What Art Is For
When machines can paint, painting means something new.
Photography did not kill painting. It liberated it. AI will do the same to the disciplines it seems to threaten — but only for artists willing to reconsider what their medium is actually for.
Craft and concept
For centuries, technical mastery was proof of seriousness. That signal is now noise. What remains is concept, intention, and the mark of a specific human sensibility.
The return of the handmade
Expect a counter-movement: analogue photography, physical printmaking, live performance, the visibly imperfect. Scarcity migrates to whatever the machine cannot fake.
New forms
Real-time generative worlds, personalised opera, procedurally infinite novels. Some of it will be junk. Some of it will be the beginning of an art form we don't have a word for yet.
Questions worth arguing about
- ◆Is a prompt a work of art?
- ◆Will galleries still matter in 2040?
- ◆What can only a human artist do?