Getting meta about creativity
What does it mean to make art?
Hi Artists!
I never get tired of learning about other people’s creative practices, journeys, struggles, and triumphs.
am I mining life
to make meaningful art, or
just to make content?
I’m feeling a little meta today.
What is the difference between content and art? Is there a difference? How much of yourself should you put into your art? In a world of AI, does art still have meaning?
These are some of the questions I’m thinking about today. What about you? When it comes to art and creativity, what questions do you wrestle with?
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
For me I create my art as a way to document personal history, feed my soul and have it act as an extension of self with which to befriend or enlighten others.
When I set out on putting the work into a Substack, I originally thought to make the content something that was topically relevant, like political cartoons. But after further consideration, I moved the subjects to be more personal and extraordinary. I spent much of the Bush years grinding out political cartoons and honestly it became tedious since the topics are so repetitive in US politics. Ergo why I chose the other direction for my Substack. I wanted to create something with more longevity and uniqueness.
Now that AI is quickly dividing art, music and writing into two camps of Human Created and Robot Created, where the AI creations are distinctly soulless, it's only a matter of time before political art and cartoons are AI generated since there are only so many well worn tropes used in it. (Think Corruption, Greed, Bigotry, etc.)
That's why I chose the far harder path of creating comics that strive for something completely different. I think ultimately it's only through that choice of following our personal stories will Human creation survive and thrive past the AI who only sees the world from within a box.
Good questions, Jason. Certainly the advent of AI image generation (not to mention chatbots) has us all thinking. I think art is very relevant and vital. I create AI images and purchase art created by human hands. I don't think either will stop.
As to the question of whether or not AI images are art, I think the answer is sometimes. If one is merely copying others' prompts or throwing out unthought out prompts, I question how much personal creative process goes into that.
But many of us take our talents as writers and our imaginations into our images, crafting them, sometimes through many iterations. We study the ways different technical additions to the prompts create different effects. We use other programs to edit our images. Are these art? I would say yes.
Just my perspective, but it is something I've given a lot of thought to. I'm interested to hear what other people think.