Art is not a Business (Article)
And philosophy is not a department.
Socrates: So even our walks are dangerous here. But you seem to have avoided the most dangerous thing of all. Bertha: What's that? Socrates: Philosophy. Bertha: Oh, we have philosophers here. Socrates: Where are they? Bertha: In the philosophy department. Socrates: Philosophy is not a department. Bertha: Well, we have philosophers. Socrates: Are they dangerous? Bertha: Of course not. Socrates: Then they are not true philosophers.
-Socrates Meets Jesus: History's Greatest Questioner Confronts the Claims of Christ
Peter Kreeft’s Socrates Meets… book series is an interesting thought experiment in which the author - a Catholic professor of philosophy - placed various thinkers from Machiavelli to Karl Marx in the afterlife wherein the Father of Philosophy himself would question them in a socratic dialogue.
For Socrates Meets Jesus, Kreeft decided to shift gears; instead of questioning Christ directly, Socrates instead confronted the extraordinary claims of Jesus Christ in a 21st century Divinity School. How did he get there? Apparently, the hemlock juice given to him by his executioners transported him over two thousand years into the future to an American college campus.
Don’t think too hard on that. Or any of the scenarios in the series for that matter. Kreeft’s main point is the importance of questioning one’s assumptions given the things one often takes for granted.
In the aforementioned Socrates Meets Jesus1, Socrates met Bertha, a student of the nearby divinity school on her way to class. As expected, Socrates - having come from Ancient Athens - was astonished by the technological wonders of modernity. Yet his discussion with Bertha gave him the impression that the modern world doesn’t engage in philosophy of which, after nearly getting run over by a car, he voiced to his newfound companion.
Bertha responded that they did have philosophers… in the philosophy department. Indignant, Socrates retorted that “philosophy is not a department”.
Behind this clever wordplay is an important truth that philosophy is not just something that is taught in classes, to be crammed in your mind so you can write an essay that’ll get you that much needed A so you can graduate and get your degree. And if that’s all philosophy is to you, then you’re doing it wrong.
Similarly, I claim that “art is not a business”.
Yet just as the modern world has reduced philosophy into a department, it has also reduced art into a business.
I suspect this is what’s behind much of the anxiety towards “AI Art”. A lot of artists fear that they will be “replaced” by the robot. And you know what? They are right to fear that.
pointed this out in his article, Art is Communication:Going back to AI art, artists are afraid of being replaced because truthfully many of them could be. This is because they are working as technicians for corporate or corporate-style products, rather than being artists in the romantic ideal. They are drawing what another person tells them to draw; thus, if it is cheaper to tell a computer to draw the same thing and the outputs are similar, the human will lose out on a job. Nobody really considered the artist an artist to begin with. He was a laborer, a peasant employed to do a job for a certain salary.
But behind this assumption of many artists that the robot will make their skills obsolete is the idea that art is a business. Saying that human beings will stop creating art just because the computer can now generate good looking images is like saying people will stop cooking just because McDonald’s is now a thing.
Now to be fair, there is some truth to that. Fast food, especially in light of delivery apps, have made people lazy when it comes to cooking. But does that mean people have stopped cooking? Far from it. And just because one’s cooking is not exactly business friendly doesn’t mean that it’s obsolete.
I think of my own mother. I consider her to be the best cook in the world, bar none. Some may think Gordon Ramsey or Guy Fieri or whoever to be the best chef in the world, and that might be true objectively. But subjectively, my mom makes the best food I’ve ever tasted.
But does that mean she should open a restaurant? The answer is no. Not because she’s not a good cook, but because the ingredients she likes to use are expensive. And I’m not even getting into how tiring cooking for business is compared to cooking for personal reasons (like family).
For my mother, cooking is not a business; it’s something she does for her children, her husband, her relatives, and her friends. It is a way of life.
Imagine if artists so-called treat art as a way of life instead of a business.
This isn’t to say that “AI Art”2 isn’t a disruptive piece of technology. Nor am I saying that it’s wrong for people to want to make money from their art (whether it be writing, visual arts, and so on). These are topics for another article.
My point is that the hysterical, almost cultish, way people react to the very existence of “AI Art” (to the point of blacklisting authors who make use of the technology) tells me that this isn’t just a debate. For many people, this is existential.
But why? I can think of many reasons but to put it charitably, they have internalized the idea that art is a business. And those who think this way are not true artists.
Yes, you heard me. If all art for you is a way to make money3, then you’re doing it wrong.
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As an aside, I recommend the book, it’s a pretty fun read. I also enjoyed the play:
I prefer to call it “algorithmic illustration”, per
. As the term actually describes what the technology does.Why else would you react violently at the idea that someone is not procuring your services?
The structure and operations of North American media have forced most artists to become businesspeople in order to ensure both personal survival and artistic integrity. While neglect of the integrity of art has become common across history, this era is particularly disrespectful of it. Becoming a business is the only way for an artist to meet gatekeepers on their own terms.