Why Love Generative Art?
Disclaimer: I come more from the contemporary art world even than from the tech world. (Much of my job is looking at thousands of art exhibitions from around the world each month. My little non-profit publishes the ones we think are most important to see at the moment so that the public can learn about them for free even if they aren&#x27;t rich collectors.)<p>First, I want to say that I&#x27;m thinking about Generative Art in the context of &quot;contemporary art,&quot; which despite sounding like it could apply to literally any art made in the current era actually denotes a specific social context and the set of people, institutions and works that constitute it. Some people call this &quot;fine art&quot; but I don&#x27;t like the implied hierarchy and value judgment of that term. I think there&#x27;s a separate case to be made that Generative Art is actually more akin to important historical craft and decorative arts traditions, which have great artistic importance and matter much more to many people than contemporary art. I mean &quot;contemporary art&quot; the way people usually mean it when they start institutions called &quot;Museum of Contemporary Art&quot; or &quot;Contemporary Art Center.&quot;<p>Generative Art qua &quot;contemporary art&quot; seems to fit a pattern that you see a lot in startups: people who are into coding and technology enter a given field that they aren&#x27;t so involved with and start applying their skills to it. As far as I know, the AirBnB people weren&#x27;t running bed and breakfasts at the beginning, they were looking for problems to solve with technology. That worked great, for the most part: they identified concrete problems and found ways to solve them.<p>The odd thing about Generative Art, which seems to fit this pattern insofar as the energy and interest is coming much for from the tech side than the art side, is that art doesn&#x27;t have any problems because it has no clear purpose. Any idea you may individually have about what art should do, or what makes art &quot;good,&quot; can be easily defeated by famous counterexamples. Lots of important art declines to be beautiful, to start interesting conversations, or to care at all about the history of art, for example. In other words, no one ever sat on a bench in a contemporary art museum looking at paintings and, chin-on-fist, said &quot;there has to be a better way!&quot;<p>This article goes to great effort to insert Generative Art into the history of art, more or less finding math-y geometric art or artists who used algorithms. These artists were often doing so to resist earlier ideologies about the genius of the master&#x27;s hand, or to pretend to escape their own subjectivity, rather than out of an enthusiasm for visual algorithms as a craft. I&#x27;d suggest those interested in contextualizing Generative Art historically also research &quot;process art,&quot; which normally had a messier aesthetic but, like Generative Art, posited the activity of producing the artwork as the most expressive aspect of the artist&#x27;s practice. The act of painting, for process art, would be more important than the painting itself, almost closer to performance art than any other movement. That certainly seems to fit the Generative Art ethos, which is often about the construction of a specific activity that leads to an uncertain result. That said, process art is associated with the 1970&#x27;s.<p>We&#x27;re about two decades into a deep rejection of art movements, which are inextricable from the problematic, exclusive teleology of modernism. A certain kind of person with a certain kind of power used to dictate what forms and ideas were important, and rewarded artists who fit the narrative and, well, were the same race and gender as all the other successful artists. These days, artists are generally expected to be individuals rather than to be swept up in some cultural wave. To be part of a group with such a narrow direction (&quot;we make art using cutting-edge software!&quot;) subordinates the individuality of each artist and, I think, compromises their efforts to be successful in the field of contemporary art.<p>Therefor, I think that the project of including Generative Art as a movement into contemporary art discourse is probably quixotic. Instead, I&#x27;d suggest that we&#x27;re likely to see more and more individual artists incorporate these tools, not just because they&#x27;re neat tools but in service of their own unique aims. Simon Denny, for example, engages heavily with digital and start-up culture, but he does so (I would argue) from a place of critique and fascination about what the state of technology implies about both current society and human beings on some kind of fundamental level. I don&#x27;t doubt that an individual artist could exclusively use Processing to make their work and have an art career. But they would need to make the case for themselves, rather than for Generative Art, and in my opinion the less they position themselves as representing a craft-driven community the more likely they are to be successful.<p>I did want to say that I really appreciate the effort in this article to highlight the contributions of women to Generative Art. This is very much in keeping with where the art world is at the moment. Just like tech, art has been the subject of extreme discrimination that is only just beginning to be improved, and there is broad consensus about that within the art world.