Is there an audience for this point of view? I don’t know. Owning art is unscientific, unverified, a leap of faith since none of its theories have to date been clinically tested. OA stands in opposition to the current art establishment as exclusionary and aloof, with velvet rope access, and shoulder to shoulder with a lot of people who have never thought much about art, didn’t think it applied to them, and who don’t much seem to care. It’s an awkward place to start.
Still society is in dynamic turmoil, tooling around on a revolutionary roundabout, and no one sure what street we drive out on. The economic calamity about a decade back had its sobering effect on the ‘just give me more’ mentality, and engendered reevaluations all around. Increasingly our lives are populated by robots replicated by other robots, turns out almost everything is soluble in digital, and cars are going to drive themselves. We be at a crossroads.
There’s a pile of humanity in art. As a fact it’s a refuge. In most other areas there’s nothing you can do a bot can’t do better. They can drive a train better than a sleepy engineer, prepare dinner without burning anything, even let you win at chess, but they can’t make art. They were manufactured, have no life experience, and it would never occur to them to make art. Now it is the case that a computer can be programed to make stuff that looks like art, just as occasionally humans will do this just to make money, but creating actual art is not among their vast capabilities.
So, let’s suppose ordinary folks somehow start being curious about art, perhaps as a result of huge shifts in societal perspective beyond their awareness the way they sometimes do. If they once discover the potency of art to alter and aerate their low-oxygen living spaces, see in it a magnet for memories and a unique signifier of home, and come to think of art a stable and enduring object worthy of respect, something singular from a living hand, then maybe they’ll want to buy some and take it home. They are the phantom audience, the potential avid readers of my encouragement and exhortations but not quite ready, behind a partition, although in the end it won’t matter. Art will change as people change their minds, and it will be art that helps them think those new thoughts.
Still society is in dynamic turmoil, tooling around on a revolutionary roundabout, and no one sure what street we drive out on. The economic calamity about a decade back had its sobering effect on the ‘just give me more’ mentality, and engendered reevaluations all around. Increasingly our lives are populated by robots replicated by other robots, turns out almost everything is soluble in digital, and cars are going to drive themselves. We be at a crossroads.
There’s a pile of humanity in art. As a fact it’s a refuge. In most other areas there’s nothing you can do a bot can’t do better. They can drive a train better than a sleepy engineer, prepare dinner without burning anything, even let you win at chess, but they can’t make art. They were manufactured, have no life experience, and it would never occur to them to make art. Now it is the case that a computer can be programed to make stuff that looks like art, just as occasionally humans will do this just to make money, but creating actual art is not among their vast capabilities.
So, let’s suppose ordinary folks somehow start being curious about art, perhaps as a result of huge shifts in societal perspective beyond their awareness the way they sometimes do. If they once discover the potency of art to alter and aerate their low-oxygen living spaces, see in it a magnet for memories and a unique signifier of home, and come to think of art a stable and enduring object worthy of respect, something singular from a living hand, then maybe they’ll want to buy some and take it home. They are the phantom audience, the potential avid readers of my encouragement and exhortations but not quite ready, behind a partition, although in the end it won’t matter. Art will change as people change their minds, and it will be art that helps them think those new thoughts.
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