Art as a Rorschach test

The artist creates. The audience interprets. The academics write books on the artist’s intentions and the audience’s reactions. So it was in the beginning, is now and …. oh, hang on. Artificial Intelligence just set up its easel and hired a baby grand.

But does AI really change the audience’s experience? When you look at a picture in an art gallery, do you think about the artist or the picture? When you listen to a symphony do you think about the composer sitting at his piano with a quill or do you let the music sweep you along?

A good tune is a good tune. The verdant foliage of pastoral scene created by AI is no less verdant than a landscape by Constable.

We see and hear stimuli and let them affect us. We resonate with them. Before the stimuli came to us from other people. Now, perhaps, they come from an algorithm like a camouflaged Rorschach test. Yet it is still us and our response that sings, or not, in our hearts. Beauty is in the eye (ear) of the beholder. Not in the hands of the maker however skilled they are.

O tempora! O mores!