People have said similar things about artists throughout history. Oil Paint? Non-religious/mythical subjects? Impressionism? Fauvism? Cubism? Modern Art? Etc.
Throughout art history people have often not valued the new, but only the existing. Beaux-Arts de Paris in the late 1800's was the premiere art school in Europe training traditional artists; yet many eventually turned to impressionism, etc. and abandoned the old styles. I do "computer art" today and go in directions that are new. If all you do is what came before, everything including art will stagnate. Evolve or die is not just for biology.
There are but a few classical traint artist that started to use computer programs to produce art. One of them is the Dutch artist Peter Struycken. See pstruycken.nl for his art works. In his last works, that focus on colour, he used software to find arrangements of squares with no recognizable patterns as not to distract the viewer from the subject of his works, the interaction of carefully selected coloursm
I am an artist who works with both digital and traditional media. When household computers were just making an appearance I remember talking with a family friend on the subject of art. They asked my if I had considered trying out this new technology, saying with stars in her eyes that âit can draw lines to a degree of accuracy of thousands of an inchâ. I was at the time rightfully unconvinced.
This anecdote demonstrates how completely misunderstood new technologies can be. Such accuracy is completely irrelevant to an artist.
In the end the thing that âconvertedâ me was getting my hands on a copy of Photoshop. I was then, and remain, unimpressed by its painting tools. However, I was blown away by its ability to penetrate the surface of a photo - to change the facts of that photo. Effectively, this solved a creative problem I did not even know I had.
I honestly believe that tools are invented before tool users.
> That is, the role of the computer in the production and presentation of semantic information which is accompanied by enough aesthetic information is meaningful; the role of the computer in the production of aesthetic information per se and for the making of profit is dangerous and senseless.
I think this was prescient and still worthy of contemplation.
Humanity's abilities are always enhanced by their tools. This simply changes the judgement of art in the face of easier execution.
Let's say I used a custom power saw to carve a statue faster than ever before and more precisely. Would that reduce my influence and my application of taste? No. I would in fact be able to produce a piece faster and have more room for making more attempts.
Neural network based art tools are all giving us the same thing - easier execution. This means greater production and the ability to try most possibilities. The fact that creating art is more accessible to the public means that more creatives can be in the arena, making for more competition.
Any creator grapples with this change over time. Woodworkers of old prefer their techniques to modern power tools, painters prefer physical media, carvers prefer real blocks of marble/whatever. All of these things have modern digital equivalents, but the establishment of existing artists refuse to leave their posts. They hold their ground that the medium is critical to the art.
Art moves and changes slowly because of this human bias against new solutions. Go to any museum of modern art and you'll find that most of it could have been executed as such 20+ years ago. It's just that art takes time to accept a new way of doing something.
> I find it easy to admit that computer art did not contribute to the advancement of art.
But a banana sticked to a wall with some tape did!
I'll stick to the best definition of art that I've heard : "if it gives you an emotion, it is art".
It seems it was originally written to be provocative and might not reflect author's views, as author have himself produced a lot of computer art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieder_Nake#Art_career
I think something missing in the article is role of art as a way to communicate meaning. Perhaps it's deliberate, i.e. author wanted to provoke people into talking about that aspect.
Obviously, art is part of the broader culture and it is one of the ways people update the collective unconscious. With computers entering human life, and thus culture, people need to make sense of computers. And "computer art" is a part of it, and it's part of the discussion about originality and individuality, so it definitely should be (if anything should be at all).
I remember there being a bit of a storm, roughly when Braid was released, about whether games are allowed to be called art. And at that time I spoke with lots of digital artists who had been told that they weren't artists at all also.
There should be no tax incentives and deductions to trade art.
> I find it easy to admit that computer art did not contribute to the advancement of art.
(We = humans) We made the tweets. We made the paintings. We wrote stupid things on Reddit (or the smarter things). We photographed nature. We built LLMs. In a way, what LLMs are doing is derivative/product of 'our' (and nature's) work. It's like adding 4 ingredients to the blender, blend it for only a few seconds, and you get variation. If you put 4 similar ingredients and you blend again for the exactly same amount of seconds you will get something similar but not the same.
LLM is a blender :)
The same author was on twitter until recently giving his take on AI
https://x.com/CarlCanary/status/1479567776272498693
There are people around who successfully predict new modes of creativity when humans and AI will be working together. Seriously: âworking togetherâ. Not: âhumans using softwareâ. One such software is called âBottoâ. An artist is its inventor.
https://x.com/CarlCanary/status/1480107734087479296
I read, there are machines that take an input text to generate images from it. Thatâs meant to be surprising. Havenât programs always been texts? You mean, natural language texts are different? So what? Isnât there Natural Language Programming?
I've got to say though, I dont think his takes were very good
A little distracting that the cookie dialog buttons on dam.org have black text on black backgrounds when Iâm in dark mode.
The styling is not as annoying as the cookie dialogs themselves, though.
Google shot themselves in the foot by transferring the pain of privacy to the user for Google Analytics. No one wants this. It wastes so much time. Itâs as if every storefront that previously had open doors got a half door added with a crappy combination lock.
Art is unique and made directly. You can record and photograph it. Creating the recording or the scan of the photograph with the computer is direct digital cloning. A source file and no originals.
That being said you can make a print on canvas and take a brush to add some unique strokes or play the recording and strum along on a guitar.
or you can automate the direct digital cloning and ask the computer for something original.
I'm not an artist, and I don't know much about aesthetics. But I've always felt that the most meaningful kind of image is one that somehow captures what you were feeling inside at the time.
AI-generated art can be stunning, but the more I see, the more it feels a bit empty. It often looks great, but there's no emotion behind it.
> In the light of the problems we are facing at the end of the 20th century, those are irrelevant questions.
I'm just surprised that someone writing in 1971 thought that they're sufficiently close to the end of the century to comment on it.
> There is no need for the production of more works of art, particularly no need for âcomputer artâ
I mean, if you're against new art in the first place then the rest kinda follows from that right? This article is like titling an essay "Against Chelsea" and then halfway subtly dropping that, well, actually, you hate football in general and people should stop playing it.
Commenting about recent events, because that's why probably why the link was posted:
I think AI art is actually going to make gallery-based individual contemporary art objects more valuable, because they are unique things that cannot be replicated. There are only so many paintings by Picasso, or Kiefer, or Hockney, and even if you could copy them down to the atom, the chain of provenance would still basically make the copies worthless and the originals invaluable. This extends even to smaller contemporary artists that aren't world-famous names. And it also means that digital / computer art is probably never going to sell for much money, at least directly as an art object.
At the end of the day, it's essentially simple supply and demand. AI is commoditizing digital images, but it can't commoditize physical ones (yet, or ever.)
I am an artist who uses a computer to make art (https://gods.art). The reason I starting doing art with code was due to the difficulty of drawing wave interference pattens and phyllotaxis spirals by hand. Why should I spend hours doing it by hand when I can write an algorithm to perfectly draw the mathematical patterns I have in mind? It feels more elegant to me to understand the math, and express it in code, rather than just copying it manually (which can be done without understanding the mathematical dynamics).
That said, doing a simple prompt into an LLM and calling it "my art" seems disingenuous.
My impression is that the author's underlying position, which happens among other things to lead him to the conclusion that "there should be no computer art", is that art should be subordinate to politics.
"There is no need for the production of more works of art [...] Aesthetic information as such is interesting only for the rich and the ruling. [...] Thus, the interest in computers and art should be the investigation of aesthetic information as part of the investigation of communication. This investigation should be directed by the needs of the people. [...] We should be interested in producing a film on, say, the distribution of wealth. Such a film is interesting because of its content; the interest in the content is enhanced by an aesthetically satisfying presentation."
That is: to the author, the purpose of art is simply to enhance the presentation of something whose primary purpose is political.
It may be that the author's position isn't specifically about politics as such: he might say, rather, that art should be subordinate to morals, that making art is only valuable in so far as it furthers some other goal that has value in itself, which might or might not be political. But the specific examples in this article are political.
The author does evidently have some other more specific reasons for being skeptical about "computer art". He says that "the repertoire of results of aesthetic behaviour has not been changed by the use of computers" (which might be true, or might be false now but have been true in 1971, but he offers no evidence or arguments for it). He says that "outsiders from technology" are invading the art world without understanding its political situation and "surrendering to the given 'laws of the market'" rather than rebelling against commercialism as real artists should. He says that technology in general, and computers in particular, worsen "the alienation of the artist from his product". Two of these reasons are also political but do engage with the specifics of "computer art" as such. But I think his main reason is the overarching super-general political one: there should be no computer art, because there should be no art as such, because there should only be anti-capitalist political activism which will sometimes use art as a tool.
So far as I can tell, the guts of this argument -- art, in practice, is driven by the rich and powerful, artists should reject this and focus on serving the greater need to overthrow the system with those rich and powerful people at the top and replace it with something fairer, therefore such-and-such an idea in art-as-such is a distraction -- could be transplanted without loss to any moment in the history of art and any particular artistic idea or technique or movement.
Maybe that or something like it is right, but my bet is that in practice the human race is enriched by having some people in it who create art because they love creating art, for whom other concerns are secondary.
(Having said all of which, so far as I can tell the author is basically correct about "computer art" not having contributed much aesthetically, and if he'd written more about that it could have been very interesting. And he might be correct about technology increasing the separation between artists and what they produce, and about that being a bad thing, and if he'd written more about that it could also have been interesting.)
> There is no need for the production of more works of art
Really? Was art finished in 1971?
These sort of very dated articles by people misunderstanding history can be funny, but this particular claim stands out as unusually weird.
There should be no art at all. And indeed there is no art. So everything is fine.
First things first--art is innately human. If a human didn't create it, it's not art. That means nature is not "art" (though that doesn't mean you can't notice the beauty in nature).
The artistic process is complicated, and which role a person plays in relation to the creation of a piece of artwork varies. Some people are the actual workers who go about creating the thing. Some are collaborators who help out the worker with small pieces of the artwork. Others are simple curators who bring people together.
Then you have those who commission an art piece, and it's what their role in this process is that I find myself conflicted on--are they deserving the title of artist because they funded it's creation, or had the initial idea for the piece? If your answer is yes--that they are considered an artist for commissioning a piece, then I think you can argue that a person who uses an AI model to generate art is actually creating art.
But if your answer is no--that simply having an idea and the means to bring it about (through money, or an AI model that was trained off the works of millions of artists without their consent), then I think you have a basis to argue that simply prompting these models to generate art, is not enough to constitute art. The piece wasn't generated by a human, and the prompt given to the model wasn't from someone who actually contributes to the creation of the art piece, therefor the result is not art.
Now what if someone first prompts a model to generate an image, and then spends a lot of time tweaking said image in Photoshop--are they still only a commissioner at that point? Well I suppose they aren't. But what about repeatedly prompting an AI until it gives you a close enough replica of what you imagined? Is this process practically the same touching up the piece yourself? I'd argue no, and I'd say this is simply the role of a commissioner telling the worker they're off the mark, and that the worker needs to start over.
Anyways that is a lot of text, but I think my point is this--analyzing the role a person plays while prompting an LLM can help inform if the output of the model is actually art.
So in 50 years our current articles worrying about AI and artists will look as dated and silly?
honestly this whole âis it art if a computer did itâ convoâs starting to sound like a stuck loop. like yeah we get it, itâs not the brush, itâs whoâs holding it. always has been. rip the whole damn idea open.
feels like most generative stuff now just wants claps. but if youâre not asking why it looks good, or what beauty even means when itâs built in tokens, then you're just vibing in style transfer mode forever.
need less gallery, more lab. more weird. more why.
My cousin went to RISD in 1972 after graduation she started hanging around MIT eventually studying under Negroponte before the formation of the media lab. After graduation she worked as a computer animator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter
She is in the photo at the terminal working on the last starfighter.
She has been creating computer art ever since. She has often expressed confusion and disillusionment with the field. She is often unsure if she or the computer is the artist.