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Art Has Always Been Artificial - by Louis Anslow - NEWART

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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

Animation Courtesy of Freethink Media 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…

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