Will AI make human-made art more sacred?
Will AI make human-made art more sacred?
And me, a brothel mommy over my girls (aka paintings).
I am wicked close to being done with my current painting, a 24x48” canvas of a highway overpass, of course. As I do with all the paintings, especially in the last weeks of the execution, I sit and look and talk and wonder in front of it.
Lately everyone is talking about AI, writing about AI, using AI, etc. etc. And I recently saw this great tweet:
AI makes me wanna vomit a bit when I think of what it will displace. The potential I see for it just with illustrators startles me. We’ve taught a machine to take in human-made images (words, etc.) and spit out robot-made ones. It’s a new level of cannibalizing artists and their skills that frightens me. It seems ass backwards to make it harder for the humans to make the art that we all love and consume, so that a robot can do it?
But as I was sitting with my painting the other night I wondered if AI may make human-made art even more valuable, more sacred? With digital art it seems less likely because robots will only get better at copying. But something like a painting, a physical art object?
Will our eyes know the difference? Will we feel the difference?
God I hope so. The way I feel standing in front of a painting is like listening to a musician in person, a wave of something comes over the body, a feeling. There’s energy to it. A human dreams up an image, commits it to a surface with colored paste, making 1,000 decisions in the process, and a spirit emerges within that object.
I sat there that night thinking, you’re mine. I get to say who sees you and when. I get to say if someone ever owns you, and if not, then you live with me. I feel like a brothel mommy, a madame of the house with all my girls.
Here’s some progress over the last couple of weeks:
things worth sharing
MOVIE: The Elephant Whisperers was an absolute delight—it tells the story of a couple who are entrusted with an orphaned baby elephant. It’s a gorgeous story of their connection and for me how simple joy and love can be. Beautifully shot and it’s only about 40 minutes long.
QUOTES: A couple about humans making art:
“Every single thing in the world that was made by anyone started with an idea. So to catch one that is powerful enough to fall in love with, it is one of the most beautiful experiences. It’s like being jolted with electricity and knowledge at the same time.” -David Lynch
“I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.” -Yohji Yamamoto
“I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the ‘canary in the coal mine theory’. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.” -Kurt Vonnegut