What art is formulaic? What art is just the old stuff rehashed? What art is shallow or simplistic?
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I’ve been seeing some comic book like work created with the help of AI. The writing was done by a human, but the images were created with AI.
Art isnt created with AI. Just some visual slop with stolen assets.
I use two definitions for the two broad intellectual trends in art over the past century:
Robert Hughes on modernism- “the shock of the new”
David Harvey on postmodernism- “The reduction of experience to a series of pure and unrelated presents”
AI fundamentally can’t create modernist art because it recombines what already exists into a crude 3rd stage simulacrum. You’ll never see genuine brilliance from how we understand AI. It’s incapable of creating a new perspective, new consonance out of dissonance, or a societal transformation through art. If the world is a shared historical trajectory where we’re discovering the same common thing, AI doesn’t participate in that. It has no investment in the nature worship of art nouveau or the class politics of constructivism or the physics of cubism. It can’t overcome the 1936 standard of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction when he was only describing crude printing presses.
AI can create postmodern art but only because postmodernism is ideologically, historically, and financially flattened into artists as bourgeois bloggers. If the world is nothing but commodified individual commentary in a marketplace of ideas with the most valuable commentary coming from wealthy failchildren, AI is a wealthy failchild that can also regurgitate what it learned from scraping art school data while still staying tailored to market preferences.
I don’t personally value the latter or see it as anything more than a counterrevolution against the future we lost in the mid-20th century. There’s no reason I’d ever pay for an AI image if I can generate a more personally-tailored version instantly for free using the same IP it recombined to shit out. It’s inherently Thomas Kinkade kitsch but somehow less valuable because they don’t even pretend to involve creative labour in it.
I would imagine it would be in something you already have some interest and skill in. Art entirely created by AI is not that great.
Well there you go. Art where the quality is accepted and expected to be low. That’s art that AI can do a good job at.
Art that is like fastfood.
Not the person you are replying to, but I think they meant that the AI needs a substantial amount of either reference (an art genre with lots of samples) or lots of your input if you’re feeding it to rework your concepts. They never said anything about quality.
This is a very nuanced question, because art isn’t always about skill.
I remember I was one of those guys who thought modern art was stupid. My family took me to MoMA and I remember I was looking at a painting of a red square. It was a large 2 foot by 2 foot red square. I remember saying “but anyone could do this” to my aunt. She replied:
But nobody else did.
Stopped in my tracks and it clicked. The fact that they had done it, and we were there talking about it and discussing it, that right there proved it was art.
So it’s not just quality. I’m sure AI could spot out 1000 red squares, and some would consider that low effort, but no one would ever discuss them.
I mean, if a duct-taped banana can fetch millions
“But you didn’t” is such a powerful idea in art. The only reason European artists aren’t stuck in strict biblical representation with church-approved colours is that people pushed boundaries. The modernists rejected boundaries altogether and embraced pure creativity to such a degree that their own audience couldn’t recognise it as art. I’ve seen that same Malevich painting in the MoMA and that’s revolution. That’s a communist rebelling against centuries of only realistic paintings of idyllic landscapes and aristocratic portraits being taken seriously. He’s saying a red square is art for the sake of creative expression, an idea that would mature into “common people are alienated from art which is restrained to a professional class. Everyone should be entitled to its production and consumption” with proletarian art. He destroyed the idea of subject as a model of patronage as much as he did as a creative restraint.
Art should do that. It shouldn’t just have a message, but a call to some greater action that enables better art. We wouldn’t have modern music without Wagner violating the tonic as the most sacred principle of European music. Modern music, and especially classical music, is fucking beautiful in completely new ways because someone had the courage to reject centuries of what Serious Adults said was beautiful.
If you poke around on sites like Nightcafe or AI image subreddits, there’s a lot of generic oil paintings, a lot of 1 or 2 subject matte paintings, and stuff that looks like the covers of bad fantasy novels.
