Art Has Always Been Artificial - by Louis Anslow - NEWART

Written in collaboration with Freethink for their Special on Creativity & AI. Originally published there. Art has always been the product of new techniques: from spoken language to the written word, from drawings on cave walls to paint brushes, from quills to word processors. In 1859, French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire decried a new form of artistic expression: photography. This new medium, he said, was “the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies” and to embrace it was a sign of “blindness” and “imbecility.” Baudelaire considered the output of these fanatical “sun-worshippers” as more artifice than art—canned creativity, a synthetic, artificial substitute for the real thing. It was a notion that would have felt as compelling then, as similar critiques of AI art feel today. And it was just as much of a fallacy too. THESE BRAVE EARLY ADOPTERS ARE TASKED WITH DEFENDING THESE NEW TECHNIQUES UNTIL THEY’RE TAKEN SERIOUSL

Written in collaboration with Freethink for their Special on Creativity & AI. Originally published there. Art has always been the product of new techniques: from spoken language to the written word, from drawings on cave walls to paint brushes, from quills to word processors. In 1859, French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire decried a new form of artistic expression: photography. This new medium, he said, was “the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies” and to embrace it was a sign of “blindness” and “imbecility.” Baudelaire con