My cousin went to RISD in 1972 after graduation she started hanging around MIT eventually studying under Negroponte before the formation of the media lab. After graduation she worked as a computer animator.
She is in the photo at the terminal working on the last starfighter.
She has been creating computer art ever since. She has often expressed confusion and disillusionment with the field. She is often unsure if she or the computer is the artist.
Photographers have always had similar sentiments, but if you look at artistic photography versus random or amateur photography the former is definitely an art form.
Nearly all art except singing and dance is made with tools. In many cases tools define the art form.
Tools define those too, I've seen a few GREAT articles on the subject, but the example was given: There's a dance everyone knows called "the robot."
It, of course, didn't exist until after robots were invented because no one would recognize it as that. Even more interesting, when e.g. a dancer makes it look like s/he's "moving backwards." We as humanity couldn't really concieve of that until we saw e.g. film actually run backwards.
Recently I was watching some beatbox battles, similar deal. I kind of like them less these days because I prefer when they imitate/get inspiration from acoustic or other "older" instruments, but now the majority of them are imitating, e.g. bass synths and EDM type stuff.
Dance generally uses tools too, but they are more subtle and better integrated. Clothes, props, lights and even the stage can be seen as tools to achieve dance's aims.
Singing can certainly use tools too. Auto tune and special microphones.
Perhaps you mean to say that neither require tools.
Even signing and dance use tools, they’re just biological and under sophisticated neural control. It takes at least as much work to train vocal cords and breathing as it does to train muscles to use a paintbrush.
> She is often unsure if she or the computer is the artist.
Did she really say that? As a moonlighting digital artist, I feel like this is the same thing as a painter saying they’re not sure if the paintbrush is the artist. Maybe if I wanted a full time art career I should have leaned into it and fostered the dramatic narrative of the computer having intent. God knows there are a bunch of artists who actually know better say lots of stupid untrue stuff that anthropomorphizes computers, and they enjoy a lot of attention for it. I think this hyperbolic ghost in the machine crap is very short sighted and has influenced public opinion much for the worse.
Artists are undermining their own efforts and talents and spreading misinformation about what computers actually do when they tell the story this way. More importantly, they are undermining the efforts and talents of all artists, specifically of digital artists who don’t want to take part in the computer-as-artist narrative. I’ve stood next to my art at a gallery show and had people walk by and say out loud something like “ugh why is this here? this crap is just made by a computer”. I don’t expect people to understand how I use the computer, but the bias and lack of curiosity is pretty sad, and my computer was neither artist nor collaborator. It was a tool that I used to achieve a vision I had, the same way I use a paintbrush to make pictures.
We could talk about who made the tools, whether it’s a paintbrush, a camera, or computer hardware and software. There’s a Grand Canyon of space for credit that various other people might deserve, in between the artist and the art made using a computer. Jumping to the conclusion that the computer did anything on it’s own and deserves attribution is to be unintentionally (or sometimes intentionally) ignorant about what a computer is and what it does.
> As a moonlighting digital artist, I feel like this is the same thing as a painter saying they’re not sure if the paintbrush is the artist.
This is non-sensical. You hold the paintbrush and move it across the medium with your own hand. It is entirely within the artists control. With a computer, you tell it what to do and within it's own constraints, be that p5.js or an llm whatever algorithm will produce some result.
People have said similar things about artists throughout history. Oil Paint? Non-religious/mythical subjects? Impressionism? Fauvism? Cubism? Modern Art? Etc.
Throughout art history people have often not valued the new, but only the existing. Beaux-Arts de Paris in the late 1800's was the premiere art school in Europe training traditional artists; yet many eventually turned to impressionism, etc. and abandoned the old styles. I do "computer art" today and go in directions that are new. If all you do is what came before, everything including art will stagnate. Evolve or die is not just for biology.
Throughout art history the good stuff always floats to the top as it will always.
> This leads to Eliot's so-called "Impersonal Theory" of poetry. Since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of depersonalisation. The mature poet is viewed as a medium, through which tradition is channelled and elaborated. He compares the poet to a catalyst in a chemical reaction, in which the reactants are feelings and emotions that are synthesised to create an artistic image that captures and relays these same feelings and emotions. While the mind of the poet is necessary for the production, it emerges unaffected by the process. The artist stores feelings and emotions and properly unites them into a specific combination, which is the artistic product. What lends greatness to a work of art are not the feelings and emotions themselves, but the nature of the artistic process by which they are synthesised. The artist is responsible for creating "the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place." And, it is the intensity of fusion that renders art great. In this view, Eliot rejects the theory that art expresses metaphysical unity in the soul of the poet. The poet is a depersonalised vessel, a mere medium.
> Great works do not express the personal emotion of the poet. The poet does not reveal their own unique and novel emotions, but rather, by drawing on ordinary ones and channelling them through the intensity of poetry, they express feelings that surpass, altogether, experienced emotion. This is what Eliot intends when he discusses poetry as an "escape from emotion." Since successful poetry is impersonal and, therefore, exists independent of its poet, it outlives the poet and can incorporate into the timeless "ideal order" of the "living" literary tradition. [0]
> Throughout art history the good stuff always floats to the top as it will always.
No really. For example, you have political art, conceptual art, and topical performances that, while interesting, soon become irrelevant and likely won't float on top for very long. Likewise, many past excellent artists disappeared from the museum chart, so to say, and periodically resurfaced.
Depends. Ancient Egyptian art didn’t evolve that much and it remained for millennia as current without the feeling that it ‘stagnated’. There is nothing that says things need to eternally evolve. There is some advantage in some systems in evolution, but not all systems and not for every species and not even for man.
The question about Egyptian art is more difficult than it seems. Almost all the artifacts are the ones that could survive 1,000s of years and is quite sophisticated. What we don't get a good sample of is woodworking which is much easier to manipulate. The difficulty of stone work has a built-in limiting factor.
I’m not sure your assertion regarding ancient Egyptians’ feelings on art trends of their time can be tested :P
People create with what is at hand — this includes ideas, not just physical media. In my opinion, suggesting there is society-wide progress (or lack of it) in art is silly, like suggesting the same for fashion or cooking.
Exploration, technical evolution, yes. And progress in ideas, in society? Of course!
People do not value the new because the new has no value.
Tell me the importance of a x1SjelifbOoo. It's not important because it has no importance.
Value, in this way, is formed by way of merit; of doing. That which fails to be valued greater or equivalent to another is less valuable, and lesser than another.
There are but a few classical traint artist that started to use computer programs to produce art. One of them is the Dutch artist Peter Struycken. See pstruycken.nl for his art works. In his last works, that focus on colour, he used software to find arrangements of squares with no recognizable patterns as not to distract the viewer from the subject of his works, the interaction of carefully selected coloursm
I am an artist who works with both digital and traditional media. When household computers were just making an appearance I remember talking with a family friend on the subject of art. They asked my if I had considered trying out this new technology, saying with stars in her eyes that ‘it can draw lines to a degree of accuracy of thousands of an inch’. I was at the time rightfully unconvinced.
This anecdote demonstrates how completely misunderstood new technologies can be. Such accuracy is completely irrelevant to an artist.
In the end the thing that ‘converted’ me was getting my hands on a copy of Photoshop. I was then, and remain, unimpressed by its painting tools. However, I was blown away by its ability to penetrate the surface of a photo - to change the facts of that photo. Effectively, this solved a creative problem I did not even know I had.
I honestly believe that tools are invented before tool users.
There's a related phenomenon in that we now have an "iPad kid" generation that gets sucked into these extremely precise digital tools without a lot of context, following the beginner's trope of overvaluing rendering and draftmanship to the end of making pieces that all take hundreds of hours and do very little to utilize the machine's ability to automate or dissect information.
I remember coming across a livestream of someone whose line-making process was to zoom in and scrub over a tiny area repeatedly for several minutes to create the effect of a single ink brush stroke. The effect was pleasant and had a very intentionally designed quality to it, but I came back a few hours later and he had made hardly any progress. The goal he had in mind was really better suited for vector tools, but the machine wasn't stopping him in the way that paper would give out under intensive scrubbing. I'm quite sure, extrapolating that anecdote, that there's someone out there trying to intentionally design each pixel in a 4k image.
IMHO the single most important thing digital provides is new ways to see - I'll often direct students to use the threshold filter to discover new lighting shapes in references or indicate planning problems with their value structure.
> IMHO the single most important thing digital provides is new ways to see - I'll often direct students to use the threshold filter to discover new lighting shapes in references or indicate planning problems with their value structure.
Completely agree. The hidden structures of an artwork are pretty much invisible with access to some flavor or other of a digital tool.
I believe that Rembrandt would have killed to have the ability to photograph his work and apply a de-saturation in order to see its lightness map. In fact... he did something similar... view his paintings in candle light, which does indeed almost de-saturate his colors.
Likewise, any decent Impressionist would have loved to be able to create a Saturation map using Photoshop's Selective Color adjustment.
> That is, the role of the computer in the production and presentation of semantic information which is accompanied by enough aesthetic information is meaningful; the role of the computer in the production of aesthetic information per se and for the making of profit is dangerous and senseless.
I think this was prescient and still worthy of contemplation.
The way I understand that paragraph is that "aesthetic information" is the aesthetics involved themselves, and I think it's more than agreeable that art at minimum concerns itself a great deal with aesthetics (things looking pretty, organized, orderly disorganized, etc.) - some might even argue it's all aesthetics, or that aesthetics are inalienable or foundational to it. I'd personally argue there's no art without aesthetics.
Humanity's abilities are always enhanced by their tools. This simply changes the judgement of art in the face of easier execution.
Let's say I used a custom power saw to carve a statue faster than ever before and more precisely. Would that reduce my influence and my application of taste? No. I would in fact be able to produce a piece faster and have more room for making more attempts.
Neural network based art tools are all giving us the same thing - easier execution. This means greater production and the ability to try most possibilities. The fact that creating art is more accessible to the public means that more creatives can be in the arena, making for more competition.
Any creator grapples with this change over time. Woodworkers of old prefer their techniques to modern power tools, painters prefer physical media, carvers prefer real blocks of marble/whatever. All of these things have modern digital equivalents, but the establishment of existing artists refuse to leave their posts. They hold their ground that the medium is critical to the art.
Art moves and changes slowly because of this human bias against new solutions. Go to any museum of modern art and you'll find that most of it could have been executed as such 20+ years ago. It's just that art takes time to accept a new way of doing something.
The banana stuck to the wall isn't as dumb as it sounds. Look up the story behind it. I read an argument that it's a clever bit of satire on NFTs and the idea of "owning a piece of art".
Does that make it art? Dunno. Don't care. It makes it interesting which is a more useful category.
It is a physical version of the insanity that are NFT pictures. It is a piece of art that is perfectly fungible. Anyone can stick a banana on the wall. And in fact the exhibits of this piece of art are a banana taped to the wall by some random employee. The only thing making it unique is a certificate by the artist that assures you that a banana taped to the wall in that specific exhibition is an art piece by the artist. Just like NFTs are fungible jpegs presumably made non-fungible by a blockchain entry.
I think it's brilliant commentary. And even if you have never heard of NFTs it poses questions about what qualifies a piece of art as unique or an original
Perhaps. But there's also an enormous amount of dirty money sloshing around the art world that I would argue has more to do with the price than the interest of the work itself.
> I'll stick to the best definition of art that I've heard : "if it gives you an emotion, it is art".
Stubbing my little toe gives me an emotion, is that "art"? lol
I would suggest that art is a method is communication. One philosophical definition that I've often used is that "it is a selective recreation of reality in accordance with what the artist considers to be essential."
When viewed through the lens of how art might be a useful tool for human survival, it allows us, as rational animals, to communicate highly complex topics in a condensed, straight-to-the-point manner. Morality tales and other stories, paintings, statues, theatrical plays ... all serve to communicate something.
To circle back to computer-generated "art", I would say that if the computer-generated artwork has a human programmer who was trying to communicate something through the software and its output, then I could consider it to be "art." It is not the computer producing the art, it is the human being who is programming or otherwise directing the computer through an intent to communicate something. If you leave a computer alone, and using some kind of random entropy it just so happens to produce an image of something because that's what the random generator landed on, then it's not art. There was no intent to communicate.
And in the example of computers visualizing some natural phenomenon (the article mentioned an oscilloscope as an example), then it is no more "art" than the image projected into the eye from a microscope since there is no recreation. It is, in that context, a tool for observing reality as it exists, rather than a medium of communication intended to express an idea.
> Art is the product of someone expressing themselves.
While I agree, unfortunately to the majority of people, "Art" simply means "something that makes me feel something". Whether that thing was generated by a human or a machine makes no difference. In my experience most people, when consuming art, hardly think about where it came from/who made it/why they made it, simply on the feelings it evokes with themselves. And as we have seen through outrage algorithms, computers are quite good at figuring out how to create emotional states in humans.
I've recently been presented the idea that art goes beyond its creator and involves its consumer(s) too. So basically, the expression goes beyond the one expressing, and includes those appreciating that expression.
But if we accept that, there's no need for the creator to be a person - since if you yourself are a person observing the art, the idea will still hold.
While I'd find this notion agreeable, I really don't subscribe to personhood being a requirement on either side of art to begin with. But maybe it's something worthwhile for your consideration.
> I'll stick to the best definition of art that I've heard : "if it gives you an emotion, it is art".
I think it's necessary, but not sufficient. So I kinda like my better:
It's art if (and to the extent of) people generally agree it's art.
Sounds tautological, but it isn't[0].
Of course, not everything is art. There are some aspects typically - but not always - present. Whether something gives you an emotion is one. Whether it has a deeper story behind it is another. Whether it's something that you can bond over with other people, or a shared experience, yet another. But none of those are required to be present. Art is ultimately a consensus opinion.
--
[0] - In fact, most of our civilization is built on ideas that exist only as long as most people expect most other people to believe them. Examples include: money, laws, countries, corporations, even the concept of society itself.
Does Jiro and his sushi constitute an artist and his art? Let's say yes, and let's say most people today agree with this. They're cosmopolitan enough to recognize the sophistication and craft. This definition therefore defines it as "art".
I would say if you told the average Brit living in the UK in the 1950s that there's a guy that's really good at slicing up raw fish, you might get a different average answer.
So I don't think art is dependent on the conclusion viewer, but on the intention of the author. If they arrange rocks just-so, because they enjoy the shadows they make at noon, I think that's art.
Don't forget "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue" too - a huge rectangle of mostly red, which angered someone enough to try to destroy it, proving that someone was, in fact, afraid of red, yellow and blue.
The banana would be interesting art if the concept hadn't been done a million times before. This iteration is just a cash grab (and/or publicity play). Which does, to an extent, make it interesting again, so what if it's a commentary on the cash-grab nature of contemporary ar--okay I'm logging off.
Reminds me of the Damien Hirst piece that I love and hate equally. A platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with diamonds that had an asking price of £50 million, which was bought by a consortium of people that include... Damien Hirst. He's always been great at titling his work - the fact that it's called For The Love of God, a phrase that I use regularly when I'm exasperated by something, is the icing on the cake. Just unbelievable self-referential, self-dealing chutzpah.
i've held a personal definitional aspect of art to include "many, but not all, forms of expression by humans that are unnecessary for mere survival" but this is a lot more succinct :)
If not for a PBS documentary on surrealism, I wouldn't have considered the existence of meta-art; art as commentary on art. The example I remember was Ceci n'est pas une pipe.[0] That sounds a bit like the banana taped to the wall.
that's not a good definition. if I go hiking and look at the mountains. that gives me an emotion. But is it art? it's just the actual planet. No human created that.
You're just disagreeing without offering an explanation - why was the original not a good definition?
As I see it, art is in the eye of the beholder. Splotches of color made by Jackson Pollock and those made by my 3 year old don't differ in their intent (I assume both equally want to express themselves), but in the way that we view the work. I for one don't see any issue with treating a beautiful mountain vista as "a work of art", regardless to whether I believe it was intentionally created by a personified god, or by an RNG in the simulator that's rendering this corner of the universe, or anything in between. I see art.
One is made by a human for other humans. The other is a randomly recognized pattern built from the stolen art of millions, and has no intended audience (because it itself is incapable of consuming art).
I also want to emphasize the "banana sticked to a wall" complaint is an often right wing stance to devalue art.
Art can be emotional, but not everything that creates emotion is art. In time I think we will work out a better definition of what constitutes art. One that excludes generated images and videos and emphasizes the human connection of artwork.
First, I’m going to upvote you because I’m tired of this grayed out censorship bullshit that goes on in this site. I really wish there was a way to set a setting that makes it clear idgaf about downvotes, don’t gray shit out.
Second:
One is made by a human for other humans. The other is a randomly recognized pattern built from the stolen art of millions, and has no intended audience (because it itself is incapable of consuming art).
There is something that fits that definition, which is nature. Some actually believe it’s a divine expression and does indeed have an intended audience (us). That’s a weird belief, but your argument is actually quite sound if you believe in God. If you don’t, then your argument falls apart because so much of nature is art, so much so that art is often based on it.
If the Grand Canyon is randomness, yet it appears clearly beautiful to us, and is the source of inspiration for Art, then we can say that this new form of random pattern generator is also another source, one we can take inspiration from.
There will be sticklers that will create a delineation between nature and art, which ultimately is quite arrogant because it will apply one specific characteristic to art, that being art is a specifically human creation.
I think something missing in the article is role of art as a way to communicate meaning. Perhaps it's deliberate, i.e. author wanted to provoke people into talking about that aspect.
Obviously, art is part of the broader culture and it is one of the ways people update the collective unconscious. With computers entering human life, and thus culture, people need to make sense of computers. And "computer art" is a part of it, and it's part of the discussion about originality and individuality, so it definitely should be (if anything should be at all).
Readit News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter
She is in the photo at the terminal working on the last starfighter.
She has been creating computer art ever since. She has often expressed confusion and disillusionment with the field. She is often unsure if she or the computer is the artist.
Nearly all art except singing and dance is made with tools. In many cases tools define the art form.
It, of course, didn't exist until after robots were invented because no one would recognize it as that. Even more interesting, when e.g. a dancer makes it look like s/he's "moving backwards." We as humanity couldn't really concieve of that until we saw e.g. film actually run backwards.
Recently I was watching some beatbox battles, similar deal. I kind of like them less these days because I prefer when they imitate/get inspiration from acoustic or other "older" instruments, but now the majority of them are imitating, e.g. bass synths and EDM type stuff.
Singing can certainly use tools too. Auto tune and special microphones.
Perhaps you mean to say that neither require tools.
Did she really say that? As a moonlighting digital artist, I feel like this is the same thing as a painter saying they’re not sure if the paintbrush is the artist. Maybe if I wanted a full time art career I should have leaned into it and fostered the dramatic narrative of the computer having intent. God knows there are a bunch of artists who actually know better say lots of stupid untrue stuff that anthropomorphizes computers, and they enjoy a lot of attention for it. I think this hyperbolic ghost in the machine crap is very short sighted and has influenced public opinion much for the worse.
Artists are undermining their own efforts and talents and spreading misinformation about what computers actually do when they tell the story this way. More importantly, they are undermining the efforts and talents of all artists, specifically of digital artists who don’t want to take part in the computer-as-artist narrative. I’ve stood next to my art at a gallery show and had people walk by and say out loud something like “ugh why is this here? this crap is just made by a computer”. I don’t expect people to understand how I use the computer, but the bias and lack of curiosity is pretty sad, and my computer was neither artist nor collaborator. It was a tool that I used to achieve a vision I had, the same way I use a paintbrush to make pictures.
We could talk about who made the tools, whether it’s a paintbrush, a camera, or computer hardware and software. There’s a Grand Canyon of space for credit that various other people might deserve, in between the artist and the art made using a computer. Jumping to the conclusion that the computer did anything on it’s own and deserves attribution is to be unintentionally (or sometimes intentionally) ignorant about what a computer is and what it does.
This is non-sensical. You hold the paintbrush and move it across the medium with your own hand. It is entirely within the artists control. With a computer, you tell it what to do and within it's own constraints, be that p5.js or an llm whatever algorithm will produce some result.
It may have been in the 90’s if that makes it more credible for you.
Throughout art history people have often not valued the new, but only the existing. Beaux-Arts de Paris in the late 1800's was the premiere art school in Europe training traditional artists; yet many eventually turned to impressionism, etc. and abandoned the old styles. I do "computer art" today and go in directions that are new. If all you do is what came before, everything including art will stagnate. Evolve or die is not just for biology.
> This leads to Eliot's so-called "Impersonal Theory" of poetry. Since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of depersonalisation. The mature poet is viewed as a medium, through which tradition is channelled and elaborated. He compares the poet to a catalyst in a chemical reaction, in which the reactants are feelings and emotions that are synthesised to create an artistic image that captures and relays these same feelings and emotions. While the mind of the poet is necessary for the production, it emerges unaffected by the process. The artist stores feelings and emotions and properly unites them into a specific combination, which is the artistic product. What lends greatness to a work of art are not the feelings and emotions themselves, but the nature of the artistic process by which they are synthesised. The artist is responsible for creating "the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place." And, it is the intensity of fusion that renders art great. In this view, Eliot rejects the theory that art expresses metaphysical unity in the soul of the poet. The poet is a depersonalised vessel, a mere medium.
> Great works do not express the personal emotion of the poet. The poet does not reveal their own unique and novel emotions, but rather, by drawing on ordinary ones and channelling them through the intensity of poetry, they express feelings that surpass, altogether, experienced emotion. This is what Eliot intends when he discusses poetry as an "escape from emotion." Since successful poetry is impersonal and, therefore, exists independent of its poet, it outlives the poet and can incorporate into the timeless "ideal order" of the "living" literary tradition. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradition_and_the_Individual_T...
No really. For example, you have political art, conceptual art, and topical performances that, while interesting, soon become irrelevant and likely won't float on top for very long. Likewise, many past excellent artists disappeared from the museum chart, so to say, and periodically resurfaced.
The question about Egyptian art is more difficult than it seems. Almost all the artifacts are the ones that could survive 1,000s of years and is quite sophisticated. What we don't get a good sample of is woodworking which is much easier to manipulate. The difficulty of stone work has a built-in limiting factor.
The Egyptians also had Ptah the god of creation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptah
People create with what is at hand — this includes ideas, not just physical media. In my opinion, suggesting there is society-wide progress (or lack of it) in art is silly, like suggesting the same for fashion or cooking. Exploration, technical evolution, yes. And progress in ideas, in society? Of course!
Tell me the importance of a x1SjelifbOoo. It's not important because it has no importance.
Value, in this way, is formed by way of merit; of doing. That which fails to be valued greater or equivalent to another is less valuable, and lesser than another.
Examples of new things that were criticised and rightfully not adopted include the "metaverse" or even chemical warfare.
This anecdote demonstrates how completely misunderstood new technologies can be. Such accuracy is completely irrelevant to an artist.
In the end the thing that ‘converted’ me was getting my hands on a copy of Photoshop. I was then, and remain, unimpressed by its painting tools. However, I was blown away by its ability to penetrate the surface of a photo - to change the facts of that photo. Effectively, this solved a creative problem I did not even know I had.
I honestly believe that tools are invented before tool users.
I remember coming across a livestream of someone whose line-making process was to zoom in and scrub over a tiny area repeatedly for several minutes to create the effect of a single ink brush stroke. The effect was pleasant and had a very intentionally designed quality to it, but I came back a few hours later and he had made hardly any progress. The goal he had in mind was really better suited for vector tools, but the machine wasn't stopping him in the way that paper would give out under intensive scrubbing. I'm quite sure, extrapolating that anecdote, that there's someone out there trying to intentionally design each pixel in a 4k image.
IMHO the single most important thing digital provides is new ways to see - I'll often direct students to use the threshold filter to discover new lighting shapes in references or indicate planning problems with their value structure.
Completely agree. The hidden structures of an artwork are pretty much invisible with access to some flavor or other of a digital tool.
I believe that Rembrandt would have killed to have the ability to photograph his work and apply a de-saturation in order to see its lightness map. In fact... he did something similar... view his paintings in candle light, which does indeed almost de-saturate his colors.
Likewise, any decent Impressionist would have loved to be able to create a Saturation map using Photoshop's Selective Color adjustment.
I think this was prescient and still worthy of contemplation.
definitely a real concern in art
The way I understand that paragraph is that "aesthetic information" is the aesthetics involved themselves, and I think it's more than agreeable that art at minimum concerns itself a great deal with aesthetics (things looking pretty, organized, orderly disorganized, etc.) - some might even argue it's all aesthetics, or that aesthetics are inalienable or foundational to it. I'd personally argue there's no art without aesthetics.
Let's say I used a custom power saw to carve a statue faster than ever before and more precisely. Would that reduce my influence and my application of taste? No. I would in fact be able to produce a piece faster and have more room for making more attempts.
Neural network based art tools are all giving us the same thing - easier execution. This means greater production and the ability to try most possibilities. The fact that creating art is more accessible to the public means that more creatives can be in the arena, making for more competition.
Any creator grapples with this change over time. Woodworkers of old prefer their techniques to modern power tools, painters prefer physical media, carvers prefer real blocks of marble/whatever. All of these things have modern digital equivalents, but the establishment of existing artists refuse to leave their posts. They hold their ground that the medium is critical to the art.
Art moves and changes slowly because of this human bias against new solutions. Go to any museum of modern art and you'll find that most of it could have been executed as such 20+ years ago. It's just that art takes time to accept a new way of doing something.
But a banana sticked to a wall with some tape did!
I'll stick to the best definition of art that I've heard : "if it gives you an emotion, it is art".
Does that make it art? Dunno. Don't care. It makes it interesting which is a more useful category.
I think it's brilliant commentary. And even if you have never heard of NFTs it poses questions about what qualifies a piece of art as unique or an original
Stubbing my little toe gives me an emotion, is that "art"? lol
I would suggest that art is a method is communication. One philosophical definition that I've often used is that "it is a selective recreation of reality in accordance with what the artist considers to be essential."
When viewed through the lens of how art might be a useful tool for human survival, it allows us, as rational animals, to communicate highly complex topics in a condensed, straight-to-the-point manner. Morality tales and other stories, paintings, statues, theatrical plays ... all serve to communicate something.
To circle back to computer-generated "art", I would say that if the computer-generated artwork has a human programmer who was trying to communicate something through the software and its output, then I could consider it to be "art." It is not the computer producing the art, it is the human being who is programming or otherwise directing the computer through an intent to communicate something. If you leave a computer alone, and using some kind of random entropy it just so happens to produce an image of something because that's what the random generator landed on, then it's not art. There was no intent to communicate.
And in the example of computers visualizing some natural phenomenon (the article mentioned an oscilloscope as an example), then it is no more "art" than the image projected into the eye from a microscope since there is no recreation. It is, in that context, a tool for observing reality as it exists, rather than a medium of communication intended to express an idea.
Therefore, unless you grant an autonomous AI personhood it can't create art.
However, one could use AI as a tool to express themselves and that would be art. But that's where I admit the line gets blurred.
While I agree, unfortunately to the majority of people, "Art" simply means "something that makes me feel something". Whether that thing was generated by a human or a machine makes no difference. In my experience most people, when consuming art, hardly think about where it came from/who made it/why they made it, simply on the feelings it evokes with themselves. And as we have seen through outrage algorithms, computers are quite good at figuring out how to create emotional states in humans.
But if we accept that, there's no need for the creator to be a person - since if you yourself are a person observing the art, the idea will still hold.
While I'd find this notion agreeable, I really don't subscribe to personhood being a requirement on either side of art to begin with. But maybe it's something worthwhile for your consideration.
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I think it's necessary, but not sufficient. So I kinda like my better:
It's art if (and to the extent of) people generally agree it's art.
Sounds tautological, but it isn't[0].
Of course, not everything is art. There are some aspects typically - but not always - present. Whether something gives you an emotion is one. Whether it has a deeper story behind it is another. Whether it's something that you can bond over with other people, or a shared experience, yet another. But none of those are required to be present. Art is ultimately a consensus opinion.
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[0] - In fact, most of our civilization is built on ideas that exist only as long as most people expect most other people to believe them. Examples include: money, laws, countries, corporations, even the concept of society itself.
Does Jiro and his sushi constitute an artist and his art? Let's say yes, and let's say most people today agree with this. They're cosmopolitan enough to recognize the sophistication and craft. This definition therefore defines it as "art".
I would say if you told the average Brit living in the UK in the 1950s that there's a guy that's really good at slicing up raw fish, you might get a different average answer.
So I don't think art is dependent on the conclusion viewer, but on the intention of the author. If they arrange rocks just-so, because they enjoy the shadows they make at noon, I think that's art.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/arts/design/cattelan-bana...
https://archive.ph/vs3g3
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
Art requires human intention to be art.
As I see it, art is in the eye of the beholder. Splotches of color made by Jackson Pollock and those made by my 3 year old don't differ in their intent (I assume both equally want to express themselves), but in the way that we view the work. I for one don't see any issue with treating a beautiful mountain vista as "a work of art", regardless to whether I believe it was intentionally created by a personified god, or by an RNG in the simulator that's rendering this corner of the universe, or anything in between. I see art.
Even if it's made by chatgpt? A lot of carbon-chauvinists believe only meatbags can make art.
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(shitty type systems as well?)
I also want to emphasize the "banana sticked to a wall" complaint is an often right wing stance to devalue art.
Art can be emotional, but not everything that creates emotion is art. In time I think we will work out a better definition of what constitutes art. One that excludes generated images and videos and emphasizes the human connection of artwork.
Second:
One is made by a human for other humans. The other is a randomly recognized pattern built from the stolen art of millions, and has no intended audience (because it itself is incapable of consuming art).
There is something that fits that definition, which is nature. Some actually believe it’s a divine expression and does indeed have an intended audience (us). That’s a weird belief, but your argument is actually quite sound if you believe in God. If you don’t, then your argument falls apart because so much of nature is art, so much so that art is often based on it.
If the Grand Canyon is randomness, yet it appears clearly beautiful to us, and is the source of inspiration for Art, then we can say that this new form of random pattern generator is also another source, one we can take inspiration from.
There will be sticklers that will create a delineation between nature and art, which ultimately is quite arrogant because it will apply one specific characteristic to art, that being art is a specifically human creation.
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I think something missing in the article is role of art as a way to communicate meaning. Perhaps it's deliberate, i.e. author wanted to provoke people into talking about that aspect.
Obviously, art is part of the broader culture and it is one of the ways people update the collective unconscious. With computers entering human life, and thus culture, people need to make sense of computers. And "computer art" is a part of it, and it's part of the discussion about originality and individuality, so it definitely should be (if anything should be at all).