The Nature of Art

Art has always been one of the most central aspects of human lives. It is not unique to the human experience, but it has become more important to humans than perhaps no other species on the planet. The history of Art is one of a continuous crisis and need to reïnvent itself, and as such our current age is no different. The contemporary crisis is one partly caused by the emergence of Large Language Models (llms) and their ability to quickly generate enormous quantities of visual imagery, but it is also caused by a more long-running trend of digital life and of its consequences.

Many artists (especially those leaning towards more commercial work) decry to the use of llms to produce mere “slop” — cheap, mass produced imagery — and the threat to which this poses to the jobs of artists. But if one takes the arguments of these artists at face value, that the images and text ai not in fact Art, we are left with an interesting question; one almost as old as the medium itself: What is Art?

“Art”, as opposed to mere “art”, does not take any predefined shape or appearance. It is a pure essence that exists both between and within individuals. The lowercase form of art is a form of mechanical production — it consists of things that are merely meant to be decorative, to be pleasurable to the eye, and to fulfil some innate human desire to “fill” empty space with something interesting. Art may contain art, but it does so only in the sense that Art must be contained within some sort of vessel; it represents the numerous techniques that are used in order to bring Art into the world.

Lowercase art can be almost as, if not more, varied than the Art itself. Examples may include things like drawing, painting, casting, dancing, or singing, but a complete list of the possible forms of art would be as long as a list of all possible human activities.

From this follows a similar distinction of Artists and artists; meaning those who produce Art and art respectively. In many cases these may be one and the same, but in many others they differ demonstrably. There are many artists who are not Artists, and in the same way there are many Artists who are not artists. These differences are not always as clear as one may hope, and adds considerable difficulty in differentiating the things they produce.

Most easily noticeable is undeniably the artist; it is she who pronounces herself as the creator of art, if not also making the claim of creating Art. They are the practitioner of the art qua skill of creating art. To this class we include the professional artists such as painters, weavers, photographers and the digital artists. But the makers of Art may not be so easily seen; it includes those who indirectly labour as writers (such as lawyers, programmers, administrators, et cetera) as well as those who merely through their actions embody Art — no matter the profession.

It may not always be the aim of those who produce Art to do so, it could merely be a by-product of their intended activity. By contrast, Art is clearly the goal of the artist profession; even if they do not always succeed.

The production of Art is inherently a social activity, in that it happens as a part of the social relations between individuals. The very first forms of Art were undoubtedly song and dance that was performed socially. The visual arts were probably invented first through the collection and/or orientation of sea shells or rocks — whose meaning was created in the relations within social groupings.

The creation of art does not need to be social in the same regard. As mentioned before, Art must take some embodied form in the world in order to be experienced; it commonly does so through asocially created art. But the aspect in which it is Art only appears after the work is displayed in a social setting. A painting only seen by the artist is not itself a piece of Art¹ but only becomes so as its meaning is socially constructed. The artist must be so arrogant that they dare share their art with the world, framing it as better than what any other person has made before,² and in this bold statement creates Art.

As I explained in the thesis of my earlier text Pluribus & Alienation it is easy to mistake developments in information generation with ones in communication. Both lead to an increase in the perceived amount of information³ that is received by the individual. But interestingly enough the reverse mistake has been made in the field of art. The most revolutionary development for art in recent memory, and that has still not been properly tackled, is the expansion of the internet and, through it, digital art.

There have unknowingly been many debates as a consequence of this paradigm shift. Perhaps the largest was the original introduction, discussion and corresponding legal battles surrounding peer-to-peer file-sharing and torrenting and the resulting mass-copying and sharing of music and video works whose distribution hade previously been restricted mostly by technical limitations.

The end result of these battles did not solve the underlying problem but instead merely reintroduced the earlier status quo by the creation of legal tools and barriers, as well as the emergence of services like Spotify and Netflix that shifted the economic incentives of consumers. But the debate lay dormant for a time; creating the illusion of being solved.

The second phase of the debate came forward with the invention of the non-fungible token, an extension of the (originally Ethereum) blockchain so as to include the registration of unique (and thus non-fungible) units of account, as opposed to the fungible digital currencies that had existed before. While blockchains and nfts are inherently a boring technology, they have managed to accrue a loyal following due to the (potentially) large monetary rewards that can be gained by speculating on the values of cryptocurrencies. This then led to a fixation on a specific form of nft art (most notably embodied in the Bored Ape Yacht Club series of generative artworks by Yuga Labs) rather than nfts as a tool to manage the ownership of preëxisting artworks.

This division into what became “Owning an nft” instead of “owning an artwork” created the belief that what was owned was the digital (oftentimes) image itself, and thus a corresponding belief that someone else downloading a copy of this image was tantamount to theft, since the owner had not given their consent for a copy to be made of the art.

In fact, a “copy” is made practically every time a digital image is displayed or moved; potentially hundreds of times when moved over the internet. The blockchain itself is even built on a redundant and collectively synced copies of the entire blockchain and its contents.

This mistake is of course a relic of the analog world, where producing a copy of a work was a laborious and difficult process, and where such a work maintained a strictly separate identity from the physical shape of the original. In such a world theft is possible by removing the original owner’s ability to decide the fate of the artwork. Such a development is however impossible when it comes to digital art. Obtaining access to view (and thus by necessity also copy) something digital does not deprive the original owner of anything — only perhaps the monopoly right to extract rent on such access.

The introduction of image-generating diffusion models breaks this delicate repair of a fundamentally fractured position. Image generation allows not just the copy of preëxisting art but also the creation of brand new art. Such art is fundamentally inspired by the works of those that came before⁴ through the inclusion of such works in the training data for the models. This inclusion is highly controversial to many (primarily digital) artists, who see themselves as still having some sort of authorial control over what can be done to a work.

This stems from the idea that an owner of a physical work can share said work digitally while still maintaining control over the original. But for digital art no “original” exists, a digital copy is a perfect copy that is indistinguishable from the first. Sharing your digital art with someone else then not only allows them to take inspiration personally, but also to share the work further or to modify it as they see fit. When a social media company uses images or text posted on their platform they are only using what was, in practice, made publicly available to all. A core consequence of digital media is that the only guaranteed way to prevent it from spreading is not to share it in the first place.

The creation of generative art (as compared to the mere generation) is still a process that raises it to a certain level of Art because the creation is still a social process. The reasons for this are twofold:

1. ai models do not create some internal definition for what constitutes Art or not or of what the world looks like, just as most humans do not. Instead models create images based on the images that is is trained on, and therefore mirrors our collective societal idea of how art is supposed to appear.
2. The Artist introduces the element of Art to the work through their selection and deliberate choosing to present a work. An image silently generated and deleted is not Art in the same way that a napkin sketch by a famous artist, discarded and forgotten, does not constitute Art.

These two reasons follow naturally from the idea that Art is a socially constructed and collective idea that is not in the control of the author themselves. Even examples similar to the above only become Art when a second actor discovers the discarded work and chooses to elevate it and present it as Art.

This is not to say that ai art is always Art or that it is very good Art when it attempts to be so. Instead ai is a mere tool that does not replace Artists but empowers them in a new way. The two major historical developments that most clearly showcases this are the introduction of photography into the art world as well as the modernism-defining work Fountain by Marcel Duchamp.

Beginning with the former, it is clear that photography today is an established artform that that constitutes one of the widely recognized ways to create Art. But this was not always so. Originally photography was seen as a cheap and industrialized way to capture the world around us, missing the critical element of interpretation that was done by the painter. That the camera impacted the livelihoods of artists — most notably painters — must be undeniable,⁵ but it also led to a widespread increase in the reproduction of visual imagery. Today photography is used for many technical tasks that could never have been done by traditional artists; think of the snapshot of a restaurant menu to a friend running late so that they can order in advance.

Photography also made many pieces of art uninteresting, and thus not worthy of being considered Art. The traditional painting of highly realistic-looking fruit bowls or landscapes could now be simply automated, and the fruit bowl instead became a mere showcase of technical skill.⁶ To be considered Art the work must then inform some new perspective.

The latter example is perhaps even more famous. Fountain consists of a mass-produced porcelain urinal. Its creation was offensive in two ways, partly owning to the choice of a urinal specifically (as an intimate object that is meant to be covered in piss) as well as being offensive merely in its presentation.

This second element was shared with all of Duchamp’s Readymades — everyday objects merely positioned and presented to be Art, and therefore be imbued with such a status. Doing this requires no (or at least very little) technical skill, and is therefore accessible to everyone. All Art since Duchamp has had to grapple with this phenomena, that even if a specific artwork required technique to achieve it is nonetheless possible to create great Art without it.

The introduction of generative ai does not change this state of affairs. Some people argue that ai is putting artists out of jobs today, and they are right in doing so, but this misses the fact that the Artist — who aims to create Art and not merely art — faces the same challenge as they have always done. Paradoxically the two groups that benefit from ai are those who merely care about art qua visual communication and those who strive to create Art, and choose to use ai as (one) manner of pursuing that goal. It is the group in-between, who does not care particularly strongly about neither art nor Art but merely produces art as a manner of making a living, who will suffer and largely disappear — their labour shifting to the orchestration of ai models just as most photographers today are not Artists but instead merely “documenters”. ❦