People hate that AI art is “disembodied and decontextualized, detached from lived experience” (@Terminus52 in a Substack comment thread). It feels like cheating that a clanker can mindlessly crank out an artwork that “ought to” come from a tortured artist’s struggle to create. “Ought to” is a reasonable position, though it seems unenforceable beyond encouraging people to support real human artists.[*]
However, people go beyond “oughtta” to claim that “lived experience” somehow imbues the pixels of an image or the waveform of a song with more than what appears on the surface, what inheres in the artwork. It’s a poetic idea, but it’s close to woo-woo mysticism. Forget about AI and consider this: around the turn of the millennium a middle-class minor painter cranked out dozens of paintings that experts hailed as lost artworks by tortured abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko (web search for “Knoedler forgery” or read the Wikipedia page). With a bit of creativity and a lot of experience and technical skill but none of the struggle, Pei-Shen Qian made new excellent art “by” those masters, and when a corrupt art gallery authenticated them, they sold for $tens of millions of dollars.
People want to believe you’ll forever be able to tell the difference between good machine-generated art and human art because the humans lived and the machines merely trained. We’ll see. As the New York Times’ writer put it: “Why should we value a painting known to be made by a certain esteemed artist more than a painting that is phony but is nevertheless practically indistinguishable from the authentic work? … The artist’s soul is somehow in the work, and because great artists are supposed to have great souls, there’s more soul in their creations than there is in mediocre efforts.” This poetic notion has failed again and again in blind taste tests. And there’s always a snob effect at play – “The rubes with their low-brow tastes are fooled by the fakes, but as the real art lover I know what’s real.”
An artwork feels like it’s a communication from one human to another, from the struggling creator to the person appreciating it. It could be, if you were in the artist’s studio or recording studio watching the creative process. Otherwise it’s a freestanding artifact in the world, and the key question is simply: is it any good?
Make me a Rothko, mmmkay?
I so much want to contact Pei-Shen Qian and ask him to make me a painting suffused with pure emotion, a profound statement about the human condition. I’d gladly pay real money for the fake. The problem is we don’t have a wall big enough to do it justice. A “Rothko” needs to be bigger than the human staring at it, a well that your soul falls into.
(I think this is the studio of forger Pei-Shen Quan, a still from the movie Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art)
Talk is cheap, support human artists!
[*] Buying art is easy. Go to the show of graduating artists at your local college. Engage with the work, i.e. stare at it, then read about it, then look some more. If an artwork moves you, buy it. More likely you won’t be sure if you really like it; picking an artwork after 5 minutes is like entering a long-term relationship after speed-dating. So tell the artist you like the artwork but you’re not sure, and ask if you can have an ink-jet print of it for $20 for an “in-home test.” Stick it on the wall, and after a few weeks if seeing it brings you joy, go buy the real thing. You need more art in your life!
I think I missed again, oh-ho-oh
× 2 (
!), which in the context of the life she lays bare leaves you gasping.
