Art is labour

The question of the definition of art is not a new one, but the rise of the AI ‘slop’ era makes it all the more actual and important.

There is no universal definition of art, thankfully. And I do not pretend that the one I am proposing here supersedes all others. I however think it is a useful one to adopt in the context of a collective focused on artistic creation: having a reasonably good idea of what we mean by ‘art’ is, in my opinion, a necessity in producing and distributing it.

The definition I am proposing here is based in Marxist philosophy: to put it as shortly and concisely as possible, it is a philosophy that centres material conditions and human labour in its analysis. And indeed, the latter is at the core of said definition:

Art is labour.

That’s it. And the shortness of this definition might undersell its breadth and complexity. To elaborate on the idea: all of human labour and its products can be qualified as artistic.

This, of course, goes against a certain ‘common sense’ definition of art, where there is an indistinct but very tangible line between the artistic and the non-artistic, between “real”, “good” art (usually used interchangeably) and “bad” art or non-art. This vaporous delineation is an arbitrary one, and it is revealing of the underlining political current from which it originates and which it perpetuates: colonial capitalism and White supremacy.

Not to say that qualifying an art piece as good means purposefully upholding White supremacist ideals. But this tacit, commonly agreed definition of good, true art, follows racial vectors pretty openly: those who worship “classical” (they mean baroque) music but spit on rap and techno as “not real music” may or may not be aware of how the latter originate from poor, Black American communities while the former is usually the work of White European men. The argument, of course, is not limited to music; many deny the artfulness of a painting by Basquiat while getting on all four for Europeans masters like Monet and Renoir, usually unaware that the latter were in their time also frowned upon by critics until their work turned out to be culturally significant and could be opted into the argument that European art is a display of White superiority.

This conception of art is still broadly relevant today, as crypto- and neo-fascists denigrate modern and contemporary art while embracing “real” art, which, conveniently enough, was made by a bunch of White Europeans several centuries ago. This ultimately follows with their narrative of a former glory to return to, one where art used to be a true display of skills, unlike now, where it is nothing more than a show-off by “Cultural Marxists”, and other such conspiratorial buzzwords.

Ultimately, this paradigm argues that the only real art is the good one, and the only good art is that which follows the imposed norms in terms of displays of skills and morality of the subject matter; and those norms usually follow along the lines of White supremacy and colonialism.

It is also worth mentioning that under capitalism, art has been used as a vessel for financial speculation, with artworks appreciating in value for no discernible reason, commanding ridiculous prices on the basis of the artist’s reputation alone, a reputation that follows from the artist’s work being co-opted into the previously mentioned culturally dominant narratives.

It is this conception of art as something that can be objectively good, and all the implications that follow, that I reject with the materialist approach I am proposing.

Rather than defining art retroactively from its potential financial, moral or ideological value, it is rather qualified by the material conditions of its creation. Everything that is produced by human labour can be said to have the value of artfulness.

This might elicit a strong reaction, and an instinctive urge to try and disprove it with a demonstration by the absurd: if we consider that all human labour is art, then it means that cheap t-shirts from Walmart, an iPhone charger, or flipping burgers at McD is art!

And I will not contradict this statement. Yes, those things qualify as art under the definition that I give. This sort of reaction follows the previously stated ideals which I reject, which give to art an admirable, noble quality that cannot be shared with the mundane, the mercantile, the mass-produced, the disgusting or the unpalatable. In reality, of course, nothing stops art from interacting with all that is “lesser” in prestige like the poor, the faecal, the grotesque and the caricatural: in my opinion, it is even that art which tends to have the most to say.

And if we refuse this supposition on what art ought to be, then why would a cheap, ugly, mass-produced t-shirt not count as art? It is, as much as a great painting that poses no challenge to the definition, the result of labour,— alienated, but labour nonetheless; it is the fruit of conscious decisions and design choices; it is the product of work being put into transforming raw material into something with a purpose of some kind, to be seen and to be worn; by its sole existence, it informs us about this very production process.

Once we stop abstracting the value of art as something transcendental of the cloth and ink that composes it, something existing on a moral or spiritual plane, then there is no difference to be made between art and labour.

But one could still argue that the manufacturing of those t-shirts in some East Asian country where labour rights and production costs are kept at a minimum shares nothing of a thoughtfully crocheted top made by some small artist in their bedroom. But just from this sentence alone, it is easy to see an outline of privilege: it counts as art only if one is afforded the luxury of doing it as they please.

This ultimately culminates in an individualist vision of art, within which the singular visionary artist gets to do the work of the muses speaking to them and imbuing worthless material with the magic of capital A Art.

In reality, alienated labour is still labour, which is still art. The products manufactured by under- or unpaid Filipino or Bangladeshi workers is as much the result of labour and conscious design decisions as Monet’s Nymphéas: those decisions however, are not taken by those providing the labour, but by those exploiting it. It then reflects the upper class’ values and the purpose it aims to give to the product, which is to maximise profits on investment.

The skills needed to flip burgers or to clean toilets are no less skills, and those actions are no less a performance, simply because they are relegated to something of lesser value.

And in comes AI ‘art’.

Needless to say that, in a definition that centres the human labour involved in artistic creation, there is very little to say about AI generation, regardless of how much its advocates will try to make us believe that ‘prompting’ is more labour intensive and creative than performing a Google search. Rather than to be meaningful in the way that art tends to be, for the outcome the artist was able to reach with materials, skills and time, AI generation (it is disingenuous to call it art at all) approximates meaning from a prompt, the result of which its users are content to pretend is equal in value and in intent as actual art.

The only revolution that AI generation represents is that of finally being able to alienate artists to a degree that was rendered impossible by the fact that artists have an inner life. It is a pure product, completely decoupled from the artist’s stolen work, its meanings and its inspirations; their labour and their years of learning skills to express themselves are now a tangible product. Rather, these hard-learned skills can now be used to express the user’s ideas and values, without the artist’s permission and without them having a say in the matter: our art can now be stolen and used to create the most palatable, corporate-friendly imagery that no artist with anything to say for themselves would ever wilfully make,— or to generate porn that sets back feminism by a century, and Nazi propaganda.

AI generation isn’t art, not (just) because it’s ugly and highly unethical, but because it is just an image, a non-creation generated out of pure noise without the labour that makes art what it is.

The definition I give focuses far more on the process of creation than on the outcome, and it does so on purpose. An image is an image: it is, now more than ever, worthless on its own, just another file to be displayed in the endless stream of content that slowly depletes our mental faculties. But each artwork is the culmination of its material history, from raw material to the thing standing before us to admire: the point of it all is very literally the fingerprints left in the pottery clay.

I am personally quite content to be using this definition for my own art: I have never been as happy making art as now, knowing that the final product is ultimately just a snapshot of the time I have spent making it, and that it is far more meaningful in that way than by conforming to an idea of art as a noble thing made out of innate talent. When accepting this definition, there is far more art to be found in the world: in a pair of shoes or the colour chosen for the façade of a house; in the repetitive, menial, tedious, and often times degrading work by invisible hands that keeps me fed and warm.

It is also why I encourage everyone to make art. It does not need to be skilled and masterful: there is more value in a child’s first sketches, ugly and disproportionate, than in any of the hundreds of highly-polished images that can be generated by ordering a machine around. There is infinitely more value in trope-heavy fan-fiction full of typos written by a depressed 13 year old than in the ready-to-publish slop hallucinated by computers sucking the electricity and water we need to live. As a matter of fact, I encourage you to make your art ugly and unpalatable: the reality of being human is at times horrid and gross, full of hair, shit, and existential despair, and you will reach far deeper into people by saying those things than by catering to what has been deemed acceptable.

Make something truthful. Make something, at all.