Even if your prediction comes true you still have to pick ai and set some parameters.
Arguably film was equivalent to ai. You had a fixed set of looks that you could print and manipulate with some variation. I don’t think this limitation was particularly bothersome.
In my opinion photography has always been about
All else is at best secondary. You can make a bad image less bad or a great image more great by pp but you cant really go from bad to great. (There are of course very niche exceptions) If you break the bounds of photography you can of course make good art from “bad” photos.
But why stop there? I could strap a camera to my chest, taking 30 shots every second, and AI could then select the best shots of thousands, according to some preset criteria: like Cartier-Bresson or Rembrandt or whatever.
I did notice "obligation ". I’ve not heard anyone looking back suggest that photography caused a decline in painting. I’ve heard many arguments that painting and sculpture declined but those point to other changes in society.
Richters “Betty” 1988 above
Richter did many photo paintings where he painted from a photo. They are quite extraordinary. Something happens when quirks of photography are executed by paint and combined with inevitable editing and in richters case sometimes blurring.
One from 2017 to emphasize your “obligation” point.
Google already made this product. It was a camera you set in the room of your house and it would upload what it thought was significant to your google photos.
AI will do the same for a certain kind of photography, the one that serves as a commodity and immediate-reward toy.
Composers can feed MIDI scores to synthesizers, then get their pieces played by machines. Yet musicians still sell CDs and concerts tickets.
Photography is a broad spectrum of practices, intents and expectations. 20 years after digital, some guys still do wet plates and platinotypes. Yes, these are not your average event photographer.
To paraphrase:
‘Past success/performance is not necessarily a good indicator of future performance/success.’
Machine Learning has some potential but it is NOT intelligence by any means. It is trained to do what others have done. It’s not going to come up with the next big thing that nobody has done before. It’s going to excel, if trained properly and only then, at the stuff that’s been done over and over and over again.
certainly, see my preceding response in the same post - I don’t think AI will consume all that is photography.
to go back to this for a second:
in this sense then is the key to creating the most valuable art not in choosing the correct medium for an idea?
photography is interesting in that you’re using a device to capture moments from reality in time, and while we understand all the flaws in these devices ability to do this authentically, they can still be used to create this illusory sense of connection to a reality in a way that’s quite unique from other mediums like paint and sculpture.
so while photography cannot produce art equal to that which is painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for example, perhaps in embracing its limitations we can create art that is of equivalent value.
we all know Ansel Adams is famous for his work in the darkroom, and such manipulations are essential in mitigating the flaws in our capture devices and to try and convey the feeling we had in the presence of what would become the image.
that is the beauty of photography, the beauty of the natural world, that someone stood in front of this grand cloud formation and was able to capture it.
if photography were to be liberated from this it would lose its very essence, its value, and its relevance. So while AI might gain much attention from the cult of the new, and will no doubt be a revelation for advertisers, I can’t see it being taken too seriously in the long-term, thankfully.
You can get your heart racing from reading a novel. You don’t see anything, you just imagine.
You can get your heart racing from watching an anime cartoon. You see something, but those comics figures, drawn with flat shapes, are nothing close to reality. And yet you connect with them through the story.
You can get your heart racing from watching old movies with bad CGI. At first, all you will notice are the bad CGI, but after 10 min into the story, it won’t matter anymore. Because, again, you will be taken by the story.
And, of course, you can get your heart racing from full HD, crystal clear, modern movie.
To be clear, when I say heart racing, I mean that adrenaline shot you get when the hero is in distress or suspense is burning. Because that kind of emotion is easy to measure through hormonal concentration. But it could be any other emotion, really.
So the resulting emotion has little to do with the chosen medium or/and the connection to reality. It has more to do with how it reaches your imagination and connect to your memories to bring you somewhere else.
Once again, let us not be fooled by the technics and material peculiarities.
What even is the “most valuable” art? Or even “valuable” art?
I create things to share with other people, so they can have some notion of what I am thinking and feeling. There is value for me in my own creation. I hope there is value to someone else in my creation. But the notion of “most valuable” is strange, as I’ve always picture it as one-to-one. I’m sure there is some phenomena of many people experiencing the same thing at once and deriving some sense of pleasure from it, like the hundreds jammed into that room to see the Mona Lisa.
I disagree, while I’m quite sure that if you chose to measure adrenaline for example to try and quantify and compare excitement levels when experiencing different stories in different mediums you could well measure similar levels, such an experiment would be quite pointless.
can you really compare the visceral response one might have to even anonymous characters being killed by an explosion in fractions of a second at the cinema to the pages of writing that would be necessary if you hoped to generate a similarly deep response in a book? Even if an equal chemical response was produced, the book will differentiate itself with much more narrative structure, the film by forcing the viewer to make more assumptions based on the imagery.
its just not possible for these experiences to be equivalent. The mind doesn’t work so simply, it has biases to different forms of stimuli. Both experiences can still be profound, certainly, but they are fundamentally different due to the nature of their mediums.
to evoke feelings is vital in art, but to also have meaning is what it really should aspire to, and this is where the differences in mediums becomes critical to the artists expression.
there’s really quite a difference between watercolours and oils, let alone painting and photography, literature and sculpture…
Andrei Tarkovsky said “the purpose of art is to prepare man for death”, perhaps he means art is about revelation - which needn’t be thought of in a Christian paradigm.
beyond that I think its plain to see that the statue of David is more valuable than my first foray into clay sculpting in high school. Why do people pile into see that like they do the Mona Lisa? Perhaps these great masters have captured something that most have great difficulty seeing, but it can be felt.
edit: underline this point, art is about communication.
Stimuli are a very narrow part of what happens, then the brain does a great deal, so much that it can even reconstruct a stimulus when there is none. That’s why I think focusing on the input is missing the point, the point is the response. And to trigger a response, the medium does not matter, what is needed is to connect to the memories and “mind referential” of the viewer. If cartoons can make you empathize with rabbits or toys, that’s because they appeal to your values and struggles as a human, resemblance with real life is not the matter.
Well, that kind of is both your hypothesis and your conclusion, so I would say it’s tautology.
I strongly disagree with that. The world is all about pathos, emotions and feelings lately. Hell, you could also claim that provoking feelings is vital for advertising and newspapers too. Emotions are surely a by-product, but are they a goal or a must of any artwork ? Art is about showing stuff in ways that are personal to the artist, which we call expression. But what spectators will feel eventually is theirs only, and actively seeking to make them feel this or that is a long shot because you don’t control what they feel.
Many guys have said contradictory things about art (made to make life bearable, made to connect with sacred stuff, whatever), I’m not sure we can devise on big purpose for all art form and hide behind one citation to make a point. Art has been many things, depending on century and artist.
Valuable to whom ?
As a guy who went into Mona Lisa’s room to find out what all the fuss was about, and saw an ill-lit smirking bitch in muddy colors behind an annoying glass cage (you got to love those spotlight reflections to appreciate it), I can only tell the more interesting things in that room are the Japanese tourists. Most probable explanation is people pile because people pile. Success is a self-feeding loop, you only need to jump-start it. I wouldn’t search for meaning in that, it’s history’s accidents.
Ah, but mud is beautiful! All those old portraits, painted with natural pigments, look like they are spawned from the earth. Give me that over the plasticity of modern cadmiums and pthalates any day.
It is also rather unfair to judge an artwork by its experience, unless the experience was intended. After all, da Vinci didn’t paint the bad reflections, and hoardes of tourists. It would be like buying a pizza, eating one slice in a crowded restaurant, and another at the park, and saying one tasted better than the other. Of course people are swayed sentimentally in this fashion, but it was the same pizza, and one should not judge the chef on the environment.
However I agree entirely that art is simply an expression, and what spectators feel is theirs only, dependent on their unique personality and history.
What annoys me is how this reaction is heavily manipulated through marketing and culture. How many have stood in front of a modern gallery, thinking all is shit, but not saying it, thinking that because this type of thing is everywhere, the problem must be not with the art but with them? And how many like a piece of art just because everyone else does, or its cool to do so? This kind of culture stunts the natural reaction to the artwork, so that now the individual responds not just with his or her personality and history, but with the expectations of everyone around. It’s possible then for the reaction to be completely unnatural, and go against instincts. And in a world whose culture and art seems to be forever degrading at the hands of money and agenda, the unnatural is becoming more and more common place. The more messed up becomes the world, the more messed up becomes the filters everyone views art through.
I’m of the belief a universal objective ‘good’ in art may exist, but could only be truly realised in a healthy culture, which we are far from.
I guess I’m in the “different strokes for different folks” camp. At it’s essence, the presentation of “art” is a two-node, one-way communication between an artist and a regarder; the artist pored whatever angst into their creation, and an individual regarder will walk away from the rendition with whatever they take, good, bad, indifferent. In all that, I think there are artists who visualize something that simply appeals to them, capture it, and put it out there for others to consider; other artists capture with the explicit intent to communicate something to others. And that distinction is itself ambiguous.
Yes I agree that’s how things are currently, and maybe always, to some extent. It just can’t be understated how much influence culture has, and how much culture is manufactured to push people in certain directions.
