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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Any art created using Photoshop was low status

I'm not a great art connaisseur, but it seems to me this is still the case? If I go to my local museum almost all work on display is created from real materials, and that includes modern and contemporary art.

You might say that musea favor physical art in general (you don't need to go outside to view digital art, after all), but they do still exhibit photos and even film snippets (e.g. on a projection screen), but these are invariably recorded in the real physical world, not purely digital creations. And especially with photos, photoshopping them seems to detract from their artistic value, not add to it.

There is also stuff like Damien Hirst's spot paintings most of which are just colored circles painted on a white canvas. You could almost auto-generate them. Hirst doesn't even paint them himself; he has nameless employees that do it for him. So the artistic merit of these paintings seems to be in the idea. Yet is there any doubt that if Hirst had released these paintings as a collection of PNG files, nobody would have been impressed?

I can only conclude that digital art still very much doesn't “count”, and I expect that AI-generated “art” (which in its current form is not very original) will remain similarly low-status.

Yet is there any doubt that if Hirst had released these paintings as a collection of PNG files, nobody would have been impressed?

I would agree with you except one thing... What about NFTs?

I once visited (unintentionally) exhibition of art generated with a computer, some pictures even had a source code

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