Art

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

What if every artwork you’ve ever seen is a fake?: I was shocked to learn just how many pieces of art sold around the world are forgeries. But should finding out something is a cheap dupe really make us enjoy it less? (Nell Stevens, 10 Jul 2025, The Guardian)

Many years ago, I met a man in a pub in Bloomsbury who said he worked at the British Museum. He told me that every single item on display in the museum was a replica, and that all the original artefacts were locked away in storage for preservation.

I was shocked and challenged him. It surely could not be the case that millions of annual visitors to the British Museum were encountering and experiencing not tangible, concrete treasures of human history, but the shallow simulacra of replicas. I may have even used the term “fraud”.

Yet on my way home that night, I began to question my own experiences at the British Museum. I wondered what it meant if the Greek water jar I had been so moved by, depicting a woman who may have been Sappho bent over a scroll, had in fact been a worthless copy. Did that make the experience any less real?

No.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

People say they prefer stories written by humans over AI-generated works, yet new study suggests that’s not quite true (Martin Abel & Reed Johnson, 3/18/25, The ConversationO)

People say they prefer a short story written by a human over one composed by artificial intelligence, yet most still invest the same amount of time and money reading both stories regardless of whether it is labeled as AI-generated.

BIZARRO HOPPER:

The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker review – art for art’s sake (Andrew Martin, 27 Jan 2025, The Guardian)

“The Secret Painter” here is Joe Tucker’s uncle Eric, apparently the most unaesthetic of men, inhabiting the most unaesthetic of places, the industrial town of Warrington, Lancashire. He kept his trousers up with a rope; his habitual bomber jacket was patched with sticky tape, as was the cracked rear window of his car. He worked as a labourer and his regular haunts were Warrington pubs, the rougher the better, and the local Betfred.

But when Eric Tucker died, aged 86, in 2018, more than 500 paintings were found in the small council house he had long shared with his mother. The works, of the highest quality, depicted mid-20th-century working-class northern life. Many showed blurry, smoke-filled pub interiors, beautifully composed and full of slightly grotesque figures, typically side-on to show their strange profiles. They often look pale (except for red noses) and pensive, but they all have one another, and here is the first of many paradoxes about Eric Tucker.

He depicted scenes of sociability yet he himself was an uncommunicative loner with few close friends.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

If You Can’t Tell the Difference, There Is No Difference
(Shelly Palmer, December 1, 2024)

Our clients’ tests confirm this, if the audience isn’t told what it’s listening to, they have no idea how it was created, don’t notice, and don’t care.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

Despite Creative Hubris, Artists Are Quietly Embracing A.I. in Their Work (Aaron Mok • 12/05/24, Observer)

Artists across the entertainment, art and design industries are biting their nails over the rise of generative A.I. Many argue the technology violates intellectual property, devalues creative labor and flattens creativity. But as A.I. image and video generators advance, a growing minority of artists are embracing the tools with open arms. Creative professionals ranging from art directors to filmmakers say using A.I. saves time, boosts creativity and leads to new opportunities.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably (Nature, Nov. 14th, 2024)

[…] the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

People prefer AI-generated poems to Shakespeare and Dickinson (Jeremy Hsu, 14 November 2024, New Scientist)

Most readers can’t distinguish classic works by poets such as William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson from imitations generated by artificial intelligence. And when asked which they prefer, they often chose the AI poetry.

“Over 78 per cent of our participants gave higher ratings on average to AI-generated poems than to human-written poems by famous poets,” says Brian Porter at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE; IDEOLOGY IS UGLY:

The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty: After Duchamp, the art world came to view the pursuit of beauty as naïve and gravitated toward political art in their search for meaning. But this is a Faustian bargain: you can have meaning, but you do not get to make it for yourself (Megan Gafford, 20 Sep 2024, Quillette)

This deference to identity politics is an example of Hoffer’s observation that the true believer “subordinates creative work to the advancement of the movement”:

The true-believing artist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul, or to discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorify and to denounce.

The idea that politics must have a mandate over art seems self-evident to many contemporary art students—including many young hopefuls destined to shrivel into Hoffer’s “incurably frustrated.” When they begin to learn art history, students are typically given Janson’s History of Art. About fifteen years ago, I was assigned the seventh edition, which culminates in a chapter on postmodernism that largely focuses on politics. My classmates and I dutifully tried to pick up where history left off by making political art of our own. I had long since come to my senses by the time I returned to the classroom as a university lecturer—but I was still asked to teach students how to make “socially-engaged art.”

Students often perceive the history of art as a progression towards the evolution of ever more political art.

AS Tom Wolfe put It: “All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well – how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not seeing is believing', you ninny, but believing is seeing’, for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.”

“

MORE:
PODCAST: Podcast #254: In Defence of Beauty: Iona Italia talks to artist Megan Gafford about how we have come to value statement-making over beauty and craftsmanship in art and architecture. (Quillette, 9 Oct 2024)

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

Misunderstanding Plato (Paul Krause, July 5, 2024, Minerva Wisdom)

Plato’s cosmos is rationally ordered and hierarchal. It is a reflection of the perfection of the Forms, but not the whole cosmos is a perfect, or ideal, reflection. For instance, we all know the form of beauty looms large in Plato’s philosophy. The cosmos, taken as a whole, is a perfect reflection of the form of beauty. Constitutive parts, the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the rivers and trees and hills, etc., are not a perfect reflection of the form of beauty and never will be. Instead, every part of the cosmos has some beauty to it in differing degrees. This is only made possible, and makes sense, when you subscribe to a hierarchy of value and beauty as Plato did (which many moderns no longer do which makes it easier for moderns to misunderstand Plato). That is, in a hierarchy some things are naturally greater than others. Those things that are greater are closer in reflection to the ideal. For Plato, wholeness is the perfect reflection of the ideal. Smaller parts, breaking down to individual pieces, while having some embodiment of the ideal within them, are lesser than the whole.

Thus, the earth, and all that is within the earth, possess nature, a reflection of the ideal, but in comparison to the whole of the cosmos, the earth is lesser. Hence, the earth (alone) is not the fullest reflection of the form of beauty. Instead, the earth, when brought together with the sun, moon, stars, and other planets – that is, when the earth is properly situated in the whole of cosmos – becomes far more important and precious when you understand what function, or role, the earth plays in the perfect beauty and reflection of totality. This coming to know the truth magnifies the beauty of the earth and all within it.