I felt the same way. I would liken it to the author technically living in the same city, but they were describing the other side of it and mistaking their small sphere and local description for the rest of us in that city. Their idea of the art world was similar yet very foreign. A few proverbial landmarks could be seen from both our relative places, but they lost me with their inaccuracies so their critiques and conclusions didn’t land.
Art has already been industrialized. Content, which is the only thing AI can make, is not all of art. Art and the creative fields are part of an evolutionary survival strategy to impart experiences to others. If you’ve ever wondered why the Greeks had only two genres, Drama and Tragedy, it is because Drama was about helping people navigate the world, and tragedy was a warning of what not to do and why. So if class consciousness will help people the most, then the most substantial form of art will pass that experience along (e.g., Social Realism). Modern narratives are mainly content—and we can see that they are unsubstantial because they are “just entertainment” (Fun fact: American films had their right to free speech revoked in 1952 for this reason). They exist for profit. Art is much more than that, and if art helps us, the working class, better navigate life with experiences we don’t yet have, I would argue such art is inherently revolutionary. That is why the ruling class can’t make new stories; they only make entertainment and content, lest they risk imparting valuable lessons to the working class. And yes, this is a summed-up version of a fascinating thread of soviet art philosophy but one that the author of that article has either never encountered or has a more limited audience (i.e. western lib artists) the article is applying to than let on in the preamble.
I felt the same way. I would liken it to the author technically living in the same city, but they were describing the other side of it and mistaking their small sphere and local description for the rest of us in that city. Their idea of the art world was similar yet very foreign. A few proverbial landmarks could be seen from both our relative places, but they lost me with their inaccuracies so their critiques and conclusions didn’t land.
Art has already been industrialized. Content, which is the only thing AI can make, is not all of art. Art and the creative fields are part of an evolutionary survival strategy to impart experiences to others. If you’ve ever wondered why the Greeks had only two genres, Drama and Tragedy, it is because Drama was about helping people navigate the world, and tragedy was a warning of what not to do and why. So if class consciousness will help people the most, then the most substantial form of art will pass that experience along (e.g., Social Realism). Modern narratives are mainly content—and we can see that they are unsubstantial because they are “just entertainment” (Fun fact: American films had their right to free speech revoked in 1952 for this reason). They exist for profit. Art is much more than that, and if art helps us, the working class, better navigate life with experiences we don’t yet have, I would argue such art is inherently revolutionary. That is why the ruling class can’t make new stories; they only make entertainment and content, lest they risk imparting valuable lessons to the working class. And yes, this is a summed-up version of a fascinating thread of soviet art philosophy but one that the author of that article has either never encountered or has a more limited audience (i.e. western lib artists) the article is applying to than let on in the preamble.