Art Thoughts 2

 

Artists of the world wake up! You have a lot to lose, not just chains. In fact there are no chains around you no. If you think you have one, then you must be hallucinating. The governments are no longer interested in your paintings or sculptures or any other work of art because your artistic acts no longer matter to the governments. They have become so apathetic and ruthless therefore they are not going to chain you. Governments are only concerned about facilitating the corporations. The corporations are concerned about manipulating big data. Data, as they say, is the new crude. In the long run the majority is going to be irrelevant in the game. Artists are a lot that faces the threat of irrelevancy. Why so, let me explain.

 

Creating art is one thing and making money out of it in the market is another thing, so says Jasper Johns. And do we need a Jasper Johns to tell that now? He had said it long back before many of you were born even. The current market is all about the object experience of art and its conversion into monetary value. But of late, we are talking about the NFTs- the Non-Fungible Tokens. It may sound so good to the ears of the artists. Your work cannot be replicated once the NFT is here. You are the unique creator and your creation has been transported into the digital realm, with a virgin code, so pristine, and the kind of one that goes back into the previous state once the monetization with it is done. But in the long run, it looks like there is a problem.

 

NFT talks about the digital piece even without the original one; original is perishable. At times it is forcibly destroyed depending on the nature of transaction. Next is nothing but an NFT whose original never existed! Who is then the maker of it? It is a simple question with a simple answer. The AI could do it for the market as you are made obsolete by the market itself. A work of art made to order to serve a particular economic purpose. It is projected that in the near future the number of global population that understands economics operations in the digital realm will be zero. You cannot fight against a system that you don’t understand.

 

So what are you going to do with your art and artistic skills? Your art could give you some sort of existential relevancy for the time being. But then even if you are a professional artist, your services are no longer needed. What is the point then in continuing with something that doesn’t create any value in the market? You may find some aesthetical value within your own limited functional society. But that society also would go for a sea change sooner than later.

 

When AI can replace HI (human intelligence), and if it happens in a decade or so what will be the role of the artists in the society? I am no doomsday prophet. But there are chances of art becoming obsolete or turning into some sort of a primitive human act. May be it is time that artists wake up and think about the present day deeply and derive strategies from a world that keeps evolving in terms of info-technology and bio-technology, two factors that speed up change in unprecedented and unpremeditated ways.

 

-JohnyML