It’s important to stay curious. Instead of asking, “Why should I care?” a more interesting question is, “How did the artist get here?” or “What unique experiences shaped this artist’s journey?”...
The least interesting critique you could make of a piece of art is, “I could have painted that.” […] The question is: would you have painted that?
If you are alive…you have artistic value. […] Saying “I could have painted that”…is just a criticism of yourself.
We’re being encouraged to abandon our natural creativity in the name of “convenience.” And that disregards the only prerequisite for something to be considered art: life.
It’s important to stay curious. Instead of asking, “Why should I care?” a more interesting question is, “How did the artist get here?” or “What unique experiences shaped this artist’s journey?” And if we can’t bring ourselves to lead with that sort of curious query, are we engaging in ~arts because we actually like art? Or because someone told us that we need “taste” to be perceived as cultured?
In the Museum, we are glimpsing a story. Art history is really the art, which is why many exhibits attempt to showcase the interplay between historical contemporaries. But its meaning is interactive and not deterministic. Formalism was never the end of history—the human experience necessarily envelops it.
Craft, and physical technique, is evidently computable and infinitely replicable within a relatively tight margin of error. And craft has always been admirable, but traditionally for at least two reasons: respect for the work, and respect for the artifact. Today, if any person can instantly create an artifact perfectly mimicking preceding artifacts by using the correct computational tools, then the focus of admiration shifts toward that earlier question: “What went into this?” Do we believe there’s value in interior experience, in laborious creation? Or just in output?
It’s interesting to read about LLMs solving mathematical conjectures. But the reason this is useful is not the display of mathematical characters in LaTeX, which already exists somewhere in the Library of Babel and could be generated randomly by monkeys with typewriters. Rather, we are excited by the knowledge of how these runes connect to a history of prior knowledge. Our theory of knowledge requires the interpreter to situate robot-articulated mathematics in context and independently evaluate the model’s chain of “thought” to understand the output’s correctness—in other words: methodology, a secretly creative experience, underlies verification. Artistic endeavors are parallel: the artifact is interesting when it’s part of something with memory, life, and rhythm to it.
I dance because anyone can do it and not despite it. The real joy of watching an expert performance is less the spectacle and more the knowledge that you are part of a community that supports such effort.
Disclaimer
The video responds to a specific critique about a specific kind of art in a specific context. The presenter is probably not thinking of you personally. It is not telling you that you must like the subjective form of any specific piece. Yes, you are permitted to dislike the strange modern sculpture in front of some building near you, and I probably agree with you that it’s ugly and I wouldn’t have installed it there either. I shared this video because it is simple, short, and has a nice message, which is that you should lean into your own creativity to escape self-minimizing platitudes like this.
It’s important to stay curious. Instead of asking, “Why should I care?” a more interesting question is, “How did the artist get here?” or “What unique experiences shaped this artist’s journey?” And if we can’t bring ourselves to lead with that sort of curious query, are we engaging in ~arts because we actually like art? Or because someone told us that we need “taste” to be perceived as cultured?
In the Museum, we are glimpsing a story. Art history is really the art, which is why many exhibits attempt to showcase the interplay between historical contemporaries. But its meaning is interactive and not deterministic. Formalism was never the end of history—the human experience necessarily envelops it.
Craft, and physical technique, is evidently computable and infinitely replicable within a relatively tight margin of error. And craft has always been admirable, but traditionally for at least two reasons: respect for the work, and respect for the artifact. Today, if any person can instantly create an artifact perfectly mimicking preceding artifacts by using the correct computational tools, then the focus of admiration shifts toward that earlier question: “What went into this?” Do we believe there’s value in interior experience, in laborious creation? Or just in output?
It’s interesting to read about LLMs solving mathematical conjectures. But the reason this is useful is not the display of mathematical characters in LaTeX, which already exists somewhere in the Library of Babel and could be generated randomly by monkeys with typewriters. Rather, we are excited by the knowledge of how these runes connect to a history of prior knowledge. Our theory of knowledge requires the interpreter to situate robot-articulated mathematics in context and independently evaluate the model’s chain of “thought” to understand the output’s correctness—in other words: methodology, a secretly creative experience, underlies verification. Artistic endeavors are parallel: the artifact is interesting when it’s part of something with memory, life, and rhythm to it.
I dance because anyone can do it and not despite it. The real joy of watching an expert performance is less the spectacle and more the knowledge that you are part of a community that supports such effort.
Disclaimer
The video responds to a specific critique about a specific kind of art in a specific context. The presenter is probably not thinking of you personally. It is not telling you that you must like the subjective form of any specific piece. Yes, you are permitted to dislike the strange modern sculpture in front of some building near you, and I probably agree with you that it’s ugly and I wouldn’t have installed it there either. I shared this video because it is simple, short, and has a nice message, which is that you should lean into your own creativity to escape self-minimizing platitudes like this.