[9:03 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): sorry to drag this up again but the whole thing interests me – the AI art question I mean
[9:03 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): I didn’t want to get into this during the raid but it just strongly reminds me of an article from almost 100 years ago that was almost on the same topic
[9:05 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): in 1935, Walter Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which talks about how the ability to mass-reproduce art devalues it, and, as a result, changed art forever – and for the better
[9:07 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): if an artwork’s physical value is diminished, but the art is still powerful, meaningful, etc, then where is the “art” of it located? Mechanical reproduction revealed that it isn’t IN the art object, it’s..somewhere else
[9:08 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): Benjamin starts talking about the “soul” of an artwork, and I get his approach, though for me, that’s too unreal
[9:10 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): I’ll get into what approach DOES work for me, but just to tie that off – when art is detached from its object, art became freed up to take on new forms, forms that were harder to locate, and starts to allow the lines between art forms to blur – music was always considered art, and paintings were always art but now we could to paintings that required music, maybe, performance art, experimental art, etc
[9:12 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): mechanical reproduction also removed some of the “authority” from art – we used to put art and artists on pedestals – I mean, we still do, but more so back then – and while it’s good to appreciate and even honor art, putting it on a pedestal takes it out of the reach of “normies,” it becomes only accessible to the rich
[9:13 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): art can be graffiti now, or a poem scrawled on a napkin, or a song played on so many guitar pedals that you can’t even hear the notes anymore
[9:15 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): Benjamin didn’t leave the topic open-ended, but I think it wasn’t done – I think the following half-century was a huge growth spurt for humanity and for art, in part because of that new freedom, artists were no longer chained to the objects they created
[9:16 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): There’s a lot of great stuff to read on the topic – Jean Genet has a tiny little book called “What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet,” and then there’s an article by Jean Luc Nancy called “Why are there several arts and not just one” – tho let me know if you want to read that one, it might be better to do in teams
[9:17 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): (I just found a pdf of What Remains of a Rembrant – I have a real life copy because I’m super cool, of course – but it is literally a tiny little book, like, 3-4 inches tall, so the way this pdf presents it is accurate to the original https://memoirsoftheblind.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/genet-whatremainsofarembrandt.pdf)
[9:23 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): So anyway – I think it’s fair to say that mechanical reproduction destroyed art as we knew it – and what came next was even better
[9:23 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): I don’t know if AI will do something similar – I mean, probably, right? It seems like it should – but it may just be an echo of the same issues raised by mechanical reproduction – AI may just further disassociate art from its product.
[9:24 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): AI might explode art, but – and this is the important part, imo – it doesn’t have the power to take art away from us. Art isn’t about the product, not anymore, anyway. It’s about the process, both the process for the artist themselves or the process of experiencing the art, as an audience member or viewer or whatever.
[9:26 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): when it comes to what “art” is when you remove its physicality, I mentioned that Benjamin’s explanation didn’t really work for me – and getting into what works for me is getting dangerously close to a very long-term Special Interest, so forgive me if I go way too deep into this
[9:30 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): My favorite writer on the subject of art is Maurice Blanchot, a French literary theorist and novelist who wrote from the 1930s until the 1990s – he was a hermit who rarely spoke to anyone, he had one friend, and his writing is considered so complex and challenging that even the most well-known philosophers of the 20th century were often too intimidated to write about his ideas – so, basically, a super smarty pants
[9:30 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): but more importantly for me, a describer of really, really interesting ideas
[9:31 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): For him, art was an attempt, a “try” at bringing something from deep within us out into the light of day. That thing, whatever it is, exists only as it truly is when it’s inside us, in that darkness, so to take it out into the light is to fundamentally fail at reproducing it, and to even try is to betray it
[9:31 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): but, at the same time, if you’re compelled to express it, there’s no other way to do it – you can’t bring people into the inside of you, so you have to take your insides out. A “great artist” might be thought of as someone who is able to bring with it some of the darkness that it needs, the darkness that makes it what it is.
[9:32 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): To put that another way: Any attempt to put something into words is to shape it; when you call a feeling “love” then you’re painting a very specific notion in the mind of others – one that might not capture all the nuance and detail that you want to communicate – so instead of calling it “love” you might instead tell a story about two characters that develop something like the thing that you’re trying not to call love.
[9:34 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): One way to think about art is as the thing that we call our power to dive into that darkness – and humanity is a word we might be able to use to describe our perpetual hope that, with this new phrasing, or chord progression, or palette of colors, we might be able to do it the way we meant to this time, this time, we might be able to get it right. Humans are dumb and simple and adorable because we just keep trying anyway, even if we’ve failed a thousand times.
[9:35 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): So for Blanchot, this experience of diving into our deepest and most compelling mysteries and delicately teasing them out, only to inevitably betray them – that’s important to our experience of art – both in creating it and in experiencing it. If AI can provide that experience, then there’s hope for AI art to be “real” art. But if it can’t, then there isn’t.
[9:36 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): But no matter what it is, one thing that it most definitely isn’t is a threat to art. Art isn’t something that can be taken away from us, or ruined. Art is a compulsion, started by inspiration, which is itself an amazing experience, and then continued because the experience of both expression and observation of art is sublime. We make it and we pursue it because it’s awesome, and AI is either a new art form or just a new way for corporations to screw workers out of money, but –
[9:37 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): like, if you think about mechanical reproduction – it made a physical painting have less value – but people still painted – and they still do today, people still use oils on canvas even though they could do it much “better” in photoshop
[9:39 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): Van Gogh is a great example of a Great Artist because he was so emotional, and so vivid, and his work is so beautiful, and the way he painted was so…simple? that even someone who doesn’t know anything about art can look at Starry Night and understand why he painted the sky the way he did – it wasn’t simple, that’s not the right word –
[9:41 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): it was like when you hear a super genius physicist talk about physics – someone who really gets it can explain it in a way that’s easy for anyone to understand – and that’s what Van Gogh did with painting (and what Borges did with his essays, but I’ll save that Special Interest Activation for another time)
[9:45 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): but there’s another part of Van Gogh – there’s something of HIM in those paintings, something of the pain and suffering he endured through mental illness and poverty, but also some of (a lot of) his passion and ecstatic, sublime experience of painting – and when I look at his paintings, his feelings echo in me, and they echo in all of us, and for a tiny moment, he’s less alone, and I’m less alone – we’re all able to feel what he felt, all together
[9:46 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): and my point isn’t that AI can’t do that, I don’t know if it can, I think there are computer programmers who are just as smart and talented as Van Gogh and we might someday be able to appreciate AI art as “real” art –
[9:47 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): My point isn’t that AI can’t do it, but that YOU CAN, and whether AI can or cannot won’t change that
[9:48 AM] 𝚓𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛 (𝚑𝚎): There’s no “end” to art, there’s no goal, there’s no right answer – we keep doing it not because we think we’re going to come to a final complete and perfect understanding of the universe but because there’s something inside us that we want to express, to share, and when we can’t use normal words, we use art instead