Becoming an artist means being an art student
Suppose we take seriously the promise that “AI art” will make everyone an artist, or make traditional artists obsolete. I think the first question we should ask is: how fast does it happen? Do you become an artist when you make an account or when you make your first picture? Maybe when you make your first NFT? Can you stop being an artist whenever you want, or do you have to call customer support to delete your account?
If you extend “becoming an artist” over time, you end up becoming an art student first. I have yet to encounter a marketing campaign that dares customers to unleash their inner art student, so I worry that this might come as a shock to some people once they realize what’s going on. Here’s how it happens:
You sign up, you make some images, and you share them. Now you probably have people saying things about them, and they’re probably not saying exactly what you thought they would say, or what you wanted them to say. So you go back and look at the images you made, maybe you change the prompts and make some new ones. At this point it’s already too late. You’re becoming an art student.
A large part of being an art student is making something that looks good to you, and then listening to others pick it to pieces. This is called a “crit.” You get told what’s wrong with it formally, aesthetically, ethically, and conceptually. Your methods, your identity, and your intentions are all carefully considered in relation to the art you present. You aim at making art that will survive this process, and you learn to articulate your thoughts enough to argue for the right of your work to exist. These arguments are shaped by economic, professional, and personal concerns in addition to “purely” artistic ideas.
The AI has given us all the power to be lazy art students
With the mainstreaming of “AI Art”, some distorted version of this discourse sprouted up all over the internet, in spaces that had never discussed images like this before, or in brand new spaces dedicated to the production and sharing of images.
Right now, notable images of machine-generated art trail arguments like kitestrings as they drift across the internet. We argue over the ethics of the image generators, whether their generations count as art, if they mean the end of art or artists, and just generally argue over the everything-else-ness of it all. Like most arguments on the internet, these are often entrenched and acrimonious, redundant and perhaps swayed by bots. However, they are, ostensibly, arguments about art. And they involve countless voices that hadn’t previously been part of a public discussion or presentation of art.
To whatever new degree art-making has been [democratized], so has art critiquing. You can’t yet tweet your way to becoming a credentialed artist (It’s not like being a pilot), but in some sense Online has become a gigantic, unmoderated, endless art crit. Whether or not “AI” is making “real art,” we’re having real arguments about art because of it. Learning how to do this is a huge part of being an art student.
Reasons to care about that
Debates about art are also useful to the people who own the platforms The market sees a source of profit in the effort required to become and remain an artist
So how do talk about art like an art student? Well, since we’re talking about “AI art”, we have to assume the 20th century happened. Let’s review what that means for talking about art. I figure between those of you who already have a handle on it and those of you who don’t, no one wants to spend much time on it. Here it is in less than 500 words.