Against all good judgment, I listened to a business-self-help sort of podcast a few weeks ago, the panic-inducing title of which was “You Have About 36 Months to Make It” and the terrifying premise of which was “Worry greatly, because in three years AI will be unimaginably superior to you in everything, so you’re in very big trouble.” I streamed most of it while trying to remove burnt cheese from the bottom of a casserole dish.
The person on the podcast said lots of significant things in an urgent voice, but I was very doggedly scraping the cheese, so my attention was divided and I’ve forgotten most of them. But here is one thing he said that I do remember:
“I personally do not believe that art should be tied to a series of buttons that people press, but instead why they press that series of buttons. That’s what art is.”
The person said this because he believed that AI could make art, and that there was no was ultimate difference between telling AI to make art for you and making art for yourself. Art, he thought, was not a matter of buttons, but ideas.
This is half right, which is to say it’s all wrong.
Let’s pretend for a moment that the person was not speaking abstractly about Art, but instead about some real, lower-case form of art you might find in actual, sharp-edged life – say, pottery.
“I personally do not believe that pottery should be tied to clay, but instead why people use that clay. That’s what pottery is.”
You might as well say you don’t believe in pottery (or art) at all.
There is no untying art from things. You can’t take the bright sound of a trumpet apart from its brass tubes and valves, or the beauty of Kintsugi apart from its broken pieces and glue, or the supernatural grace of ballet apart from a flesh-and-blood body. You can try (and many admirable, pitiable people have) to separate a concept from its construction, but the harder you pry the two apart the more you find that to sever something from reality is to make it not exist, and the worse your paintings get. Follow that way to the end and you come, literally, to nothing.
To put it simply: Art is not only pushing buttons, but it is not only proposing ideas, either. Art is – at least – process and purpose intertwined.
Art needs reality.
So do we.
(There is still a small crust of burnt cheese in the crevice of the casserole dish.)
