Member-only story
AI won’t replace artists- instead, it will augment them
In an unsurprising yet exhausting twist, the art world is obsessed with works created by artificial intelligence. If you’ve been keeping up with art news, you’ll know that last October a very generic AI portrait sold for a cool $432,000. It was made by an open-source program called GAN. Christie’s claimed it’s the “first portrait generated by an algorithm to come up for auction.” Of course, that’s not really true- artists like Thomas Ruff have been making compilation artworks like this for decades. The piece that sold at Christie’s wasn’t even an advanced or inspired use of AI image creation. So why was it sold? I believe it’s because we’re at the logical end-point of a consistent trend in the art world: rejecting itself. For centuries now, art has been in a perpetual freefall, fragmenting and challenging the very definition of its form.
This isn’t new. Master painter Caravaggio rejected the light and idealism of painting in the late 1500s by depicting incredibly dark, morbid, dramatic scenes. Picasso rejected the human form in favor of a more intuitive, emotional figure. Duchamp rejected the idea of art as a sacred creation, and did thinks like calling a urinal art- to the shock and awe of audiences. Rothko rejected figure and representation entirely, and made a fabulous living selling blurry blocks of color on canvas. Andy Warhol rejected whatever…