Portrait of Paul Valery by Jacques-Emile Blanche

Back in 1928, Paul Valéry predicted streaming media:

It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. We shall only have to summon them and there they will be, either in their living actuality or restored from the past. They will not merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be. A work of art will cease to be anything more than a kind of source or point of origin whose benefit will be available and quite fully so, wherever we wish. Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign. Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of energy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality.

Paul Valéry, The Conquest of Ubiquity (La conquête de l’ubiquité)

Walter Benjamin followed up in 1935, wondering how our relationship with art will change once it’s so easily copied. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he analyzed what had made a work of art special in the past, and how that was changing in the 20th century, and he forecast that original art objects would lose their value. The essay is world-famous, but his forecast was wrong: originals are now more valued than ever. Now that we’re approaching the age of mechanical creativity, I’ll try to learn from Benjamin’s error and make the opposite kind of forecast: I predict that AI art will make human art even more precious.

Walter Benjamin

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What’s special about an original painting or sculpture? Benjamin says it is the object’s “aura”, which he defines in a few ways. The aura is “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.” That is, you cannot possess or control the object, it is distant and “unapproachable.” Its aura is also its authenticity; Benjamin says, “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.” Maybe this is easier to grasp in the original German? I’d redefine aura as, “The special value we assign to an art object because of its unique identity.” The key is recognizing that we assign this special value. A perfect copy of the Mona Lisa produced by a Star Trek replicator, even if it were indistinguishable by carbon dating or electron microscopy, would still be a copy, valued differently from the original, only because we know which is which. If someone secretly swapped them, the aura would cling to the one we thought was original.

Benjamin says art objects first had aura because of their magical or religious meaning. I imagine Stonehenge or a statue of Athena: they are not valued for their beauty or originality, but their power. Copying was just as hard as producing an original, so the terms “original” and “copy” didn’t apply. All statues of Athena were sacred. In the secularizing Renaissance, beauty took precedence. Once the Industrial Revolution began, the Romantics responded by heroizing individual artistic creativity. As Benjamin says,

… art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of ‘pure’ art" …

Calling it a “theology” is right: the Romantics made a real cult of “art for art’s sake” and the artistic genius. But Benjamin skips over the Romantics. He dismisses creativity and genius in a sentence as “outmoded concepts.” He thinks that the art object’s function has evolved from ritual, to exhibition, and then to politics. He’s a Marxist, after all, and he both hopes and predicts that art’s main function in the future will be making revolutionary demands. Meanwhile, he predicts the aura of the original art object will fade. “The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated.” And, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”

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The depreciated actual work of art?

Walter Benjamin was wrong. The Mona Lisa has to be one of the most reproduced artworks, but the quality of its presence has not depreciated a bit. Every year more pilgrims go to be in its presence. It’s because we can all see high-resolution color copies that the original became a cult object. It’s why we ritually gather around it, take selfies with it, make even more copies with our phones and cameras as an act of worship. Benjamin defines aura as “distance,” and the original Mona Lisa has definitely become more distant: unapproachable, roped off, guarded. Owning it is impossible to imagine—even a mediocre Leonardo sold for $450 million. In general, the more famous an object is, the more it is reproduced—fame and reproduction are nearly synonymous on the Internet—and the stronger its aura.

Maybe if Benjamin were alive today, he’d say what persists isn’t the real aura that art objects used to have; it’s just fetishism or greed. Yes, things change. The modern world is secular and scientific: I will never know what an ancient Greek felt in front of an Athena statue. And I’ll never know what it was like to see the Mona Lisa in person for the first time, before the world was tiled with copies of her. Today’s aura is different from before. But even though things change, the special value we assign to unique art objects keeps growing! More and more tourists travel to crowd around famous things, the price of famous artworks spirals upwards.

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The value of an original painting or sculpture is a little beside the point, anyway. Some art forms don’t create unique objects: music, literature, photography, and movies are all exhibited by copying. Yes, there might be an original score handwritten by a composer, or an original negative shot by a photographer. They have some aura, and that’s what makes them collectors’ items, but they’re not the primary artwork. Digital photography and literature written in Microsoft Word produce no artifacts at all. For a moment, some people tried to recreate the aura of the artifact with NFTs. The moment passed, thank god, but it’s a symptom of our human need to assign aura somewhere. It turned out NFTs were unnecessary: These non-physical art forms still have aura; the aura just migrated from objects to creators.

The cult of the creative genius seemed to be the main source of aura in the 20th century, and continues to be today. This is another way Benjamin’s forecast swerved off course. The more original and innovative the artist is, and the more they seem “pure” and uninfluenced by fame, money, or convention, the more we value their work. Think of how Picasso or Hilma af Klint are lionized, or the auteur directors of American films in the 1970s, or literary cult figures like Emily Dickinson and David Foster Wallace. “Authentic” and original musicians like Bob Dylan are celebrated ad nauseam. (Enough already, let’s worship Björk now.) Art’s aura is undiminished compared to the past—its source just changed, from religion or beauty to admiration of the artist.

(Aside: The Romantics thought of creativity as spontaneous, inspired only by the artist’s interior passion, like something from nothing. This made no sense—an artist is always determined by their environment and tradition, even if they’re rebelling against it. “Originality” is just free will, constrained to art, and it’s as nonsensical as free will in general. I think art critics now scoff at the idea of artistic originality—Dadaism wounded it and Postmodernism finished it off—but free will is still overwhelmingly popular among philosophers, which baffles me. Anyway, we don’t need to believe humans are capable of originality, or that AI isn’t—we can assign special value to human art regardless.)

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What does it matter if Walter Benjamin misforecast? Yes, like most Marxists, he was too focused on economic competition among classes, he underestimated people’s attachment to ideas and rituals. It turns out people really want to treat some artworks as special, and high-fidelity copying only intensified this. We doubled down on valuing objects and artists, the opposite of what Benjamin expected. So what?

Well, now we’re entering the age of mechanical creation. We can see on the horizon AIs with an artistic creativity that matches our own. What forecast should we make about the value of human creativity in the future?

First, I have to regain your trust by showing I hate AI art as much as you do. Most of the AI art I see now is repulsive, because the AIs’ default “house styles” are tacky. If you give it a simple prompt and accept the first result, Dall-E usually makes excessively detailed airbrushed images with golden sidelight, and Gemini makes earth-toned kids’ book illustrations.

Left: art from the Dall-E home page. Right: my first Gemini image.

Even prize-winning AI art, made by experienced prompters trying their hardest, is nauseating. I hold the humans responsible: the prompters have bad taste and so do the judges.

Skilled and tasteful prompters can produce competent art that doesn’t look like AI. They make images in a variety of styles, art that fools laypeople in head-to-head contests with human art. I liked some of these images, until I found out they’re AI. So what’s that about? Why do I sometimes enjoy an image, then retch when I learn I was fooled? Why do I refuse to use image generators myself? Why do I instead spend hours searching for vintage images to illustrate my blog?

It’s because the aura of human creation is powerful. I care whether an image is created by a human, a person with a living body and a history, someone doomed to die, with limited skills and a specific intention. I care about this, even though AI art is sometimes indistinguishable to me, and I expect to be fooled much more. In fact, I think there will come an AI artist with all the creativity and intention of a Hilma af Klint: there will be a self-conscious AI artist who conceives and executes a body of work that expresses the AI’s unique experience, unprompted by a human. I might appreciate that art, knowing how it was made. But for no reason inherent in the art itself, I will always distinguish between human and mechanical creation.

So here’s my prediction: just like we still value original art objects, no matter how faithfully they can be copied, we will also value human creativity, no matter how creative AI becomes. Once we can’t tell the difference, we’ll make systems for tracking the provenance of human creations, just like we do for objects. We’ll sometimes fall for AI forgeries, and sometimes catch them. But we’ll always assign special value to art we believe was human-created. Aura is not a property of objects or of creations, it’s something we give them to fulfill our own need. Whenever aura is undermined by technological change, it doesn’t wither. We find a way to create it again.