--- Ben Davis, in Art in the After-Culture, quoted by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei in Stephen Thaler’s Quest to Get His ‘Autonomous’ AI Legally Recognized Could Upend Copyright Law Forever, Art in America, Jan 8, 2024
Excerpt
In his 2022 book, Art in the After-Culture, art critic Ben Davis writes, “‘Art’ stands in symbolically for the parts of cognition that do not seem machine-like.” Accordingly, the loose definition of art has changed to keep pace with the advancement of machines. Craft is not really art because machines can make tables and sweaters. The advent of cameras, which made rendering a realistic image as simple as pressing a shutter button, initiated Impressionism, Cubism, and the long arc of conceptual art. In contemporary art, the institutions, galleries, and other gatekeepers have increasingly clustered around the figure of the artist and the individual life story, and run away from the material object, which can always be replicated anyway. We are left clutching that indefinable spark as some final differentiator between humans and machines.
