Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists’ permission. And that’s without getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
people forget that what makes art impressive is also the skill of the artist in the respective medium
if someone creates a perfect color gradient fill in Photoshop nobody is going to be impressed but make it with colored pencils and people may regard it as stunning
the beauty is also in the effort it took to create, not only in what the result looks like - i don’t need to take time to look at stuff people didn’t take time to make
if someone creates a perfect color gradient fill in Photoshop nobody is going to be impressed but make it with colored pencils and people may regard it as stunning
Funnily enough, that was what Mark Rothko was doing with paint. Exploring color to get the perfect shade of something. Looking at color at its most basic. That’s why those of us who understand what Rothko was going for often really love his paintings while most other people say, “I don’t get it, it’s just rectangles.”
Oh I do get it but it’s still just rectangles. If the only people who like your stuff are other painters, not other artists in general but other painters, then I think it’s fair to say that what you’re doing is 99.99% craft and maybe 0.01% art.
That kind of stuff also exists in an AI context, btw, people doing things for the heck of getting it to work and showing off technical aspects. Like absolutely a milestone when it comes to video2video, absolutely at a stage where it’s usable for artistic expression if you’re willing to work within some limitations, though the video here is much more dicking around than art. You’ll also find gazillions of AIified tiktok dances from the same crowd as tracking limbs isn’t exactly trivial.
But it isn’t “just rectangles.” That’s the point. They were slowly and meticulously constructed by layering oil paint in a way that explores the idea of what colors and color contrasts mean.
He didn’t just take a broad paintbrush and paint a rectangle.
He also suggested viewing his canvases up close, maybe a foot away, so you could see it the way he saw it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
absolutely a milestone when it comes to video2video
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Respectfully disagree. There’s a plethora of artists with exceptional skills that create photorealistic art in several mediums. While the process takes an inordinate amount of time it is completely devoid of any creative input. These are essentially human xerox machines that match color values from a photo using the naked eye. The skill is impressive, the art: not so much.
No. The person I replied to was exclusively praising skill and emphasizing its relevance to the final product. I pointed out that effort does not by default result in an original or creative product. OP dismisses effort and equates time with quality. Take for instance japanese calligraphy: the master places only a handful of strokes to render something gorgeous. On the other hand, someone could spend 80 hours meticulously recreating a photorealistic portrait in watercolor but it’s just a human xerox at that point. The human element is completely missed.
I always hated that the most upvoted art on reddit was just photorealism… Abd then the comments were all like, “Wow! I was 100% sure this was a photo until i zoom in!!!”
Yeah I agree, but with large platforms it’s inevitable for tastes to converge towards the median. A Rothko wouldn’t even register on such a platform.
This is because different people enjoy different things about art. Some people see it as a connection, hearing another person’s voice in the piece. Some love to see sacrifice, like spending hundreds of hours on creating something. Some view it almost like a sport and want to see a display of pinnacle skill. Others want the art to connect with them and their past.
people forget that what makes art impressive is also the skill of the artist in the respective medium
I bet you don’t like it when people put urinals on a pedestal.
the beauty is also in the effort it took to create
While I support your whole statement, I think the beauty of art lies in the message, vision or emotion that the artist wants to convey to the world through a visual medium. You can have a super realistic portrayal of a human and still prefer the art of Van Gogh because he shared his emotions through his art and people could feel that.
there was an ‘also’ in that sentence - and he put it there himself without leveraging other bathroom-installations-on-pedestal works
He put it there leveraging a whole urinal factory. Transported into today’s world, instead of clicking “generate” on a prompt with “urinal” on it he put “urinal” in the amazon search box, picked the first result, and then hit “buy”.
The art is in the idea, the message, the thought or impression that’s getting transmitted, the effect in the recipient’s mind (in this case it was a shitpost to troll conservatives on the one side and have a good chuckle among people who got it on the other). The rest is craft. Craft, on its own, can be fucking impressive but it’s not art.
And, of course, yes, not everyone hitting “generate” is putting a urinal on a pedestal. Much of the AI stuff out there is devoid of artistic intent, much of it isn’t even crafty, but that doesn’t mean that something being AI generated cannot be art, or that it would need craftiness to become art.
In the case of his bicycle wheel thing he went through a gazillion wheels – hitting generate a million times if you want – until he found one that was neither beautiful, nor ugly, but one that was profoundly uninteresting, “just a wheel, nothing special”. That was work, the actual work of an artist (judging the impression something makes), and with precise artistic intent – to make a statement about how art should be about engaging the mind, be not about aesthetics.
The people producing profoundly uninteresting works with AI don’t do that. Just goes on to show that the author is very much not dead.
I just need to press a button and my DSLR will automatically upload the picture I took. Is photography art? Different people get different things from art. If you want to see something that took a human a hundred hours of consideration, that’s fine. But I don’t care what the artist was thinking most of the time. I care how it makes me feel. What inspiration it sparks in my mind. I’ve been moved and inspired by AI art. Admittedly I could also probably have been moved by inkblots. But people hang inkblot prints in their house because it does something for them. Art is subjective, meaning it’s more about the subject viewing it than the artist.
