Can Art Exist in the AI Era?

Probably Not

Dear Friends,

I’m continuing to serialize my World Cup novella at Cult Classic.

Best,

Sam

CAN ART EXIST IN THE AI ERA?

Recently, I’ve come across the same — deeply depressing — idea from several different directions. The idea is that the history of art is finished, that in a real sense there can be no more art — and there are perfectly ironclad theoretical reasons to believe that this may be the case.

One place I’ve come across this is in Francis Fukuyama’s interpretation of Alexandre Kojève who was in turn interpreting Hegel. Kojève’s argument was that history is coming to an end and that the absence of history precludes the existence of art. Here is how Fukuyama summarizes it:

It would no longer be possible to create the great art that was meant to capture the highest aspirations of an era, like Homer’s Iliad, the Madonnas of da Vinci or Michelangelo, or the giant Buddha of Kamakura, for there would be no new eras and no particular distinction of the human spirit for artists to portray….They could not say anything fundamentally new about the human condition.¹

The point is that art is linked to dialectical movement. In most societies at most points in time, art is decoration or religious offering — the lyric is also possible. But to actually have artistic evolution, you really need a movement of historical forces that art, essentially, is keeping pace with. Empirically, this is more or less a provable proposition. It’s not an accident that the Italian Renaissance happened at the time it did and in the way it did — Florence was experiencing a financial revolution at the time, really a first birth of capitalism, and the artistic efflorescence appended itself naturally to the new forms of wealth. As Julianne Werlin says of the similar efflorescence in Elizabethan England, “It’s all completely intelligible. Beginning in late medieval Italy, and then moving northward, there was rapid economic development as a result of new markets and technologies and early globalization.” Habermas in particular has documented how the rise of the novel is embedded in the “bourgeois public sphere,” with the novel linked to a new class. Modernist art seems connected to a concerted attempt to keep pace with transformative developments in technology and to the ideological conflicts of the mid-20th century. And then, as everybody must have noticed, art sort of goes fallow after that. ‘Postmodernism’ is really a catch-all term to convey directionless. Nothing is so depressing as the ‘New Museum’ and the strange self-reflective nullity of contemporary art that is almost exactly as Kojève described Japanese ceremonial arts although without beauty. The recent energy connected to feminist-oriented art and to literature and art from the ‘margins’ actually confirms the Kojève/Fukuyama theory — that’s the dialectic we have, of ‘historically marginalized’ people taking the center stage, and this is, by a sort of unanimous consent of the artistic bureaucracies, where the action has been for the last couple of decades. For those who have by contrast arrived at something like the end of history, there is nothing more to say.

The other variant on the ‘art is finished’ argument comes from Andrey Mir by way of Marshall McLuhan and is more specific to technology. As Mir writes:

A counter-environment makes us pay attention to what surrounds us and how it affects us. When you mind your perception you become aware of the environment. According to McLuhan, art may serve as such a counter-environment. As McLuhan often quoted Ezra Pound, “artists are the antennae of the human race.” … However, just at the time when McLuhan credited art with the capacity for counter-environmental sense-making, the arts were changing under pressure from electronic media, and this transformation may have deprived artists of that epistemic counter-environmental function.

The absence of set-aside spaces means that there is no real interest in the counter-environmental effect of art. That’s what seems to be happening when people don’t have it in them to read fiction on Substack but have no trouble ‘effort-reading’ through long tracts decrying the current of fiction. Imagination feels heavy to us. What we are interested in is exploring different aspects of reality. Actually, we have all kinds of soap operas and fairy tales spinning through our heads at all times but they’re about ostensibly real people, the wedding of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the sorrow of Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, the agony of Messi and the peripatetic wanderings of LeBron James. What we don’t have is defamiliarization, which Viktor Shlovsky took to be the essence of art. And the move for artists, as per the analysis of Kelefa Sanneh and W. David Marx, is to embrace poptimism, to connect to the technology and to look for themselves in the noise. But as Mir puts it, “When art collapses into self-expression, it risks becoming a relay of narcosis rather than a counter-environment. It substitutes one reflective enclosure (the artist’s) for another (mine).”

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These are theoretical arguments to try to understand why it seems that art can’t survive either the end of history or the ubiquity of digital technology, but they match up with something I’ve been feeling for a while and have had trouble putting my finger on. I feel it most, actually, with this platform, which is full of writers and all kinds of talented, creative people and in theory has no bar to anyone writing in the way they want to write. But what does well? Different forms of critique, various arguments about random things in the discourse. What does poorly? Actual creative writing. For a while, I thought it was a failure of will, or of the medium of free online exchange not quite reaching maturity, but now I think it’s a deeper issue than that. To be clear, people will write and create as much as the spirit moves them. The question is whether anybody gives a shit enough to actually read it, and that’s a more serious concern.

The essential point is that people are interested in what affects them. Communication is, above all, a way of conveying information. Art, by contrast, tends to exist in a zone where no super-relevant information can possibly be conveyed. That’s what’s happening when the curtain slowly rises at the foot of the stage, when the lion roars in an MGM film, when the storyteller clears their throat and says, “Once upon a time.” We are collectively agreeing that nothing of vital importance is happening in our lives, that no urgent information is coming, that we are bored and likely, in the zone of our actual lives, to be bored for the duration of the period of the performance. If any actual information comes to us, it’s likely to be bad news — a stagehand running out to announce that there’s a fire in the theater. In that period deficient of information, we are able to give our full attention to something that is not exactly information, that is not exactly real, and we are willing to let it work its magic on us. But a property of the internet is that it always promises information — the infinite scroll is assembled in such a way that we always seem to be on the verge of hitting something that’s of importance to us and we never quite reach the stage of boredom that allows us to enter willingly into fantastical space. Nobody has figured out how to institute ‘frames’ — curtains and book bindings and lions’ roars — on the internet, and without that it’s difficult to imagine what space will emerge for art.

I’ve noticed something else recently. In all the conversations about whether AI can or cannot replace human artists, the verdict itself is somewhat elusive but what we seem to be interested in is … the conversation itself. Jamir Nazir’s AI-generated story was certainly the most widely-read winner of any Granta Commonwealth Prize. The conversation on Substack has really perked up with the Pangram AI-detection feature — suddenly, a whole new and riveting discourse has emerged, of trying to catch one another for using AI and then either defending or castigating those caught. The whole thing is of course much more enticing than, say, wading through a normal Commonwealth Prize-winning story. But behind that seems to be an even deeper issue. The fact that AI can kind of, sort of, mimic human writing doesn’t produce a whole new wave of riveting AI writing — I’ve certainly seen no evidence of that — but it does diminish the magic and excitement of human writing. In a way that’s comparable to the ‘frame’ that’s put around an artistic performance, art is supposed to put a ‘frame’ around the creator, to say something like this is the best, truest reflection of who this person is and what they have to say. With the ability of AI to mimic, and parody that, with the emergence of ‘hybrid’ creators, of ‘artists’ working in tandem with their trusty AI tools, the first casualty is that sense of framing. The work may well be somewhat better — or at least more likely to be typo-free — but we are almost automatically not interested in the product, or even in the activity itself. The frame is gone, which means — and we probably feel this for all writers whether they are using AI or not — that we suspect we’re not getting the actual person, and that means that our scrutiny extends not to what they’re writing but to our little deductive pastime of trying to suss out what actually is theirs and what is not theirs.

The AI detection craze may pass — that’s just the discourse of the moment. What likely will not pass, though, is the crisis of art. If art is not linked to the dialectical movement of history, and if it loses the needed defamiliarizing relationship with an audience, and if the frame is removed not only from the act of performance but from individual identity itself, then it becomes extraordinarily hard to see how we ever get back to a magical relationship with one another’s work as opposed to just talking at — or usually past — each other.

1. Kojève, who had spent time in Japan, further theorized that there would be art at the end of history but it would be like the purely formalistic arts of Japan’s long period of isolation —Noh theater, tea ceremonies, flower arranging, etc.