Steven Pinker talks about art in one of his books. I believe it’s in “How the Mind Works” he splits art in to two rough categories:<p>“Museum Art” and “Motel Art”.<p>Motel Art might be a picture of a flower or a field.<p>Museum art is things like Picasso and Rembrandt - what can be in a museum changes over time. E.g, if I paint a Picasso that would be passable in a motel, but not a museum. Picasso has been done. Doing it again is not museum art.<p>That is, motel art is pretty to look at. Museum art is culturally and historically defined.<p>A less favorable interpretation is that museum art is an intellectual pissing contest, where curators and visitors can measure their dicks by how much they know about the art history that lead up to this work or how much that work challenges status quo.<p>Making pretty motel art is a solved problem.<p>Making museum art, the prettiness or the craftsmanship has for a long time been largely been irrelevant. It might help form the story around the piece, but it is the story around the piece that is important.<p>That story may be ruined by the revelation that a given piece is produced by AI or it may be the center piece of the story that propels a piece into art history.<p>We have already seen childrens paintings and monkeys paintings win museum curators favor. We’ve also seen toilets and feces been placed in museums and art history.<p>I don’t see anything here changing.
On this debate people are confusing artistic illustration skills with creating art. An artist created this artwork at the state fair, not the AI. The artist had a vision, directed the AI towards that outcome and selected the result they wanted.<p>Some very famous artist exposed in museums today don’t physically hold the tools that « make » the artwork, they direct a team of assistants who act as their hands. Some like to hold the paintbrush themselves but they don’t have to and that’s why it’s not a criteria for whether they are the artist or not.<p>Much like a movie director directing a team to create a movie doesn’t hold the mic boom or deal with the photography themselves. They orchestrate other humans into creating the piece of art they have envisioned.<p>This is exactly the same. Instead of a known visual artist directing art students to fabricate the artwork they’ve envisioned, the artist directs the AI.
Who would have ever imagined that one of the first groups to be unemployed by AI would be artists?<p>I can imagine a new chain of mall stores where you come in and a counselor creates a series of prototypes after chatting with you. Pick the one you want and they will 'paint' and frame it while you wait.
A great photograph can take just a few minutes to get right, it's still great art.<p>There used to be a debate whether photography really was an art form, but that was long ago. Pretty much everyone now agrees that photography is a tool, and a great artist can produce great art with it. There is nothing about text-to-image learning models trained on huge corpuses that makes it fundamentally different from that.<p>Art is constantly evolving. That's what makes contemporary art relevant. The judges, who one may expect to have seen a lot of highs and lows, seem to find the tool used here less controversial than some of the commentators.
It's the recognition of perceived merit based on effort. If you believe the human artist did nothing more than you could have done yourself with your current skills, it's natural to devalue the work. Sometimes that effort is intellectual, sometimes it's just brute force, and most often it's reflective of years of training and honing of skills that might be commonplace. At some point you might value the artwork, but not the human artist because you don't think much effort was expended to achieve that work.<p>In this case the article says:<p><pre><code> "Allen created Théâtre D’opéra Spatial by entering various words and phrases
into Midjourney, which then produced more than 900 renderings for him to
choose from. He selected his three favorites, then continued adjusting them
in Photoshop until he was satisfied. He boosted their resolution using a tool
called Gigapixel and printed the works on canvas."
</code></pre>
The artist claims 80 hours. Is that enough effort? It's certainly not turnkey. That's the question.
I'm on the fence about calling myself an "AI artist". I think a better term is "muse to an AI"<p>I couldn't possibly create the images that I get out of Stable Diffusion, so I consider it the real artist. But it can't possibly come up with the ideas of what to draw, so I am the muse.<p>What's more, I feel that the ideas that I come up with are uniquely my own. By which I mean, it is unlikely for another human to have the same idea.<p>For me, the point at which it becomes art is when it expresses something. It has to evokes thought in the viewer.
In Tantric philosophy (at least according to Christopher Wallis in <i>Tantra Illuminated</i>), the concept of <i>rasa</i> (usually translated as aesthetics) describes the experience of someone experiencing art. It’s not the modernist idea of “this is art because I say it is art”. Rather, something has <i>rasa</i> because the consciousness experiencing the art, in that moment, remembers profound spiritual truths. It’s more similar to what psychonauts might realize during visionary experiences. And if something doesn’t evoke <i>rasa</i>, it isn’t art.<p>I think everyone more or less has a connection to some source of inspiration and creativity. But not all of us have the craft or skill to execute that vision. These AIs can help bring that out. I am already seeing indie fiction authors creating sketches of characters they have created. I wouldn’t be surprised when someone hooks up GPT-X driven interactive fictions with generative art to illustrate them. If properly curated, little kids take naturally to this stuff — it’s all Make Believe.<p>Generative music is probably coming next.<p>This debate on what is art, and artists who do have the craft feeling threatened by the technology is just a surface debate. These models are only as good as the examples we feed them, and there is a place for people to execute on new art styles and variants.<p>Rather, this ability for anyone to execute on their personal source of inspiration means we will be surfacing up content deep within our collective consciousness. There will be the sublime, and there will be the horrific. Any and all fantasies, both wholesome and beyond the pale, will emerges. What we do about this as a civilization, is I think, will be a much bigger debate than what is art.
One of my favorite artists Grimshaw [0] used to use a camera in his paintings, at the time it wasn't considered 'real art' [1] much like the use of AI now isn't considered real art.<p>But time passes and now not only is it considered 'real art' but it's also (subjectively to me) some of the best art ever created.<p>Although it's hard to envisage I imagine the same is going to happen with AI art, it's hard to see now but in the future it will be considered 'normal'.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Atkinson_Grimshaw" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Atkinson_Grimshaw</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.trinityhousepaintings.com/looking-back-artist-john-atkinson-grimshaw-birthday/" rel="nofollow">https://www.trinityhousepaintings.com/looking-back-artist-jo...</a>
> The winner, Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, “depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting,” Matthew Gault writes for Vice. *“Classical figures in a Baroque hall stare through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape.”*<p>Curious, has someone with access to Midjourney tried using this exact description to generate a <i>new</i> image? I'd be fascinated to see the AI-generated result of a human's description of an AI-generated image.
<i>listed them for sale for $750</i><p>Regardless how you feel about AI-generated art, I feel like this piece will be worth a heck of a lot more than that soon, given the controversy / infamy it's generating!
In an artists chosen medium, there are constraints. For the painter, the paint; for the photographer, the subject.<p>It is the constraints that determine creativity.<p>With AI there are no constraints, so it is not art.