A true story you probably heard before is a banana which was taped to a wall sold for $120,000. Later, someone ate it and the “artist” called that “a performance,” who then replaced the banana. This sold, too, I believe for 150K. This absurdity and mockery of craft is the destination our deeply unserious clown world has taken us. You should care about this, if you care about creativity at all, lest we end up even further down the path of our dystopian spectacle reality.
When you follow the postmodern art philosophy to its logical conclusion, there’s a final nihilistic place you’re left, marooned alone. It’s somewhere with no beauty, no craft, no meaning, only empty spectacle someone put a price tag on to trick you into thinking something meaningless is legitimate. It’s all just a big con (sometimes for tax purposes) but you, fellow citizen, are still the mark.
The grift says that “everything can be art.” But once you’ve decided everything qualifies, what you’ve actually decided is nothing does, and when you accept this you are indistinguishable from a nihilist (postmodernists are mostly nihilistic, empty humans btw). Collapsing the distinction between someone who spent 10 years mastering a form of painting and someone who taped a banana to a wall because somewhere in your liberal education you were fed some bad propaganda, which should be more questioned. Really what has happened here is the elimination of standards, which is the removal of the only real mechanism by which excellence can exist at all. Of course this all came to light during the “everyone gets a trophy” generation who were endlessly promoted “equality” and “everyone is exactly the same.”
But I flatly reject all this, and find such premises as ‘beauty is subjective’ as complete hogwash. Yes, taste varies, but that’s not remotely close to the same thing as saying all output is equal, and anyone saying otherwise knows this deep down even if they won’t admit it publicly. There are objective standards of beauty, and if you don’t accept this it’s more likely you’ve been demoralized than anything else. This is the same logic that makes every opinion equally valid, every choice the same level of worthy, and thinking every culture is worth the same respect (including ones which suppress women’s rights and basic freedom, sorry these are wrong too). The moral relativism is honestly all so tiresome, I find it fairly gaslighty as it’s asking you to ignore core truths that allowed Western civilization to exist in the first place. This is the same reason you see people supporting strange things.
Want to know why we get “enshittification” in our creative sectors? This is the end result of our fast/cheap culture that spent decades optimizing for averages, and managing out anything or anyone interesting. Average products for average people should apply to Tupperware, but our creative sectors should be better, and we should demand it. It’s also interesting how there’s so much discourse around “taste,” but you see almost no one able to make any real aesthetic choices anywhere in popular culture.
AI has unintentionally taken this philosophy to its logical endpoint. Type a prompt and receive an image, even an entire novel or an album. And NPCs who couldn’t tell the difference between a fast food and gourmet burger have decided this is “making art.” But only psychopaths would put up the equivalent of a picture frame from Target with the stock photography in it on their wall. No normal person actually does this. Prompting is essentially the same, it’s stock photo generation, not a creative skill in any meaningful sense, neither is Googling for information to do research by itself. Fake skills, fake competency. It’s fine for memes, content designed to be created and consumed in a day. But if that’s your whole life, it’s just kind of sad and empty.
Here’s another simple analogy to help further, I’m pretty sure I’ve said this in a past post about AI somewhere: you are not a furniture builder because you assembled some IKEA furniture. It’s fine if you do this by the way, many people do. But imagine someone who did this going around telling people they build furniture, or worse, arguing IKEA assembly is “the future of all furniture making,” that the craftsman in his workshop is doing the same thing just slower. The craftsman would say: why not build something unique yourself? And the IKEA person, if they had any self-awareness at all, would see this as a challenge to progress their skills further, instead of mindlessly doing more of the same, faster. Can you tell the difference yet, anon? And to add, this obsession with speed is antithetical to doing anything meaningful.
Same is true of the banana artist, the AI prompter, and every relativist who’s been praying at the alter of “everything is valid.” You can call it art, you can price it at $120,000 (and if you can get someone to pay, good for you). But the person who actually made something via years of sacrifice and created something that couldn’t exist without their specific years of effort is not playing the same game at all.
And remember, having standards is not a form of “gatekeeping.” They’re how excellence comes to exist. Abandon them and you get a world of endlessly produced, instantly forgettable work and empty, sad humans who never sharpen themselves enough to build anything memorable that lasts the test of time. You really have to do this first to understand where automation and AI could actually be useful. I’m confident you’ll see this eventually, even if you don’t get it today.
There’s this tea I drink and the bags have this little fortune cookie thing, and I often get the one that says, “the difference between a flower and a weed is a judgment”. It annoys me every time lol.
Like the difference between a beautiful cathedral and a concrete building with four walls is a judgment.
As you say, taste does vary, and that is a good thing. But most people who are in tune with the world in the right ways are able to recognize universal beauty when they see it!
I find myself agreeing with parts of this but also wanting to challenge parts of it, and whilst I don't think my thoughts are fully clarified even to myself yet, the crux of my challenge is that how art makes an individual feel has little to do with the time spent, effort or even the technical ability of the artist, generally because you are not aware of it (this is obviously variable depending on the field or medium) and if you then become aware of those things, it neither validates nor invalidates your relationship to it.
Of course, the extreme events mentioned (the banana art, et al) are largely performative and sit at the very end of this scale. But the magical thing about much art is the subjectivity, and if something genuinely invokes feeling to you and moves you, then you largely aren't reacting to the amount of technical skill involved, which is why many people would rather listen to The Beatles and Nirvana as opposed to say, virtuosos with extreme technical ability like Yngwie Malmsteen or Steve Vai.