The Results of Rigor

An Ansel Adams processed through a General Adversarial Network

Whenever I attend local art fairs, I typically notice photographers who are showing what are very cliche photographs, for example, the long exposure photograph showing the trails of stars or waterfalls showing the blurring that is created by the flowing water, and I realized not all art has to be Art. Sometimes art can also be a display of skill, simply for the sake of being involved in some kind of a creative process and for the enjoyment of honing the skills to achieve the desired result.

The corollary in music might be to score something that Stravinsky would have done over a century ago. It's not done to be what it was then, or to function culturally the way it did, but to "shadow" what he did.

When artists used to copy masterful works in the presence of the original it was known to be "touched in the original", so as to align with it spiritually. Playing cover songs that sound exactly like the recording does the same thing.

But with the advent of AI, deceit has entered the picture: There might not be any work involved at all except for the printer operator and the FedEx delivery person. This brings us back to the 60s in some ways with Warhol promoting the idea that art could be completely democratized and anyone could be an artist because it was easy. But "easy" can easily get boring.

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9/12/2024:

There used to be a philosophy that being able to compose was only possible once the musician’s skills had matured. I never understood it because as skills develop you can use them compositionally. Once you know all the major scales and know the relative minors, and perhaps the modes, you can use them to build something. The musician might stop with the skills but the artist proceeds to shape something original. 

In pop music, skills are less important than artistic expression—which can be achieved by combining sounds without ever playing an instrument. 

The recording studio became an instrument in the late 60s. Now the internet can be an instrument. Internet artists can be musicians but not in the traditional sense. “Audio artist” is actually more accurate—and there have always been artists that have used sound as a medium, for gallery installations for example. They wouldn’t want to be called musicians because the term is a “container” word that includes musical instruments. 

Another reason the terms are now blurred is because one can be an Artist simply by creating an Artist page on a streaming platform with just a few tracks.