Art

I have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of art. To me, if a human creates something with the intent to convey an idea to another human, that’s art. If I bang two rocks together, I might be leaving a mark on the natural world but that’s not in itself art. If I arrange the bits of rock I made in a pattern, that’s art. If I bang the rocks together in front of an audience, that might be art, but chances are the Artist’s Statement I handed out beforehand might be the actual art.

Curation, the act of arranging artworks to convey something, is itself art. I’ve used algorithmic music programs before, one had little sliders for how you wanted it to sound and what sort of instruments it would use. Most of what it produced was crap, but a couple of the songs were alright and I showed them to my friends. That’s curation. That’s art.

For anyone who has used an AI image generator like Stable Diffusion or DALL-E, it’s much the same way. If you really want to make something nice, you have to dig through a lot of garbage to get the good stuff. Midjourney adds a lot of hidden prompts to cut down on that process, but there’s still the act of curation. It reminds me a bit of what an editor does. You wouldn’t call an editor a writer, or an artist, but they’re an important part of the act of creation and the end result is still art.

Some people would argue that art doesn't just convey "something" but conveys a specific emotion. I don't think this is the case. I think feelings are an important part of artistic expression, but emotionless art, while rare, does exist. I don't think this particularly matters, though, because the nature of the art alone isn't the only thing that matters.

What the art conveys/invokes to the viewer doesn’t have to be what the artist intended, but it is important that the artist intend something. When a viewer approaches a work of art they bring their own feelings and biases to the art, which means different people may come away with different feelings from the same art. For instance, perhaps an IKEA diagram has no emotional component for you, but for me I am filled with fond remembrance of my old friend and the day we spent assembling furniture for their first apartment.

Actually, I think the IKEA diagram is a bad example of emotionless art, because, similarly to Lego instructions, there is a genuine art to how the information is presented to the viewer. You’re meant to feel safe and welcomed by the diagrams, and not overwhelmed by the complexity of the thing they are asking you to create. Perhaps a better example in this vein would be a blueprint, which presents information in a way as sterile and emotionless as possible, but even then I’ve seen blueprints framed and put on the wall because the pure craft of the drafter can be appreciated on an aesthetic level. So even in this situation, an image created to be as sterile and neutral as possible can still be artistic simply because of the way it is interpreted by the viewer.

I do still believe that artistic intent matters, a beautiful sunrise can elicit an emotional response in a viewer but a sunrise in itself is not art, because there is no intent behind it. Likewise, an AI generated image can elicit an emotional response, but it also is not art. To become art, a sunrise and an AI image must be interpreted by human intent. If I take a picture of the sunrise, or even just wake up my spouse so they can appreciate it with me, that can become a form of art. If I work to make an AI image (or song) that reflects my intent, that can be a form of art. Intent matters, a desire to share something with someone else matters. Ultimately, that’s what art is, to me at least.