A very brief history of art: In the beginning…
The following article is the result of a bloody fight between myself and a guy I married a few centuries ago. In the end we had to acknowledge that our points of view were virtually identical but neither of us wanted to admit it. So we reached a compromise: he wrote the article, I deleted the most politically incorrect remarks, he rewrote them in a milder form, I got a bunch of roses as an apology, he got a fine dinner. Occasionally marriage can be a great thing… 🙂
Lately I’ve read a lot of posts wailing, grumbling and moaning about the latest developments of AI potentially stealing the job from all kind of artists. Some of them looked reasonably well-informed, others gave the impression of a strong emotional position not really supported by any actual experience or direct knowledge.
Be it as it may, I think they could be right: if things keep going the way they are, plenty of ‘artists’ will inevitably lose their jobs as soon as their customers learn how to order a piece of art directly at the source, a skilled and most likely way cheaper AI. It’s just a matter of time, but the trend looks pretty clear.
However this is not the first time such a tragedy occurs: about four millennia ago some ruthless guy invented the potter’s wheel without giving a thought to the countless people his devilish invention would leave jobless: soon all those skilled artists capable of making a nicely round vase in less than a week saw their customers fade away and go buy for a ludicrously low price a perfectly round vase made in a quarter of an hour with the new gadget.
Still someone – probably a jobless artist – must have considered that the concept of ‘art’ could not be constrained to the way a beautiful thing is made: it might as well extend to the feelings such a beautiful thing elicits in us humans. And he (or she) started decorating those outrageously round vases with paintings that survived all the way to us, beautiful pieces of art having very little to do with the roundness of the support.
It’s sort of suggestive that for several millennia the Greek word τέχνη (téchne) has ever meant ‘art’ exactly in the sense we attach to this word today. Will that mean that in the course of time all arts are bound to get standardized and flattened into technology? I don’t know, I’m just thinking of another word, ‘artificial’…
Nor is this an isolated case…