Couple centuries ago the highest mastery of the painter
was to capture the look of people and things:
the visual specificities of light and form,
optical perception hand-traced in pigmented oils.
Then photography came along
and easily surpassed the manual portrayer
at rendering with accuracy and detail,
doing a work of hours in seconds.
Still the photo never vanquished the paint.
The paint was liberated, free to explore its own properties:
Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstraction.
And to this day, a lot of painters still practice drawing from life.
So now robots are putting on smocks and claiming to be artists.
Makem pay royalties forever for the art they ripped off,
but let the robots show what they can do.
We artists will be liberated to do what the robots cannot.
Computers are best at doing what people are bad at.
Their value lies in complementing us, not replicating us.
A robot is missing the living soul, in its mortal form.
The deep part of art, robots don’t get that, not yet anyways.
Today we think Art is mainly about a Concept
realized as an Image or Object, in a certain Style.
But Art runs in the blood, and secretes from the glands.
An artist just sails, in a tempest or a doldrum.