Art(n.): An overloaded catch-all term for various creative things which people can nearly define however they want in any given context to lend unearned credence to their glib and/or self-interested philosophical stances.
I'm not actually cynical about art. My life is art: I went to art school and am a professional commercial artist. I'm cynical about the way people in the tech crowd use the word, now: glib, hamfisted philosophical snippets to redefine art to only legitimize fine art without monetary compensation so they can totally ignore the human effects of spraying the entire world with the vacant sheen of generative AI. Yes. I am very cynical about the tech world's attempt to define art right now.
Former performing artist here, and I totally agree. Thanks. I don't think that's what this article was trying to do, although it wasn't particularly great.
The most telling (and frustrating) point of information is that 96% of people surveyed think art is important, but only 27% think artists contribute to society. (Did I read that in this piece, or run across it in something else today?) I mean, and I say it advisedly, WTF? That disjunction is what allows tech companies to get away with everything you point out. I have no idea how to fix it.
The problem is the 'art is important' people think about stuff like The Peasant Dance (Breughel, 1568). When they say 'artists don't contribute' they think of the 120k USD banana taped to a wall (which was promptly eaten by a hungry student).
Ironically, the banana piece was all about pointing out the triviality of (much) contemporary art!
But... Yeah. That's probably the explanation for the disconnect. It's so extreme, though. Everyone (literally everyone!) owns and / or enjoys things created by artists. I think the education- / elite-driven insistence that Real Art is fine art (or maybe just old art) - like, Breughal counts, but the exquisitely crafted mug my wife bought at the farmers market last week doesn't - has something to do with it as well. Which is stupid, because that whole idea was stomped to dust by 1900 or so, and yet it remains.
I just watched a solid mid-90s documentary about African art on YouTube. It focused on the colonial Europeans and subsequent anthropologists wild misinterpretation of beautiful African objects, and how that was used to justify the oppression. In many African traditions, the idea of "art" as it exists in the European cultural vein doesn't even exist: the aesthetic imbued into the practical everyday objects like masks used in ritual is inextricable from its function and the tradition of craft that informed its construction. It would be ridiculous to say it isn't art, but equally ridiculous to interact with it using Western philosophical conceptions of art.
People in dominant positions justified steamrolling people whose humanity was inconvenient, in part, by insisting on the universality of the rigid, outdated, old Western conception of art... and they clearly still do.
I agree the article wasn’t trying to do that, and I also didn’t think it was good. It read like an arrogant philosopher trying to be edgy at the apex of a coke binge.
I was only really commenting on the blustery, arrogant yet often uninformed pseudo-intellectual conversations about art that always seem to happen in tech crowds. Cringey DK vibes. Even more since generative AI took off. Having worked as both a developer and a designer in software, I’m surprised I’ve never passed out because my palm was so consistently covering my face when these topics came up.
