| Steven Pinker talks about art in one of his books. I believe it’s in “How the Mind Works” he splits art in to two rough categories: “Museum Art” and “Motel Art”. Motel Art might be a picture of a flower or a field. Museum art is things like Picasso and Rembrandt - what can be in a museum changes over time. E.g, if I paint a Picasso that would be passable in a motel, but not a museum. Picasso has been done. Doing it again is not museum art. That is, motel art is pretty to look at. Museum art is culturally and historically defined. A less favorable interpretation is that museum art is an intellectual pissing contest, where curators and visitors can measure their dicks by how much they know about the art history that lead up to this work or how much that work challenges status quo. Making pretty motel art is a solved problem. Making museum art, the prettiness or the craftsmanship has for a long time been largely been irrelevant. It might help form the story around the piece, but it is the story around the piece that is important. That story may be ruined by the revelation that a given piece is produced by AI or it may be the center piece of the story that propels a piece into art history. We have already seen childrens paintings and monkeys paintings win museum curators favor. We’ve also seen toilets and feces been placed in museums and art history. I don’t see anything here changing. |
It feels like most of what I see is meaningless "motel art" or unaesthetic museum art (think of the artists who do things like bolting a urinal to a wall or abstract art that's basically a blank canvas with some lines).
I'm not saying that there isn't a place for avant garde art. I just think that the art community has lost its way in focusing on it almost exclusively.