When Machines Make Better Art

Notes on the return of art to its original function
I.§ The premise no longer takes much daring: machines will come to make better art than humans - more skilled, more inventive, more conceptually agile, endlessly, and for nothing. A persona, sometimes offered as a consolation, comes apart under scrutiny: as an intellectual construct - a voice, a biography-shaped narrative, a style signature - it can be run by a machine more steadily than a person could ever sustain their own. The skill is long gone. The novelty is going, and the recognition and the money might follow. What remains is not a faculty artists have and machines lack. It's stranger than that, something the artists have been standing on the whole time without looking down.
II.§ Two unrelated witnesses describe the same odd feature of art, from opposite ends.
"...were an artist to be seen as simply in it for the money, his work would be worth less of it."
David Graeber
Looking at the market, Graeber found that a work's value depends on the perception that it was made in the pursuit of something other than market value. An artist seen to be chasing it is worth less of it. So the artist has to want something other than what the work is judged by, and cannot afford to admit, perhaps cannot even know, that the not-wanting is the price of the prize.
"[The tasting of rasa is] the very twin brother of the tasting of God."
Ananda Coomaraswamy
Reading a thousand years of Sanskrit aesthetics, Coomaraswamy finds the same law inside the work, where the stake is not price but whether the work comes alive at all. The essence of art, in that tradition, is a tasting of the real more than of the senses, and works that chase rasa routinely fall short. Rasa comes only unchased.
Set the two together and one rule shows through: whatever art is for comes only to the one not reaching for it, and to aim at it is to ensure its absence.
III.§ We know this rule from a different book, a book of enlightenment. You cannot get enlightened by trying to get enlightened, because the one doing the trying - the one who wants the prize, projects it ahead, schemes toward it - is precisely the thing that has to dissolve. Seeking sustains the seeker, the search ends not when it succeeds but when it is seen through, and the books all agree, maddeningly, that you can do nothing to make this happen and everything to get in its way.
Same shape. A goal you can reach only on the condition that you have stopped pursuing it. Artists have been running this koan for two centuries and filing it under "career."
IV.§ If that is the structure, the art world was a machine built precisely backwards. It ran on ambition - on the pursuit of recognition, position, price, the next thing no one has done. That is, it ran on the purest possible form of reaching, which is the one move guaranteed to keep the door shut. It produced strivers in enormous numbers and protected almost all of them, by way of their own hope, from ever arriving at the thing underneath the striving. The market did not only corrupt the artist. It kept the artist busy on the near side of a door that ambition cannot open.
The ones who slipped through tend to confirm it: the icon monks painting as a prayer, the rice-bowl potters making the bowl vanish into the moment of tea, the asylum painters filling page after page for no eye but their own, the pensioners painting to distract themselves from the grim reality of an approaching death. The thing the market would later prize arrives in each case, except perhaps the pensioners', as the byproduct of a different goal - the way the worth a museum keeps was rarely the worth its makers were chasing.
V.§ But you cannot drop a goal by deciding to - the decision would just shift the goal. The seeker has never been able to quit, because some payoff still seemed to glint at the end of the road. What the seeker cannot do for himself, circumstance can do for him: the goal can be removed by becoming impossible.
This is the service the machines are about to perform. They are not making art wrong, or forbidden. They are making the pursuit of it pointless - every external reason a person ever made art, skill, originality, recognition, a living, quietly foreclosed, not by decree but by a competitor who does all of it better and for nothing. The carrot is not banned, it's simply eaten.
And the traditions agree, the road walked to its end with nothing left to want leads to the real opening, past the gateless gate where only that which cannot be a project remains. The machine starts to look like an engine of involuntary renunciation at scale, taking from the artist every motive for the work but the one that counts.
VI.§ So the prophecy.
When the machines have taken the skill, the novelty, the recognition, and the money, the artist is left with the one thing they cannot reach: the real making, where something true comes into form, with no ego behind it and nothing nameable beyond it - the contact, not the object, is the point. The artwork emerges as a trace of the contact. That happens to a living person or not at all, and it is the same thing the pensioner and the icon monk are doing at different depths - one stroke, one breath at a time.
Many will give up, but the few who go on, once the work earns nothing, will be making the way the cave painters did, before there was a market at all - because the doing is a door, and now that the tireless and cheap has walled up the rest, it is the one still open. Art will turn out to have been a contemplative practice in the dress of a profession, and the machine, by making the profession impossible, takes the dress away. Which may be, after all this, the return of art to its original function.

Source: https://emptyname.org/when-machines-make-better-art/
Licence: CC0 / Free as Air - https://emptyname.org/faal