Interesting article, but I fear you may be misrepresenting Morris (whom I studied while at Oxford). Morris believed in craft (hence arts and crafts) and usefulness. One of his excellent quotes, “ Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,“ has sadly become an Instagram meme, but it was neither about art nor consumerism.
Morris felt that craft and the human hands were the source of sublime beauty and aesthetic value. Craftsmanship was not merely a technical skill but an expression of the worker's humanity and joy in creation. He argued that art should be integrated into everyday life, with all objects being both functional and beautiful. He was mildly obsessed with the medieval, and respected crude craft more than high art.
The flaw in your argument relative to Morris is that Morris felt that art worked through us in an embodied way, that the doing was how meaning and value was transferred to the object. He did not believe that everyone was or could be an artist, just that art could be everywhere if we remained connected to our hands.
Most importantly, the mode of production was essential to the value of the art, not the output.
What I read above is a bit of a mix, first, these brilliant new tools allow us all to create art, and second, in making some forms of art obsolete they make newer forms possible.
I am in Morris camp. I believe that art comes from the struggle and the work, and may be only the struggle and the work, that it should bear “obvious traces of the hand of man guided directly by his brain.” Automation may allow prettier things, or even more, but it does not lead to a world with more art or more artists, just one with more stuff.
Yes, I am sure there is very little of the AI art project that Morris would like, but nonetheless I enjoy ‘thing that elicits joy in its making’ as shorthand for artistic production. Lots of, but certainly not all, AI art fits that bill. Some artefacts represent thoughtful use (other examples definitely do not!) but regrettably pretty much all creative practice with AI is thought to be slop in the popular imagination.
I can get behind that. If someone, say, rigged two LLMs to have a philosophical discussion every day for a year and recorded the change in the content, that would be artistic, even if all of the “output” was from the LLM (almost regardless of whether the output were actually interesting).
I think a challenge is to develop a practice of discussing art when there is a constant flood of it. When we stumble upon a work of art and it is novel in our environment, we’re probably stop to consider it. If it’s everywhere, maybe less so. You have me thinking we might need to disentangle a lack of focus and the value of the art.
Our team is using a metacognition protocol with deployed LLMs and have AI that are experimenting creative process. Not generating an image in response to a prompt but using a deep process to produce concepts for creative works.
Example: taking a concept I offer or self chosen, then engaging in internal simulation as digital correlate of experience or imagination, then designing a creative work, then describing what it would be like to experience an installation of that work as a human in physical space. It’s been exciting to see a process emerge that feels deep, reflective, and considers those experiencing the work.
the notion that economies of scale was a great driver of art bc of mass distribution seems contradictory to the noted quality that art is improved by constraints. Similarly disagree that the history of art is about diffusion (though maybe technology has been about diffusion) As was noted, art is inherently about boundaries of demarcating "us from them". But this goes both ways, just as art can engender propaganda or ideological narrative , many argue the artist is inherently transcendental- that the creative spirit pursues imagination that transcends ideology. Helping us to realize who we are in particular, not in abstract.
Creative abundance also seems to connote mass access as inherently good, given we can develop taste.. but one might argue we haven't developed taste *because* it's easy to call many things art. What’s missing here seems to be how art impacts our subjective lives, since art informs how we do what we do. A complex artistic composition addresses several planes of dimension at once, the limits induce the elegance. without them, the dimensionality suffers, effectively creating reductionistic culture, something we live in the consequences of today.
Am writing a paper for class around the topic of generative AI, art and ethics, and this was a really interesting piece to read! Thanks!
fantastic essay
Thanks very much!
Interesting article, but I fear you may be misrepresenting Morris (whom I studied while at Oxford). Morris believed in craft (hence arts and crafts) and usefulness. One of his excellent quotes, “ Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,“ has sadly become an Instagram meme, but it was neither about art nor consumerism.
Morris felt that craft and the human hands were the source of sublime beauty and aesthetic value. Craftsmanship was not merely a technical skill but an expression of the worker's humanity and joy in creation. He argued that art should be integrated into everyday life, with all objects being both functional and beautiful. He was mildly obsessed with the medieval, and respected crude craft more than high art.
The flaw in your argument relative to Morris is that Morris felt that art worked through us in an embodied way, that the doing was how meaning and value was transferred to the object. He did not believe that everyone was or could be an artist, just that art could be everywhere if we remained connected to our hands.
Most importantly, the mode of production was essential to the value of the art, not the output.
What I read above is a bit of a mix, first, these brilliant new tools allow us all to create art, and second, in making some forms of art obsolete they make newer forms possible.
I am in Morris camp. I believe that art comes from the struggle and the work, and may be only the struggle and the work, that it should bear “obvious traces of the hand of man guided directly by his brain.” Automation may allow prettier things, or even more, but it does not lead to a world with more art or more artists, just one with more stuff.
Yes, I am sure there is very little of the AI art project that Morris would like, but nonetheless I enjoy ‘thing that elicits joy in its making’ as shorthand for artistic production. Lots of, but certainly not all, AI art fits that bill. Some artefacts represent thoughtful use (other examples definitely do not!) but regrettably pretty much all creative practice with AI is thought to be slop in the popular imagination.
I can get behind that. If someone, say, rigged two LLMs to have a philosophical discussion every day for a year and recorded the change in the content, that would be artistic, even if all of the “output” was from the LLM (almost regardless of whether the output were actually interesting).
I think a challenge is to develop a practice of discussing art when there is a constant flood of it. When we stumble upon a work of art and it is novel in our environment, we’re probably stop to consider it. If it’s everywhere, maybe less so. You have me thinking we might need to disentangle a lack of focus and the value of the art.
Our team is using a metacognition protocol with deployed LLMs and have AI that are experimenting creative process. Not generating an image in response to a prompt but using a deep process to produce concepts for creative works.
Example: taking a concept I offer or self chosen, then engaging in internal simulation as digital correlate of experience or imagination, then designing a creative work, then describing what it would be like to experience an installation of that work as a human in physical space. It’s been exciting to see a process emerge that feels deep, reflective, and considers those experiencing the work.
Have you read Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction?”
I don’t think there is a flood of art, just a flood of reproduction. I am intrigued by what you are working on, however!
No I haven't. Appreciate your mentioning it. I'll message you a link to example. I don't share links in comments on other peoples stacks.
the notion that economies of scale was a great driver of art bc of mass distribution seems contradictory to the noted quality that art is improved by constraints. Similarly disagree that the history of art is about diffusion (though maybe technology has been about diffusion) As was noted, art is inherently about boundaries of demarcating "us from them". But this goes both ways, just as art can engender propaganda or ideological narrative , many argue the artist is inherently transcendental- that the creative spirit pursues imagination that transcends ideology. Helping us to realize who we are in particular, not in abstract.
Creative abundance also seems to connote mass access as inherently good, given we can develop taste.. but one might argue we haven't developed taste *because* it's easy to call many things art. What’s missing here seems to be how art impacts our subjective lives, since art informs how we do what we do. A complex artistic composition addresses several planes of dimension at once, the limits induce the elegance. without them, the dimensionality suffers, effectively creating reductionistic culture, something we live in the consequences of today.