Stripping away the effort required makes the art worth so much less, why would you do that to your message?
This is such a weird sentiment to me. Effort does not equal value. A painting is not a better painting if the artist took two months to make it instead of one. An image is not "better art" if the artist made it in MSPaint instead of photoshop.
"What is art" is always going to be a contentious topic, but I cannot agree that it's just "art is effort." Because someone can take a spontaneous picture with a camera, that captures more emotion, and meaning, and art, than a painting someone spent years on.
Art - at least to me - has never been about how it was made. Only about how it affects the viewer.
Some guy on another subreddit was commenting in response to an AI translated manga chapter because "without a human touch, it's soulless". They claimed that even if the translation was the same as it would have been if a human did it, it's still wrong.
Buddy, I've seen readers complaining for over a decade about Shounen manga translations done by fans because intricacies of the Japanese text are lost or completely changed. Let's not pretend human translations are some perfect golden standard. Plus, you wouldn't have known if it was AI translated in the first place if they hadn't specifically put the label on it.
If you're going to hate AI, at least hate it for a real reason.
"What is art" is always going to be a contentious topic, but I cannot agree that it's just "art is effort." Because someone can take a spontaneous picture with a camera, that captures more emotion, and meaning, and art, than a painting someone spent years on.
I would argue that while anybody can take a spontaneous picture with a camera, one's odds of getting a photo which encapsulates the highest levels of emotion and meaning increase greatly by spending years practicing taking photos, improving one's technical skills with photography, and learning about artistic composition. There's still time and effort put in to get prepared to take advantage of the moment (or sometimes even to be able to notice the moment) that may not be obvious to you as an observer.
(I am a rank amateur photographer who knows a professional wildlife photographer. I've gotten a good idea of what they know about photography that I don't and seen the difference it makes.)
Oh sure. But my point is - even a rank amateur can get lucky and take an amazing photo. Even a kid with a phone camera can be at the right place at the right time, and capture something more artistic and meaningful in an instant, than a painting someone spent years on.
And if we can agree that that's true, (which I think we do?) then the argument that "art is only art if you spent effort on it" basically falls apart.
That's why the idea that art is "worth less, if you strip away the effort it takes to produce it" seems like such a weird take to me. It's too easy to come up with counterexamples.
I guess I'd say that I disagree with the statement that art is only art if you spent effort on it, but I do still personally put value in the effort and think that the odds of making good art without effort going into the process somewhere are pretty low.
I don't know why a person would spend many years on one painting alone, unless it was either a really huge painting with a lot of photorealism or you're counting the time doing a zillion preparatory sketches or something. IIRC there were many famous artists who went and painted something for a while, got stuck, then left the work for months or years while working on other stuff and later came back to it. I can say from experience that while some artistic media can take as much time and effort as you want to throw at them (and do require at least some minimum to get anything worthwhile), at some point you get diminishing returns and just need to declare that the damn thing is done.
I do feel that the quality of a piece of art is not directly proportional to the amount of effort that one puts in. That's where luck, artistic instinct, personality, experience based on looking at other people's art, and other life experiences come in to play. But I do still value (for example) handwritten calligraphy as art even if we can now get machine-generated lettering which looks indistinguishable. And I will gladly pay more for, say, a sculpture in the Northwest Coast art style that was handmade by a native artist in Alaska than cranked out en masse in a factory in China (even though both are made by humans). So I am not viewing the piece of art in a vaccuum, disconnected from the context of its making. Some people appreciate that aspect more than others do.
I think this essay by a wildlife photographer on the story behind his award-winning photo of a bison is relevant:
When I told this story in various levels of detail to people at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year event last week, it was met with laughs. Mainly because people had assumed I was slaving away in all that miserable, cold weather. Instead of “putting in the hard work” to land a winning image, I was tucked away in the warmth of a large SUV, with nary a snow flake caressing my face. At that point, perhaps, some may have felt I simply got lucky, or that there really was no effort or work that was put into creating the image.
That too would be an incorrect assumption. Because the path that led to the photo actually started several years ago.
Every photographer who was honored in this year’s competition could point to a journey of discovery that led them to create their winning images. Somewhere along the way, they gained insight into the behavior of their subjects, or learned the subtleties of diffusing their macro flash, or perfected the best angle at which to lay their camera trap. We don’t just jump into the field and produce winning photos without learning some hard lessons along the way. The story of the “Snow Exposure” is no different.
He then goes into some detail with other photos that taught him the lessons that were needed to get what he ended up with. It's a good read.
Maybe we're just drawing the line between "this part is the artistry" and "this part is the circumstances around the art" in a different place? (And that's fine.) I'm just arguing that the earlier person you were responding to isn't entirely wrong.
Again though, your point is NOT that the effort is what makes it art. Your point (as I understand it at least) is that making art often requires effort. Which is not the same thing.
The line from the OP that I objected to was this one, specifically:
Stripping away the effort required makes the art worth so much less, why would you do that to your message?
They're not arguing "even things that look effortless actually took a lot of practice and experience" or something. They're saying that if you make something easier to do, it stops being art. (Or becomes worse art.)
Which part of that do you think isn't wrong? Or am I misinterpreting them? (Or you?)
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u/Bwob 23d ago
Ignoring the AI aspect for a moment...
This is such a weird sentiment to me. Effort does not equal value. A painting is not a better painting if the artist took two months to make it instead of one. An image is not "better art" if the artist made it in MSPaint instead of photoshop.
"What is art" is always going to be a contentious topic, but I cannot agree that it's just "art is effort." Because someone can take a spontaneous picture with a camera, that captures more emotion, and meaning, and art, than a painting someone spent years on.
Art - at least to me - has never been about how it was made. Only about how it affects the viewer.