Art in the Age of Creative Technology: a manifesto
Between July and September 2026, humanity has faced its greatest, most televised threat—yet the extent of attention it has received lives in satirical memes and extremist, arrogant beliefs. At one extreme, scientists are calling for the end of the world; at the other, artists deny AI any creative capability. Fed up with the comfort of our own stubbornness, I laid out the facts and acknowledged our ignorance to finally allow artists to question their own future in an academic manner. 9000 words later, what started out as a personal project is now being published by UCLA and revered by hundreds. Below is a short "abstract" for the longer essay:
link to article ^
This paper argues that art has never possessed a fixed essence. Based on Aristotle’s distinction between essential and accidental properties, the essay follows how each quality once required of art—ritual function, unique presence, realism, craftsmanship, tonality, or technical skill—was demoted to an optional description once technology made it available to anyone: a pattern the paper names qualitative subdivision. It then argues that three determinants—politics, demographics, and technology—decide which property is promoted in its place, and that together they construct the subjective reality from which any population perceives art. Generative artificial intelligence now subjects the last widely held essential property, creativity, to the same subdivision, but on an unprecedented scale: for the first time, anyone can produce any output. Applying the determinants to the present day, the paper predicts that the domain of art will expand, that human-made work will persist as a smaller market, and that there are three different ways art can be perceived—a utopia of art, a blurred middle, and a world in which art loses significance—and closes on the responsibility that remains: not to save art, but to attend to the experience of it.
