And that is why it’s valuable. At least according to artists and notable people like Oscar Wilde.
All art is quite useless. – Oscar Wilde
Now, in no way do I consider myself an artist, or to have any authority to critique Oscar, but I do think I can relate to some sentiments he shared that art need not serve a purpose. Indeed its value could lie purely in the pleasure it provides the audience. Art in a pure sense does not contain a morality tale or provide utility and inversely if it does this by design, you’d call it a product.
Art can do many things but it doesn’t have to do anything. Perhaps a defining quality of art is that two people can appreciate it for entirely different reasons.
Our modern history is full of times when a new technology has landed and caused some initial (and now obviously over) reactions to the impact it has on artists and even the purity of art itself. Here’s some highlights:
- Photography
art's most mortal enemy, at its introduction created a multi decade long argument over the notion that it could ever be considered art. - Novels
not real literature, were seen as vulgar compared to the true arts of verse and theatre. - Jazz / Synth / Hip-hop
not real music, all examples of music then considered threats to legitimate music of the time. - Impressionism / Conceptual Art
insulting and incomplete, obviously just lazy and void of creativity. - Film
cheap entertainment, was looked down upon by literary critics and supposedly could never match novelists or painters. - Video Games
could never be art, even as recently as 2010 we get famous declarations of what people think art is, now and forever.
Some may notice a theme or pattern here; inference isn’t just hype relegated to the land of GPUs, your brain can do it too, have fun! Also now that it has been mentioned, we can wax on about the current threat to the art establishment: AI.
Artificial Intelligence Is Useless
If a certain video game has taught me anything then logically AI is Art. Let’s leave any definition or debate surrounding what constitutes intelligence for a future writing episode and ponder at what a possible addition to the above list could be:
- Artificial Intelligence
does not produce any of the above art forms, in a way AI might be now aggregating an emotional reaction previously split across centuries.
So what does it mean to say AI can't make art? Is it simply just that art is a human only endeavour and clearly robots don’t count? Is it human because we struggle, is making art reserved for humans because the process of making art invariably involves an emotional journey? Perhaps there being a perceivable journey at all is a requirement and humans can’t operate at the speed of computers; therefore not art!
It’s very true that using the technology we have today, creating facsimiles of art requires a low amount of effort. Much like taking a photo and so perhaps Charles Baudelaire was right back in 1857. Most photos these days are probably just products for the individual and not attempting to express anything artistic. They are used to capture memories or brag about the aesthetic quality of some breakfast. Sometimes, accidentally, photos will capture an emotion or gain an artistic quality. Much more rarely though, photography will be used by people as the tool of choice for their artistic expression and we’d even call those people artists.
I remember when Trent Reznor released master tracks of some of his new music that anyone could open in Garageband. Shortly after, as expected, there was some pretty great remixes available on your favourite mp3 network. I even messed around with it and though I created nothing I ever felt like sharing and made definitively worse songs, I would not make any case for what I did to be considered art. The takeaway I’ve held from that event all those years ago is that the experience was only enabled by the barrier to entry being momentarily removed and I’m sure more than one person was inspired that day to become a musician.
Today I enjoy watching Switch Angel write programs in Strudel to make music. I write programs to create products and she writes programs to create art. She’s more than just an electronic artist as the narration she provides when iterating live on her programmed music is a story of its own. It adds a whole new dimension to the experience. This raises a particularly challenging thought however. If we were to add more abstractions onto this process, if the iterations to the music is only driven by her story and not at all by the characters of the function calls, when does the music produced stop being art?
Generative AI as a tool used to create “music” is understandably very contentious currently. These songs garner mixed reactions; from a trained musician that easily picks apart a soulless artifact to an average listener that equally enjoys and appreciates them as though it was a human creation. Some people upon learning about the involvement of AI in the process are unfazed, others recant their enjoyment and feel guilty or betrayed. It’s easy as an external observer to make a judgement on effort and deem a result not worthy. Either way we now have AI music leaderboards.
Hang on, I’m a software engineer
As a software engineering leader why am I thinking so much about art?
There are many programmers among us who express their own creativity through software. Writing software is a craft for some but merely a build step for others. I’ve worked on teams that focus purely on the destination product and I have created teams that weren’t nearly as invested in the outcome as much as they were in the work itself. Treating software almost as though it was art leads to a team culture that cares deeply about the aesthetics of the code they write, consistency of services and even performance and correctness for its own sake. The first iteration often delivers the required business goals but if the team was going to take real ownership of what they wrote, you can bet it was curated over a bunch more iterations. Relatably it was almost art for art's sake.
Will AI free some time for us to make art or are we going to just make ever more product?