Computers can do everything better than we can, except for one thing. Computers can’t make art. Computers can make stuff that looks like art, but it isn’t the same. Thirty two thousand years ago somebody made pictures of the animals in their world deep in a cave. Somehow we moderns can look at the marks they made and recognize animals that no longer exist in Europe, animals that have been extinct for tens of thousands.
In the art they made to represent the world, they revealed themselves, and, as it turns out, made a statement that stands for us all. Wouldn’t phase a computer – its gut and heart wouldn’t feel a wave of deep nostalgia for such an eloquent expression of awareness from so far beyond our earliest recollections. A computer would have no clue why people stand in line to see Van Gogh, and be at a total loss to explain why they go back. Smarter, faster, harder to kill they may be, but they don’t know our history on this planet as carried in our genes, and they can’t create images which resonate in human consciousness. Only art and artists can do that.
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