3 ms·

No, two artists are the same. As an artist, if I’m not constantly pushing the boundaries of how I’m expressing myself via media then I’m just telling the audie

No, two artists are the same. As an artist, if I’m not constantly pushing the boundaries of how I’m expressing myself via media then I’m just telling the audience the same thing over and over. Im not actually changing as an artist, I’m simply producing the thing regularly that is expected of me. This is 99% of professional art you find your style and then you do that over and over for money so that you can survive in a way that you like. If you did this with a Thomas Kincaid, it would be trivially easy because Thomas Kincaid has built his entire portfolio around a very specific type of art that does a very, very specific type of thing. Similar for Kahinde Wiley On the flipside you’re not going to be able to reproduce something from Duchamp or Picasso - their styles changed because they as individuals in the world changed, and they had to change their approach in demonstrating how they interact with the world. I totally can understand the perspective from professional artists who have developed a style and capability to produce something that they feel comfortable with and live on that we could sit here and debate about the aim of Art or otherwise, but the reality is, if the core of what you do is reproducible because you have focused on commoditizing your medium or expression type (such that it is so recognizable immediately by any human - eg Kincaid) Then you should not be surprised if your limited vocabulary is fairly easy to replace The art masters cannot be replaced, you cannot predict what they’re going to do next because they change the rules entirely. This is how we know a great artist from a mediocre artist.

ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
> The art masters cannot be replaced, you cannot predict what they’re going to do next because they change the rules entirely. This is how we know a great artist from a mediocre artist. I agree that in principle the best working artists are those who know how to create, modulate and discard artistic languages over time -- creating and abandoning rules for sequences of work -- but AI systems can clearly be unethically trained to mimic art in those styles, and there are many living artists (or estates of recently departed artists, supporting their families) whose incomes are defined by some periods of their lives where they worked a particular set of rules in a way that became definitive. So it's not enough to say that great artists won't be affected because they change the rules all the time. Most of them will still be ruined by this, because as soon as there's enough work in the new style it can be stolen.
- jsheard 2y ago
  > because as soon as there's enough work in the new style it can be stolen. This is where the oft-cited comparison to previous advances like the camera breaks down - AI has an ongoing parasitic relationship with the mediums it is displacing. The camera doesn't need a thousand photorealistic paintings of a new subject to be made before it can capture that subject going forward. AI is an unprecedented situation, as far as I can tell, where a new artistic medium greatly de-values prior ones while also being reliant on those other mediums continuing to be used at scale in order to avoid stagnating.
  - ganzuul 2y ago
    This week I completed a sculpture which I intentionally made to be non-photographable by choosing lighting and materials which showed off high reflectivity and high chroma so that screens would not be able to reproduce it. To the human senses it is something that really steals your attention, perhaps because we have becomes so used to the constraints of our reproduction technology and this is not that. The Prussian blue pigment sucks you into the astral realm and the gold is hypermodern reference to the Apollo program. It started a lot of conversations. The work is a critique of photography, prints and screens and all of postmodernism. It also is also a warning about being satisfied with mediocrity.
    - astrange 2y ago
      I always find it philosophically entertaining when I see a material in real life that can't be photographed with a phone like this. (Of course that includes gold foil, mirrors, blue LED concert lights, the sun, the moon… so, pretty common.) But try making one that can't be videoed or 3D scanned with Polycam.
  - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
    I agree wholeheartedly. As a photographer I am shocked to see other photographers who are AI proponents making the comparison to the beginning of the photography era. (Though it's usually the very bad photographers or those who haven't actually done any reading about the impact of photography on art who make this point) Art's one hope to avoid this parasitism is to move back into the realms of the purely physical, I think (and as a photographer that includes me).
BadHumans 2y ago
At a certain point, art sells because of the artist not the art. Picasso's sell because they are Picasso's. An artist starts by creating a style that separates them from the pack but eventually turn into a brand that sells because they artwork is from that artist. For people that successfully are able to turn into a brand, great, but I feel new artist are going to be heavily kneecapped by AI.
zephyrthenoble 2y ago
You are presenting opinion as objective fact for a subjective medium, which is surprising to hear from an artist. This argument, and this article, are not about the "great masters" but about amateur and professional artists who find their efforts easily reproduced and outproduced by AI. These people are not protected by "This is a REAL Picasso" and some of them could lose their financial security because of it. The article indicates that style can be copied in as few as 20 to 30 images. Could you imagine being an artist who is attempting to gain notoriety, publishing low quality pngs of 20 of their works for their Etsy store, and then someone trains a LoRa on that and profits off of your images? Hundreds of hours of time in an attempt to start your art career, to have it duplicated in seconds by computer. You have no time to grow as an artist, because your required contribution to the data set has already been made.
- AndrewKemendo 2y ago
  My takeaway is that as with many of the artists, they are reacting to the philosophical no mans land that cheap computer reproduction is putting them into...From TFA: >As I’m contemplating this Cronenberg-like transformation of the image, I can’t help to be struck by the triviality of my own work. There’s something confronting in facing a computational doppelgänger, something akin to the uncanny valley. I’m surprised at how much this affects me, even though my whole schtick is to be reflexive and critical about style, what surprises me the most is that even though the output if “objectively” a failure1, I see myself in it. But maybe what I see in the generation, what I find actually disturbing, is the part of my work that has already been objectified and commodified, the parts of my style I spent years making digestible for clients, consistent for social media, and reproducible for easy production. This feeling is not present in artists who are not commercial artists or otherwise produce VOLUMES of similar work - because it is functionally impossible Why? Again, as with picasso et al... they are performing the work of an artist. Namely it is a lifetime oeuvre - not a single period - that defines an artist. This is my point, and you can disagree, most commercial artists are not producing art, they are designing propaganda for corporations. It takes artistic skill, but it's not what I would consider relevant for the author The author sits at the intersection of capitalism and art - that you can produce designs for money repeatedly and so predictably as to be identically imitated is proof enough for me Nobody can reproduce or copy my art because it's PHYSICAL and hanging on my (and many others' including our own jacquesm) wall. They can try, but forgeries are very hard to do.
HiroshiSan 2y ago
Goodluck replicating and replacing a leyendecker or a Gibson or a Rockwell. Getting to that level of technical proficiency is more than just settling into a style.
freetinker 2y ago
I’m no artist, but I’m not sure I agree. As an example, Cubism (Picasso) or stuff by Pollack (arguably another ‘great’) seems quite distinct and therefore reproducible – at least visually if not physically (paint texture, etc.).
micromacrofoot 2y ago
what if ai is the next great master
- AndrewKemendo 2y ago
  Then I believe that’s quite the feat of engineering and we should all rejoice in the birth of AGI

ecjhdnc2025 2y ago

> The art masters cannot be replaced, you cannot predict what they’re going to do next because they change the rules entirely. This is how we know a great artist from a mediocre artist. I agree that in principle the best working artists are those who know how to create, modulate and discard artistic languages over time -- creating and abandoning rules for sequences of work -- but AI systems can clearly be unethically trained to mimic art in those styles, and there are many living artists (or estates of recently departed artists, supporting their families) whose incomes are defined by some periods of their lives where they worked a particular set of rules in a way that became definitive. So it's not enough to say that great artists won't be affected because they change the rules all the time. Most of them will still be ruined by this, because as soon as there's enough work in the new style it can be stolen.

jsheard 2y ago
> because as soon as there's enough work in the new style it can be stolen. This is where the oft-cited comparison to previous advances like the camera breaks down - AI has an ongoing parasitic relationship with the mediums it is displacing. The camera doesn't need a thousand photorealistic paintings of a new subject to be made before it can capture that subject going forward. AI is an unprecedented situation, as far as I can tell, where a new artistic medium greatly de-values prior ones while also being reliant on those other mediums continuing to be used at scale in order to avoid stagnating.
- ganzuul 2y ago
  This week I completed a sculpture which I intentionally made to be non-photographable by choosing lighting and materials which showed off high reflectivity and high chroma so that screens would not be able to reproduce it. To the human senses it is something that really steals your attention, perhaps because we have becomes so used to the constraints of our reproduction technology and this is not that. The Prussian blue pigment sucks you into the astral realm and the gold is hypermodern reference to the Apollo program. It started a lot of conversations. The work is a critique of photography, prints and screens and all of postmodernism. It also is also a warning about being satisfied with mediocrity.
  - astrange 2y ago
    I always find it philosophically entertaining when I see a material in real life that can't be photographed with a phone like this. (Of course that includes gold foil, mirrors, blue LED concert lights, the sun, the moon… so, pretty common.) But try making one that can't be videoed or 3D scanned with Polycam.
- ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly. As a photographer I am shocked to see other photographers who are AI proponents making the comparison to the beginning of the photography era. (Though it's usually the very bad photographers or those who haven't actually done any reading about the impact of photography on art who make this point) Art's one hope to avoid this parasitism is to move back into the realms of the purely physical, I think (and as a photographer that includes me).

BadHumans 2y ago

At a certain point, art sells because of the artist not the art. Picasso's sell because they are Picasso's. An artist starts by creating a style that separates them from the pack but eventually turn into a brand that sells because they artwork is from that artist. For people that successfully are able to turn into a brand, great, but I feel new artist are going to be heavily kneecapped by AI.

zephyrthenoble 2y ago

You are presenting opinion as objective fact for a subjective medium, which is surprising to hear from an artist. This argument, and this article, are not about the "great masters" but about amateur and professional artists who find their efforts easily reproduced and outproduced by AI. These people are not protected by "This is a REAL Picasso" and some of them could lose their financial security because of it. The article indicates that style can be copied in as few as 20 to 30 images. Could you imagine being an artist who is attempting to gain notoriety, publishing low quality pngs of 20 of their works for their Etsy store, and then someone trains a LoRa on that and profits off of your images? Hundreds of hours of time in an attempt to start your art career, to have it duplicated in seconds by computer. You have no time to grow as an artist, because your required contribution to the data set has already been made.

AndrewKemendo 2y ago
My takeaway is that as with many of the artists, they are reacting to the philosophical no mans land that cheap computer reproduction is putting them into...From TFA: >As I’m contemplating this Cronenberg-like transformation of the image, I can’t help to be struck by the triviality of my own work. There’s something confronting in facing a computational doppelgänger, something akin to the uncanny valley. I’m surprised at how much this affects me, even though my whole schtick is to be reflexive and critical about style, what surprises me the most is that even though the output if “objectively” a failure1, I see myself in it. But maybe what I see in the generation, what I find actually disturbing, is the part of my work that has already been objectified and commodified, the parts of my style I spent years making digestible for clients, consistent for social media, and reproducible for easy production. This feeling is not present in artists who are not commercial artists or otherwise produce VOLUMES of similar work - because it is functionally impossible Why? Again, as with picasso et al... they are performing the work of an artist. Namely it is a lifetime oeuvre - not a single period - that defines an artist. This is my point, and you can disagree, most commercial artists are not producing art, they are designing propaganda for corporations. It takes artistic skill, but it's not what I would consider relevant for the author The author sits at the intersection of capitalism and art - that you can produce designs for money repeatedly and so predictably as to be identically imitated is proof enough for me Nobody can reproduce or copy my art because it's PHYSICAL and hanging on my (and many others' including our own jacquesm) wall. They can try, but forgeries are very hard to do.

HiroshiSan 2y ago

Goodluck replicating and replacing a leyendecker or a Gibson or a Rockwell. Getting to that level of technical proficiency is more than just settling into a style.

freetinker 2y ago

I’m no artist, but I’m not sure I agree. As an example, Cubism (Picasso) or stuff by Pollack (arguably another ‘great’) seems quite distinct and therefore reproducible – at least visually if not physically (paint texture, etc.).

micromacrofoot 2y ago

what if ai is the next great master

AndrewKemendo 2y ago
Then I believe that’s quite the feat of engineering and we should all rejoice in the birth of AGI