Art has always been the product of new techniques: from spoken language to the written word, from drawings on cave walls to paint brushes, from quills to word processors.
In 1859, French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire decried a new form of artistic expression: photography. This new medium, he said, was “the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies” and to embrace it was a sign of “blindness” and “imbecility.”
Baudelaire considered the output of these fanatical “sun-worshippers” as more artifice than art—canned creativity, a synthetic, artificial substitute for the real thing. It was a notion that would have felt as compelling then, as similar critiques of AI art feel today. And it was just as much of a fallacy too.
Art has always been artificial. Those words even share the same Latin root: ars or artis, meaning skill, craftsmanship, or technique. In other words: artificial acts of creation. Art has only ever been the product of new techniques: from spoken language to the written word, from…