Digital technology is the Zeitgeist of our time. It is the engine driving the 21st century economy. The art world, in this time of digital abundance, has become an arena of deep confusion. Serious cultural is losing attention to superficial performance. In the collective myopia of attention-seeking addiction driven by technology, society has lost sight of art’s primary superpower: its perennial nature. Great art, throughout all ages, outlasts the technology of its time, the artist who creates it, and the society in which it emerged.
Art is humanity’s oldest and most powerful cultural force.
Art predates recorded history and outlives every civilization that creates it.
Across the expanse of human existence, technology fades and art remains. The nature of art is inseparable from the qualities that make humans, human. It carries independent thought, changing emotions, feeling of spirituality, community, living, dying, all nature, and man as nature, allowing us to explore the totality of existence, universal truths to the innermost individual corners of perception, even the perception of a perception.
Exploring these expanses and giving them meaning is the work of an artist.
Art last because its nature is universal.
True artistic talent is developed by an imagination that questions boundaries.
True artistic talent has never born from conformity.
The advancements of early digital technology have brought economic and social prosperity to most of the world’s population. The industrial revolution has passed. The second order advancements of the digital age, such as AI and Robotics are replacing work, economic systems, political structure, and global power dynamics. Digital technology is shifting nearly everything in its path.
But it is not and cannot shift the job of the artist.
Throughout history, when work and economic prosperity have been transformed on a global scale, entirely new and previously unimagined possibilities have emerged and materialised over different timescales. Radical transformation in technology changes the trajectory of nearly everyone.
Yet the role of the artist job remains steadfast throughout the ages.
IN the digital age, there are more “artists” and more mediums than we’ve ever known. Prosperity has created a double edge sword for humanity’s most important role, an abundant supply of “artists” of which there are many kinds.
The few, which Vasari, would cement into history as he did with Giotto, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci. And the many confused, who focus on the superfluousness of abundance, of which Tolstoy described as “low” and “tedium”, feelings which are accessible not only to all people but also all animals. The confused artist, the highest portion of the oversupply have reduced a lifelong pursuit of disciplined practice to superficial thinking, conformity and hyper-production. No matter how important they seem today, their lack of depth and long term cultural understanding, wither away into nothing like a plant without water and sunlight.
Most of what is claimed as “art” today carries little lasting cultural or economic value and contributes nothing of consequence to society. Some of it, a deficit to society.
Art that lives on does so because it’s depth commands respect across generations.
The artist role is to reveal the meaning of this time, not to become a clog in its machine, and not be controlled by the machine.
Art’s longevity is earned by carrying the most exceptional human qualities forward though time.
Art is both a personal and cultural pursuit.
Great artists are serious. They value great art like they value air.
Great artists pursue the cultural depth of their time the way a great solider pursues protection of his country.
Art is the work of the human spirit. It is derived from intuition, imagination, lived experience. The act of creating art requires a level of perception and perspective which only unique to humans. This level of perception is not merely on observation, but perception shaped by the nuances of real-world experience, real memory, gut intuition, suffering, desire, place, and time.
Culture is shaped in nuance.
Culture is shaped by understanding.
These are depths of reality in which technology are unable reach, not matter how intelligent. It’s inconceivable that such simple ideas need to be written down. But in a world where intelligent machines tell humans what to do, write, think, create, the Artist still has their job to do. Disruption followed religion, agriculture, factories, cities, the printing press, cars, airplanes, computers, internet, social media, all of them changed the world forever, but none of them changed the job of the Artist.
Throughout history, no matter how revolutionary the times, the Artist experienced a level of reality which is unavailable to everything else but nature.
That is why, throughout all human history, technology fades and art remains.
Art is carried on for centuries and millennia and protected. Sometimes it fought over.
Culture is not always clean, or ethical, but it is enduring.
What happened during the time of Titan, Reubens and Velasquez. We look at them to understand and trust their judgment, centuries later. We look at Goya’s work and feel the despicable lows of which man can descend. Dali showed us the imagination itself, through dreams and surrealism. Warhol gave everyone a taste of the American Dream, and it means to achieve the impossible.
These Artists defined the era of which they were a participant. Their work and names live on, without replacement, without dilution, no matter how many other names come along. They’re names become increasingly relevant with time. Their more valuable, more appreciated. While the most important technology their age has been replaced or forgotten.
Today, we live in another stage of impressive technological advancement. The Artist who takes on the job of deepening cultural roots and sharpens cultural niches will live on. They operate against little competition, against shallow currents, for serious work. Their lesser peers are guided by machines telling them how to think and what to do, not by what makes them “artists.”
Today, Intelligent machines are causing a cognitive divide between an intellectual elite (those who copilot AI to get deeper thinking) and an intellectual underclass (those who let AI think for them). A large part of society unsurprising is turning to more superficial level of thought while the few are voyaging into the deep. Deep philosophical thought driven by the nuances of lived experience is the key to the greatest cultural movements in history, and its art.
Siezing this nuance to a level of deep understanding and giving it expression that translates across generations is what divorces good from great.
Great art is the key to a understanding a society, both now and 1000 years after.
The job of the artist today is just as important as it was centuries in the past. Even the lesser artists have part in the value chain. They may may not last, but they matter. Without art in the age of technology, life becomes robotic and superficial. Art is the one of the last remaining jobs which can only be executed by the Artist.
Technology have never lived therefore if cannot make great art.
We cannot look up to any form of technology, no matter how great, for the level of perception and intuition it takes to create great art. Technology produces impressive outcomes which are impossible for humans, but humans produce art which is impossible for technology. The transfer of these unique human traits onto a canvas is the difference between art and a painting. Just at the transfer of feeling into a piano is the difference between Mozart and everyone else who played.
Our technological tools are revolutionary, but none understand the emotional gravity of grief, divorce, anger or dying from hunger. It doesn’t the loftiness of love, dreams, sex or being enveloped in the presence of spirituality, nature and God.
As digital technology expands into every facet of life, work, politics, finance, economics, it’s unnamed promise is productivity across every domain of existence. As with the rise of capitalism, this technological age promises prosperity, but for who? What it won’t produce is anything culturally worthy of being remembered centuries from today. No matter it’s weight or gravitational pull on the world, it will fade. By its nature, it is replaceable.
And just like man, and art, technology conforms to nature.
The creation of art is as distinctive to man as the creation of children.
The important task of culture remains with the artist: in these times they will decide on how to use these tools, to give meaning to these times, and to leave something of consequence and worthy of inheritance behind, long after the technology building these times, is replaced.
Civilizations outlive themselves through art. All dominant nations of the past have fallen. The Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, and Ancient China. Their technologies are antiquated, their systems and governments are replaced, their industries disappear, their currency becomes worthless and is replaced by other stores of value, yet the work of their artists speak for them today, and everyone who will come.
Art is what remains of age after everything else becomes obsolete.