Anyone who has seriously put in work learning to draw/paint (I'm talking like 10,000 hours+), will have realized that the outcome of art *is* the process. When I pick up a pencil and sketch it's an extension of my thoughts. And through the process of thinking with a pencil a drawing is produced. AI promises to bypass the process entirely, but in so doing eliminates the point of making art in the first place. I'll give an example from two great paintings.
Here's a painting I saw in the impressionist wing of the Art Institute of Chicago,
Pardon in Brittany by Gaston La Touche, painted in 1896. The late 19th century was a golden age for the art of painting, where impressionism had gained enough acceptance and influence that people could really build on its ideas.
The
pardon in question is a catholic processional ceremony native to Brittany in western France. The artist has not only depicted this in a representational way, but he's also allowed us, the viewer, to take part in this ceremony as well. There's a type of gradation of detail happening from left to right, where there are distinct recognizable faces at the start which gradually melt into a heavily abstracted field of color. So we experience the individual dissolve into the mass of collective unity that religious ritual allows us to experience.
The second painting is one of the greatest of this second wave of impressionists, John Singer Sargent (and it's a pretty powered up generation of artists, his contemporaries were Anders Zorn and Joaquin Sorolla). Although landscape painting was his first love, he made a career out of being a society portraitist.
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is a painting which wasn't much remarked in its time, but has become celebrated for its enigmatic mood and psychological complexity.
Sargent employs a similar technique of a gradating dissolution of detail, although instead of side to side it goes front to back. The daughters are spatially ordered by age, and as they recede into the darkness of the hall their attitude towards the viewer begins to change. As one ages from childhood into adolescence one develops more and more of an interior life, and often becomes withdrawn and perhaps inscrutable to one's parents in many ways. The dismissive, infantilizing thing to call this is being a "moody teenager", but Sargent takes these emotions quite seriously in this painting. The eldest sister has the most melancholy pose, not engaging the viewer at all but peering off into a world of her own thoughts. Has she left childhood behind? Internalized the inevitability and injustice of mortality and heartbreak? The placement of the portrait subjects is off balance, so that the eye zig zags through the entirety of a childhood before settling on the eldest leaning against the porcelain vase, the repetition of dress enforces this actually rather complex reading order. It's a painting that respects the experience and psychology of children and adolescents in a way far ahead of its time, and really, our own time as well.
Both of these compositions are so replete with deliberate, thoughtful applications of all the techniques of painting that they both end up being much more than just the sum of their parts. They aren't just pretty pictures but statements which communicate something deeply felt.
I just don't see how you could ever arrive at something like that with the push of a computer button. You can end up with a picture, but never a meaningful one in any way.
