GenAI Art: Blurring the line between Creators, Curators and Critics
Creator Economy metaphor moves from Wine to Cocktails
Context
I had the good fortune to know at a young age that my mind was optimized for a nerd future. But there was the conflict between being an (epically) bad painter1, and the potential to be a second rate art critic - whether comparing the sinews as sculpted by Bernini vs Michelangelo, grokking the greatness of Albrecht Durer or Jan Van Eyck and such. Part of my Cutts-ian ‘do something for 30 days’ journey this month was AI Art, with a goal to create art that I would still like 30 days hence.The resulting gallery of stuff is presented as contextual work in progress to scaffold my points about the changing nature of creativity.
Creative Transition
Not so long ago, there was a hard line between Creators, Curators and Critics. If you weren’t pretty good with brushes - you had no shot of being Picasso (or even a decent starving artist). However, as the book Picasso’s War depicts - Picasso wouldn’t have been Picasso without Peggy Guggenheim or John Quinn(the Curators), or Clement Greenberg (Critic). Painters created out of obsession, curators saw ‘metaphor transforms’, and critics articulated the new aesthetics to masses. Critics and curators understood (perhaps even envisioned) artistic greatness but had no ability to create the product.
Now that has fundamentally changed. AI has not only factual knowledge of every painting hanging in every gallery - it knows the objects, the kind of brushstrokes, the moods, the juxtapositions, hidden affinities between artists, visual preoccupations for specific artists .. and more.
If a curator (given they have a unique point of view driven by their collection of art) can envision a magic blend of a Cezanne and a Matisse rendition of ‘looking out of a seaside window’ (or more edgily, Matisse La Coilleoure and Ed Hopper Rooms by the Sea), they have the vocabulary to get AI to paint it for them. If a critic wants to turn an artist ‘inside out’ because their greatness is in a secondary character in a painting - they can re-craft the narrative and have AI be the envisioner apperentice.
In effect the process of painting goes from being like wine making (a long drawn out ‘analog’ process where you have to understand grapes, yeast, aging, lees, coopering, batonnage, lunar cycles ..) to more akin to cocktail making (understand and combine creative building blocks - style, mood, composition, blending, brush work etc).
To illustrate at a shallow personal level, my process of painting the lady in blue and orange above went as follows:
started with a desire to put words that I liked into a picture - ‘aging in transition - from rigid and certain into fluid and playful’
choosing style metaphors that I felt were the picture - Picasso was too owlish, Miro too playful, Hockney too much like corporate marketing, Mondrian in the mix added simplicity but overdid striation. In all cases the eyes felt ‘dead’. Adding Velazquez (famous for painting eyes that are limpid), sadly distorted the output in other ways. The partially satisfactory end result was a De Kooning, Vermeer combo.
a bunch of other parameter twiddling and about 25-30 different visual generations on playground.ai. Btw playground.ai, hypotenuse.ai, MidJourney (I assume Firefly at some point) have different ‘brush vocabularies’ so the choice for your painting’s visual language becomes important.
Implications
The wine vs cocktail analogy works to a point - because creating a passable cocktail is easy, but a great one hard. But as I write this, another analogy that comes to mind is the move from Portraiture to Photography (there were similar ‘end of creativity’ lamentations in the 1860s). The process of selecting lenses, exposure and visual composition resembles the above AI version of the visual assembly process. Interestingly Lewis Carroll (he of Alice in Wonderland, knew a thing or two about words) was an accomplished photographer because there were pictures for his words in his head, ones he learned how to bring to life.
Are creators dead?
I could be flippant and pull a Princess Bride (they’re not all dead! just mostly dead). But just as photo-realistic depiction in paintings died with the advent of photography, structural aesthetics (as in you’re cool because you invented a certain kind of technique) will have a short shelf life and be easily copied. Great artists will capture a spirit of a moment and the inner state of their protagonists in an inimitable way much like photographers, and they will be able to transcend mediums in ways that are almost impossible today.
I can buy Raghu Rai’s cameras and mimick his f-stops, but I will never get within a mile of the stunning visual essays that capture the juxtaposition of optimism, joy, rage, brown sahib hauteur, and obliviousness that comes in a country of contrasts2.
P.S.
As I was in my little journey - I happened to use an agentic tool called Fabric (recommend) and in the process discovered Daniel Meissner (ex-Apple) who is coming to a similar conclusion. His ‘nurturers’ (a term I am not wild about) are growers of ideas without the innate skill in the craft .. so some combination of Curators and Critics.
But the points on the future of creativity (or at least how we think of it today) are similar:
reduction of barrier to exploratory creativity,
restructuring of the creative class
as with other forms of ‘AI co-intelligence’ value migration to the last mile human element, a different skill than ‘from scratch’ creativity
mass democratization of creativity (if everybody who has a web page could also create their own art) - which would help change art from an elitist sport to more broadly spoken language
As a matter of fact, I had a fair amount of time on my hands during art class to expend in an imaginary debate with Sir Kenneth Clark, as I spent much of the class in detention :-)!
Taken from the stunning exhibit A thousand lives in photographs at Kiran Nadar in Delhi. It forever changed my views on photography as art