Last week while chatting with
screwtape in Lambda Moo's sushi
shop, he mentioned my poetry.
He hinted that my recent life
hardship was an ingredient to
better poems.
I then added that, of course in
time of distress, there is more
creativity and in time of war
and suffering, artists also created
new trend, new genres. The surrealists
movement came to mind.
It made me wonder what will
emerge from our present crisis,
and as things seems to be getting
worst, what will be the role of
the artists in this current collapse.
Artist have been promised fame
and fortune from distributors
and 'agents.' The market has
commodified them, to create
schwag and disposable items. Always
diminishing the artist profit.
The internet also opened up the
market for everyone to be an
artists. Skill and training wasn't
needed much anymore as it became
a social game. Every artist started
to share everything for free in
order to attract more people. The
social networks saw how it benefited
them, and change the rules of the
algorithm, so again, artists had
to create even more.
Now that everything is online,
everything is available for free,
the AI comes in and digest it
all in one centralized creative brain.
A sum-up of all the art that ever
existed, to finalize the commodification
of art-you don't need the artists
anymore.
So what will the artists become?
For one thing, I hope artists will
all take a more activist stance.
Art was never a tool for capitalism,
it often had the posit goal of
criticizing and going against or
at least bringing injustice to
the surface. Artists often had the
role of expressing what everyone
felt, but couldn't put it in images,
in words. They were also the ones
who could tap into their intuitive
self to foresee the future, warning
us of an impeding doom.
In the coming years, there will be a lot less
artists, creative people living
from their art. We just went through
a golden age of the creative digital
nomad. But with the advent of AI,
a lot of that economy will disappear.
If an AI can create what the consumer
wants, at a fraction of the cost,
the market will shift toward that.
Of course there will be artists
who interface with the AI, becoming
producer of consumable, but soon
it will become too easy to interact
with the AI to even need this in-between.
I wonder if we will see the re-emergence
of the artist-activist, the artist-hacker,
the artist movement against all the
bullshit.
Regrouping and creation of new movements
in response to this new attack toward
artists and our sanity. I see previous
art movements being a reaction to
external forces, like politics and
technologies, and I hope to see this
happening again.
A group of artists fighting for a
common cause, post-absurdism?
