On Thursday, The Middlebrow tagged along with The Artist Wife to attend the Armory Show kickoff at the Jacob K. Javits Center in Manhattan. We participated in a toast hosted by Champagne Pommery to celebrate artist Joe Minter, winner of this year’s $10,000 Palmer Prize. Minter, an autodidact who believes the spirit of God works through him, was represented at the fair by his 1999 sculpture, And He Hung His Head and Died. The Artist Wife’s description of the work is far more valuable than mine, so check it out here.
What I see in the sculpture is a man in dialogue with his religion, with our shared history and with our present circumstances. I see an important conversation, informed and befuddled by many voices. In Minter’s belief that God works through him, I see a man who believes that art can help us express and experience sublime mysteries. Art helps re-enchant the world, which helps us discover our place in it.
I don’t mean that art can’t be whimsical or fun, just that the purpose of creating it, from evoking tragedy to comedy, is serious business. You see that seriousness of purpose in work like Minter’s and in works at the Booths throughout The Armory Show.
Art, across tones and mediums, can be almost anything but making art, in any way, is a practice of communication between creator and audience that, to borrow a seemingly outmoded concern, separates what it is to be human from animals and sophisticated manqué technology. Even when art tries to embrace chance and seem random, the act of making art is an existential statement of purpose and will by the artist, akin to Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation that every moment where we choose not to kill ourselves is a life-affirming choice. Making art says, “I am here and either have something to say or want to use my talents to let some other person say it.”
Two days after my tour of the Armory with The Artist Wife, art critic Susan Tallman at The New York Times explored the contributions of artificial intelligence to the art world, in and article that contained this:
“Art is a game between humans,” the artist Jan Svennungsen wrote in his recent book on generative A.I., “Art Intelligence.” We humans look to art for reflections of human experience, and for most of human history, art has been made by humans; even when we employed sophisticated tools, we could feel secure that the ideas being expressed were our own. A.I. muddies those waters. It may work as a kind of smart pencil, executing images beyond an artist’s own manual skill, or as a sparring partner whose suggestions and misunderstandings push the artist’s ideas in new directions — or it might offer a way to destabilize how we think about intelligence itself.
If we imagine something like a paintbrush that can render any of our ideas into a canvas worthy of Van Gogh, I doubt we’d be much bothered. There is still an artist guiding the production, after all, a ghost in the machine. For this magic paintbrush to be used, we still need a human artist, determined to make art in the first place and with something to say.
Where Svennungsen goes wrong is that he says “Art is a game between humans.” While it may sometimes have game and playlike characteristics, art is an intentional way that humans communicate with each other and has deep roots in human pre-history and with evolutionary advantages. The fables attributed to the Ancient Greek slave Aesop, for example, have childlike, fanciful and fun qualities but the lessons within them, which often speak directly to the survival of the individual and their communities, inspired Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The artfulness made them a more effective conveyance of lessons than a more efficient list like Hammurabi’s Code. It’s not the Ten Commandments that stick with us, it’s the epic of how God revealed them to Moses that gives them power. These are adventures, not games.
Certainly, smart artists are using AI in their work right now and this will continue. But Svennungsen confuses a new paint brush for a new artist. The artfulness of a project will depend entirely on the level of human guidance and control. What the computer makes on its own is an artifact, not art.
I think Tallman agrees with me as she goes on to dismiss the creations of widely used AI art programs like Dall-E for much the same “those remind me of posters sold at Spencer Gifts in the 80s” reasons that I do. Tallman goes onto explore museum quality art work where the real point of interest is less the technology than how the artists are employing it to explore themes like life in a big data society and life under constant social surveillance.
Writers for newspapers and websites don’t often choose their headlines and maybe Tallman was ill-served by “A.I. Enters the Museum” as the machines are not getting there on their own. Maybe Svennungsen’s quote, pithy as it is, doesn’t represent his whole view on the nature and purpose of art, either. Someday, maybe soon, Champagne Pommery will give its prestigious award to an artist using AI tools. But it’s important, I think, to hang onto the perspective that art is a human activity, engaged in primarily to help us all be as human as we can be.