critical thinking

[totient]

A bunch of folks who think they know what art is are debating whether AI art is art over in the convention-running social medias.

So far every criticism I've heard is also true of someone whose works sell for millions of dollars. Kruger, Rauschenberg, Banksy, edited to add: Koons. (Did you know that a Rauschenberg recently sold for $89 million? I didn't until today, but I'm pleased that the reaction of the art world seems to have been "it's about time".)

Ultimately I think the question is meaningless. Is any given image art? If so, at what point did it become art, and how? To my mind, the first question is much more about what happens after it's finished than what happens beforehand. Trying to classify things as art according to their creation is absurd.

Comments

[rmd]

I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that it's a different type of art compared to some other things we categorize as art. Like, a performance is different than a painting is different from generated art. With this AI-generated stuff, I think some of what makes it 'art' is the input of and curation by humans - what are we selecting, what are we trying to say or what response are we trying to elicit by picking this piece but not that one, and how are we presenting it.

[totient]

In this way AI art is a lot like photography. No question that some of photography is art, and also no question that some of it isn't. My own process certainly does not make that distinction at the point that I take the photograph.

[lehser]

Yeah, it was interesting. My 100-year-old grandmother studied art (with Albers, among others), and taught public school art for a number of years. When we mentioned the AI art controversy, she said, "It's no different than how artists have been operating forever! None of them actually execute (all) their own art!"

Not saying she's right, just pointing out that an old-school art person, who might be expected to be appalled, was far from it. FWIW.

[totient]

This is a particular criticism of Jeff Koons. Or maybe it's a criticism of a lot of artists, but it's more significant with Koons because Koons is such a polarizing figure among art critics, or more cynically because Koons' art doesn't (according to the artist!) have any other significance.

Still, it actually hadn't come up in the FB discussion in question, and so I'll go ahead and add Koons to the list of commercially hyper-successful artists in the top post.

[(Anonymous)]

I keep coming back to thoughts about whether there is a difference (and whether it matters) among the artness of art and its importance to the art world and accessibility. I've had a fair number of interesting conversations about this in which I point at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire
and
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/484972

[foms]

Argh. The "artness of art" comment was me, again. I didn't log out. It just happened, while I wasn't looking, I swear.