The advancement of Artificial Intelligence in both visual and text formats has created quite a stir across the Internet. Many of these discussions center around the question, “What is art?” or perhaps the discussion is better framed as, “What is Art?” That change from lowercase to uppercase “A” may be vital to the heart of this discussion. Maybe.

In this, I’m not going to explore the economic ramifications of AI-generated content upon working creators. I’m neither an economist nor an IP lawyer. That conversation isn’t the point of The Geek’s Guide To Lit Theory, and it’s not as interesting to me. Late-stage free market capitalism is unkind to most people struggling to be creative professionals, and the struggle is exhausting.

My goal here isn’t necessarily to define what art is or isn’t. I’m just wandering down the rabbit hole of my own thoughts through the keyboard. Maybe I’ll come out the other side with a new understanding, as Alice does at the end of her journey. Or perhaps, I’ll just get lost wandering around, lost in the Wonderland of my mind. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Merriam-Websters online defines art as:

1. skill acquired by experience, study, or observation
2. a branch of learning
3. an occupation requiring knowledge or skill
4. the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects
5. decorative or illustrative elements in printed matter

Dictionary.com defines art as:

1. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance
2. the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria; works of art collectively, as paintings, sculptures, or drawings
3. the fine arts collectively, often excluding architecture
4. any field using the skills or techniques of art

And because I’m super snarky and adore irony, Chat Open AI defines art as:

“Art is a broad term that refers to the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in the form of visual or performing arts. It can take many different forms, including painting, sculpture, music, dance, literature, and film.”

As I suspected when I thought to get definitions from different sources, we’ve got a wide range of definitions. In the discussion of images created through AI generators, I’ve seen lots of people coming up with many different definitions of what art is. Most of those come as pronouncements. “Art is as thus….” and then they go on to define the “thus.” Most of the time, I see what follows “thus” that art requires some form of human intention and/or creativity. This isn’t limited to visual mediums. This conversation has come up in music and in writing as well. The whole of academia is in the middle of an existential crisis over AI generated essays, poems, and stories. It’s not so easy anymore to determine when students didn’t actually write their essays.

Something I noticed missing in pretty much every conversation I’ve seen over AI-generated art is the viewer. That makes me wonder: What role does the person who experiences a created thing have in defining whether the created thing is actually art?

One of the great literary discussions of the 20th Century centered around the conversation (and sometimes academic shouting matches) between New Criticism and Reader Response Theory. Examining works through the lens of New Criticism is grounded upon the idea that true works of art (or maybe Art) contain objective meaning already present in the work being examined, completely removed from the viewer’s experience; however, Reader Response criticism argues that a work contains no meaning before a human experiences—reads—it.

I understand that many artists across multiple mediums have many fluctuating emotions about the quality of images being churned out by AI generators. (Heck, I gave an AI the prompt, “Write a poem about Lucille Clifton at Comic Con,” and the result was surprisingly not terrible.) I’m not trying to justify their feelings, not is my aim to tell them their feelings aren’t valid. People are going to feel how they feel. I’m working here beyond my own feelings, and diving into my curiosity about the conversations people are having, and what it all might mean. Again, not necessarily looking for answers. Rather, I’ve grown curious about what perspectives aren’t being explored in most of these conversations.

I brought up Reader Response vs New Criticism because I see lots of people talking about the creator in these conversations about art. I see very few people talking about the role of the observer in relation to art. Different people are going to have different views on this. If everyone felt the same about it, we wouldn’t need a distinction between Reader Response and New Criticism. Where’s the line between art, the creator, and the observer?

This is at the forefront of my mind because of a project I’m going to launch soon, Folklore Fridays. I’m going to go through Grimms’ Fairy Tales and rework them as if I was telling them during my storytelling shows. I have 5 different translations of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The Brothers Grimm did not write these stories. They collected them, wrote them down, and published them. Every translation is slighty different. My versions are going to be WILDLY different. We don’t know the creators of these stories. They exist as works of art only because people continue to observe them. We can do the same with any number of stories or works of art: all of folklore, The Sphinx, the Lascaux cave paintings, etc…

In the case of AI-generated content, if an observer sees something that comes from an AI, and it elicits some kind of response that resonates within the observer, is it art or not? Does that change if the observer learns the object’s origin story?

To muddy the waters even more, I’ll bring Object Oriented Ontology (OOO for short) into the discussion. I find OOO fascinating, even if from just a thought experiment perspective. OOO is a philosophical position that challenges traditional critical ideas espoused in postmodernism and critical theory. According to OOO, objects have their own inherent properties and qualities with no dependence on their relationships to humans or other objects. This means, according to OOO, an object, no matter what form it takes, is not merely a passive thing waiting around to be acted upon by humans or other agents, but rather, the object’s very existence gives it an inherent agency. Really out there, crazy thinkings come from us practicing Object Oriented Ontologists.

(This barely scrapes the surface of the awesome weirdness of OOO. Seriously, pour yourself a drink and spend a lazy rainy weekend afternoon checking it out.)

Back to Grimm. Those stories exist as changing and evolving artifacts of the universe. Are they art because someone told them once upon a time? Are they art because the Brothers Grimm wrote them down? Are they art because someone translated them? Are they art because I read them? Are they art because they exist? — A heavy series of questions that are worthy of valid exploration. And each of the various answers those questions produce is almost certainly worthy of exploration. (One of the four pillars of true criticism is curiosity.)

This brings me to Deconstruction Theory, which I suspect is really at the heart of this conversation about art, Art, AI, humans, Humanity, agency, etc… Basically, Deconstruction Theory works to break down a text into its constituent parts and examines how those parts relate to one another and to the work as a whole. It’s about how changing the context can change our understanding of a piece, because language is clunky, awkward, and imprecise. Words are little bundles of Schrödinger’s definition waiting for other words and punctuation marks to help give us a clue as to what it’s going to mean. The heart of Deconstruction Theory lies in understanding that language is not static. Deconstruction Theory uses this meta-understanding to examine the language and concepts used in objects created with language in order to explore the underlying assumptions. contradictions, and biases that shape their meaning. As the OOO cats will tell you, language has its own agency.

Further and further down the rabbit hole I’ve gone, wandering in my wonderings deeper and deeper until, curiouser and curiouser, until now I think I’m satisfied (at least for now) at the place I’ve arrived.

Discovering the concrete definition of, “What is art?” isn’t quite so interesting as being in this pivotal moment in human consciousness where we’re truly exploring the question of, “What is art?” For me, the exploration is far more important than any momentary definitions we stumble onto before wandering back into the question once again. I think on the other side of the momentary existential crisis AI-generated content is causing the artistic and academic community, we’ll collectively have a greater appreciation not just for artists, but for the process of artistic creation. The conversation about art will shift from, “this made thing,” but into, “the making of the thing.” As a creator, I’m still a little freaked out in the short term. As someone who loves the exploration and examination of ideas and concepts, I’m super jazzed for the conversations we’ll have over the next couple of years. These two views are not mutually exclusive.

What an amazing time to be both a creator and observer of artistic creation.