Ken Crost - The AI Fine Art Studio

I’ve been reading Brian Eno and Bette A.’s book What Art Does – An Unfinished Theory and it has made me realize that almost anything is art — or rather, anything can possess artness. Their long list of “things that count as art” isn’t meant to be definitive; it’s meant to destabilize the old boundaries. Once you see the list, you understand that artness isn’t a property of the object. It’s a property of the encounter.

Artness is what happens between a thing and a viewer.

And that means something quietly radical: If you don’t like a particular work, your dislike doesn’t erase its artness. It only reveals something about your own perceptual wiring.

Take collage. I find collage particularly ugly. I’ve never seen a collage that struck me as beautiful or even interestingly artful. But that doesn’t mean collage lacks artness. It means I have a blind spot — one I’m not especially motivated to correct. I can live a perfectly full artistic life without collage. My rejection of it is personal, not philosophical.

This is one of the liberating ideas in Eno’s book: Artness doesn’t depend on the method of creation. It doesn’t depend on difficulty, labor, tradition, or virtuosity.

Marcel Duchamp understood this long before the rest of us caught up. His Readymades — a urinal, a bottle rack, a snow shovel — were purchased objects that he simply signed and declared as art. People still argue about whether those objects “count,” but the argument misses the point. Duchamp wasn’t trying to prove that a urinal is art. He was demonstrating that artness is not located in the object at all.

Artness is a shift in attention. Artness is a frame. Artness is a declaration. Artness is a moment of perception that reorganizes how you see the world.

Once you accept that, the old debates about “real art” versus “fake art,” “handmade art” versus “machine-made art,” “high art” versus “low art,” all collapse. They become irrelevant categories — artifacts of a time when people believed artness was something you could measure with technique or pedigree.

In Eno’s view, and increasingly in mine, artness is democratic. It’s everywhere. It’s available to anyone who chooses to engage with the world in a certain way. And it’s not diminished by the fact that someone else doesn’t see it.

My dislike of collage doesn’t remove its artness. Someone else’s dislike of AI art doesn’t remove its artness. Duchamp’s urinal didn’t lose artness because people were outraged. Artness persists independent of approval.

This is the liberating, slightly dangerous, wonderfully expansive idea at the heart of What Art Does: Artness is not a quality of the thing. It’s a quality of the relationship between an art object and the viewer.

And once you see that, the world becomes much larger — and much stranger — than it was before.