So, for those who don’t know, I minored in Anthropology in college. Although my school didn’t offer more than one minor, I also took the equivalent of classes for minors in art history and history, so you could say I have a lifelong obsession with understanding the human experience and the cultural artifacts it creates. I am a firm believer in the idea that by learning about the world around us, both contemporary and historical, we can better understand ourselves.
It is my incredible disappointment that art history is so often separated from general history, because these are things so inextricably linked that your understanding of one can never be complete without the other. Art is the product of the culture that produces it. Removed from its context, you lose all the essential information you need to truly appreciate it – the motivations of the artist, the social and economic pressures that caused this specific thing to be created in the specific timeframe, the culture of the intervening years that caused this thing to be preserved (or not!) – all of these things are crucial.
When we think of art movements – Dadaism for example – it’s important to know these details as it should inform how you view it. This is majorly simplified for length, but Dadaism was largely influenced by the shock and horror of WWI. It was marked by a rejection of reason, logic, materialism, nationalism, the bourgeoisie, and essentially all the things that created a climate in which this truly cataclysmic war could take place. Reader’s digest on WWI: it was the first truly widespread mechanized war, and the mass destruction and method/magnitude of loss of life was something humans had never before reckoned with. Therefore, it had massive far-reaching influence on everything that came out of that era. There are a lot of common threads between then and now – a widespread loss of faith in institutions, an irrevocably broken social contract, incredible financial pressures and basically all the ingredients for the rise of fascism – and I’ve been saying for years that the growing popularity of contemporary absurdism is like Dada 2.0 for many of the same reasons.
Getting back to the present, where is art now? Aside from the aforementioned Dadaist tendencies, there is a creeping shadow forming over the millennium-spanning human experience of art: AI. Although there are some outliers (and I’d never pretend to speak for all artists) the prevailing opinion among us is that AI is an existential threat to everything that art stands for. AI seeks to skip over the artist, and all that embodies: the sacrifice for skill, the commitment to craft, a consciousness honed to imagine the impossible, challenging the status-quo, ad infinitum. And why is this happening? Profit, essentially. The biggest proponents of AI art seek to gain with unearned ability, quite literally stealing the experience and craft of the sum total of human history to create image without soul.
ALL of that is to say, casting our minds back to the previous point of art being the product of the culture that produces it, can you think of any art movement more appropriate for this modern late-capitalist era than AI? It’s truly the embodiment of the commodification of the entirety of human experience – theft of the creation of every person that has ever lived – to sell something. To remove the artist, and all the dangerous thought crimes they propagate. To stop us imagining. Hoping. Creating. To sell back to us a Frankenstein monster built from the pillaged cultural equity built over tens of thousands of years. An amoral pastiche of life.
I can’t think of anything more fitting. Or more sad.
I can’t stop AI art. I can’t stop you from consuming it. But as long as I have breath, a brain, and hands, I’m going to keep making my own. My own dirty, imperfect, human art.
