The Slop Must Flow

AI and the case for creative abundance

La Belle Iseult by William Morris from 1858.

On a London evening in 1880, textile designer William Morris cut his way through the Finsbury Circus fog. His destination was the London Institution, an imposing mass of white stone flanked by ornate columns.

Speaking to the great and good of English high society, he gave a speech about what it means to make art. For Morris it was simple: “No work which cannot be done without pleasure in the doing is worth doing." What he meant was that art comes from joy in its making — not formal training, money or credentials.

The speech is an interesting artefact, not least because it represents a curious meditation on art and the politics of progress. Morris, after all, was a well-known Marxist. He was a member of the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League, and the Hammersmith Socialist Society.

In his 1890 utopian novel, News From Nowhere, he envisioned a future in which big business, government, and private property had been replaced by a pastoral communist society. A study of creation and creativity, the book describes a world where art and production become one and the same. Public spaces are beautiful. Characters stop to admire the architecture. Even the pipes, Danny boy, look splendid.

Art should be for the public and by the public. As a textile designer, he quite literally wanted it to be part of the fabric of daily life. According to one character weighing a time long past, in the age of industry “there was so little art and so much talk about it.”

Morris had a soft spot for the medieval. Rather than sprawling factories, News From Nowhere describes an economy of artisans. Society is propped up by a web of interconnected cottage industries, small-scale operations where skilled craftspeople make things by hand. It’s pleasant, romantic, nostalgic.

Machinery is a last resort. In these ‘banded workshops’, work that was once done by iron fingers is back in human hands. This isn’t because they can't build machines, but because they prefer the satisfaction of making stuff manually.

The wrinkle in Morris’ logic is that industrialisation was the great driver of the arts. Before the mechanical age, most people tilled the land to survive. Some crafted goods by hand, but they were mostly functional rather than glamorous. Art was generally restricted to religious institutions, royal courts, and wealthy patrons. Outside of these exclusive clubs, few had the means to create.

When the great project of industrialisation began, more could be produced with less. Economies of scale made goods cheaper and people got richer. A middle class emerged with incomes that allowed them to buy pretty things like wallpaper, ceramics, and jewellery. Demand from the newly minted well-to-do saw the market for artists and craftspeople balloon in size.

Over the long run, education became widespread, the cost of producing art plummeted, and rising living standards encouraged more people to pursue creative careers. Increased productivity meant getting paid more for less, which forged giant consumer markets looking for new mediums of artistic expression.

Today, everyone is hungry for art — and anyone can make it. Wealth created the conditions that allowed ordinary people to engage with the artistic, but it also allowed them to contribute to its creation.

If you want to look at some art your laptop is right there. If you want to create something beautiful, your laptop is right there. We still live in the shadow of this dual revolution: a dramatic expansion of demand for art and the ability to supply it.

Not everyone likes the results.

Yes, industrialisation made the beautiful available — but its critics would argue this represents a degradation of art, not its democratisation. As Richard Wagner, the great German composer, put it:

“We have only to convince ourselves thoroughly that our history today is made by the same human beings who once also made the works of Greek art. But having done so, our task is to discover what it is that has changed these human beings so fundamentally, that we now produce merely the output of luxury industries, whereas they created works of art.”

For Wagner, the art of the ancients was inseparable from religious, political, and philosophical life. A tragedy like Agamemnon wasn't entertainment so much as a civic ritual. A sculpture was divine, not decorative.

A superficial reading might suggest Wagner thinks art must be exclusive. In the classical world, the few who could participate in artistic and philosophical life could dedicate themselves entirely to it. Freed from material concerns, a small group of noble artisans could give their lives for the sublime.

The rub is that constraints breed creativity. In the immortal words of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane: “If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.” Some of the best art is born of struggle. Comfortable conditions, like those given to a special few in Ancient Rome or Renaissance Florence, eventually lead to the safe or derivative.

The Art of Painting

‘The Art of Painting’ (1666-68) by Johannes Vermeer.

The Art of Painting is one of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous works. The figure in blue is Clio, one of the nine muses who was said to have inspired the epic poetry of Ancient Greece. The artist, clad in black, is thought to be from the 1400s.

The 15th-century artist isn't working in isolation, but hand in glove with classical mythology. When I look at this painting, it reminds me that art has always built on, remixed, and transformed what came before.

Vermeer was famous for using the camera obscura. To make one, you take a dark room and cut a small hole in one wall the size of a coin. When light passes through this hole, it projects an upside-down image of whatever was outside onto the opposite wall. An artist could place a piece of canvas on the projection and trace the outlines.

In his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, the artist David Hockney suggested that great artists like Caravaggio, Raphael, Frans Hals, Velázquez, and Ingres may have all used the camera obscura alongside curved mirrors and other gadgets.

This idea underpinned what would eventually be known as the Hockney-Falco thesis. It held that technology, not genius, lay at the core of the emergence of realistic Renaissance painting. Historians of art and science are more cautious. They generally think that optics may have played a role in the development of naturalist techniques, but are sceptical that the production of realist paintings was wholly contingent on it.

Hockney was quick to caveat that he thought a little help was fair game, that artists should strive to use technology in the creative process. Twenty years ago, he said “the lens can't draw a line, only the hand can do that, the artist's hand and eye.”

Two centuries after the old masters and their tricks, another device had the same effect.

The first successful photograph was created around 1826 by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce using a process called heliography involving a camera obscura and pewter plate coated with bitumen that hardened when exposed to light. A few years later came the ‘daguerreotype’, invented by his countryman Louis Daguerre. The first publicly available photographic process, the daguerreotype created images by using silver-plated copper sheets treated with iodine vapour.

The new technology posed a challenge to painters who feared it would upend their livelihoods. Some railed against the photograph. Others embraced it because it made their art more valuable. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm notes in The Age of Capital, “Photography was useful, because it could help the painter to rise above a mere mechanical copy of objects.”

The key question was whether mechanical intervention could truly be considered art. On this point, Hobsbawm quotes the critic Francis Wey:

“Neither drawing nor colour nor the exactitude of representation constitute the artist: it is the mens divina, the divine inspiration...What makes the painter is not the hand but the brain: the hand merely obeys.”

People make art using tools, whatever they may be. The law agreed.

The photograph’s status as art was settled by the lawyers, not philosophers, when an 1862 court in France ruled that copyright law could be extended to photos. The judgement went further, proposing that it was for the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the owner of a photograph in question had produced a ‘work of spirit or genius’ or just a mechanical copy.

The eye of the beholder

Today, art is everywhere. It’s on televisions, laptops, and phones. It hangs in museums and galleries, and is pumped through wireless headphones. Art is famously tricky to describe, but you know it when you see it. Beauty is, more or less, in the eye of the beholder.

That doesn’t mean that everything must be art. It certainly doesn’t mean that all art is good. What it does mean is that the reality of the information age is one of artistic and creative abundance.

The weight of history reminds us that the story of art is about diffusion. More people can create and experience art than during any other time in human history. That should be seen as an unequivocally good thing, but it isn’t.

The reason is simple: art is a way of separating us from them. When anyone can produce and distribute creative work, it threatens the integrity of a social apparatus whose legitimacy depends on deciding what counts as good taste. Art, as John Berger saw, is a servant of ideology.

Brave defenders of artistic life are less concerned with protecting art than their dubious positions as arbiters of cultural value. When a TikTok dance provokes more soul searching than a performance at the Royal Ballet, you have to wonder about the vitality of the cultural hierarchy.

All this was true long before AI had its moment in the sun. Of course language models and image generators can produce slop. You only have to spend five long minutes on Facebook for that to be obvious — but I doubt anyone was calling status updates high art before ChatGPT.

The clarifying distinction isn't between AI and human art. It’s between abundance and scarcity. Ours has long been the age of digital plenty, where the great wellsprings of content serve us more information than we could ever hope to parse.

We know there are too many books to read and too many films to watch. But that’s fine because we get to choose what we like and what we don’t. Taste is the name of the game. That will still be true if and when most of the art we see and hear is made by machines.

As for the creative act, the bulk of commentators seem unable to unpick what AI means for artistic life. Some of the most circular criticisms amount to something like “art is a thing that humans do, therefore AI cannot produce art.” It’s an anxious sort of hand-wringing that looks more like a defence of cultural authority than of artistic integrity.

Others can’t fathom modes of use that don’t involve copying and pasting reams of text without bothering to read it or spitting out gross, glossy pictures. It's a strange thing for the creative classes to suffer a failure of imagination.

If they were around in the 17th century they would have scolded the Dutch masters for using a camera obscura. Heaven only knows what they would make of William Morris’ belief that art should be for everyone, or that a layperson might find joy in its creation.

The uncomfortable truth is that we are the heirs to a trend hundreds of years in the making. Art is getting cheaper to produce, and there’s more of it to enjoy, critique, and discuss.

If slop is the cost, then so be it.