Can artificial intelligence be creative, can it create art?
In this video a method for exploring how computers can be creative is discussed.
The idea is that these computers have learned how to recognize things visually and that process was then reversed so that the computers create visual imagery.
Here is another example of a program that writes poetry.
Here is a link to the bot or not website...give it a try yourself and see if you can tell the difference between machine generated poetry and the poetry that humans have written.
My question is do you believe that these machines are truly being creative or is just a trick of programming in your opinion?
The idea is that these computers have learned how to recognize things visually and that process was then reversed so that the computers create visual imagery.
Here is another example of a program that writes poetry.
Here is a link to the bot or not website...give it a try yourself and see if you can tell the difference between machine generated poetry and the poetry that humans have written.
My question is do you believe that these machines are truly being creative or is just a trick of programming in your opinion?
Comments (59)
Hi M-Theory & Zookeeper
I liked Schwartz's talk, his semi-conclusion of a computer as a mirror. The computer can mirror that normativity, I am not convinced that it can go beyond the norm. Kurzweil's Singularity will be normative.
That is the question I am probing.
Art is somewhat subjective in how it is interpreted by an audience.
So the normative is a dynamic and shifting thing that depends upon the eye of the beholder.
When we talk about creativity in art, aren't we talking about how a 'thing',an art-work, reaches out to us in a way that goes beyond it self as a thing qua thing.
Here is why I believe these computers are being guinely creative but I will concede your point that it is not art in the traditional sense of what this term has come to mean.
In the first example I showed this was a program that learned what things were and is then instructed to produce an image of that thing based upon what it has learned.
I think it is fair to say that is an example of genuine creativity because there is some motive there to succeed at producing the thing in question as an image.
It does not simply copy and paste an image...it starts from nothing and eventually converges upon an image that resembles what it has learned is that thing.
In the first example the computer is trying to express what the word bird means to it based on what it has learned about how birds look through a visual sense in order to depict that thing visually.
The same is somewhat true of the poetry writing computer as well but I agree that it is quite a bit different from being creative the way a person is creative and/or artistic.
It was taught what a poem was and it is trying to express what it has learned when it composes a poem.
The difference in this case compared to the first one is that it has no attachment to the terms it only themselves in any sensory way.
The computer however has never sensed, touched, smelt, tasted, or heard anything and so the terms are just strings of symbols that it arranges artfully/creatively based on other strings of symbols it has learned about.
Now you might argue that in these examples there is no emotional attachment for the computers and that art requires emotional experiences to be truly art.
I would concede that point...but I would still argue that the computers are being truly creative even if what they creates is not art in the emotional sense of the term.
I will have to agree with you that these machines have no emotional experiences to portray with their creativity and that they do not hope to inspire any emotions in others so they are not making art in that sense of the word.
But even though these machines did not intend to inspire emotions they did succeed in my case.
I was quite impressed with how well they were able to perform.
I think it is fair to say that these program have learned to be creative in ways that humans can appreciate even if they do not do so that their creations may be appreciated.
AlphaGo condenses enormous quantities of data and then filters its findings, arriving at new combinations that fit the rules of discourse...combinations that have never been seen prior to its formulation. Beautiful combinations. I think a machine can be creative in this manner. Input determines output, regardless of how virtually disparate the results.
Can a machine go beyond the 'universe of information' it has access to, we can also ask man the same question so ... is there a creative the ability to start a new series, where none existed, one that is apart from current discourses. In the twentieth century works by Duchamp, and Warhol seem to suggest a bifurcation in art, where art becomes self absorbed with its surface, a surface that is no longer representational. The conversation between art and anti-art, kinda schizoid, may be something new.
Man seems to be able to go beyond, to able to rise up against societal programming.
Emily Howell is a computer program created by David Cope during the 1990s. Emily consists of an interactive interface that allows both musical and language communication. By encouraging and discouraging the program, Cope attempts to "teach" it to compose music more to his liking. The program uses only the output of a previous composing program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (Emmy) as a source database for its musical choices. (2005), MIT Press.
Meow!
GREG
FUGUE, by Emily Howell:
I would be most impressed by a computer that interrupted its performance of the task you had assigned to it, by saying, "Your work is just too boring. Here, listen to this song I have been composing."
A computer becoming bored and deciding to make up a tune would be a sign of computer intelligence. Emily Howell is a demonstration of David Cope's skill in instructing the computer. I find Emily Howell's composition interesting enough, but it did begin at David Cope's instigation.
Actually a computer with a midlife crisis would do it for me... complaining that the battery doesn't hold the charge as well as it used to or getting annoyed by all the faster younger computers trying to be important by simply being loud.
Yep!
If a computer can do that, then you have me sold. ;)
Meow!
GREG
I checked out the 'bot or not' website, voted on about fifty poems and got two wrong.
For me the clue is that the human poems always embody some thread of an imaginative theme, however attenuated or abstruse.
It might sound like an excuse, but I honestly think the two I got wrong were due to lapses in concentration.
Quoting Joshua Rothman
So, it seems that throughout the modern era "being creative" basically meant being imaginative, and a person could thus use his/her imagination to be considered creative regardless of whether it resulted in the production of stuff, such as books, pictures, or other objects.
Nowadays a person is "creative" when s/he produces stuff (e.g. decorates, knits, draws, paints, photographs, writes etc.), or has a "creative job" (e.g. design, communication, entertainment, producing fine arts and so on).
So, perhaps the meaning of creativity has simply been redefined again? Furthermore, it seems to be referred to as a means for the production of stuff, or the accumulation of certain capacities, and as such it seems unsurprising to me that it could be automated.
But it ain't the romantic/modern version of creativity.
Way better than me.
:P
I was wrong about half the time.
I even write poetry too (or well I used to) so I thought I would have an advantage.
Maybe you're just a bit out of practice. I have been writing poetry for abot (I left this genuinely accidental typo on purpose because it seems so apt) forty five years, and continue to do so.
:)
A machine knows nothing, and so is not acting with volition required by the art of artistic creation.
I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be there.
Art needs to be a creation with intended communication of something.
It then needs to be combined with a receiver (viewer) of that communication.
The communicated message goes through interpretation by the receiver and the combined event between the communicator and receiver through that art is how I define what art is in its most fundamental form.
Therefore, a thing cannot create art since it lacks the intention of saying something with it. People often say that beauty in nature is art, but that is not art, beauty is not art, nature is not art. Art is intentional.
So when we talk about an A.I that creates something, first we must define if this A.I truly has the intelligence or is just an algorithm simulating intelligence.
Does it understand that it creates something intentionally for interpretations by receivers? In the case of current A.I:s no, not even close. These AI systems are algorithmic synthetic intelligences. I often say that people lump together too much under "AI", which leads to confusion as to what AI truly is. I define any current AI as SI, synthetic intelligence or ALi, Algorithmic Intelligences. They have no self-awareness but can be programmed (in the future) to act so close to the illusion of human intellect that we will be fooled by it. For day to day life, these SI and ALi:s will function as companion "apps" and smart-things as they act in science fiction films. But they will never be able to think freely for themselves in the way we think about true intelligence.
True AI happens when the intelligence is self-aware, capable of independent actions and act out its own will based on desires. A true AI that evolves without human-like parameters will never be able to communicate with us since it acts within its own realm. It would be like trying to communicate with super-advanced aliens. But if an AI is programmed to develop a human intellect and capable of acting out emotion-like responses and have human-like desires and fears, it will be able to communicate with us.
At that stage, it will be able to create in the sense we view art. It will be able to create with an intention of something beyond just telling us straight up about something. They will understand the importance of interpretation by the receiver, in this case, us other humans.
But that leads to the question, or rather a conclusion; if the created art demands an AI to have an intellect and intelligence that resembles us, humans, it would essentially just be another "human being" who creates art. A new individual, not by flesh but by silicon, but with the same kind of desires and emotions as we have.
This is essentially the argument I have worked out about why human art can never be replaced by any machine or another being that do not function in the same way as we humans do. Art as we define it, exists within our realm of not only understanding facts and knowledge, but emotion, desires and fears. We cannot apply that to something that lacks those human elements without the resulting creation being as empty as when someone says "everything is art". Essentially my opinion on this conclusion is that people who look at these produced images and say it is art, essentially are the same who say that everything is art, which in my opinion makes the word "art" meaningless. The specific computers making this imagery presented at TED are just algorithms, they know nothing of what they themselves are doing. It would be like me throwing a hand grenade into a room filled with paint cans and say that the hand grenade painted the art on the walls, not my act of throwing the hand grenade in there. The logic fails completely.
That this question is being asked speaks volumes. Is human creativity such a big deal?
Consider a ''normal'' computer and an AI computer. There's nothing fundamentally different between the two (all algorithms) and yet one ''acts'' like a human and the other doesn't.
Who is the artist, the pencil or the artist?
As I defined it
Quoting Christoffer
It doesn't matter if the art is modified and later perceived in the wrong way. Just as Greek statues are collectively considered white marble, they were originally painted (in comparison looked quite ridiculous to the monolithic nature of how they look now), but the fundamental truth is still that they were created by an artist with intention and the receiver interprets the art. If there is no art-intentional agent, there is no art. If anything and everything can be considered art, then everything is art and it loses its specificity in language.
As I also mentioned, an A.I that creates art must be its own art-intention agent, it cannot be programmed to follow rules, it must be able to interpret reality and mix them with subjective thought. An algorithm cannot do this, it is programmed and has no idea of what it is doing. If the computer subjectively knows it creates art, it does so with intention, otherwise its the one programming the computer who did the art through algorithmic randomness. But if a computer reaches the level of doing art by how we define humans doing art, they will need to be treated as artists and individuals of those thoughts.
I’m being a bit flippant there. The whole idea of creativity itself is a big enough subject, let alone whether an A.I can be creative. My point was that an A.I. Is not independent. Can it even create and turn on its own power source? Like so many other areas I suspect the idea of creativity will be redefined so that an A.I. can then be said to be creative. Even a lot of people who regard themselves as creative are not. Nor is the primate who daubs paper with paint. Creativity seems to be an impulse that must be made real. Going from the impulse to the material and carrying that impulse successfully forward is the difference. Of course it can all be called subjective. But I don’t believe the A.I. can have that impulse. And anyway, who is going to declare that, yes, the A.I. has been creative, an artist or a scientist, or god help us, a critic. Maybe what is an essential point here is that man alone owns art and does not understand it.
Am I straying too far from the subject here?
No you still in the realm of aesthetics (the philosophy of art) and not estemelyolgy wich I was leaning towards.
How ever you did put you answer to is there something that makes something inheritly beautifully?
And/or in this case creative.
At this point it might be a good idea to define creativity.
The dictionary says
the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.
To me creativity is not subjective because subjective is to the individual, when I believe we need a group of people to say yes or no. Secondly it does need to be original.
Lastly if one person sees differently he is "wrong" like how I know someone who says baseball is not a sport, he has the right to his opinion and the right to say it's not a sport but that will not stop everyone else from saying it is one.
I think you can say the same principle to are when applied to art.
In short we are going to. As it looks to me you agree on that though, please say otherwise if I'm wrong.
We don't need to understand something to use it, the Roman engineers are prove of that. All we can do is try to make sense of it in the long run.
Most of the logistic class has a hard time with art because it not logical,
the question boils down to this do you believe art needs to be understood, or do you believe that we are as humans responseable for defining what is art.
I go with the second one.
I don’t think art needs to be understood, unless it’s very obscure, then it might need some sort explaining for those who like things to be clear. It might be interesting for someone to write about art, but it’s not necessary for the art itself to exist, and the writing about art is another creative act itself, so in some ways it’s removing itself from its subject.
It doesn’t need to be understood except to know that as humans we create it. No other life form does that. Someone might chose to analyse it or measure it, but it’s not necessary. It exists with or without our understanding.
So, being responsible for defining art seems unnecessary. Only humans create art, so why do we need to define it? To explain it to other life forms who don’t create art?
An A. I. is not human, so it can’t make art. What it does create, if it does, is something an A. I. produces. Let the A. I. define it.
Am I correct. (It is a convincing argument so I want to make sure I understand correctly)
Several questions immediately come to mind. Is all creativity art? Is all art creative? What is art anyway? Is consciousness, or subjectivity, important on the part of the maker of the thing in question? Can a non-conscious thing "express" anything? Can a non-conscious thing demonstrate aesthetic insight?
It seems to me that the question of whether AI can be conscious is critically important here. And that is a very tough question, perhaps forever unknowable with any certainty, since subjectivity, by its very nature, cannot be verified objectively.
Quoting zookeeper
Is this true? As similar as you want? What about exactly identical? In that case, it would have to be an actual human brain.
Are we talking a physically instantiated neural net approximating the function of a brain or a simulation of a neural net running on a conventional computer?
At this point in our understanding, it isn't at all clear to any of us what consciousness is or how it comes about, no matter what anyone on any side of the ever-raging debate likes to think. When something is clearly understood, like the basic shape of the planet, there is usually a strong consensus. When there is no consensus even among the so-called experts on the subject, we can be reasonably sure that the issue is not well understood. I can't think of a feature of the actual world more puzzling at this point to us humans than our capacity for everyday, subjective, conscious experience. And my puzzlement here and claim that we don't know what it is or how it can be, contrary to what some might suspect, has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, a need to believe in an afterlife, or any such thing. I am mostly an atheist, mostly hostile toward religion. And I do not believe that my personal identity and point of view will survive the disorganization of my brain. Regardless, I have considered and researched the problem of consciousness for many years and am completely baffled by it and am aware of the general failure to understand the matter among the experts.
We simply don't know yet if a brain is all there is to consciousness. Second, even if there is nothing in addition to the brain, we don't know if the actual substance of brain tissue matters. It could be the case that the architecture of the neural net isn't all there is to it. The suspicions of some that there might be something more going on inside the neurons, for example, or that some kind of quantum effects (knee-jerk reactions to my use of the word "quantum" fully expected) or some other unknown factor might be important can't be completely ruled out at this point. If any such thing is important, even if the functional architecture of the neural net exactly copies the connections and neuron-firing behavior in a human brain, it may be that such a neural net simulation written in Java and running on a smartphone is missing some critical condition for actual consciousness.
Quoting m-theory
I am someone who has often been called an artist. I paint pictures. Sometimes I get paid for them. I can paint a very convincing likeness of whatever it is that I am looking at, including subtle human faces, perhaps the most difficult thing to convincingly represent. This is very impressive to most people who see what I have painted. But when I am fairly accurately copying appearances and making an oil painting that resembles a photograph of someone, I don't feel that I am being particularly creative. And it doesn't feel like art. Slavish copying of appearances, in my mind, is precisely the sort of painting that lacks creativity and art. The more accurate I am, the more stiff and the less artistic it feels.
When I am doing that, I am a human camera, a human copy machine. It is a kind of algorithmic surveying. Imagine that you are given some line diagram and then you use rulers, protractors, and other tools to measure every point, every angle, and so on, and you painstakingly reproduce that on a sheet of paper, such that you get a convincing copy that is accurate to within very small tolerances. That's what I am doing mentally. I have developed a mental procedure for comparing and reproducing relative angles, distances, colors, and so on.
People often breathlessly tell me about some of the portraits I have painted that I have "captured his soul!" They often comment that I must really have deep insight into the sitter to be able to capture their character like that. In my mind, I roll my eyes. They simply don't understand how I did it. I have done nothing so mysterious as that. A camera can do better than I did at reproducing a bunch of geometric relationships and it has no insight into the person's character. No insight is needed. I can convincingly copy any visual appearance. It is largely an algorithmic, mechanical process. It is generally no more artistic that what a surveyor does at a construction site.
Further, all of this that I can do can be taught to most anyone, given some time. It is nothing magical. I haven't been touched on the head by the gods. It is a skill that can be learned and has nothing to do with talent, whatever that is supposed to be. It just happens to be a skill that few spend the time acquiring. Most people are skilled at reproducing complex mouth sounds that they have heard others produce. We don't call them creative or artistic, and we aren't terribly impressed, I think, mostly because such skill is almost universal.
All that said, I do think that artistic things can happen in a painting, a musical performance, or some such thing. But this isn't to be found in the preciseness, the accuracy, the perfection, the detail, the amount of time it takes, the convincingness of a representation, or any such thing. As I see it, it happens when aesthetic feeling gets involved in a certain way. There is a kind of feedback loop between the piece and the creator. A machine can play a bunch of notes in precise time and with perfect pitch. It can play a Beethoven piece given the score. Even a player piano can do that. But can it do that with feeling? Sure, even a mechanical performance of a Beethoven piece can make us feel something, but can a computer hear and feel the music while playing it and expressively adjust the sound to enhance the feeling impact for an aesthetic effect that it desires to communicate to an audience, or even just to feel itself?
There is something in a Jimi Hendrix guitar performance that I think a computer would be hard-pressed to pull off. A human guitar player hears the sound being produced and feels the emotional effect it is having and then further modulates the sound to steer that feeling in a desired direction to express yet more feeling. A painter, if not a complete slave to the subject matter and the need to be perfectly accurate, can do the same thing. There is feeling even behind the movements of your hand as you make those flourishes while signing your name. The art, at least in part, is in the endless micro-adjustments made throughout your gesture-making which are part of a feeling feedback loop.
Feeling. It seems to me that a true experiential subject, a feeling agent, must be involved in anything that we might call art.
Do computers feel? In the history of computing, do we have any reason to believe that a computer has ever felt even simple pain, for example? How might you program a computer to feel pain? Computers follow instructions. They execute procedures. Can you write a step by step program that would produce a subjective feeling of pain in the computer executing that program? Is there a way that you could arrange a gazillion dominoes such that when you set them falling, the domino arrangement feels pain?
The Grand Canyon is beautiful and it moves us. But is it art? It was generated unconsciously by certain processes. You might even say that there is a certain complex algorithm behind it. Is it art? I don't think so. That which created it didn't intend for it to be felt that way and had no capacity to feel the effect of experiencing its form. This, I think, is somewhat analogous to anything a computer might do that might move us.
Besides, it is humans that are programming the computers or training the neural nets to give a certain effect. We write the algorithm that generates something that looks like poetry. But was the computer moved by something and inspired to express its feelings? Did it carefully and feelingfully choose words for just the desired effect? Did it understand what it was saying?
While performing Bach's Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott, can a computer feel the contrition?
Listen to this performance by David Gilmour, especially the guitar solo at 4:37:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTseTg48568
If a computer "composes" or plays a series of sounds like that, is it pouring out its "heart"? Is it feeling all that emotion it is communicating? And how can there be communication of feeling if that which produces it doesn't feel it? Notice that all of those performers are apparently feeling something while they are playing. That, I think, is key.
Marcel Duchamp said “I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.“ I take that to mean that art is that which is created by artists. His work “Fountain” (an old urinal) was art because he said so, he turned a urinal into a piece of art by his action.
Being creative is not the same as making art. Children are creative in their playing. We all go through that. When we are making art we’re making creativity an “art”, as a verb. It’s an action that the individual makes. Duchamp made the urinal a piece of art by his creative action. You can decide to call it art when you see it, and some regard this as the step that makes it art, the viewer, but it became art immediately by his actions.
An A. I. doesnt have the desire to take that action. Neither does anything else. The A. I. might do something creative, but it’s not yet art because the A. I. doesn’t chose to regard itself as an artist.
The more important point is that a great deal of literature is already produced by second-level creativity even though written by humans, in being written to formulae - almost all 'literary fiction' published today is generated by Creative Writing course graduates following templates or simply recycling current tropes. To be be genuinely creative, literature has to be self-reflexive to the extent of undermining its own status as 'literature', pointing back to the world from a self-declared artifice. It's difficult to believe programmed computers would develop that self-reflexivity.
We could, perhaps, create an artificial mind with an aesthetic sense. This mind would need to interact with the world and feel emotions. It would need desires, longing, and a sense of awe. Is this really possible? Maybe.
If there is a relevance here to the A.I./literature debate, it lies in this same circularity of defining what constitutes a 'literary' text, and by whom.
Can most humans? I hear the phrase "truth is stranger than fiction" quite a lot. For me, anyone who says or agrees with such a phrase has little to no imagination and I question whether they understand the meaning of "truth", "stranger", and "fiction". But then I just assume that people like idioms and don't care if they make sense. Anyway...
The definition of "creative" may answer the OP:
creative: relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I think this highlights the fact that, SO FAR, machines do not have imagination. But that does not seem to be a REQUIREMENT of creativity. Since it is an "or" in the definition, we can drop the "imagination" from the definition and we get:
creative: relating to or involving original ideas, especially in the production of artistic work
Emily Howell seems to meet this definition entirely?
Quoting Cavacava
Yes, but it seems the viewer of art is just as capable of adding this extra meaning as the creator of the art. So even if 'art' is created by a machine with no 'intention' of creating 'art', it becomes art when the viewer views it as such. Kind of the inverse of how a blank white canvas becomes 'art' when some famous 'artist' puts a frame on it and sells it for 8 million bucks.
When an AI can engage in artwork that involves not just novelty but mutual adaptation as part of the reflection on the art, as art, I'll be satisfied we're dealing with art (maybe not good art). When we can share a common mental space where art, as a term, means something to both, where the AI can answer my question on the genesis of its artwork and I can give feedback and it can acknowledge and appreciate that feedback.
And just as neither Beethoven's mother nor father were responsible for his composition, the programmer must be sufficiently distinct from the creation. I couldn't predict my child's passion for the piano prior to his birth (I would have designed him, rather, with a passion for cosmology that he lacks if it were up to me).
I wonder if this is realistic to expect.
Ok, but in the meantime...what do we call the original piece of music created by an unthinking machine? Is the programmer the artist? Or is the piece not art?
Let's say I paint a picture, and then someone says, "hey, that's a nice piece of art". Then I respond, "actually, I did not intend to create art, so that is not art; that is just me painting the idea that popped into my head." Is the work art or not? What is the difference between the above example and the "art" that a machine spits out?
It seems we all need to agree on "what is art?" before we will make much progress on whether AI could create such a thing. And what are the odds we all agree on what art is?
Hey Brett, you seem pretty informed when it comes to art (I enjoyed arguing with you last time - and I am not trying to say you are not informed on other subjects, haha), this thread has brought up a question for me:
Take as an example a work that WAS NEVER INTENDED to be "art" but was deemed "art" by a viewer. Has the viewer become the artists in that case? Or is this somehow NOT "art"?
It's music and music is an art form. But I'd have difficulty calling the software the artist.
Where does that leave us? I suppose until the AI can be considered as having an identity separate from the programmer, it means the artist would be the programmer.
If I speak in a lyrical tone but insist that I'm not trying to sing, it may sound as art but that would be unintentional. Should a cloud that combines characteristics of Donatello's David with Michelangelo's be considered art?
If you record my voice or photograph the clouds it might be appreciated as art. In these cases the person most responsible for bringing it to the attention of the public would be you. You are the witness that framed the phenomena and raised it to public attention. I have a friend who took a marvelous photo of colored buoys on a pier. He was the one with the artistic eye, regardless of the fishermen who (unintentionally) arranged the buoys. At some point, since I'm not a complete moron, I'd "discover" the musical nature of my voice and insist on a cut. Just means that we're dealing with a certain ambiguity in artistry shared between two creators (Rogers & Hammerstein).
This gets to my point. If I take a picture of those clouds and frame then it is art no question, right? (your next paragraph agrees)
When did it become art? When the picture was done printing? When it was put in a frame
and hung on a wall? Or my assertion, it became art as soon as the viewer thought of it as art?
Your definition of art seems to include some aspect of sharing that experience with other humans. So I could not create anything just for myself that would be considered art?
Quoting JosephS
But you just said that if the creator did NOT intend to create art it is not art. Couldn't the programmer say they were not trying to create art, they were trying to create a computer program that generated previously unknown pleasant sounding noise?
I think saying that "art" can only be created intentionally, is quite limiting and can result in music, paintings, poetry etc NOT counting as art. Meanwhile, EVERYTHING that is created by humans counts as art IF the person that made it said it is art? This seems problematic.
Maybe I can solve our disagreement by using the word artistic? By making it an adjective does it soften the meaning? Those clouds are artistic, but they are not 'art' until a picture is taken and framed? I think I could get behind that.
I don't have any problem with your assertion. Someone else may have a more developed position on the 'coming to be' process. The underlying premise is that the label art is a subjective attribution.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
It's not so much that the definition of art requires sharing as much as for me to ascribe artist to what might be, rather, a non-conscious automaton, I include the process of sharing perceptions as part of the verification process. A question might follow of the artist who refuses to engage the audience ("let them think of it what they will"). In this case there is a certain presumption of art. Is it part of an exhibit? Is the artist paid as an artist? Do they claim themselves an artist? The refusal of a human to engage still presents the ability for mutual adaptation as that choice to not engage may be interpreted as a principled effort to not provide preconceptions to the audience (or they just might hate talking to art aficionados).
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Not sure if there is any real space between 'pleasant sounding noise' and 'art', but I would take the programmer at their word that they were not trying to create art, even if a melodic ditty results. At that point, as with the example of the unintentional lyrical voice or colorful buoys arranged seemingly without artistic intention, art derives from not from the naturalistic source but from the perceiver, framing it, recording it, sharing it.
Again, someone may have a more developed concept here that distinguishes between a 'producer' of art (painters, sculpters, singer) as opposed to a 'recorder' (photographer, naturalist audio recorder).
Quoting ZhouBoTong
To suggest that anything a person claims as art, even a blank canvas, is art, is a liberally expansive definition of the word. I don't have any problem with that, even if it does lead some rather tasteless results (brings to mind the performance artist with the speculum who would sit naked and invited viewers to peer inside her as part of an exhibit). So the artist saying "this is art" as a sufficient condition to label art doesn't present any obvious problems to me (with certain caveats around sincerity and the nature of the thing saying it). Even saying "this isn't art" doesn't prevent the viewer/recorder from deriving art from it, at which point the viewer becomes the artist in extracting it/framing it.
Things artistic, if I understand your meaning, are [1] things that might be considered art. Arguably unbounded. How about [2] things closely related in form or type to other things that are already typically perceived as art. Art and artists, as social disruptors, should rightfully chafe at this restriction. If the label art is essentially subjective so is artistic. It remains that my morning commute isn't art (it's a pain in the ass, daily slog) unless I call it so, and at which point you tell me that my art is lame-ass crap, which I agree with.
Is the set of things artistic larger than the set of things that are art? With definition [1] above it would seem the proposition is true. [2], to my eye, is not as clear. If 'artistic' gets us to the clouds that look like Mickey and Minnie Mouse, but doesn't include my latest bowel movement, or if artistic includes my dog barking Chopsticks but not the sound of me coughing up phlegm, this proposition is not nearly as clear cut.
Quoting David Rose
I wish I had a well considered response to your comments, but I have to say I've never knowingly read a poststructuralist literary theorist. What I recall of my education regarding Duchamp is limited to analysis of Nude Descending a Staircase. My comments are at least one if not two or more rungs down the ladder of artistic analysis. What I have read on is articles regarding music generating programs that can produce never before heard compositions half way between Brahms and Beethoven.
I've written my own comments and topics which, as brilliantly conceived and executed as they are, have received absolutely no response in this forum. It is as pearls before swine, I tell you. :-)
Quoting JosephS
Well if you agree with both of these statements then our differences are not all that important :grin:
Quoting JosephS
I think I need to explain what I meant by 'artistic' with an example...I think language is the easiest. Most figurative language is artistic. If there was a clearer and more direct way of saying something then the ONLY reason for figurative language would be aesthetics or to gain an emotional response. While aesthetics and emotional responses are not art, they are the defined purpose of art.
And I do get that I am basically inventing word usage here (although it seems to meet the second definition of artistic - relating to or characteristic of art or artistry). But I have had too many art arguments like this, where I find myself generally agreeing but feeling like we just don't have the words to bridge our misunderstanding.
Actually, less cliquey, but equally selfish :grin:
You will notice that almost every response in the thread (and many other threads) has a blue name included. That means they quoted (or tagged with @ button) the person. That sends the person a reminder that someone commented. Then we go and respond. I do try to read whole threads that I am involved in, but sometimes, you come back 48 hours later and there are 8 pages of responses. So you just hit the ones that were direct responses.
I think if you quote previous speakers you will be SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to get a response. Sorry if it seemed like you were being ignored.
Agreed. But you also just pointed out that most humans can't really do it either.
Quoting David Rose
An interesting take. Is the stance basically questioning how 'creative' are all the things we refer to as 'creativity'? They have a point.
Quoting David Rose
EVERY art thread includes me making arguments related to this quote (they may be simple and unrefined but I refuse to accept art being defined by an authority beyond the dictionary).
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Excuse the time taken to reply.
It might depend on the viewer. A critic might say its art, a child might say its art, a person who dislikes art might even say its bad art. But I don’t think any of them are artists. But how do I prove that? I think it makes sense at the least, or as a beginning, to say that an artist produces art, to begin with the artist.
I was wondering, if we destroyed all art, made it disappear, what would go and what would be left?
No problem. We were talking in a couple different art threads...so hopefully my response is on topic.
Quoting Brett
I am with you here, but it brings up questions:
What was the first art? The first two cavemen to see animals in the clouds? The first cave paintings? Or the first civilized human that intentionally created an abstract and/or impractical work that was designed to illicit an emotional response from its viewer?
and of course your question would similarly apply:
Quoting Brett
Interesting question. Does artistic language count? Does figurative language serve a purpose besides "dressing up" the statement? What about Lionel Messi? Many professionals are called "artists" when they reach a high level, is this just a metaphor, or are we saying something about their skill being beyond reason or instruction? The more I think about it, the more we would be destroying EVERYTHING created by humans. I am looking at phones, staplers, printers, and clocks right now...they all have artistic elements.
So, could we actually destroy ALL art? Would that include destroying all minds capable of understanding, and therefor containing, art? I can understand there is a difference between "artistic" and "art" that potentially clarifies most of my problems...but how could the adjective "artistic" exist (or make sense) if there was no "art"?
Well, a bunch of questions with few answers. That's all I got :smile:
Excuse me while I wipe away the hubris.
huh? please explain. I don't see where pride relates. And I barely made an argument, so it is not like you are referring to my confidence in being right. I don't get it?
Maybe this was supposed to be a response to the rich/poor thread? I still wouldn't see the hubris, but at least I was more strongly disagreeing.
I usually regard your posts as quite reasonable. Possibly I over reacted there. Throwing so many questions at me in one post didn’t seem like an attempt to address my post. I mean, did you expect me to address each question? It seemed more like a dismissal of the query. Anyway, I think the subject has been done to death, and I have my answer: only humans produce art.
Well we don't need to go that far :razz:
Quoting Brett
Ok, I can see that...but that is exactly what I was doing. Your question made me think of all those questions. In order to answer YOUR question, I would need to know the answers to all of MY questions...I don't know those answers, so I could only give an incomplete answer to your question.
Quoting Brett
Not at all. They were just there to show how difficult it would be FOR ME to answer your question. Those are all of the questions that I start considering in my attempt to answer your question.
I actually thought that your question was similarly rhetorical. It seemed designed to make us think about what art was, by thinking about what an absence of art would look like.
Quoting Brett
I can see how it could be seen that way. Does my explanation here at least convince you that that was not my intention? although I may need to work on my communication (or lack there of) style.
Quoting Brett
What?!?! No, just kidding. Definitely done to death. I always feel like I am trying to answer these things in an objective manner, although I actually view most (all?) analysis/discussions on art as almost wholly subjective...this is probably where I just end up confusing people :grimace:
Quoting Brett
I am still not sold...but I don't have any arguments that are stronger than any of the weak unconvincing stuff I have already mentioned.