Art and Artifice
Soviet Affairs Desk, 12/13/21
There is nothing on the desk. I’ve still got to write Part II of “The Soviet Rabbit Hole” but that hasn’t come together yet (and there is a perverse appeal to never writing it). So. What else should we talk about? Maybe you’ve seen it. This Wombo abomination. An app powered by AI that will take any word or combination of words you feed it and paint you a picture. They’re all pretty, in the same way that I’ve never seen an ugly cloud. But clouds are water vapor—not art. And the pretty pictures “painted” by Wombo are just digital associative collages powered by the same dumb shit that is used to sell you Peletons and divorce lawyers and Teflon pans.
I recently had a conversation with some fine internet folks about whether or not Wombo makes actual art. I was in the minority in asserting that it does not; that what it makes instead is stuff. The conversation came and went, as all internet interactions do, but I was left stewing over it long afterward. So I might as well channel that stew into a thinky piece.
It is difficult to draw a fine line between what is art and what isn’t because “art” is one of those words that we pretend is far more versatile than it actual is, using it to mean almost literally anything. These scrambled eggs are a work of art. This knitted scarf—so artful! And that picture you painted of a bird. What artistry!
What does the picture of the bird mean, though?
What do you mean “what does it mean”? It means bird.
In that case, I think what we’re talking about is *craft*, which is a component of art, but not equivalent. About 75% of the time people call something art, craft is what they mean. Craft makes useful things. Art transcends utility, often to the point of becoming gloriously useless—except to teach us something about ourselves.
And it begins in the mind—which is my first point of umbrage with the idea that art can be produced by a mindless generative algorithm. There is an inner vision that compels you to bring it out into the world, either to teach a lesson or hold up a mirror or share pain or for the sheer pleasure of the creative process itself. A work of art is conceived with intention. So is an algorithm, you might argue. You might even argue that coding itself is an artform. You could also argue that the instructions for your vacuum cleaner are a form of art, if you want to be that guy or gal.
Art is an aesthetic experience first endured by the artist and then transmitted across the gulf to the receiver/viewer/consumer. Can you have an aesthetic experience looking at the generated mishmash of the Wombo app? Sure. You can have an aesthetic experience looking at a tree, too. But who made the tree? And why? If you must drag theology into it, then fine, God made the tree. But not for you to stare at in wonder all day. Strictly speaking, God doesn’t make anything without some natural purpose (except maybe pigeons—pigeons can get fucked). But man? A man can look at a tree and have an aesthetic experience and then translate that experience into a poem or a sculpture that transcends the tree itself; or he can chop down the tree, cut it up into discs, and engrave stylized scenes from history onto those discs, then hang them on the wall and call them art, and I won’t give him any shit for it. He can also turn the chopped-up tree into a desk, even one with very pretty carvings up and down the legs, and if he calls it art, well then he’s just being obtuse.
I’m not just being snooty, sipping my wine with my pinky finger pointing straight out. The more I think about the growing transhumanism of our digitized age, the more primal my rejection of automation as a valid component of art becomes. The transhumanist goals—such as integrating complex computers into the human brain—are exciting and hip to some, apocalyptic to others. If the process of making people into computers accelerates beyond some critical point (???), what guarantee is there that it can ever be slowed, let alone stopped, let alone reversed? What will be lost? Will art come along for the ride?
Let’s go further and assume that an AI (far superior to Wombo) one day attains not just intelligence but sentience; that is, not only the ability to think for itself, but to contemplate its own existence. Until such a superintelligence could learn or grow to feel some simulacrum of human emotion, how could it possibly relate to art? How could it understand? It’s difficult to imagine an AI hanging around listening to a piece by Beethoven—although it does amuse me to think of one listening to them all at once. Art is a fire. Art is the lungs and the heart and the genitals. Art sits at a vector between the mind and body. I’m not even sure a mind without a body, a mind not embodied in the world, could have a full enough experience of the world to regurgitate that experience as art. And whatever it may regurgitate in lieu would have a hard time registering as art to us, the embodied.
Anyway, I had some friends input the word “communism” into the Wombo thing (I refuse to use it) and below you’ll see some of what came out. I chose “communism” because there is just something so…communist about the Wombo fad—in the sense of this new flavor of communism strangling the globe, turning us all into eternally pacified serfs for the corporatist technocracy. You will live in a pod. You will eat bugs. You will enter the Metaverse. You will take the experimental gene therapy. You will enjoy Wombo art. You will own nothing and you will be happy.
Isn’t it beautiful?
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