Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 20 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.
Last week, Scott published The Colors Of Her Coat, a meditation on superstimulus and context collapse after a week where AI-generated Ghibli images were inescapable on social media (this was like Mishapocalypse for the ratsphere).
This week, we'll use his essay as a jumping-off point to compare current reactions to AI art to historical cycles of discourse around photography and music.
The Colors of Her Coat - Scott Alexander, 2025
As I read Hoel’s post, I thought of ultramarine blue. But also, I thought of the first phonographic records. In 1890, hearing Enrico Caruso sing Pagliacci might be the highlight of your life, the crowning glory of a months-long trip to Italy and back. By 1910, you could hear Enrico Caruso without leaving your house. You could hear him twenty times a day if you wanted. The real thing in Naples would just be more Caruso.
And I thought of computer monitors. If you wanted to see Lippi’s Madonna and Child when it was first painted in 1490, you would have to go to Florence and convince Lorenzo de Medici to let you in his house. Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia - something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi.
[YouTube] Ways of Seeing, Episode 1 - John Berger for BBC, 1972
OR
Ways of Seeing, Chapter 1 - John Berger, 1972
The book is an adaptation of the BBC documentary miniseries, which means the video is actually the primary and preferred text. You get the same takeaways from both, so just choose one. (Incidentally, the whole 4 part miniseries is worth a watch and is entirely available on YouTube. They're from a bygone era where BBC documentary miniseries went incredibly hard.)
This segment of Ways of Seeing is a 1972 rehash of Walter Benjamin's seminal 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which discusses the vibe shift that took place in the early 20th century when paintings (such as the Mona Lisa, say) went from being unique, one-of-a-kind objects that one must go on a pilgrimage to see, to something that was readily available for consumption in a variety of formats and contexts due to advancements in photocopying technology. In addition, the meaning of "true art" was increasingly derived from modes of consumption rather than the image itself - for example, art pieces became more valuable for being the subject of a heist, for being featured in movies, or for, well, being sold to a wealthy person for ludicrous sums of cash.
This comes through more in the second half. Try to note down what arguments are being made about the impact of mass reproduction on art, and consider to what extent similiar arguments can be made about AI art.
What of the National Throat? - Rob Horning, 2022
This is a piece that compares a thread of AI art discourse to John Phillip Sousa's 1906 "The Menace of Mechanical Music", which argues that newly-available pre-recorded music "replaced musicians’ labor, serving as a “substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul.”
Rob Horning is imo one of very few AI art critics who actually takes AI art criticism seriously, and is as far as I know the person who first started making connections between contemporary AI art discourse and early writings on the transforming nature of art in the early 20th century.
Art in the After-Culture Passage - Ben Davis, 2022
Ben Davis wrote a banger book chapter about AI art which holds up despite being written before the era of Dall-e and Midjourney. I've excerpted the five pages of it that are most relevant to our discussion today. Davis asks us to consider the social function of art, and how AI art fits or does not fit with what we want art to be. The whole book is available here.
Supplemental:
Photography: A Little Summa - Susan Sontag, 2003
Sontag has also been writing about the ethics and aesthetics of photography since the 1960s (also from a viewpoint originally heavily influenced by Benjamin), and had hashed and rehashed her own takes on the subject a regular basis over her writing career. Her Little Summa is the last rehash, from just a year before her death. It's an interesting thread to follow: when photography was first popularized, the reactions to it were all, well, reactionary: comparing it to yardsticks of fading and bygone eras. A century later, it's a well respected art style in its own right, with its own rules, conventions, language, and subgenres.
What might AI art conventions look like, in a century?
Eno - Gary Huswit, 2024.
Probably one of the first exceptionally good pieces of AI gen art, which I was lucky to catch one showing of. A generative documentary about Brian Eno, that’s different every time it’s shown. My favourite art critic, Ben Davis, has a review here.
Keep an eye out for potential future showings!
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Walter Benjamin, 1935
Ur-source. Despite being associated with the Frankfurt School, I found it fairly readable, and it's not too long.
When an AI can generate a thousand "Ghibli-style" images in minutes, something happens to our relationship to the art.
Contrast this to Davis on Eno: As an artwork, Eno definitely has a stable personality—the tone is consistent, and consistently affecting. Hustwit drew from 30 hours of interviews with Eno and 500 hours of archival footage. I imagine that it is very, very difficult to assemble all the parts and to weight all the probabilities to generate this consistent personality—it is likely more labor, not less.
With some kinds of art now almost too cheap to meter, new conventions of meaning that aren't based on traditional markers of human craft or effort must emerge. Barring timelines, what do you think AI art conventions might look like, in twenty years, or half a century?
In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance.
With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935
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