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This trend started with photography. “You pointed the camera at something that already existed and pushed a button? Where’s the art in that, anyone could do it!” Of course there’s far more to it, and it is obviously clear photography is an incredible and difficult art. https://t.co/pRoFYuICYy
You get another wave of this trend with conceptual modern art. What did the artist actually do? Anyone could have done that! Yet no one did. Don’t get me wrong, there’s bad conceptual art just like bad paintings. But some of it is brilliant and beautiful. https://t.co/ew9kZfabbo
But at least these conceptual artists made their own stuff. Warhol created the modern art factory system, and Hirst, Koons and Murakami have followed. Not only is the art usually conceptual, the artist doesn’t even make it! https://t.co/NskxjSzZJY
This model has also been on the rise in music…top end artists hold “camp” where they pay dozens of talented producers and musicians to come together and collaborate on making music together, with the head artist as a kind of manager. Kanye is particularly known for this.
Right now this approach is only available to artists so fabulously successful or wealthy that they can afford to pay multiple other artists to work for them on their pieces. But with the advances in AI, we will see the price of having “helpers” drop and drop.
Right now the debate on whether Hirst is a “real artist” has settled pretty clearly on the affirmative. But there’s a new debate on whether people who use AI as a tool are “real artists” or not. I think the trend of history is obvious: of course they are.