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When I was working as an editorial illustrator, the goal was to have a distinctive trademark visual style, so that when art directors commissioned something, th

When I was working as an editorial illustrator, the goal was to have a distinctive trademark visual style, so that when art directors commissioned something, they had a reasonable idea of what they could expect to get. If they wanted something in a different style, they would find an illustrator who specializes in it and hire them. Last week I was telling my artist friends that, however upsetting this technology is, the game has changed. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. I realized last night however that that is incorrect. Whatever "genie" artists have spent their lifetimes nurturing can now trivially be captured and confined to a bottle.

Slow_Hand 4y ago
You're right that the game has changed and I think it's crucial for illustrators (but not necessarily artists) to realize that and account accordingly. The birth of photography did not mean the end of painting, but it did mean that certain roles for painters no longer had as much value. Portraiture mostly became the domain of the photographer and photo-realism became more trivial. Painting as an art form shifted gears into greater and greater abstraction with less emphasis on realistic representation. I think a good example of that shift is the painter Mark Tansey. His paintings, while photo-realistic, don't derive their value from their resemblance to the real world. Instead their interest lies in their allegorical representation of people and places. Their value lies in the curation of ideas and the story, concept, or idea that they convey. For now - even in the age of AI generated images - such artistic allegory is still out of reach of technology. The value still lies in the human curation of symbols and ideas. https://www.thebroad.org/art/mark-tansey/achilles-and-tortoise https://www.thebroad.org/art/mark-tansey/achilles-and-tortoi...

Slow_Hand 4y ago

You're right that the game has changed and I think it's crucial for illustrators (but not necessarily artists) to realize that and account accordingly. The birth of photography did not mean the end of painting, but it did mean that certain roles for painters no longer had as much value. Portraiture mostly became the domain of the photographer and photo-realism became more trivial. Painting as an art form shifted gears into greater and greater abstraction with less emphasis on realistic representation. I think a good example of that shift is the painter Mark Tansey. His paintings, while photo-realistic, don't derive their value from their resemblance to the real world. Instead their interest lies in their allegorical representation of people and places. Their value lies in the curation of ideas and the story, concept, or idea that they convey. For now - even in the age of AI generated images - such artistic allegory is still out of reach of technology. The value still lies in the human curation of symbols and ideas. https://www.thebroad.org/art/mark-tansey/achilles-and-tortoise https://www.thebroad.org/art/mark-tansey/achilles-and-tortoi...