On art – Aaron Peck in TLS:

‘One of Eno’s most recent projects, What Art Does: An unfinished theory, co-authored with the Dutch artist Bette A., turns his attention to a general theory about art. A pocket-sized hardcover in white and pink, it seems at first glance to take its ambitions lightly. Inside, amid Bette A.’s playful illustrations, Eno, in a plain-spoken and direct style, attempts a pragmatic yet sophisticated defence, bringing together ideas he has been exploring since the 1990s. While we see that humans everywhere enjoy art, we have little sense of what it actually does, he claims. No wonder some governments marginalize it. To argue for it, he says, we need to understand it.
Eno imagines a continuum from the humblest human activities, such as cutting hair (not how an artist might propose cutting hair as an artwork in a gallery, but actual haircuts), to the most remarkable aesthetic achievements – a symphony, poem or painting. What, according to him, unifies these varied things? They are how we explore feelings. And how does that happen? The further art gets from utility, he argues, the greater freedom it has to explore the range of human emotions: “The art engagement begins where the functional engagement ends.” It’s a rather standard definition advanced since the Enlightenment, to be sure. But what is refreshing about his formulation is that it includes things that are tied to utility without abandoning the autonomy associated with more traditional artforms. Most aesthetic theories claim one or the other, beauty or function; Eno leaves space for both. “Art,” he says, “only happens when there is room for options, where things can be fundamentally otherwise.” He envisions an avant-garde approach that is both generative and inclusive, a general theory for everyone and anyone.’

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‘But what is meant here by “avant-garde”? It’s a word that is often used rather loosely. “The term ‘avant-garde’”, writes Morgan Falconer, “first came into use in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century and pointed to artists who were behaving in distinctly new ways.” His new book, How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern artists and the quest to end art, explores how those artists attempted to destroy a bourgeois understanding of art, replacing it with something that merged with daily life.’

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‘We encounter, for example, the young Filippo Tommaso Marinetti stargazing in Alexandria, years before his return to Italy to champion futurism, the wild bohemian nights of Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball in Zürich at the birth of Dada, as well as Guy Debord’s drunken dérives across Paris with other members of the Situationist International, smoking hash on the banks of the Île de la Cité. With a talent for setting the scene and rendering vivid portraits, Falconer brings the stories of these artists, each with conflicting agendas, into one comprehensible argument. The lightness of his critical touch does a service, too, because it manages to take a rather theoretically dense premiss, illustrating the radical aims of the historical avant-garde, without recourse to academic jargon.’

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‘In terms of the avant-garde, the boldest ways in which art and life are merging, outside luxury lifestyle branding, can be seen in tech. David Hajdu’s The Uncanny Muse: Music, art, and machines from automata to AI begins from a moment of unease. In February 2019, the music critic attended the opening of Faceless Portraits Transcending Time, an exhibition at HC Contemporary that claimed to be the “first show of algorithmic art in a New York gallery”, a collaboration between a computer science professor at Rutgers University named Ahmed Elgammal and an algorithm he had programmed. For Hajdu, it spurred a number of questions – one being, “How new is this really?” And that led him to explore the extensive history of creativity and automation.’

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‘Reading this book feels a bit like learning how to stop worrying and love the bomb: “Growing in intelligence”, Hajdu writes, “machines may still have more to communicate, if we let them.” The worry is not so much about generative AI changing creativity, however, as about the convergence of widening economic disparity and our reliance on tech – as we risk becoming “techno serfs”, to borrow an idea from Yanis Varoufakis – tethered to our devices, subscriptions and apps while a few huge companies accrue more wealth and power.’

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‘We need a new avant-garde, one that thinks “fundamentally otherwise” from how it has been co-opted. Brian Eno’s “unfinished theory” is a beginning.’

Read the article here.

In order to answer the question, can a machine produce art, we need to answer the question first: what is art?

Art didn’t stop with the birth of Dada, nor with the demise of Dada, to state the obvious.

Room for options, is a pleasant lowest common denominator.

The machine will give us more options. Stop fearing the machine, start loving the machine, and eventually the machine will love you.

I have been told that also my books are used to make AI a better writer.

Well, that’s what happens all the time. The giants of the past make us better writers, which is not to say that I’m a giant.

The new competitor is here to stay.