Is Art Gone?
Intrigued with the exhibit of AI art on display at Waterstreet Studios I returned on Saturday morning to have a measured look at the pieces offered for appreciation. I took my time, pausing before each work to absorb movement offered by the artist. A few photographs were taken.
Artificial Intelligence is in it’s infancy. I suspect AI bots already influence us, and will soon develop into a wave of tools that we’ve not imagined before. My sense is this is something which we must understand from scratch… Hang on!
My sense of the AI art on display at the gallery is captured by these lines penned by Jean Baudrillard
…the soul of Art
– Art as adventure,
Art with its power of illusion,
its capacity for negating reality,
for setting up an ’other scene’ in opposition to reality,
where things obey a higher set of rules,
a transcendent figure in which beings, like line and color on a canvas,
are apt to lose their meaning, to extend themselves
beyond their own raison d’être,
and in the urgent process of seduction,
to rediscover their own ideal form
(even though this form may be that of their own destruction)
— in this sense,
Art is gone.
–excerpt The Transparency of Evil, essay on Transaesthetics by Jean Baudrillard pub. 1990
