This month, Leonard Barden celebrates 70 years as chess columnist for The Guardian. You read that right. He has been filing a weekly piece for the British newspaper since 1955.
To match Barden’s astonishing feat, I would need to keep plugging away at this column until 2075. I can’t quite see myself coming up with the goods every week from now until then. Still, it’s not impossible; one of the perks of being on the arts beat is that there really always is something new to cover.
Over the past two decades as an arts writer, I’ve seen a lot of theatre. The number of shows is probably not more than 1,000, though I reckon it must be in the high hundreds. Yet there’s a first time for everything, and this week brought the first time I’ve been in an auditorium where a performance was cancelled at the moment of curtain-up.
The director appeared apologetically — in front of a full house — to say that the actor in the one-person play we were there to see had taken ill and was incapacitated. The show must go on ... most of the time. But occasionally, it cannot, however strong-willed the actor. Our flesh is weak.
The audience took the news graciously, offering a gentle smattering of empathetic applause to carry its well wishes to the performer. Some milled around in the foyer, others headed off into the night, unsure what to do with the time they had now been granted.
As I walked back to my car, I found my disappointment slowly morph into a curious kind of elation. I had just had the privilege of an invigorating reminder that art is actually made against the odds. The more you think about it, the more unlikely it seems that a play should be written, directed, rehearsed and then performed night after night. Why don’t disease, money problems, divorce, theft, fire, flood and a host of other obstacles, from minor inconveniences to full-scale disasters, get in the way more often?
Content without intent is not art — it’s not meaningful.
— Tim Minchin
Australian musician and comedian
Well, of course, they do. Life happens. Death happens. War happens. The road to artistic perdition, just like the road to artistic success, is paved with shelved first drafts, incomplete sketches, unrecorded melodies. Art has meaning because it faces off against — and sometimes loses to — mortality and oblivion. Works are forestalled, deferred, lost, ignored or forgotten.
Artists create out of, and despite, our shared human frailty. They can soar above it, making moments, music and images that leave us feeling like gods. But they also immerse us in muck and misery, in the messy clutter of being human; and they dwell with us there, in what Irish poet William Butler Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”.
To make art is to take time. To risk embarrassment and disdain. To confront the prospect of spending long hours making nothing, or making something that will remain largely unseen. This is why (quite apart from the environmental damage, the copyright issues and a freight load of ethical or existential questions everyone seems eager to sidestep) generating a picture or a song or a story through an AI prompt is simply anathema to art.
With rare exceptions, when it comes to art, AI is not just uncreative, it is actively anti-creative. Unfortunately, our monkey brains are so pleased by the novelty value, the easy immediacy and the LOL factor of media produced by AI — and we are mostly so poorly trained to engage critically with it — that we allow it to wash over us. Will we drown?
Australian musician and comedian Tim Minchin thinks not. In a Times Radio interview, Minchin predicted that “AI art and the memeification of art is going to precipitate a revolution of human art” as we collectively realise that “content without intent is not art — it’s not meaningful”. Minchin’s commitment to live audiences is that he will “sweat and try and fail and improvise” when he is on stage.
One day, perhaps, machines will fuse with humans, or be infused with humanity. They will feel, fail, forget, fall ill, fluff their lines. Until that day, AI art of all kinds belongs on the digital trash heap.
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