Evolution of cave-art
I started out doodling that stick figure - just the head to begin with. No idea what I wanted to draw. Its pose, whatever it is, just came up as I kept moving the pen across the page. I wasn’t happy with the fingers, so I drew another figure right opposite, with a different kind of fingers. Even more horrible. And kind of funny. And just like that, there were two stick figures now, facing each other. So, naturally, I drew a ball (orb?) between them, making it look like they were playing throw-and-catch.
None of this was planned. Doodles usually aren’t. But by this point it had caught L’s attention. I turned the notebook towards her, and she added a creature between the two figures - aiming, she said, for a dog. I suppose if you squint the right way, you can see the scrawny dog :)
The scene kept evolving as we took turns - adding “walls” around the figures, a ghost outside, mountains, trees, robots, whatever else came to mind. Along the way we kept giggling, trying to explain what the latest squiggle was, or what we thought the other person had drawn. Or just what the hell was supposed to be happening in the scene - was the ghost scared of the robot and seeking shelter in the house?
Either way, it seems too much fun not to be a game of its own - a collaborative, evolving scene-doodling exercise.
But is it art?
I think the earliest art in the form of cave “paintings” came of boredom from one of the cave-dwellers, who was probably just sick of being stuck inside for the time being - without internet - waiting out the tigers or lions or just the dark outside the cave.
Like our doodles, that boredom is where it starts, and it grows from there - sometimes collaboratively, sometimes competitively; someone trying to draw a better flower, a better bicycle, a better dog. Although, whether this competition always results in improved rendition quality over time or generations - that’s up to debate.
7000 years Libyan rock art of hunter and their dog |
Picasso's dog - by Picasso. |
But perhaps rendition quality was never the point as long as someone took it in and lingered with it for a while.
Art arises from a multitude of places and needs, and evolves in a million different directions. But all of it seems to share one thing: it makes us pause - both in the act of creating it as well as in encountering it. That pause can be contemplative, reflective. It can come with peals of laughter. Or a sense of confusion, even. Sometimes all of it at once.
But it makes you feel something.
Pollock's Untitled. Because, well ...
So the question becomes: is it still art if you felt nothing making it? If you never lost yourself in it? What about AI-generated art?
Well, if you feel moved, or happy, or anything at all, watching an AI-generated image or listening to an AI-generated song - it is art, for you. And I think this is close to what most people already agree on: art is subjective and personal, because feelings are subjective and personal.1
But would you call what the AI did “creating art”? Is it an artist? It didn’t feel anything generating that song or image. It merely followed a stochastic process, guided by the weights inside its network.
I’d hesitate to call that artistry - though there’s a case that we humans run some version of the same process ourselves, guided by our own weights, embedded in our own neural networks, that we call biases and experiences and imagination.
But really, I hesitate to call AI generation as “artistry” for a different reason: I don’t think art is ever fully created, by anyone or anything. It’s only ever experienced by whoever encounters it. Marcel Duchamp made almost exactly this argument in a short 1957 talk, “The Creative Act”: that the artist doesn’t fully know or control what they’ve made, and it’s the spectator who finishes the work by interpreting it.2
Urinal Fountain - by Marcel Duchamp
I may not feel much beyond mild derision on seeing “Fountain” - by Marcel Duchamp, but a lot of people do. And so, for them, it’s art. For me - well.
Till my thoughts evolve further, I think art is anything that makes you feel something.
It doesn’t matter much whether the feeling happens in the one making / performing of it or the one experiencing it afterward. Either is enough. And the two aren’t as separate as they sound: when you properly lose yourself making something, in the flow of it, you become your own first audience.3 The line between the person doing and the person feeling blurs, and sometimes disappears. That, perhaps, is the reason why the output of some artist churning out item after item for the sake of output sometimes feels uninspired. And it feels less of art and more of work - both for them as well as their percipients.
By the way, here’s a version of the doodle game you can play that L and I couldn’t stop giggling through, ghost-scared-of-robot confusion and all. Add a squiggle, hand it off, see what the hell someone else makes of your artwork :) Or just pick a pen and notebook :)
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I found a bunch of precedences for my line of thought about art - that art isn’t complete until it lands in a receptive perceiver. Reader-response criticism and Barthes’ “Death of the Author” make a related argument for text - meaning is made in the reading, not fixed by the writer’s intent. Closer home, the Rasa theory says something similar again - “Rasas are created by one’s bhava (one’s state of mind)”. So, not really exploring new grounds here. But I’m glad I had some time today to think about it on my own. ↩
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I came across Duchamp’s talk while researching this piece - after arriving at this argument on my own. It was kinda strange to hear the confirmation of the idea from someone else from decades earlier, that too someone who I scoffed at as example of “weird artsy folks”. ↩
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“Percipient” felt like the more precise word here, over “audience” or “consumer.” ↩
