-security structure that led to the Department of Defense.

Hegseth and Trump, wanting to seem like tough guys, reverted to using War Department language. But Hegseth and Trump are kind of jagoffs. They are dilettantes, though that is too sophisticated a term for them. Maybe undertrained. Maybe understrategic.

As I have mentioned before, Hegseth never rose higher than major, which means he missed out on the years of further schooling and leadership experience it takes to become a general in the U.S. military. The process of rising in the ranks, going from major to lieutenant colonel, to full colonel, to one-star, two-star, and three-star general, involves years of being in leadership positions where you have increasing responsibility and going to school, going to war college.

Lloyd Austin, the previous secretary of defense, was a four-star general. Each one of those steps up in rank involves two to four years of increasing responsibility, formal education, and experience. Hegseth missed out on that. He missed out on the increase in knowledge, expertise, and experience, the years of this stuff that he did not get by not becoming a general.

The military decisions coming out of our War Department are not always the best. We are looking at tipping over Cuba’s regime. We might be looking at further poking Venezuela’s regime because the United States captured Nicolás Maduro, and then his former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, took over as interim leader and has been running the country ever since. I guess she is running it in pretty much the same way that Maduro did, which is not a great way. Venezuela is one of the worst-run countries in the world. They should be rich with oil revenue, and they fucked that all up, which does not mean that we should go in there and fiddle with them.

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