What is art?

[Claude J Greengrass]

CSotD: Errors and Omissions

Ann Telnaes originally posted this a year ago, but brought it back recently to comment on the flourishing of AI. Then someone re-posted this segment with a link to the full piece: That fragment zeros in on the main problem with AI. Whether it’s graphic art, writing, music or whatever, the...

www.dailycartoonist.com

 

[brianvds]

I'm not sure it makes any difference whether AI art is "really" art. It might still compete human artists (particularly in art intended for reproduction) out of business, simply because it is cheaper, and my experience is that the public can't really tell the difference. But that remains to be seen.

Either way, current attempts to curtail it via the law are bound to fail. I don't know of any new technology that could, in the longer run, be repressed by legal means. Genie is out of the bottle and we'll have to learn to live with it.

The funny thing is that it appears that a lot of manual labor turned out more AI-proof than anything else.

In the 1980s, people like Carl Sagan naively predicted that AI would "free us from back-breaking labor" so we'd have time to create art and music and literature instead. Now it turns out AI will free us of art, music and literature so we'll have time to do back-breaking labor instead!

Well. The most satisfying and fun job I ever had was the one I got fresh out of high school, which entailed back-breaking labor, so if needs be, I'd cheerfully go back to it and do art in my free time. The advantage of that will be that I won't have to worry about sales anymore.

 

[txomsy]

I think most people underrates human ingenuity.

AI is just another tool. It won't take long before some people finds novel, creative uses of AI to do new Art and move it beyond our current expectations. As for appreciation... last I looked, hand-made pottery was still highly appreciated with tourists taking home striking pieces of labor; and pottery has been around for many thousands of years and gone over metal ages, industrial ages...

A significant part of what makes people pay for Art is not just the looks, is the appreciation of the work involved, the time, its difficulty and, obviously, its beauty and the feelings it ellicits. Hand-crafted urushi is still far more appreciated than silk-printed industrial urushi. Books are printed (as they were hand copied at a time) but they are still being written. People may read less fiction, but TV plots are still being written. Doré made engravings for printed books, Hiroshige made art for wooden block printing,... Artists have had to adapt, but hard work, beauty and feeling is still being appreciated.

My bet is it will still be so despite AI being used as a tool for mass "art" production.

 

[Bartc]

The masses appreciate "affordable" mass art. That's my take on it. Fine art is appreciated too little in our society, and that's been the case for far too long before AI entered the fray.

I'm now seeing videos that look fairly lifelike made from old postcards. Only a few moments of it, but still, it's rather amazing and that kind of AI trick is only going to improve. Like those non-AI art projection shows that are rounding the globe making millions, they're a phenomenon the masses like. Though based on real human art, they are glitzy, over-the-top derivatives, and if you read the market realistically that kind of thing makes the big bucks and gets the big audiences.

The public buys spectacles, but when it comes to real original art made by skilled or gifted humans they seem to need a new prescription to their "spectacles", in my not-at-all-humble opinion.

Yes, AI genie is out of his/her/their bottle now. And like the cautionary fables, be careful what you wish for.

I will admit experimenting with AI lately. It's interesting. I've even found one to be superior in its reasoning and results to several others in this fast growing arena for text (not yet for any graphic models though). It still won't replace human expression in my book - not for a while - but then I'm a biased human.

 

[txomsy]

The masses appreciate "affordable" mass art. That's my take on it. Fine art is appreciated too little in our society, and that's been the case for far too long before AI entered the fray.

I may be an exception here.

But while I cannot afford reckoned "fine art", I jump on the first chance to get "minor art" that I can pay. That, I think, is the point. I rarely go to Opera or Big-Musician-Concert (too expensive), but do go to Theater about once every one-two months, do not refuse a pub-live-performance and jump at the chance of any free performance. Music and Theater are also Arts.

When I travel or go to any crafts market, I often see people looking appreciatively to pieces they like, buying them and taking them home.

Now, what is Art? If I had gone to Arlés a hundred years ago and bought a "clearly-non-academically-realistic, low-fidelity" picture from an unknown asylum patient, I might have ended with a Van Gogh.

I will not claim that the watercolors, quick-portraits, statuettes, hand decorated pieces... tourists (or anyone) buy at flea/artisan markets are (capital) Fine Art. But I won't claim it isn't either. I know many people who proudly have a quick charcoal or graphite picture/cartoon they got from a street artist prominently displayed in a wall in their house. Is that Art? Maybe not, but they love it as if it was a Michelangelo.

Back on topic: I don't know what the future holds for us, but I feel certain we are only scraping the surface of what is possible. Nobody thought Van Gogh's work was worth anything at the time, but he (and many others) changed completely how do we see and interpret Art in ways nobody had thought before. There is still a lot to come. Even with AI and all that.

 

[Bartc]

But while I cannot afford reckoned "fine art", I jump on the first chance to get "minor art" that I can pay. That, I think, is the point. I rarely go to Opera or Big-Musician-Concert (too expensive), but do go to Theater about once every one-two months, do not refuse a pub-live-performance and jump at the chance of any free performance. Music and Theater are also Arts.

When I travel or go to any crafts market, I often see people looking appreciatively to pieces they like, buying them and taking them home.

Don't misunderstand me here. I'm not at all against people buying what they like, beautiful or kitschy or in between. And I certainly cannot afford high end art either. It's still art. But it's HUMAN art.

I'm just pointing out that spectacles, glitz, flash and fashion seem to rule the marketplace, and because of that conditioning and reinforcement AI is likely to flood the zone, so to speak. You can't stop that, nor can I.

In our American culture especially (though we are not exceptional) we don't value art even as we use and buy it. I used to have lots of conversations with Silicon Valley major CEOs for work. They worshipped STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) and disdained "art". I pointed out to them that what really sold most of their software and hardware in the public marketplace was actually art - design choices, user interfaces, etc., created by artistic specialists. They would laugh and not get it at all, laughing all the way to the bank, mind you.

Those folks buying less expensive pieces at the art shows are not your typical American consumer. Mostly they are specifically there to see "art" and to take home something that tickles their fancy within reach of their pocketbooks. Nothing wrong with that at all in my book. Glad they care.

But the mass marketplace will be susceptible to AI produced stuff. For the connoisseurs there may always remain a lucky few humans who are able to sell them their art in comparison. Most I fear will languish. Just my frustration coming through here, folks. Nothing to see, move along....

 

[brianvds]

Now, what is Art? If I had gone to Arlés a hundred years ago and bought a "clearly-non-academically-realistic, low-fidelity" picture from an unknown asylum patient, I might have ended with a Van Gogh.

I will not claim that the watercolors, quick-portraits, statuettes, hand decorated pieces... tourists (or anyone) buy at flea/artisan markets are (capital) Fine Art. But I won't claim it isn't either. I know many people who proudly have a quick charcoal or graphite picture/cartoon they got from a street artist prominently displayed in a wall in their house. Is that Art? Maybe not, but they love it as if it was a Michelangelo.

As far as I am concerned, "fine art" is "art for art's sake", i.e. things like paintings intended to be hung on a wall, as opposed to illustration, in which pictures explain or enhance books, posters or advertisements. Obviously, there will be some grey areas and overlap in between, and one is not better than the other (although I daresay that illustration often requires more technical skill).

And thus, your flea market watercolor landscape is fine art. It may or may not be "good", but limiting "fine art" to "good art" is quite meaningless.

Back on topic: I don't know what the future holds for us, but I feel certain we are only scraping the surface of what is possible. Nobody thought Van Gogh's work was worth anything at the time, but he (and many others) changed completely how do we see and interpret Art in ways nobody had thought before. There is still a lot to come. Even with AI and all that.

Well, we'll have to see whether society will remain interested in human-made art. There will probably soon be AI "paintings" available which are printed in such a way that they have "brush strokes" etc, making them sort of indistinguishable from human made paintings. In the current art market, the very fact that machines can churn them out is precisely what will make them largely worthless, and putting them on your wall would be like decorating your home with prints of Elvis on velvet, i.e. not exactly an upper class thing to do. In the current market, what makes an original painting valuable is precisely its scarcity and uniqueness.

But it may be that a new generation of people will come to see art as a commodity, and simply not care about uniqueness etc. For them, a cheap printed "painting" will work as well as an expensive original one. Or better yet, a screen on the wall with a slideshow of AI-generated imagery.

There is no way to predict which way humanity will go; we are currently tumbling down the weirdest rabbit hole in history. But the notion that original works of art are uniquely valuable has been with us for a some centuries now, and is thus "Lindy"

Lindy effect - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Anyway, AI art taking over the market will not end human art any more than AI chess computers have put an end to human chess playing, or helicopters have ended human mountaineers.

All those STEM folks laughing might soon find that they are not as immune as they thought. Already a good deal of code is written by AI, and problems in mathematics, unsolved for centuries, are being solved by AIs. I.e. that degree in math might soon be worth about as much as a degree in art history.

Not that this will deter humans who are interested in math any more than AI art is going to put an end to my sketching. The real question is what humans are going to do once no one has a job anymore, but that puts the discussion on the dangerous road to politics.

 

[txomsy]

I doubt it will change much.

AI may imitate humans, and even maybe create. But it has to do it. And to do it it must make sense, economical sense as it eats up resources. Real human art is inherently wasteful. You do it once. And that's it. Like a musical performance, you do one Mona Lisa. That is what we normally value in Art. Everybody can have a copy of Mona Lisa, but none will be valued as much as the original.

For AI, it will be the same: it will make more sense to print a zillion copies and sell them cheap than to make only one. And since machine made, all copies will be the same, so none will have more value than the others. Like Hiroshige printed plates when they were sold.

Let me give an example: let's suppose Calligraphy is an Art (as some cultures consider). When the first fonts were designed I remember thinking they were as "impersonal" as printed books. I also thought it should be trivial to change a program so each letter had some minor random variation and make it look more like human. Yet, 50 years later, nobody has cared to do it. Most you can get is flourishes, but all same letter and all same flourished letter look exactly the same.

I like to hand write. Lately it has become known, and everybody around is coming asking for notes written by hand. No matter how much I insist a computer will make them perfect and I'll make mistakes, errors and... well, I do not have a hand half as nice as my parents (and they weren't calligraphers). Yet, they give it much, much more value to the human touch than to the perfection of the machine. Nobody cares if it is cursive, italic, round, copperplate, gothic... all they care is it is hand made, and the more obviously hand made it is, the more valuable it is for them.

My guess is AI will be the same: We all love having beautiful things, and everybody will want a cheap copy, like a reproduction of Mona Lisa, Picasso, Michelangelo's David (in reduced size, of course), a CD/DVD/Mp3/Ogg... because they can't afford the real thing (and anyway only one person can have it), but they will still value much more the human touch, the unicity that only an artist/craft-person can provide, and the feeling that it was made for you and mainly for you. Not an impersonal item. Something that makes you feel you have value for someone.

 

[Bartc]

what humans are going to do once no one has a job anymore, but that puts the discussion on the dangerous road to politics.

"Welcome to the Monkey House", by Kurt Vonnegut.

 

[Bartc]

As to "value" of mass produced art, calligraphy, etc., consider that we have long adopted the Hallmark card, which almost completely replaced the handwritten heartfelt greetings and sentiments. Not an improvement, just a convenience, but it is now expected.

Your computer demonstrates that there are very many fonts that indeed do have distinct personalities, and that's just in English vs. the Arabic calligraphy multiple variants for example. Handwritten Chinese or Japanese scripts are indeed unique and very valued. A Jewish Torah must be hand written and copied perfectly on vellum, each one becoming very expensive.

Once for a pass/fail English course in college the prof told me for my final project I could just write him a few poems in the style of the poets we were studying: Blake, Yeats and Thomas. I wrote him an expressive cycle of poems for each poet's style and subjects, then grabbed the new (then) marker pens in colors and hand calligraphed (?) and illustrated the whole thing in Blake's style on large watercolor sheets and bound them. When I turned it in he held it to his heart and nearly cried, asking if he could keep it for his library, which he did to the end of his life I'm told.

I only wish I could have that early effort back in my own collection. One-off hand done will always appeal to a connoisseur.

 

[brianvds]

As to "value" of mass produced art, calligraphy, etc., consider that we have long adopted the Hallmark card, which almost completely replaced the handwritten heartfelt greetings and sentiments. Not an improvement, just a convenience, but it is now expected.

Indeed. I have tried to market hand-painted cards, at the same or even lower price than mass-produced ones, but it appears there's virtually no market. People now insist on a printed one.

Once for a pass/fail English course in college the prof told me for my final project I could just write him a few poems in the style of the poets we were studying: Blake, Yeats and Thomas. I wrote him an expressive cycle of poems for each poet's style and subjects, then grabbed the new (then) marker pens in colors and hand calligraphed (?) and illustrated the whole thing in Blake's style on large watercolor sheets and bound them. When I turned it in he held it to his heart and nearly cried, asking if he could keep it for his library, which he did to the end of his life I'm told.

I admire anyone who can do poetry. My own attempts to even just understand it, let alone write any, have mostly failed.

I only wish I could have that early effort back in my own collection. One-off hand done will always appeal to a connoisseur.

I have no doubt of that. The real question is whether there will be any connoisseurs left. We'll have to wait and see. But it wouldn't surprise me if the market for handmade cards suddenly began to pick up, and indeed, I can foresee a possible market for medieval-style handwritten books too - they'd be fantastically expensive, which will of course be their whole appeal.

 

[Bartc]

But it wouldn't surprise me if the market for handmade cards suddenly began to pick up, and indeed, I can foresee a possible market for medieval-style handwritten books too - they'd be fantastically expensive, which will of course be their whole appeal.

Jeez! You mean I've been wasting my time with trying to sell my paintings and should have gone into the one-off illustrated manuscript business? Shades of Richard Brautigan....

 

[brianvds]

Jeez! You mean I've been wasting my time with trying to sell my paintings and should have gone into the one-off illustrated manuscript business? Shades of Richard Brautigan....

One can always do a bit of both. I suppose there might also be a market for single pages of quotes, illuminated with decorations and illustrations; sort of a hybrid between a book and a painting.

 

[Bartc]

One can always do a bit of both. I suppose there might also be a market for single pages of quotes, illuminated with decorations and illustrations; sort of a hybrid between a book and a painting.

You're making work for me! I'm retired, Brian. I can just visualize this: Old man in a rough brown hooded garment slowly scribbling with a quill pen on vellum by candlelight in a dark, dank stone monk's cell. My Latin sucks, you know.

 

[txomsy]

Indeed!

When I went to the yearly book fair this year i was surprised. Several booths had old, battered book collections leather or leather like bound, for sale as "decorative", you know, the kind whose content nobody usually reads any more, old low quality collections and which are typically bound for disposal in libraries.

If that wasn't enough, they were sold by units at a price much higher than similarly aged and bound books with really worthy literary contents.

I guess all it's worth was in being old and aged instead of shiny new. Aging takes time. Even for mass produced items. And although one can artificially age items, ut is ease to tell old from fast-paced. Even non (literary) connoisseurs, that time is easily recognizable and highly valuable.

Same for human labor. Even non (art) connoisseurs will appreciate more a low (artistic) quality hand made product than a good (artistic) quality machine made one.

Or so it seems to me. YMMV

 

[Bartc]

Indeed!

When I went to the yearly book fair this year i was surprised. Several booths had old, battered book collections leather or leather like bound, for sale as "decorative", you know, the kind whose content nobody usually reads any more, old low quality collections and which are typically bound for disposal in libraries.

If that wasn't enough, they were sold by units at a price much higher than similarly aged and bound books with really worthy literary contents.

I guess all it's worth was in being old and aged instead of shiny new. Aging takes time. Even for mass produced items. And although one can artificially age items, ut is ease to tell old from fast-paced. Even non (literary) connoisseurs, that time is easily recognizable and highly valuable.

Same for human labor. Even non (art) connoisseurs will appreciate more a low (artistic) quality hand made product than a good (artistic) quality machine made one.

Or so it seems to me. YMMV

At that fair you really COULD judge a book by its cover.

 

[txomsy]

You are right. And it makes me sad to think how many people judges a book by its cover or a picture by the frame (or gallery). What it tells of us as a species is left as an exercise for the reader.