art history

The Democratization of Nothing

I’m thinking about AI again…

Art is a tricky subject - getting away from “What even is art anyway?”, it’s a concept that is rife with contradictions. Art is both for everyone, and also not for everyone - can be made by anyone, and yet not everyone can make it, and even more importantly: not everyone can make a living at it.

For Everyone, and Yet Not

Historically, only the very rich had access to even seeing art. Museums in an ancient context were a place for philosophical debate and introspection - a museum as a place to view art didn’t exist until the 15th century, and the first open to the public museum (rather than a rich mans private collection to share with his rich friends) didn’t open until 1683. From there the history of publicly available museums is spotty…

As time has passed, more art has become more accessible to the public through museums, through print and the innovation of art books and reproductions, and eventually through the internet and the myriad ways anyone with a phone and a wifi signal has access to everything from museum collections to individual artists instagram pages. This greater access has had a cascading effect on the people who make, or would be inclined to make art, because seeing great art inspires great art. Seeing what other people have accomplished inspires other people to push farther.

In addition to access to seeing art - the tools for creating art have also become more accessible. Earlier painters had to make their own paints by grinding pigments from stones and ash and plants (and mummies). The knowledge of how to do this, how to stretch a canvas, what paper to use all had to be learned from other painters - and all of these materials are costly. Even today, nice professional quality paint can be exceedingly expensive depending on the pigment. The availability of synthetic pigments, commercially available paints, and eventually student grade materials made the bar of entry ever easier to pass through. Eventually the innovation of digital media lowered that bar even further - the one time purchase of a tablet, digital pencil and procreate can set an artist up for years without any additional cost, let alone storage concerns - because what do you do with the heaps of pieces you can’t sell?

Art knowledge, lessons, specifics on media (watercolor techniques vs oil for example) are more readily available now than ever before. No longer do you need an apprenticeship with the one artist you’ve ever heard of - there are specialized schools, private lessons, uncounted how-to books, and endless internet tutorials. I’ve often joked with my husband that if I’d had the available information there is now when I was first starting out, my entire life would be on a different trajectory.

The history of art is the democratization of art. We live in a time when anyone with the will to put in the hours can become an artist, in practice if not in profession. And if you only want to own art rather than make it - there are countless artists available to you at the click of the button, and nearly every price point. If you can’t afford an original, buy a print - and if even that is too much, stealing a screenshot to keep as your computer desktop is easy enough for anyone. If this artist is too expensive, there are thousands more. And yet…

And yet some tech bros are so hard pressed - either that they can’t make art, or can’t buy art - that they have to crow about the democratization of art with the introduction of AI systems. Because “now everyone can make art” - forgetting that that has always been a possibility, working artists just put in the hours first to hone a craft; dismissing that generating an image with a text prompt isn’t really making anything at all, and that the source images that the AI model was built off of were all stolen from people who put many more into their work than the programmers did creating an algorithm. I do wonder if they’ll be crowing about the “democratization of finance”, or the “democratization of software development” when AI is competently capable of doing those jobs as well. I haven’t messed around with MidJourney or any other AI image generators enough to see where they are in taking critique, or making small revisions. In my job I have seen an influx of imagery submitted by high school students who want something shiny for the low low cost of free, and at least a few posts from artists and designers who have been let go from their jobs because they were replaced with AI.

How hard would it have been to only train AI models on art in the public domain - to give those models the same art education that any college graduate would get and see what evolved from that? Something far more interesting I think than the overly plasticized look so many ai images have now when the ai hasn’t been directed to copy a specific artist.

Progress is inevitable, but a thing that you can get for free has no value. I can see a future in which art become harder to access, because to give access to a thing is to have a thing stolen - this has already been a problem for years with unscrupulous individuals and companies stealing art images from the internet to turn a profit on a cheaply made t-shirt or sticker, that all of this art has now been scraped from social media is just a cherry on top of a pile of bullshit. The desire of cheaply made goods, and the refusal to take no for an answer will in the long run rob everyone after.

Progress is inevitable, unless it’s built on exploitation and the exploited have just enough power to take control over their own production. Artists faced with a world in which noone listens to their concerns will draw back into safe spaces, will stop posting art so publicly, will revert back to physical media which is more complicated to steal.

Progress is inevitable until progress eats itself.