The End of Artistic Innovation?

This morning, in the New York Times’ Magazine section, I saw the piece “Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill” by Jason Farago. The subhead certainly caught my attention: “A Times critic argues that ours is the least innovative century for the arts in 500 years. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.“

Really? As I began to read it, my first thought was that this was a written by some cranky old curmudgeon. It felt like things I’ve read over the years, written by someone who had aged-out, was out-of-touch with the cultural “now,” and was trying to make themselves, and their previous era, relevant again. I remember, as a child of the 80’s, those who dismissed the music being created, whereas I thought it to be amazingly vibrant and revolutionary. But now, in hindsight, there is a recognition of that era’s creativity. Was this article just someone who doesn’t get what’s happening today?

But as I read on, Jason spoke to things which felt quite real to me. When he wrote “Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change” it rang true – our endless scrolling reveals the seeming firehose of content that is bombarding us in all forms of media. Likewise, the passive way in which we consume this content – perhaps giving it a heart, or at most a short comment – is a reminder of how little impact our actions (as either consumers or creators) have in our modern media ecosystem.

“We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.”

Yikes! But isn’t innovation supposed to be the norm? Should it be the standard by which we consider everything? Maybe not.

“As the economist Robert Gordon has shown, the transformative growth of the period between 1870 and 1970 — the ‘special century,’ he calls it — was an anomalous superevent fueled by unique and unrepeatable innovations (electricity, sanitation, the combustion engine) whose successors (above all information technology) have not had the same economic impact.”

Jason “blames” (although that’s not quite the right word) a lot of this on our current technological age. Specifically he writes about what happened at the start of this century:

… the plunge through our screens into an infinity of information; … our submission to algorithmic recommendation engines and the surveillance that powers them. The digital tools we embraced were heralded as catalysts of cultural progress, but they produced such chronological confusion that progress itself made no sense. “It’s still one Earth,” the novelist Stacey D’Erasmo wrote in 2014, “but it is now subtended by a layer of highly elastic non-time, wild time, that is akin to a global collective unconscious wherein past, present and future occupy one unmediated plane.” In this dark wood, today and yesterday become hard to distinguish. The years are only time stamps. Objects lose their dimensions. Everything is recorded, nothing is remembered; culture is a thing to nibble at, to graze on.

So, have we failed? Is our current non-special era a disaster? One in which nothing truly new emerges, and we live in a swamp of sameness? Jason offers a lifeline, pointing out that prior to the “special century” artists were highly creative. It’s just that the lens of “newness” wasn’t a primary way in their work was perceived.

Instead, previous cultures valued reflection and tradition. “Roman art and literature provides a centuries-long tradition of emulation” and “Consider also the long and bountiful history of Chinese painting, in which, from the 13th century to the early 20th, scholar-artists frequently demonstrated their erudition by painting in explicit homage to masters from the past.“ Maybe we’re just returning to something approaching the traditional idea of “normal” for what it means to be creative.

I’m not totally convinced. And I’m not sure that I want to go back to that. But… as I read this, what I thought of was the latest generative AI technologies, the images they create, and the creative future they point to. In particular prompt-based image generating tools such as Midjourney and Dall-E. These are, essentially, statistical resamplers (creating what Hito Steyerl calls “statistical renderings“). They learn from the massive collection of images on the internet, and create images that, essentially re-use elements from them. Erik Davis (in this interview with Ezra Klein) considers what this means:

“the apparent creativity of large language models relies on the novel shuffling of a gargantuan deck of cards that already exists”

“…are we actually getting to a place where we start to recognize that less and less, that it’s sufficient to simply be entertained by the reshuffled deck, or is it just going to be clear that there is this kind of difference that we’re losing?”

The point being, that these new AI images, these reshuffles of what’s come before, may be initially entertaining — they certainly seem to have captured people’s imaginations — but they reinforce Jason Farago’s premise that nothing new, and certainly nothing innovative, is actually being created.

And this gets to why I did this post. The article helped articulate why I have so little interest in this latest AI technology.

I do believe that AI can create “innovative” art, but I’m highly skeptical that it will be coming from those massive prompt-based image generating tools. The images that they create are merely clever technological tricks. In a recent interview, I said that using them is “cheating.” The supposed “creative democratization” that they offer is a myth. They are backwards looking — by definition not innovative.

It’s why I don’t use massive pre-trained AI networks. I work with more fundamental and rudimentary AI tools — getting deep in how they work and understanding their unique materiality, in order to explore what the technology is about, and what it says about our materialist and greedy culture. And I’m not the only one - there are other artists out there, thoughtfully pushing the boundaries of what it means to create art with AI, and other technologies. And they’re innovating.

To this point, in the comments section of Jason’s article, there were several people who thoughtfully pointed out that there actually is compelling work being created today — it’s just really hard for us to see it. “The gatekeepers have been doing a terrible job, seduced by profit and status.“

So… don’t give up just yet. And maybe, in addition to looking harder for innovative art, we need to be deeply questioning how we use social media, trust museums, and otherwise engage with the world. And how we may be personally gatekeeping the most interesting stuff away from ourselves.