What We Think About When We Think About Art
In an interview, the artist and author Austin Kleon was asked to respond to an audio clip in which the painter Makoto Fujimura said, “There is something intrinsic about the art process that is needed to sustain all of us creating work. Apart from the marketplace. The work of art can exist on its own without the marketplace. But civilization cannot. Without the gift of art, we lose our soul.” “Another way to think about what he’s talking about,” Kleon replied, “is process versus product. When we think about art, a lot of people think about art as the finished product. It’s the thing up on the wall or the shelf or the screen—that’s the product. But then there’s the process of art, the work done over time to make the thing. And I think we’re in a moment right now where a lot of people only understand the product of art. A lot of the chit-chat about AI—these are people who really believe in the product of art, and they don’t understand and appreciate the process of art.”
Process versus product—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
What To Celebrate
Gabe Whaley is the founder and CEO of MSCHF (”mischief”), an art collective behind many wild, creative, and provocative projects and pranks. The Big Red Boots, the Museum of Forgeries (1 original Andy Warhol work shuffled into a stack of 999 exact forgeries, with record of which is the original destroyed), the Jesus Shoes (Nike Air Max’s injected with holy water from the River Jordan), and the Microscopic Handbag (a Louis Vuitton smaller than a grain of sand and narrow enough to pass through the eye of a needle, which sold at auction for more than $60,000), among hundreds of others. At a get-together a few months back, a group of us were talking about audience capture, the phenomenon where creators alter and tailor what they make to match what gets the most likes, views, or attention. Asked if he’s done anything to safeguard against becoming audience captured, Gabe shared a practice he implemented in the early days of MSCH: “we have a little celebration the day before every project launches. So we celebrate the act of creation, not the response.”
The Most Important Change Made By An Endeavor
The novelist Brandon Sanderson’s first twelve books were all rejected by every publisher he submitted them to. Deservedly so, Sanderson said. The first book, White Sand Prime, especially—“it was truly awful. It was one-part ripoff of Dune, one-part ripoff of Les Misérables, one-part ripoff of The Wheel of Time…I have no question that using the language models currently released, everyone in this audience could prompt AI to create a book that is better than White Sand Prime.” The second book was a little better, “but also leaned heavily on the authors I’d read before.” In the next few books—“the plots are tighter, the characterization is more solid, and the worldbuilding goes beyond its influences.” In the next few—“I started to develop my style of the Sanderlanche,” a portmanteau of “Sanderson + avalanche” coined by fans to capture the way Sanderson carefully sets up multiple seemingly disparate plot lines, which eventually converge in a fast-paced, cascading series of events in the final stretches of his books. And in the next few—“I started laying the foundation for me telling stories that are in conversation with the legacy of science fiction and fantasy I had read, rather than just copying that legacy.” Finally, the thirteenth book, Elantris, “where I brought all this together…It’s a fully realized fantasy epic that applies all the lessons I’d learned” in the process of writing the twelve before it.” Since Elantris, Sanderson’s many books have sold more than 50 million copies in thirty-five different languages. “Maybe someday,” Sanderson said, “AI will be able to write books better than I can.” And maybe the current language models could help him churn out books faster for his large, devoted fanbase who would no doubt buy anything with his name on it. “But here’s the thing: Using those models in such a way absolutely misses the point. It looks at art only as a product…Books aren’t the product. They aren’t the art—not completely. And this is the point: the most important thing to understand is that the process of creating art makes art of you. Let me repeat that—the book, the painting, the film script is not the only art. It’s important, but in a way, it’s just a receipt. It’s a diploma…In the end of it all, you are the art. The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you.”
The Dance of Doing It
At a meditation retreat on the Big Sur Coast, Zen Master Kobun Chino Roshi put on an archery demonstration. He set up a target at one end of a lawn along the Pacific Ocean. As the many retreatants watched, “slowly and with exquisite care,” Jack Kornfield writes in No Time Like the Present, “Roshi raised and unsheathed his bow from its leather case and carefully strung it. Then he uncased the arrows, sat meditating with them in his lap, then spun them and looked down the length from feathers to tip, finally selecting one. He stood and mindfully paced fifty feet from the target.” There he stopped and turned to face the target. He stood tall, and as he drew the arrow back, the spectators watched with great anticipation for the master archer to hit the center of the target. He aimed at the target for one, two, three, four, five seconds, then suddenly, Roshi raised the bow forty-five degrees and let the arrow fly. “It flew,” Kornfield writes, “over the target, over the cliff, and into the ocean. ‘Success,’ he smiled broadly.” Then, slowly and with exquisite care, he took another fifteen minutes to unstring the bow and pack the arrows. He turned to those watching and bowed. “It was completely unexpected,” Kornfield said. “It was a beautiful teaching: it’s not the bullseye…It’s the preparation, the care, the dance of doing it.”
The Costs of Outsourcing The Process
The allure of a large language model like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is that it can process information, create content, generate ideas, and research topics in almost no time with almost no user effort. “Few have thought through the costs that will impose,” Ezra Klein writes in Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind. “Even if those summaries and drafts are pretty good, something is lost in the outsourcing.” Mainly, the things we can get only through processing information, creating content, generating ideas, and researching topics ourselves. “Part of what is happening when you spend 7 hours reading a book,” Klein said elsewhere, “is you spend 7 hours with your mind on the topics in the book, grappling with them, drawing connections, having thoughts you would not otherwise have had. And so without that process of grappling, without those hours inside that book, it doesn’t get inside you. It doesn’t impress itself upon you. It doesn’t change you. What reading and writing and processing information is supposed to do is change you.”
The Ashes of Art
When she was fourteen, the pioneering performance artist Marina Abramovic received painting lessons from the abstract landscape artist Filo Filipović. In their first lesson, Filipović guided Abramovic through a long, meticulous process. Hours later, they had a finished product. Filipović then doused it with half a liter of gasoline, struck a match, and dropped it, the work exploding in an instant. “And then he left,” Abramovic writes in Walk Through Walls. “This made a big impression on me…It taught me that the process was more important than the result. Later on I read—and loved—the Yves Klein quote: ‘My paintings are but the ashes of my art.’” It’s not the product, the result, the target, the response. They are but the ashes, the receipts, the diplomas of the process, the care, the time, the experience, the grappling, the dance of doing it.