Art is a Vehicle for Human Values
This week Linda and I went to see a special exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art about two nineteenth century French painters: Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.[1] This exhibition got me thinking about the nature of art, about how art communicates, and about why so many humans throughout history have painstakingly devoted their time to arts of all sorts in a world that has always been full of seemingly more pressing concerns.
Each work of art represents a certain way of seeing and responding to a particular moment in time. Certain works are said to be sensational when they debut because their response to their respective moments are so clear they are striking, even unmistakable, in a way that makes their audience say this artist has shown us the world as we live in it now. Sometimes works are said to be derivative (usually by people who know too much) because they appear to be too nostalgic or sentimental, representing an earlier time that has come and gone.
But all art begins in acknowledgement, and all artists begin by imitating. This was true of Manet and Degas, who both painted their own versions of Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas and expressed admiration for Rubens and others. This sort of imitation is absolutely necessary for the development of technique, not just in painting but also in music, writing, filmmaking, sculpture, and dance. It is learning by doing, and every amateur knows that if you want to do something brilliant (and not merely pleasant) you have to study the brilliant creations of artists who came before. For humans living in today's internet era, when nearly every documented human expression throughout millenia is accessible in an instant, this raises several questions. How does one determine what art is important and worth learning about?[2] Is there any point to using art to speak to a moment in which most people living in developed countries can just say whatever they want to whomever at lightspeed? How can human artists possibly compete with hyper-specialized machine learning AI tools that can discover and replicate patterns gleaned from centuries worth of human arts with both precision and novelty?
My answer to all of these questions must necessarily be a reflection of my values, and I value humanity above all else. Anybody who values humanity needs only to recognize humanity wherever they see it—in art or in life— to learn by way of encounter. This carries with it, too, a responsibility to treat others humanely, regardless of whether they do the same for you, to try seeing the humanity even in humans that society tries to write off as inconvenient, worthless, or even evil. The reason to make art in a world full of art from eras past is simply that there can never be too much, and for as long as humans want to express their care for each other there will never be enough. And because every human and every moment is unique, there is no one that has ever lived that can see the world as it exists right now and respond to it in exactly the ways that you can. Finally, when it comes to AI, there's no competion to be had in the realm of true connection. The humanity one sees in great works of art cannot be simply reduced to precision and novelty, so while corporations and other moneyed interests might turn to AI tools to produce various sorts of "content" in the name of efficiency, short of those tools acheiving sentience I could never call their products art unless there were some human behind the curtain pulling the strings.