An Altar of Unhewn Stone
I remember exactly where I was the first time I decided to spend a whole day looking at classic paintings. I was 24-years old, and I wanted to be “cultured.” That’s why I did it. I had a few prejudices—and had seen some of the famous paintings through the course of my life. But I didn’t yet have an aesthetic sense. None of it really moved me emotionally. Two quick digressions:
Art and the aesthetic ought never to be separated: and of course, aesthetic means “feeling,” or sensing, which is why when you go to get a tooth drilled at the dentist, they give you the opposite thing: anesthetic.
Consider the third binary in the Myers-Briggs test: Sensing vs. Intuition. Part of my implied argument here is that art calls all of us into the sensuous, and many people are by their nature not inclined to enjoy that. They prefer having immediate intuitions about art, and they approach art with their intuitions all “in place.” When an intuitive person encounters a piece of art, he is already thinking about how this piece can be fit into his overall understanding of things, what it means for the future, etc. Perhaps more on this later.
Last month, I saw a demoralizing story about how “already” people have begun to prefer A.I.-generated art (and poetry!) to human-generated art. Here’s one of the reports about the recent research. In summary, humans have a strong expressed preference for human-made art, but when put to the test, they can’t identify which is human and which is algorithmic:
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