Ditto for Picasso, and many artists even going back to the Renaissance when great painters and sculptors sometimes had apprentices finish or duplicate paintings/sculptures for them.

But this isn't that. AI is something else entirely.

I don't recommend using the Warhol argument. It's become a trope used by AI-über-alles people who have little knowledge of and often zero experience in the arts.

The reason why artists are mad about AI is the same reason artists were mad about the photograph… they were selling a product like craftsmen, but calling themselves artists. Yes, there is a crisis for getting paid to be someone else’s creative, but there is no crisis in creativity. In fact, there has never been more freedom than now.

Duchamp's R Mutt is an abstract commentary.

The actual vehicle of this commentary, the upside down urinal, is wholly arbitrary.

I don't claim others misunderstand art. I'm saying that art as a product that can be sold for income, where people want to own it, is tied to thingness.

>The actual vehicle of this commentary, the upside down urinal, is wholly arbitrary.

Yes. I agree. I'm generally confused by what you're trying to say here. I also know there are a many copies of Fountain... which again, demonstrates the concept of thingness in art I'm trying to talk about.

You typically can't hang a performance art piece in a gallery all day. You certainly can't sell a print to people at home. The fact that they care about the original instead of holding equal value to the print is exactly what I'm talking about. Digital creations don't have the same thingness, because you'd literally need to do something like get the original RAM that rendered the piece to identify it as "the original."

Defining "concerns about AI" broadly as "is it art?" while obstinately denying the possibility for real concerns about imagegen tech: theft of intellectual property by the wealthy, environmental, economic, expressive, and on and on.

> I don't claim others misunderstand art.

> gp: I'd suggest people learn about ...

Is a passive aggressive way to say "you misunderstand this due to your ignorance".

> I also know there are a many copies of Fountain... which again, demonstrates the concept of thingness

> gp: Fucking Duchamp’s readymades should make any concern about AI worthless.

If anything this "demonstrates the thingness in consumerism".

My point was you are ex post facto conflating your opinion of the items in the gift shop with the named artist's own expression.

Critique, yes. Celebrate, wat?

I tend to categorize Warhol as an artist that if you hate their work you should love it because the point is to coerce you to hating it to lead you to the realization that the arc of factory mass production bends toward lowering quality.

I highly doubt Warhol used his chosen soup brand because he felt it was the pinnacle of soup and represented how even mass produced quantities can have excellence in quality.

More likely he was saying this piece is to art as this brand's product is to soup.