None of this means anything. I’m am posting this here not for sympathy or empathy or even comment, but for a place to put a train of thoughts I’ve been cycling through - to get them out of my head. None of this changes my actions or my outlook, not much anyway. I am what I am, and I create the things I create not for reaction or innovation but because they are the things that are in me to be made. Again, not for comment or pity. Just to say a thing that’s in me.
There was an article in the Washington Post about an “artist,” who is using AI to create images based on his own thoughts, which he is then sending to China to have anonymously painted on canvases, which are selling in auctions and at galleries for massive sums of money; or at least what I (another “artist”) consider to be massive sums of money. What is and isn’t considered to be art has always been a subjective scale full of grey. When I was in school studying illustration I was told (accurately) that I could never get a doctorate in Illustration because it wasn’t considered to be art - a Masters was the end of my educational line; and yet despite the fact that I did not ever and still do not work commercially as an illustrator (not entirely true, but true enough for this) I still use the term illustrator for myself because an illustration in my mind tells a story, and I’ve long considered to be myself a storyteller. I honestly don’t know what else to call myself, I don’t have the right word for it. “Artist” is too broad. “Painter” is too narrow. “Fine Artist” feels inaccurate. I’ve on and off called myself an Alchemist depending upon what I was doing at the time, as a person who takes things and changes their quality and value, but this feels more like a gimmick which in all honesty I probably need.
So I am an artist, but I do not create “art” - or I do create art but with a labeling problem. Is it an Illustration if I create it for myself, rather than a publisher? Is it “fine art” if it sits in a bin in my studio, waiting to be done something with?
But back to that article - art is subjective, and an “artist” can now create widely successful art without ever having touched the final product himself - which is also nothing new. Kinkade and Barsamian have been doing this very successfully for decades. Mass produced original art. Mass production. Mass production at wildly inflated prices based on the whims of those with the disposable income to spend it.
A group in Paris wants to “democratize art” using AI, but when the piece in question sells for over 400,000 dollars in auction, are they democratizing art for the people, or for creators? Taking the value out of years of study and practice in a field that is already wretchedly hard to make a living in, and putting more money in the hands of those with access to technology and the will to put it to use. Looking at a market that is so insidiously twisted in on itself in a self consuming knot, recognizing the magnetic draw of the next gimmick, and exploiting it. But then, how very different is that from the advent of Impressionism, or Digital Painting?
Perhaps very different, when the “creator” never makes a single mark. But is a piece as a concept executed by an Other enough to make something art? Is an idea art? Is it art once it’s something that can be bought and sold or traded or bartered? On that path, is dance art? Is a creation that crutches itself on someone elses creation art? Is it art if it doesn’t exist outside of the moment in time it exists in? Is the dance piece as a whole art, or is each performance of the same choreography it’s own individual work? And does it even matter considering the subjective nature of it all?
And my reaction, my personal reaction to all of this, is a kind of despair. Despair for an art community struggling to get by. Despair for generations of art students who will spend hundred of thousands of dollars for formal art training, only to be made more and more obsolete by changing technology. And not just obsolete, unnecessary.
We are becoming unnecessary.
I am becoming unnecessary. Something I’d really hoped to achieve only when my hands or eyes finally gave out as I aged.
Or is this another passing fad? Are these pieces selling because they are the first of their kind and eventually we will, for the most part, return to our collective senses and move on? Or find some middle ground? Utilizing the technology and meshing it back in with that acquired technique and practice into something more recognizably created rather than constructed.
This is all on the heels of a thought that popped into my head while walking through the Philadelphia airport, which became to me a tenth circle of hell. The place looks like the set of the original Blade Runner before everything got dirty and old. You can’t plug devices into an outlet with paying to activate it. And as far as I can tell the populace is a collective bunch of nosey assholes (as evidenced by the fight I heard break out between a bunch of 20-somethings and a waiter about them getting into his personal business) - yes, there are interlaced assumptions on where anyone in the airport at any given moment is originating from, but without evidence the the contrary plus local accents/dialects, I’m sticking with my initial opinion not that it matters because airport culture is its own monstrous construction.
But my thought, while walking through this future dystopian nightmarescape ran along the lines of “I don’t want to be one of Picasso’s ex-wives,” meaning a footnote in history to be mentioned only in reference to the people with whom she was associated. Like anyone else if I’m to be remembered, let it be on my own merit. But what even is that? I don’t create anything with a thought to where it will be 5 years in the future, let alone 50. My actions tend more toward the reactionary “I don’t want this,” than the proactive “I do want that.” It’s a thought pattern I may need to change if I really don’t want to be one of history’s ex-wives. I’d rather be forgotten, nothing at all; and perhaps that’s the more likely outcome regardless of what I do.
None of this means anything. Tonight, like many nights, I will work in one studio or another - on a painting or a dance - on the works that hold meaning for me. This despair will dissolve or deepen, but will be worked through regardless. I’m not an MIT grad to develop AI to create the future of art, I don’t have access to a factory of college grads to reproduce work on a mass scale; neither am I interested in either of those paths. The “democratization” of art looks to me more like the “capitalization” of a system that was already systemically broken, has been broken for a very long time.
My goal is not to worry about the events outside of my control, but to simply be aware of them. It is the sum total of what I can do.