I dismissed Charles Biederman’s Art As the Evolution of Visual Knowledge as a better manifesto than history, but as the winged scourge of AI flutters before us, the artist’s bitter, 1948 screed against those who misunderstood Cézanne seems to capture the spirit of our moment—maybe better than it captured Biederman’s.1 AI is everywhere, and the world of visual culture is deep in the coils of its reckoning. The dread of the future is evergreen; modern art, if it has any underlying spirit, is the easement of that dread. That’s what artist Holly Herndon seems to think, anyway, and I for one welcome our new robot overlords. Here’s why you should, too.
II. Anxiety is always and only a dread of the future.
“The idea of Cézanne as the father of abstract art is based on his remark that one must detect in Nature the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. What he meant by that is anyone’s guess, since there is not a single sphere, cone, or cylinder to be seen in Cezanne’s work.”2
That’s Robert Hughes, dismissing Biederman’s view of Cézanne in the The Shock of the New in 1980. What animates Cézanne’s work, Hughes thought, “is a vast curiosity about the relativeness of seeing, coupled with an equally vast doubt that he or anyone else could approximate it in paint.” Something’s out there, and our tools may be inadequate to handle it—the kernel of modern art, and a potentially anxious one.
The problem is that the new tools of human expression—the photograph, the telegraph, the motion picture—seem to always move one big step away from the really special thing that an artwork has. So much so that Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 mandatory-reading Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, put it axiomatically:
“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”3
The aura of art is exactly that thing you lose when you make a copy, and Benjamin thought it was just a few steps further down the line to the rise of outright fascism, a view that would be more alarmist if it hadn’t been written during the rise of the actual, historical Nazis. Benjamin shared with Biederman a love for the long arc of history, but hit the brakes hard on the idea that history’s forces generated the future4—and that, by analogy, Cézanne’s cones and cylinders required us to pass through Cubism and on to Abstract Expressionism. It seems a little silly to say out loud, but this was a real plank in the major critical platforms of the the 1950s.5
III. Enter the Dragon.
Enter Holly Herndon, and her collaborator and fellow human, Mat Dryhurst. Their contribution to this year’s Whitney Biennial isn’t worth describing in visual terms6—they trained a robot to make pictures, and you get to play with the robot. What that robot does—generate images of “Holly Herndon,” the putative avatar of the real life Holly Herndon—is not that important, though it is occasionally interesting. What’s most interesting is that, not only is Benjamin’s “aura” absent, its omission is the whole point. There’s no aura to speak of: we are the author, in some non-trivial way.
What a distance that is from the anxiety that AI is in the driver’s seat! Sure, the computer is generating an image, but the real art of it is that the aura is missing because we fill it up with ours. It’s like she’s exhibiting the printing press, not the book that’s printed on it. Sure, there’s no “aura”—but we get to make books!
That’s why Herndon resists “AI” as “a deceptive, over-abused term” in deference to “collective intelligence.”7 She sees art as a “coordinating technology”—a way to synch up a bunch of humans into one collective project, whether that is through a score, a painting, or a beat that everyone dances to at the club. There’s a mindlessness to dancing, and singing, and reading, and going to the opera—a surrender to a brain rinse of sorts—but it sounds a lot less sinister when you understand all art this way.
IV. Sabotage!
Reduced to simplest terms, the critique seems to be: this must be the end. The end of history, the end of art; the end of the human project. Now it’s just bots watching bots do bot stuff, the age of Man and his Hubris, for better or for worse, a faint memory in the vast computing consciousness of the Singularity. We simply can’t imagine anything beyond this.
Herndon’s work seems to say: Yes; and that’s what it is to work at the extreme edge of human imagination. You only know for sure that you’re at the edge if you can’t imagine what’s over it.
AI is going to rearrange a lot of the economy; it may indeed be coming for your job. But art itself is not in peril; the wheel of history is not grinding to a halt. As in Biederman’s day, all we can do is search the horizons. We don’t even need faith to understand that we’ll have a new horizon when we get to this one. If there are any axioms of human history, surely this is one.
Thanks for reading. I feel like the plural of “axiom” should be “axia,” and I googled around to confirm that it is indeed “axioms” but made the happy discovery that “axia” has something to do with worth and value in ancient Greek. That’s a real five-dollar word right there. As always, send your complaints about all that I have overlooked to
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, 1980.
You can play with it here. I typed in “Batman eating tacos” because it is Taco Tuesday and I am always thinking about Batman, and I was quite impressed with the results.
The Ezra Klein Show, “‘Artificial Intelligence’? No, Collective Intelligence,” transcript here.