by Anne Gabriel
Of all the depressing things in the world and the art world, I have decided there is one trend that depresses me above all others: Artists are outsourcing the only role left to them—that of creativity.
In an age where sculpture can be 3D-printed (Doug Aitken), images are digitally coded and created resulting in giant artwork on screens (Rafik Anadol), and oil paintings can be created by having them printed directly onto canvas by machine —artists don’t actually have to touch the work they create—now they don’t have to imagine the work they create either.
Advances in technology are bound to have some artists taking shortcuts to physically producing work. Why slave over hammer and chisel or pools of paint when you can get a machine (or an assistant) to do that for you? Artists have been taking these shortcuts for centuries—after all, many galleries and exhibition halls don’t seem to care much about how an artist makes work as long as they can deliver that work.
In this atmosphere of artists not producing their own works (which I already do not agree with), the saving grace of such practices then has always been that the artist at least conceptualized the work. They attempted to think of works of art that have never been created before—even if an assistant, or machine, actually created the work.
However, now gallerists and exhibition halls are indicating that along with not caring whether an artist produces their own artwork—gallerists and exhibition venues don’t seem to care much whether or not an artist has even thought of the work. In this new world—artists have fully transformed into project managers.
Now before you tell me that this is totally normal and commonplace—today’s outsourcing of creativity feels different than yesterday’s appropriation.
Even appropriation artists typically filter the appropriated image through their own lens in order to create a wholly new piece of work that is not a total facsimile of the original. Jeff Koons was inspired by clownish balloon animals—but then added the additional idea of blowing up their scale so they are no longer things that children can hold in their hands but are now monuments which dwarf you as a human. The new scale and material adds an idea and creates something new that is, like it or not, down to Jeff Koons—and I say this as an anti-fan of Jeff Koons.
With Andy Warhol and his Campbell Soup cans, the idea to repeat the same image created something new that was something different than the original image. The idea of repeating was creative and brought something new to the discourse even if not to the wall.
Well, now even the bare minimum aristocratic work of pointing at an idea for another to carry out has been handed over to someone or something else—namely AI.
I have gone to several shows recently where ok artists that have struggled to find their footing in the artworld using originally created art, have now turned to AI to amp up their creativity—thereby making their “OK artwork” simultaneously far more interesting and far more boring.
The usual process has been something like the following:
Create something (a drawing/painting/video/sound) + input it into an AI program + plug in some rudimentary commands + allow AI to extrapolate from the commands and input = some new piece of artwork that has never been created before—or at least as new as “more than one soup can”.
AI is now the artist and hundreds of artists are asking it to be. Lord knows why? Isn’t making things supposed to be fun?
In a world where gallerists just want a product and could care less who makes it and who thinks of it—I guess it doesn’t financially matter at all. But if it’s making art critics want to go to galleries less, you can imagine what it’s doing to the general public.
Image: Algorithmically-generated AI science-fiction artwork featuring a futuristic metropolis laid to complete devastation, created using the Stable Diffusion V1-4 AI diffusion model by Benlisquare.