AI allows for a rejection of conceptuality, like anti-post-conceptual art or maybe just “anticonceptualism” - late night ramblethread

First, authorship is now completely unaccountable (“the AI made this”) so there’s space to make something without considering it at all, to have no investment in it, but still put it forward on a scale that goes beyond industrial and into hyperreal production

It’s like Fluxus realized so completely that Fluxus would have to reject it — “death to art (but not like that)”

Sol Lewitt: “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

Today the machine has replaced the idea that makes the art: execution is perfunctory and so too is all the planning and decisions.

Of course conceptual art can still come into this space (I like to think I do that sometimes) and anticoncept is, in some ways, a concept. But many seem to find enormous appeal in the anticoncept of random generative images, music, or other art… why?

Maybe because our relationship to *media* has changed so completely, the anticonceptual gives us something to react and respond to, a perfected “stream” or “binge” that is always new and never ends

Which suggests an art severed from any kind of connection or relationship, oriented instead to evaluation and sharing — like what Instagram did to our vacations.

Which explains all the AI sentience nonsense! We starved all the artists and now we have to reinvent them, but they have to be resurrected as service providers and entertainers with all troublesome personhood removed.

www.artforum.com/print/196706/paragraphs-on-conceptual-art-36719

I don’t think DALLE2 is the end of the world, personally, folks can walk and chew automated gum at the same time. I do hope we get out of this button mashing populist phase of AI art and connect it something where ideas become the medium of exchange, tho. (End of ramble.)

Morning add: we *already* live in an endless stream of images so why amplify it? Perhaps even the small act of clicking the button to get it flowing, offers a comforting illusion of control. If we can start the spigot, we can close it?