From the outside, the last few years have seen a constant series of revolutions in the art world.
Since becoming widely known early last year, Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have priced works of digital art in the tens of millions of dollars. However, critics have described them as fundamentally worthless remnants that offer no substance to art patrons, with artists themselves complaining that their work has been stolen and stolen. “Made” Without Their Knowing.
At the same time, the web3-based metaverse is being touted as the new home of the art — Facebook is a multi-billion dollar digital environment whose own employees have failed to adopt its use.
And most recently, AI art (which allows you to create art based on text prompts or simply unfinished sketches) has been touted as an avenue to the “democratization” of art, making illustration cheap and affordable even for those with no technical ability. Now you can create quickly. Systems are trained on billions of existing art examples, often without the consent or compensation of the original creators.
So what do you get? Why has the art world been hit over and over again over the past year by changes purported to benefit artists? Why is it that innovations from the world of technology, which are thought to influence the way society as a whole operates, seem to explode and cause controversy, especially in the art space?
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“These technologies are looking for ways to make headlines in the art world,” explained Rob Horning, a technology writer and founding editor of Real Life magazine, pointing specifically to the rise of NFTs. .
NFTs are artifacts that operate primarily on the Ethereum blockchain, effectively systems that publicly record and track online transactions. The main purpose of this system is to allow the virtual currency Ethereum (which uses “fungible” (convertible) tokens, meaning they can be exchanged for each other as functionally identical items) to function.
In contrast, the “non-fungible” nature of NFTs means they are unique. This means it can be linked to digital artwork (which is rarely stored on the blockchain itself) to give it authenticity.
So an important part of NFTs in the world of visual arts is the perception of value. The digital art it is associated with can be copied indefinitely, but he is the only one who can claim to have a “genuine” copy.
Horning said the technology had little or no explicit purpose until it invented a marketplace for selling digital art.
Backlash and Criticism of Technology in the Art World
While the initially stated goal was to give unrepresented artists the ability to sell their work, NFTs have proven to create more division among artists.
in the meantime theft When Copyright infringement There was a clear backlash from the groups NFT was originally supposed to help, as it has proven to be a big problem in space. Small-scale artists who are aware of mashups with technology and crypto instead of finding new avenues to market their work.A subculture that uses and sells its own work without the artist’s consent.
But despite the backlash, Horning said the technology continues to be pitched and promoted because NFTs and cryptocurrencies remain “as important as the topics around them.”
“People who invest in cryptocurrency are under constant pressure to make it in the news and get people talking about it,” he said. “And one of the ways we can do that is by having an artist talk about cryptocurrency or have an artist make something that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency or his NFTs.”
The bumpy intersection of the worlds of art and technology is far from unfamiliar, but we’re witnessing a recent clash with AI art. Through machine learning models such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, anyone with an internet connection can enter a few prompts to generate an image of their choice.
As with NFT, some artists fought back. Artists such as Simon Stålenhag – whose sci-fi scene inspired his Amazon Prime series Tales from the Loop — and webcomic artist Sarah Andersen These systems complain that they are trained from publicly available art, including their own work. You can now claim to imitate and generate, potentially stealing your business.
Artificial intelligence art generators “are not in the hands of artists right now, they are in the hands of early adopters of technology,” Stålenhag said. Business Insider in a recent interview.
Blair Attard-Frost is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, researching the impact of AI and ethical ways to implement it in industry. They said those artists fall into the “labor-lost” camp, where their work is used in the creation and implementation of AI for little or no play.
However, these problems arise in many industries implementing artificial intelligence. The reason art is more prominent in the art world is because it is at the center of people’s daily lives.
“One of the reasons this ‘AI artist’ is getting so much attention is because it’s much more generalized, right?” Attard-Frost said. “It affects everyone and unlocks all sorts of new abilities for many people…in ways that more specialized applications have not done enough.”
There are several reasons as to why these technical inventions have forged stronger ties to the art world than to other disciplines. Robert Enright, Senior Contributing Editor of Border Crossing Magazine in Manitoba and Research Professor of Art Theory and Criticism at the University of Guelph, said the industry is shifting to focus on selling art rather than creating it. He said that this was partly due to the fact that
“I think one of the things that happened is that this explains why NFTs and why this kind of search is done to find new things to sell. I think it’s become an important part of this process,” said Enright.
“There’s so much money in the world right now, and the wealthy have to find something with their money, so one of the things they do is pay exorbitant amounts for art. .
At the same time, as Attard-Frost explained, these are technologies that will sooner or later appear everywhere. Although they’re only taking their first stumbling blocks in the art world, they’re comparing it to the “Wild West” because regulation on many of these technologies is still in its infancy.
But Sarah Rudy, an American artist who works with new technologies, says it’s just an indication of the field. The nature of art is experimental, and artists are constantly drawn to new mediums and techniques that are not yet widely understood.
This can make it very difficult to keep up with the changing requirements of the tools artists need to master. And while people outside the art world can see the opportunity and lead to predatory business practices, art and technology are always intertwined, she says. she said.
“Artists are being driven to expand their definition of the world and of themselves. Technology is here to expand the definition of self and connection and all of these things,” said Ludy. “So… our motivations are very parallel to each other.”
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