![Screenshot of a tweet by @amasad with the following text: 'Noooooooo you can't use AI to generate art that's offensive to the sanctity of art. The sanctity of art: [image of Duchamp's Fountain]'](/_astro/screenshot.B5F8Wm1V_Z6t1CM.webp)
I find takes like this interesting, in that there’s a presupposition that art solely exists as a vector of a supposed ‘beauty’, and little/no else.
Amjad, surely you don’t believe programming simply exists to make web apps, do you?
The interesting thing about the artistic act is its inability to be bound to a single vector. Any culture-producing act exists “in the world” and is subject to nature and its various forces, people’s interpretation included.
I don’t really understand people who claim that art only exists for the production of classical beauty. It’s sort of like saying that clay, the material, is only for the production of pots. The people of antiquity made ingenious use of clay to create toys, coinage, documents and records, modular units for architecture, and vessels of course.
Sure, Duchamp just scrawled on a toilet, but he also fashioned a blade (a question).