Best viewed on a monitor, not a phone.
It’s pretty hard to care about contemporary art: the Art World has little connection to ordinary lives; much of it seems to be just baubles for the wealthy, or a public funds scam to subsidise rich kids; art museums lecture you on ideological purity, and even the best seem dumbed down; art schools teach conformity, not expertise; there is near zero chance of making a living as a fine artist.
The awfulness of modern art has done us a favour: you may as well not bother with any of it.
AI art shows up the boundaries of all this: there is no philosophical reason why a mechanical image made by no-one can’t be meaningful or "artistically valid". But that’s not what most people mean or want. For those that care about it, art at its most meaningful is, roughly, a unique or high-expertise thing; made by a named person; representational or decorative; with a clear relationship to an aesthetic tradition. Something that feels like it has moral content.
An excellent tweet from @oldbooksguy
To put it another way: the awfulness of the modern world has shown up what most people need from art right now: the experiences of meaning and beauty and connection that sustain you through tough times. For example, experiences that reveal to you what you value; the experiences of focusing your attention and disciplining your effort; that express good ways of life and bad ones; that express the tribe you belong to, or the place you are from. Happily, there’s plenty of existing art that does all of that, and there’s nothing to stop you making your own.
Great post. I like the wide range of subjects covered in your stack.
I lol-ed at 'instinctively recognised as a scam'. So true.
I might add something about skill or craft. I know it's deeply unfashionable to consider skill or craft in art, but that is one of my rules of thumb.
The other is whether the art conveys some kind of meaning. Which is admittedly a bit more subjective.
The only seriously serious (and therefore often funny) art magazine in England, David Lee's The Jackdaw. Has first-rate editorials, often denouncing state-art and the tax-payer salaried, state-art racketeers, from Chairman-in-Perpetuity, Nicholas Serota downwards.