art. art? art! ..

Duchampishly, Duchampian, Duchamping. Duchamp's conceptual revolution is best seen as a reaction to the changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution and photography, which kicked off the contemporary struggles of art to remain relevant, interesting, and an audience draw.

Two things were especially, causally important to the development of Western art: 1) the Renaissance (identify "art"), and 2) the Industrial-Photographic Revolution (art is no longer rare, expensive, or difficult). Impressionism, abstract art, minimalism, surrealism, the avant garde, conceptual art, and relational aesthetics are all part of the Sisyphean project to Make Art Special Again. Conceptualism especially gets cheapened into a one-liner — art amounting to a smirking sort of cleverness and a single "hook" that can be stated in a sentence by some odd-dressing social critic.

Art was always supposed to look good — to be good: to be careful and precise in an attempt to look like the real thing (see: Vermeer, Rembrandt, JL David). This wasn't a problem before photography and industrial fabrication, but when those technologies arrived artists found themselves irrelevant and in search of a new raison d'etre, which became thinking of art as primarily concerned with the artist rather than the art itself: "I know this drawing of a horse doesn't look much like a horse, but it purportedly captures the spirit of a horse in a way a photograph of a horse does not...but in fact it more captures the spirit of me."

People are bound to produce art, just as they are bound to worship God and conceive children, regardless of how "contemporary" or evolved or self-aware that art might or might not seem, or whether or not others want to buy it when they can just order a Beanie Baby online. Art might be somewhat like jazz music: it requires some empathy to be an art fan, to put yourself in the artist's shoes; otherwise it just sounds like noodling.

That said, there's just something about art, about modern art, about contemporary art — about anything anyone makes here and now in this technological civilized society. And you don't have to do anything special — you just have to make something, and your product will be the fruit of billions of years of evolution; all of this, from the beginning on, has been leading up to your notebook doodle or art class still life or workbench birdhouse. In other words, I believe it's a mistake (or at least a meandering path) to try and make art into some kind of research discipline with the tragic awareness of its own irrelevance. Instead, just keep making art that is not necessarily avant garde or experimental or abstract or minimalistic or anything like that, but that only aims in good faith for absolute spirit or significance of form or whatever grand concept you like, and its historical relevancy — the human relevancy, the aesthetic relevancy — will be built in, even if we can't see it now.

natural stupidity ..

Artists have been prepared for artificial intelligence, such as it is, since the start of photography and industrial production; we already know we can't depict or fabricate as well as a machine. The solution has been, and will continue to be, to make art "about" human creativity and in fact "about" being human in and of itself, rather than assembling line and color. Duchamp wrote the latter off as "retinal art," and his conceptual revolution later lead to things like performance art and relational aesthetics: artists running around with green hair and bones in their noses, acting the part, to distract us from cameras making better images and factories making better objects.

I complain that Brad Pitt makes art and everyone pays attention only because he's a celebrity, but this is unavoidable — in big art markets the name of the artist is what matters; no one would notice the Mona Lisa if a famous name were not on it and if it did not have its socio-cultural location. Maybe conceptually-flavored, university and gallery-driven art, which observing aliens would agree is less complex, generally, than "mainstream" movies or video games or the Empire State Building, needs to be made by people in order for people to take an interest in it.

Computers can easily create images on their screens. One could print them out big and at great cost in order to get others to pay attention, but then the images would look like prints, which I guess is fine, but maybe you want more variety in your museum halls, and maybe you want noseboned greenhairs, venue, installation, etc, to augment the product so it stands above the Apple Macintosh you made it on. Robots that make oil paintings or sculptures are not commonplace — the objets d'art AI is generating now are small rectangles full of pixels on a screen, and so the only artists AI is replacing are people like me.