Artistic judgment, technological abundance, and the cultivation of excellence

 

Gustavo Pezzi recently penned a compelling essay called "Can Ease of Creation Lead to Decrease in Quality & Value?". It's main thesis is quite straightforwardly presented near the start:

"When something becomes easy and cheap to make, overall quality goes down. There are exceptions, and there always will be. But the exceptions are almost always the people who deliberately go against the easy, cheap way of making things."

Prefaratory aside: I've been reading a lot of Wyndham Lewis recently and these questions about art were a central preoccupation of his, especially during the interwar period. "The Apes of God" is perhaps his most famous satire of the degeneration of the art scene and its infiltration by wealthy dilettantes - almost the opposite of the problem bemoaned here. However, its more fundamental questions about art and parasitism on the arts have a renewed relevance in the face of AI and for me they are a useful touchstone as we wrestle with these questions anew.

The Decline of Quality in Cultural Products

Let's start by turning to the first chunk of the overall claim: "When something becomes easy and cheap to make, overall quality goes down." This can certainly be true in the average - depending on the quality of who enters the field as the barriers are lowered. But art itself is not an average-quality enterprise. That is, we don't generally evaluate the achievements of Renaissance painters by calculating the average quality of the paintings produced during the Renaissance. Instead, we care disproportionately about the exceptional accomplishments.

So what we are worried about here is not necessarily a decline in average quality. The existence of bad art is not itself a threat to good art. An increase in the production of mediocre paintings, books, or music does not imply a corresponding decline in the possibility of producing great works.

However, increasing the volume of cultural production does create another problem: how do we distinguish the good from the bad? As the quantity of work grows, so does the importance of the institutions and mechanisms responsible for discovering, recognizing, and cultivating excellence.

This becomes particularly concerning when something other than artistic accomplishment becomes the basis of cultural authority: algorithms, following, branding, participation in prestige networks, etc. These mechanisms may be very good at distributing cultural products without being particularly good at distinguishing artistic excellence.

As Pezzi notices: there are still good artists. A decline in average quality is not necessarily a decline in artistic achievement. But excellence seems to be getting buried, pointing to a discovery issue. There is decent evidence that we are building systems for discovery that become increasingly proficient at satisfying existing tastes at the expense of serendipitous discoveries that might broaden them.

The real danger, then, may be less that technology makes it easier to produce bad art than that our mechanisms for discovering and evaluating art become increasingly disconnected from artistic accomplishment.

Choosing Difficulty

Now we can turn to the second claim: "the exceptions are almost always the people who deliberately go against the easy, cheap way of making things." Which I take to imply that excellence almost always requires rejection of the easiest available means of production.

This seems to me an attempt to provide a criteria for genuine artistic achievement. However I think we are confusing two things: difficulty of production and skillful production. What we want is skillfully produced or higher quality things, but this does not necessarily require choosing a more difficult method of production. In fact, music history is full of accomplished artists who embraced new technologies to achieve entirely novel things: Liszt embracing the double-escapement piano mechanism, Les Paul and multitrack and sound-on-sound recording, etc. Technology often encourages artists to develop substantial new technical competencies to properly exploit innovations.

It is, similarly, perfectly imaginable that someone who adopts the most difficult means of production can either never produce anything at all or never produce anything good. One could easily see how difficulty can become a trap of its own where a person is increasingly focused on the means of production as an end in itself. Never actually producing anything substantial with them.

The more useful distinction, I think, is between mechanical difficulty, technical skill, and artistic judgment. Technology can reduce the first while transforming the second and expanding the demands placed on the third. Consider AI-generated imagery: one person might generate thousands of competent images with little thought, while another might use the same tools to realize a carefully developed artistic conception. The relative ease of production tells us very little about the quality of either person's achievement.

So I would reformulate the claim slightly: "When technology makes the production of artistic objects easier, the importance of artistic judgment does not necessarily diminish." In fact, as the technical barriers to production fall, the capacity to conceive, select, organize, and critically evaluate what is produced may become an increasingly important mark of artistic accomplishment. The challenge is not to preserve difficulty for its own sake, but to preserve and cultivate the capacities that make artistic excellence possible.

What Would High Standards Require

So, assuming that technological abundance makes artistic judgment increasingly important, what would high standards actually require? If the problem is not simply the production of bad art, but our capacity to distinguish and cultivate excellence, then we need to consider how artistic judgment is developed and sustained.

First, institutions that cultivate competence. Some options would be apprenticeship, demanding instruction, and serious criticism. Difficulty should be purposeful, not just tedious mechanical work to demonstrate "seriousness." What matters is identifying the capacities necessary for artistic achievement and then cultivating them. These might include technical mastery, knowledge of artistic traditions, and the ability to make sound aesthetic judgments. New technologies may change which skills are necessary, but they do not eliminate the need to develop them.

Second, institutions capable of recognizing excellence. All the cultivation in the world is of limited value if no one can recognize the skill involved in producing something. Historically this has been one of the roles of the critic, whose job is not toxic positivity but making substantive distinctions between excellent, mediocre, and poor work. These cannot just be flippant aesthetic judgments, but must be grounded in a philosophy of what constitutes high-quality work. Robust criticism should be capable of explaining why something succeeds or fails, rather than simply registering personal preferences or reflecting prevailing fashions.

Third, institutions that cultivate audiences. I think this is the part Pezzi largely misses. High artistic standards require more than talented producers and competent critics. They also require people capable of appreciating difficult achievements. An audience's tastes are not fixed, and the capacity to recognize excellence is itself something that can be developed through exposure, education, and criticism. Cultural institutions should not simply satisfy the tastes people already possess, but help them acquire the capacities necessary to appreciate things they might otherwise overlook.

In short, we need not only the accomplished artist, but the accomplished spectator who can recognize, understand, and sustain artistic excellence. Making art easier to produce does not make these capacities any less necessary. In fact, it almost certainly makes them more important than ever. And most importantly we need actually accomplished people to contribute to these things - especially in the areas of criticism and cultivation.

incoming(1): writing

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