Lost Futures of Art and Being, Courtesy of AI
The future of art is just a reflection of the past
After reading a handful of 2022 retrospective pieces over the last couple weeks, I was struck by the limited perspectives on what I’d consider the major cultural innovation of the year, AI Generated Art. Perhaps because, like so many tech innovations in our current world, AI Art has already become sewn into the fabric of our post-modern society and we have already begun building practices around its usage. The efficiency of producing art instantly with artificial intelligence is still not without some controversy. AI Art, like other technological innovations through history, is a clearing in the darkness that we quickly have stepped into in order to help balance profit and loss statements just a little better than before.
AI Art’s potential to revolutionize the artist marketplace dominates today’s debate. The question that is being asked by so many observers and artists is how many people will lose their livelihoods as Capital shifts artistic creation toward servers and away from people to save money. This debate has been well established. I do not think I would add any value in discussing how AI Art may impact the livelihood of so many artists as Capital seeks the most efficient route to balancing a better profit and loss sheet. This fact is almost undeniable.
To me AI Art brings up two deeper questions that I’d like to work through here, if you’ll allow me some space to think out loud with you:
Why is art so reliant on Capital in the first place?
Has this reliance on Capital kept art stuck in the past, and does AI Art only perpetuate this to a maximum extent?
Perhaps in asking these questions we drill down beyond the action and reaction that AI Art has driven and reveal the place we find ourselves in, and how we can focus on our condition rather than the symptoms.
Capital Over Art
I cannot speak to the evolution of art in Western society deeply, I can only reflect in a very simple way how art has been lashed to Capital as so many other cultural forms have over the last 40-50 years. As liberal economics have shifted toward the global rational system of neoliberalism, cultural patronage by the state in which artists were given room to create has been decimated. During the quasi social democracies of the modern world, art was reliant on government patronage as well as private. Traditionally safe spaces like art school or funded art environments gave artists the chance to flourish without the stress of short-term success, or the culture of entrepreneurialism. In the 30s and 40s post-depression and WWII era in the US, affordable rents in large culturally thriving cities, as well as livable wages and government safety nets allowed artists to create and translate the future for us as it came rushing toward us. Artists responded with visionary work and stylistic freedom that bursted with energy and expressed the aspirations and anxieties of the moment reflecting the diversity inherent in America itself. Government patronage such as the Works Progress Administration commissioned projects that literally fill our current museum halls with art we can’t even imagine America without.
But into the late-70s as the obsession with driving down government spending took root for the center left and right governments, arts and culture were slashed in favor of deregulation, regressive tax cuts, and financialization of the economy. Rents are unmanageable, art school is a fortune and geared toward careers and private profit, government patronage has dried up, and neoliberalism has pushed us into that of an achievement society where we must be entrepreneurs of ourselves to become Winners. Artists must be part of the hustle.
Capital has created a true psychological condition, it has become an institutionalized social order requiring dominance over our ability to be human outside of it. The emergence of AI Art as such an incredible threat to artists rather than simply another tool for artists to flourish is a result of this condition we find ourselves in. The threat to artists is not because of the technology, in and of itself, but because we have chosen a path where the cold calculation of the marketplace has taken over our creativity, and taken over the work of art’s ability to set new practices, and translate our futures. Art can no longer be set back from Capital, it requires it.
Given the way neoliberalism’s rationality has economized all features of existence, from democratic institutions to subjectivity, I see a bleak future for human-created art, and therefore art in general.
Our Stolen Futures
Getting to something I haven’t seen discussed yet is perhaps slightly more sad for our human condition. The above is a material critique, but is there a deeper psychological discussion to be had. That AI Art is not simply a new future but a feature of how neoliberalism has positioned art for short-term results over creative innovation. But how can this be? AI Art is probably the most technologically innovative art tool since software tools were created.
But when we talk about AI Art as an incredible future we are missing the conversation about this new technological horizon’s sad perpetration of the past. It is a super tool that nurtures our nostalgia and creates a road block to moving forward culturally, even if it’s an incredible technological leap forward.
With AI we are continually stuck in the past and doomed with the inability to move on. Anything that it creates, literally anything, by design, is a revival of past cultural forms.
The fact that AI relies wholly on the past, on creations already uploaded to cyberspace, in order to create suggests something about our condition and our space to be creative and be orientated toward the future. AI is only creating based upon the history of art and imagery made thus far in the world; it is a sponge soaking up nearly all past cultural forms in order to create imagery that is a simulacra of the art before it.
This is 100% not an aesthetic critique. Yes, the art created by the user prompts are almost entirely very obviously pastiche of video game art or Japanese animation. (There’s more there, of course, but this is the most common imagery you scroll across in the MidJourney Discord server.) However, there is obviously something cool and appealing as one views this type of art. I think the issue is bigger than an aesthetic rejection, or some kind of reaction to a new cultural form that ‘all the kids are up to nowadays!’.
The AI artists, while skilled in their ability to create prompts that push out artistic imagery that gets the AI to perform best, can never be fully oriented toward the future. Even when portraying artistic or hyper-realistic scenes from an imagined future these images are still copies of a retro-futuristic prior imagining. The AI can only pull from the past as this is how the prompts are required to be inputted. It cannot be unbound from the past.
For instance, when entering prompts to create an image one is required to use artists, such as filmmakers, designers, and photographers, who have a style they like. Or to prompt the AI generation with brands whose aesthetic they want to mimic in their piece. AI Art becomes a jumbled art form; a form built by bricks that are made up of forms already created. One cannot fill in a prompt without using previous forms, it must create pastiche.
Example of a prompt I came across scrolling MidJourney. This text is inputed to direct the AI to form an image:
Therefore AI Art haunts our present with all the cultural ghosts of the past. Not just by prior art, but all cultural forms can be put into a prompt to create a new form (fashion, photography, painting, sculpture, literature, etc.).
We are haunted by art we cannot move away from—we are oriented toward the comfortable and familiar. Why do we find this pastiche so appealing? What does this reveal about our current condition?
It reveals that our futures have been canceled. We are stuck in time with past cultural forms that will not let us move on. The space to create new forms is filled with the nostalgia of the past. The technologies of the future are used as generators and distributors of the past.
After all, who wants to face the bleak future with the earnest efforts required of a complete cultural reimagining of the it when artists and prospective artists are trying to just survive in the present. When artists are cultivated as entrepreneurs of the self in an achievement society, poised to pay high rents and pay off college debt, it’s much more comforting to cozy up to the forms of the past that brought joy then to forge the path toward cultural catalyst.
This loss of cultural space and desire to create is a problem for our humanity. AI Art is a symptom of that problem. We have been broken down psychologically, we have been subjugated to focus on efficiency and calculated ways of creating art. It’s are being now. People are no longer trying to anticipate the future because neoliberalism demands of us quick results, short-term solutions, and repetition of already established cultural forms. As discussed above, Capital has subsumed art, so we turn to nostalgia to fill that gap.
We must be part of the hustle, or die. And in this, we risk the loss of great works of art to reorient the practices that make us human as time forces us forward. The art that reorients our practices to face the future, to be human in the future, has been slowly canceled.
I truly and deeply understand what Heidegger meant by his oft-misunderstood statement later in life that “Only a God can save us now.” because art will not be able to do it anymore. It is stuck. We are stuck.
A lot of my take here on AI Art is filtered through my understanding of technology and Capital, through Mark Fisher, Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Nancy Fraser, and Wendy Brown. They have created the frames that focus my response to AI Art and their critical theories for me shape AI Art’s as a dark symptom of today’s condition. Of course, all of this is my own, so don’t blame them if I’m missing the mark for you.