Words from degas — a quick note to anchor this piece for readers.
Words from degas: Quick notes
“Without a heart, can one not be an artist?” – Edgar Degas
I heard this quote in Sebastian Smee’s book The Art of Rivalry. It was in the context of Degas’s reputation for being a misogynist and having an aversion to love and marriage. He said and wrote things that seemed to show at least some sentimentality and softness, including the quote above, and an anecdote about when he and Monet argued about who cared for Berthe Morisot more as they organized a retrospective after her death. I wrote the quote in my Commonplace Notebook for future reference.
AI seems to come up in conversation with more and more regularity, especially when it comes to creative work. Will AI make artists, writers, filmmakers, designers, and the like obsolete?
One of my commission clients sent me an AI-produced “oil painting” of her dog, and I have to admit, it was a pretty impressive facsimile of the real thing. The client still commissioned me to paint a portrait of her dog because I could produce something in actual oil paints, a one-of-a-kind original that was signed by the artist, and could be framed. AI, as of yet, can’t do that. It will give artists competition in printmaking, but it can’t yet replace a genuine original oil painting.
The main art-making ingredient AI is missing, though, is the fallible, imperfect, complex, utterly unique, God-created human heart. As Degas put it, without a heart, can one not be an artist? Without heart involved, is it even art? Or just a computation that spits out an art-like image?
An AI-generated digital imitation of an oil painting can be cranked out in a few seconds. There is no artist’s point of view behind it. A thousand tiny decisions about the brushes and pigments used, the colors mixed on the palette, how the paint is laid down, and how the lines are interpreted weren’t made. There hasn’t been a struggle to grow, learn, and discover an artistic voice. There is no artist to leave their fingerprints. (And there isn’t a rogue cat hair from the studio cats stuck in the paint.) All of the things that make art the special thing that it is are absent.
I’m not anti-AI, but I am pro-human creativity, innovation, and art. I am in favor of art being made by human hands, not just for the end result, but for what it does in the artist. Art doesn’t just require heart, but it’s good for the heart.
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