What Is Art?
Photo by Vackground on Unsplash
What is art?
Is it the physical artifact, the making of the physical artifact, or is it both?
Recently, Jason M. Allen won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition under the digital art category, by submitting a piece of work he created using an artificial intelligence program called Midjourney, a software that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics.
(In other words, you type in specific lines of text and the program creates the piece of work “by scraping millions of images from the open web, then teaching algorithms to recognize patterns and relationships in those images and generate new ones in the same style”.)
He duly won the $300 prize. Then, when he posted this on Twitter, it caused an uproar, even though he had disclosed this fact in his submission. Some proclaimed it the death of art, others said he had cheated, and that this just wasn’t right.
Allen’s (and others’) argument was that he did nothing wrong. He had submitted this under the digital art category, which, in his mind, was no different from using Photoshop or other software to manipulate images and that one still needed a sense of creativity. But the objectors were not appeased.
So let me ask again: what is art?
Is it the physical artifact, the making of the physical artifact, or is it both?
One could argue that it’s the idea - if you can conceive of the idea in your mind, how you produce it doesn’t matter. This has been argued for decades in the music industry since the advent of music loops, sequencers and digital audio workstations. (It’s actually been debated longer than that, as the NY Times article linked above points out - photography was once referred to as “Art’s most mortal enemy”.)
Or you could argue that it’s as much the effort that goes into the creation - the years spent mastering one’s craft - be it painting or an instrument. That graft and toil matters and it’s what allows one to translate the noise in your head onto a canvas. That that translation matters and to be able to physically make it happen yourself is art, in and of itself.
Or is it both - that you need both the idea and the (hard) work of producing it. And that software is just cheating?
One perspective - in large part mine - is that art is emotion. So whatever I create that sparks an emotion in you is, for all intents and purposes, art. If I can envision it or hear it in my mind, and somehow create it - through my years of technical training and hard work, or through a piece of software - then that is all that matters.
Note that one still needs to develop a sense of creativity and a voice. The fact is, that technology can, has and will continue to transform how we create art. But will it substitute for human creativity? Will it allow me to find my voice? I’m not so sure. It might allow me to mimic other voices, but to create my own?
You might agree. Or you might not. So let me ask you again.
What is art?
Not as easy a question to answer, is it?
