What does it matter if I skip a single, socially lubricating word when I’m talking to a massive, barely competent LLM housed in the cloud? I might be saying words, but nobody’s ears are really listening to what I’m saying. If we’re being honest about this, who cares?, especially considering that I’m only speaking to a digital assistant. Read on, because I believe it means a lot, and I’ll explain why.
Ideas are no longer bound by time and space and opportunity. In fact, since you’re likely reading this on a hand-held device, you’re intimately aware of just how many ideas are pulling at your attention right now. Too many, most likely. We must make choices.
Ordinary things are everywhere. The benches, the goofy elephant picture, the water fountain, even the tropical leaves in all directions were not in themselves the source of inspiration. Inspiration comes from following through with goals. It comes from doing the work. It comes from noticing events of the day, the chaos of monkeys howling in the trees, the acrid tang of a poorly maintained pick-up truck’s exhaust, the sweet burst of a freshly picked orange.
With everyone clicking and posting photos all day long with their cell phones, the challenge of finding interesting photographs isn’t especially hard. I’m not worried about finding a singular giraffe image, or any other easily identifiable asset that I may need for a quick turnaround production. I worry for reasons that lurk beneath the surface like shallow rocks at the shoreline.
Trips to a ball park and trips to a museum require visitors to be physically present. In the same way as watching a game on television, seeing a painting on a screen is a wholly different experience from seeing it in real life.
So many things are shot on various kinds of virtual sets that actors and directors less frequently get to fully steep in a sense of place. That doesn’t mean modern creative teams can’t do good work; they clearly can. But over time, I think there’s something eroded in the foundations of culture every time a prop or a throne room gets inserted electronically by work done in a quiet computer lab isolated from the living, breathing crew.
No matter what Election Day may bring —and I’m conscious that on whatever date you may be reading there will likely remain massive uncertainties ahead — it would be irresponsible to pretend that the travails of the day can just be ignored. They cannot be ignored. Artists especially cannot avert their eyes, even as the balm of creative work promises a cloak of comparative purpose, or at least meaningful pursuit. To pretend that our collective, human induced problems are not substantial would be to assert an abdication of civic engagement.
A culture capable of even casually reading anything — car magazines, gossip magazines, music magazines, newspapers— meant its citizens were capable of simply focusing on something—anything—for more than a fleeting moment, by which I mean minutes not seconds.
If you simply want to get a job done, you can choose to metaphorically phone it in or use some sort of pre-existing template. Of course, you can’t be surprised if nobody comes back to you for repeat business, or if your name and your work gets forgotten amid the swirling sands of time. Mediocrity rarely deserves much attention.
Yes, there were missteps. Yes, there were some ill considered choices, aesthetically, technically, and narratively. I rolled my eyes at a few of them with amusement and let most of them roll off my back at the same time. But ultimately I must applaud vigorously. With the risks of spicy big art being reduced by commercial tendencies into a tasteless pablum, this particular show asked a global audience to stretch in so many exciting and invigorating ways.
This scrap of paper and ink captures my imagination. Here’s an encapsulation of an ordinary moment, apparently compiled in haste or in an incremental process of additive notation. Its relative vacuity describes the majority of our lives, the big masses of interstitial goo that hold our more substantial bones together.
Free spirits do not always seek more choices. Many free spirits will be perfectly content to eat the same plain yogurt and strawberries for breakfast most every day for the rest of their lives.
I’m not opposed to modernity, or the soul of a new machine. I fully embrace the inevitable process where innovation forces new ways of working that are destined to replace older modes. My specific concern is that the embrace of AI’s siren promise for innovation seems uncaring about its implications while simultaneously acting as a transformational agent.
Talent alone is like simply having access to cool tools: access without practice does not independently confer greatness. Discipline and repeated effort are much more vital, and those are traits that most people are unwilling to invest in adequate measure to rise above the masses.
As a dichotomy, tools matter and tools don’t matter at the same time. Give a great photographer a cheap disposable film camera you can still buy at the drug store (I love ‘em, actually) and you’re likely going to get something interesting. Give my neighbor a camera bag filled with expensive gear, and you’re going to get backlit cat photos on the windowsill…and a bag full of expensive gear.
Endless pursuit of the perfect tool with a perfected set of skills can get in the way of actually doing good work. Make something, and your skills will automatically improve simply by using them. Constant evaluation of artistic processes other people may have employed can similarly impede our ability to actually see what those artists are trying to do creatively.
The thing about artwork is that while expertise can add meaningful substance to dialogue, even the uninitiated can be moved to feel something or get engaged. Art can influence us even if we’re not an expert. This is different than opinions about science or engineering or foreign policy, where uninformed declarations can actually be counter-productive. I don’t want to listen to an uninformed opinion about whether bridges should be inspected for safety. I want to be able to count on experts who can properly evaluate the safety of bridges.
A culture built of people invested in creative enterprise is a culture that cares about building connections. Creative expressions almost always reach out. By its very nature art does not insulate itself from interaction; it pursues interaction. In times like these, when identity politics and political polarization press our self-interested faces into hand-held screens, the value of shared experiences becomes not simply a luxury, but a campfire on a bitterly cold night.
Idealists may think that art in its various forms can function as remedy for chaos and pain. The rise of Dada in the early part of the 20th century suggests otherwise. The peril here is that when ideologues try to use creative work as a mechanism for political or social coercion, the work instantly corrupts itself. Political forces have always used creative enterprise as a means of influence, but in its most trenchant expressions, art speaks for itself as a reaction to the world much more evocatively than when it’s wielded as an instrument of power.
The number one thing we collectively did with our Promethean information powers was unhinge our jaws and try to swallow as much newly emerging social media as possible—voraciously, absent-mindedly, relentlessly. We became boa constrictors incapacitated by trying to swallow not simply a goat, but an elephant.