[ben_w]

Mm. Possibly, but not necessarily.

I have a suspicion that art is to humans as fancy tails are to peacocks: the difficulty is the point.

I believe this is why we have art galleries proudly displaying oil paintings of fruit bowls, but don't do this for random food snapshots.

It's also why photographs as a category were initially dismissed (in an era that had come to praise extreme realism in paintings), but when photographers went on long trips to visit unusual places, people, and events, those photographs suddenly did count as art.

Bit of overlap between arts and knowledge shown by the wiktionary entry for the Latin "ars", so this can be extended to the way Socrates didn't like writing, and the desire for hand-made foods and durable goods over mass produced foods and products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

[dale_glass]

> I believe this is why we have art galleries proudly displaying oil paintings of fruit bowls, but don't do this for random food snapshots.

We also have them for social/historical reasons. A museum usually isn't built around "best stuff humanity has to offer", but has some sort of more complicated angle.

Eg, a reason why you may have a fruit bowl hanging on the wall is that this particular artist has been influential, and they just happened to paint a fruit bowl. Maybe thousands of artists of the era painted fruit bowls, and maybe a dozen of those are technically more impressive, but this is the guy that got talked about a lot, or started a movement, or such, so it's this guy's bowl we're going to go with.

Museums can have many themes. They may showcase a particular artist, a particular movement, a particular theme, a particular period in time. You can build a museum of nothing but paintings of cats if you wanted to.

[vonjuice]

We have art galleries displaying things like empty canvases or toilet bowls that make a statement, it's definitely not about difficulty. The fact is that the debate about what art is is part of what makes art art, it escapes definition because part of the spirit of art is rebelling against definition.

[AlecSchueler]

> We have art galleries displaying things like empty canvases or toilet bowls that make a statement, it's definitely not about difficulty

You're under selling the difficulty of using a toilet bowl to make a convincing statement.

[thatcat]

It's a water fountain

[AlecSchueler]

That one was done over a hundred years ago, sadly. The public wasn't original and topical statements for every new opening.

[ben_w]

Mm.

I'm 50-50 split on thinking I regard that kind of art as a vehicle for tax evasion, vs. thinking the "difficulty" is the money wasted on it (which is still Veblen "look at me I'm rich I can waste money on something pointless").

[kzrdude]

We can't judge all of the art sphere just from the worst examples. Think of people who judge software by our worst examples (crypto scams, I don't know)?

[danielbln]

Why is a simple modern art piece necessarily one of the worst and examples?

[lancesells]

> art galleries displaying things like empty canvases or toilet bowls

This is so far from the norm and feels like a television lens version of artists and art galleries. Yes, Duchamp used a toilet bowl in 1917 as art which was over 100 year ago. This is known because no one had done it before and presented an everyday object as art. This is 106 years old but still referred to so you can guess it was a big deal.

My suggestion is to visit a modern art museum in a larger city and you'll see this kind of "easy bullshit art as a statement" doesn't really exist.

https://www.tate.org.uk https://www.hauserwirth.com https://www.moma.org https://www.davidzwirner.com https://gagosian.com

[vonjuice]

I have visited modern art museums. I have seen similar "low effort" pieces among a wide catalogue of high effort ones. It is evident that real artists are very prolific and are not lazy or anything like that, that was not implying that, I don't even think of it as bullshit.

My example was more about how the appearance of effort is not necessary for the viewer. Many people can look at abstract paintings and say "this is bullshit, my kid could do that!", and yet many people can also look at it and recognize beauty, and it's not because the latter group sees the piece as more effort, they're just able to parse the language of the piece better (imo).

[pawelmurias]

Those are the old school NFTs, the AI tools are for the skillfull kind of art.

[OCASMv2]

That view of art ended over a century ago with the modernist (mediocrist) movements.

Nowadays art is whatever one wants it to be (or not to be). It's just a word people use to enhance the social perception of whatever manmade creation they like.

[amelius]

> the difficulty is the point

Ok, so what does the next level of "difficult" look like?

[dale_glass]

It's an interesting question, because AI breaks the intuitiveness of this dramatically.

You can look at say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_at_Cana and quickly get that yup, this took a whole lot of time and effort.

But AI has nothing like that. Some things that look like an awful lot of work it spits out with ease, some things that sound simple can take a whole lot of fiddling.

Like the other day I was playing with DALLE3, and for whatever reason it didn't want to place things on a table.

[Dioxide2119]

In the same way that using a limited medium like some oil paints, paintbrushes, and canvas to create images = the art of painting, there will become the art of hacking / abusing / advanced prompt engineering / pushing AI to do things that are close to or at its limits of capabilities.

A: Oh so your LLM generated an image of a spaceship cockpit, so what?

B: So what? This LLM was trained on nothing but tax records from 1929!

A: :o amazing!

So AI artists do not necessarily equal 'creatives who render images using AI tooling', they may instead be 'creatives who tease out novel outputs from AIs' or something like that.

Then again, this is suspiciously close to a 'what is art' conversation, so i'll stop here.

[ben_w]

> B: So what? This LLM was trained on nothing but tax records from 1929!

I recon a sufficiently advanced AI could learn enough to do that from only that training data and some appropriate prompting.

[ben_w]

Right now, I'd guess engineering and growing custom life forms, like The Thought Emporium is doing. Not sure how long that will last for.