In 1916, a trainee doctor befriended a wounded young soldier in a hospital in Nantes. André Breton was working in the neurological ward and reading Freud. Jacques Vaché was a war interpreter, moving across the front between the Allied positions and disrupting where he could; he once collected cast-off uniforms from different armies, including enemy forces, and sewed them together to make his own “neutral” costume. He sent Breton letters describing his “comatose apathy” and indifference to the conflict, though, he wrote, “I object to dying in wartime”.
Weeks after the Armistice, Vaché killed himself in a hotel room. Breton hailed him “the deserter from within” and one of the key inspirations for “The Surrealist Manifesto”, published in Paris in 1924.
This slim volume turned out to be the most influential artistic pronouncement of the century. Breton argued that rational realpolitik had created the catastrophe of the first world war. Championing the irrational, the subconscious, dream states — “pure psychic automatism” — he called for a revolution of the mind: “thought dictated in the absence of all control exercised by reason.”
My feeling is that art that aims to disrupt usually fails to do so because the artist is trying too hard to be disruptive rather than express something meaningful and personal to them. But when an artist is expressing something authentic about their perception of the world, then it’s inherently going to be disruptive because it usually isn’t bowing to the “everything is fine” status quo.
Art that exists only to be pretty, but lacks any meaning or personal resonance, doesn’t last. It’s why AI-generated art (and a lot of other commercially-driven art) is so shallow and unmemorable: sure, plenty of it looks nice, but it ultimately says nothing. The art you actually remember has something to say - and by its very nature, that’s disruptive.
I agree with your first sentence. I don’t agree with the bit about aesthetics. There’s lots of “pretty” art that has plenty of staying power. Just look at the Impressionists. Beauty can resonate just as powerfully as any “challenging” art. I’m sure the Romanticists would agree. Disruption also says nothing. Disrupting to what and who?
The Impressionists weren’t making art solely for aesthetics though. The results are considered beautiful in hindsight, but at the time the first Impressionist paintings were considered amateurish and poor quality - so their aesthetic qualities were not appreciated and they were disruptive. It was only later that the Impressionists’ use of colour was truly appreciated.
So my point is that it’s not whether art is pretty that gives it staying power. It’s about what the artist puts into the work. Art that is pretty just for the sake of prettiness rarely has staying power. Art that has a deeper meaning does, whether or not it’s pretty
That really depends on who you’re asking. I don’t like the word “disruptive”, it’s loaded and way overused, even beyond its connotations concerning art. Art historians and critics inflate their contributions to culture and actual historical impact. Impressionism (this is aside from its actual impact, I’m not saying it isn’t) is considered important, partially because self-appointed experts said it was so. That goes for any art movement. It’s all very synthetic and self-fulling. As you can see, I have a rather low opinion of art historians and critics.
I definitely agree with you on critics. It seems to me that critics, like all humans, have their likes and dislikes, but too often they set themselves up as the beginning and end of the discussion about what is “good” art, when the reality is they’re just expressing their opinions as facts. Whereas I feel everyone should make up their own minds about what art is to them, and what they like or don’t like.
But I don’t really agree with you on art historians. My experience with those who look at the history of an artistic medium is they tend to think everything is interesting and worth looking at, but in most settings where one might have contact with an art historian, they’re under pressure to whittle it down into digestible chunks for whoever they’re talking to (be it students, visitors at a museum/gallery, etc) - so of course they have to focus on the artworks that had the greatest impact on their surrounding culture and audience. There is, of course, an element of personal taste involved, because no human can be 100% objective, but there are some objective elements: the first piece in a completely new style or medium, which inspired others, is often more influential than the millionth piece in that style or medium.
AI-generated art has about the depth of the prompt… which is curious by itself, because while it often has less depth, it also sometimes manages to have more depth; it’s up to the artist to choose, a choice that’s another artistic act.
As for commercially-driven art… let’s not forget Santa CocaCola Claus, or that most classical art portraits were sold as a way to “snap a photo” in an age without photo cameras (and a bunch of now famous artists “cheated” by using a camera obscura). Any kind of art can have the same lasting power as any other, it just depends on the skill and time budget of the artist.
I’ll concede that the very best examples of AI-generated pieces, when given a sufficiently deep prompt by someone who knows what they’re doing, may have more depth than the shallowest examples of traditional art. But it certainly doesn’t have more depth than the most meaningful human-made artworks. And it’s not representative of the typical output of AIs. Human-made art is almost always deeper, because the human has to make conscious choices about every single thing they include. AI doesn’t do that, and most of the time, neither does the prompter.
And again, the same goes for commercially-driven art. You’ll note in my previous comment I said “a lot of”. There are some that stand out and have genuine lasting power… but the vast majority of it does not. It exists to sell a product, and is forgotten in a year or two.
In another thread, I’ve had a conversation about Dadaism vs. Impressionism… and by lucky happenstance, dropped by the recent !botart@lemmy.dbzer0.com post, so couldn’t resist but try to mix it all a bit:
https://beehaw.org/comment/2262625
Now, on a scale from 0 to 10, how much depth would you give that prompt? And the output? I think the AI got it best at the first try, although nr.3 is not bad either, if it wasn’t for the… watermarks? comments? (it’s a lot of fun to mess with an AI’s “subconscious”)
PS: this one is great, I think I broke it 😂
https://beehaw.org/comment/2264660
Having experimented with AI heavily for the last couple of years, I will concede, it has some serious limitations. And people largely use it to make the artistic equivalent of cheese puffs, tasty but mostly full of fluff and unsatisfying. But it can also produce some very weird and cool things, if you learn to either accept, or work around its limitations. But as with any art, you have to understand the tool isn’t the art. Anyway, ultimately it’s the viewer that decides if art is important. That goes for AI imagery as well.