The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Regurgitation

First, the title. I’m pretty proud of its level of smug pretension. It’s a very clever reference to an essay by Walker Evans called ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in which he muses on how our understanding and treatment of the artistic object changed after the introduction of photography and improved printing techniques. Something like that. I’ve not read it since uni.

That concern about how our approach to art changes with the advent of new technologies, though, keeps tickling my brain with all the talk of that ‘bloody AI’. Now let’s be clear, I’m not a fan. ‘AI Art’ is neither AI nor Art, and that’s coming from a sci fi loving nerd who has spent time trying to convince people not to be snobs about what is and isn’t art. You can’t chuck everyone’s drawings and paintings in a woodchipper and call the result art. Actually, scratch that, that would actually be a fun art project if you did it in real life. It’s the stealing and the bland soulless outcome that’s the problem with genAI. Yeah there’s probably interesting things you could do with using a machine learning type thing to remix your own work, but that’s not what this is about. 

When photography was invented a whole load of people were credited with leaping in the air and yelling “From today, painting is dead!”. It wasn’t, but art did change. It’s not a coincidence that the western art tradition went from an attitude of ‘good art is all about making things look exactly like they look in real life’ to ‘actually, let’s reproduce atmosphere, feeling, movement - hey - isn’t abstraction fun!’. This is a slight exaggeration, but since photography could now reproduce stuff accurately, painting needed another mission.

In the meantime, photography had a nearly two century long breakdown about whether it was art or not. Every undergrad photography student has had to write essays on ‘Is Photography Art’. Yes it is, now shut up. 

The real question for us is what happens to art now? It’s not dead, humans aren’t going to cede power of creativity to a mulching machine. We’ll still make things. We’ll still want to express things and we’ll still want things to, at the very least, look nice. Financially, artists of many forms will lose jobs and/or their patience, and somehow billionaires will get richer. But what will artists make? How will art look?

My time machine is broken, so I can’t tell you, but it seems to me that we’ll turn to the things we do best. GenAI machines, packed with all the art they can steal, can only remix, take an average. There’s nothing new or special it adds, no special sauce. Now, for humans a big part of making art is looking at other art. I spent 17 years teaching students that the more good stuff they put in their brain the better stuff would come out. On the surface this seems like what genAI is doing, but that misses a whole other chunk of how human brains and art work. We’ve got life experience, viewpoints, opinions, personalities. We’ve seen and thought things that maybe we didn’t think important at the time, but stored away for later use, consciously or otherwise. Books, poems, conversations, all that stuff is sloshing around in our mushy brains, making connections genAI just can’t. 

More importantly, we can judge and make choices. As any artist knows (but apparently people who don’t make art don’t) your final piece in whatever form, will not come straight out in one go, as perfect as you imagined it. There’s sketches, reworking, experiments, new details and ideas, random chance, alternative approaches.  All of this makes important contributions to a piece of art. 

Actually, as an aside if you’ve not made art before and your first draft of a thing is crap, that’s how it’s meant to work, it’s step one.  Keep going. If you think you got it right the first time, you’re kidding yourself.

So this, I predict, is where art will go. It will be more personal, more directly linked to the artist. Not in an ‘awful personalised T-shirt’ way, but in the way you’ll see traces of the artist’s thoughts in the lines and the words, the extra ideas that joined the party on draft four or five. As viewers we’ll start to appreciate that detail and depth, the things that mean the artist cared. Perhaps, too, we’ll start to really appreciate the messiness, the handmade, the silly mistakes, the stuff we can relate to. Art is communication. No one likes talking to the robot when they’re trying to sort out their insurance and that # key is getting mashed until there’s a real human to speak to. We want and need that connection.

For me, personally, it’s the sense of humour that’s missing. Machines can’t be silly or dick about or just do something for lols. Perhaps I’ll expand on the importance of dicking about in another blog - I consider it a fundamental part of being human and we should remember that when we consider humans throughout history. GenAI isn’t going to pop a tiny hidden character in a picture just because it made them laugh. It’s not going to sneak in a pun or a cheeky reference that only a select few will get (but love with all their hearts).

My vague recollection of Walker Evans’ essay (no, I’ve not even reread it for this, this isn’t a college essay) was him talking about how, once art could be reproduced, the original piece developed an aura, like a sacred object. We’ve all seen reproductions of the Mona Lisa, yet if you go to the Louvre you might not be able to see it due to crowds (and the fact it’s surprisingly small). If genAI doesn’t crash and burn in the next week or so, people aren’t going to stop making that ugly, creepy slop, but perhaps culturally we’ll start to really appreciate what human art can do - from kids’ hand prints to delicate oil paintings, from cheesy fantasy books to heavyweight literature, from Westend musicals to opera to death metal - even my new comedy show which I’ll be performing towards the end of this year. And that terrible ending proves I’m not using an LLM.