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The Refusalist Manifesto (lemmy.today)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [M] to c/genart@lemmy.today
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We refuse art_anti-art as product, brand, credential, and personality package.

We’re done asking galleries, critics, algorithms, institutions, or strangers on the internet for permission.

We reject the idea that the right materials, the right training, or the right process make something more legitimate.

Paint on canvas, junk mail glued to cardboard, a photograph, a broken chair, code, a photocopier, or an image generated with AI. Everything is a tool. Nothing more sacred than that.

We’ll use whatever we want.

Art_anti-art doesn’t have to mean anything any more than a bird has to mean something when it flies. A hawk doesn’t circle because it represents freedom. A wild boar rooting through the dirt isn’t beautiful or ugly. It just exists. Art_anti-art can exist that way too. It doesn’t owe anyone beauty, ugliness, skill, labor, difficulty, a message, or an explanation.

We refuse the demand that every object justify its existence. If we call something art_anti-art, it’s art_anti-art. If somebody else refuses to call it art_anti-art, fine. Their refusal doesn’t change ours.

And we refuse the new gatekeepers who tell us which machines we’re allowed to touch. AI generation belongs here for exactly the same reason scissors, cameras, synthesizers, photocopiers, software, found objects, and paint belong here: because we choose to use it.

The process isn’t an embarrassment to hide. Generation, prompting, selection, rejection, alteration, collage, painting over it, destroying it, or leaving the output exactly as it came out are all available to us. The naysayers can declare that it isn’t art_anti-art. We refuse their authority to decide.

There’s no required amount of work and no approved way to make something. Make something painstakingly by hand. Generate it in thirty seconds. Tear up an advertisement and glue the pieces together. Paint over your own work. Make something useless. Make something stupid. Make something nobody sees.

Refusalism begins with a simple claim: art_anti-art is whatever we decide to call art_anti-art, made however we decide to make it.

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[–] 2 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I take a broad view of art. If the creator says it's art it's art. Suffering certainly isn't a requirement, but I believe intention is. If an artist starts with a vision of what they want to create, I think you're right in that it doesn't really matter how they get to a final piece.

The struggle for me though is how trivial it is to make images with AI. You train it on your own work and clearly have the expertise to know what is or isn't what you were going for. But not everyone trying to make art with AI is. Using a massive model trained on the work of countless artists can generate endless derivative without context or intention.

If you thought your boss's nephew's photoshoped designed were annoying imagine the kid's gallery show of AI artwork. I understand that AI is a Pandora's box and now that we've opened it, it's not going away, but where does it take us and how will it change art in the future?

Artists don't need to suffer to create art, but they do need to know what they're doing and why.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 week ago* (4 children)

    Good points. I used to think a lot like this. Then I read The Andy Warhol Diaries (fun read, by the way!) and started digging into Dada, Duchamp’s readymades, and later conceptual art.

    Then I stopped caring about what supposedly counts as “art.”

    I started to actually love shit like Duchamp’s Fountain or Cattelan’s banana taped to a wall. They came from different movements, but both challenged the idea that art has to be made a certain way to count.

    I’ve posted traditional paintings before (on Lemmy and on Reddit) and got accused of using AI. I made the mistake of trying to argue and show proof. I showed the sketches, progress photos, and pictures of myself painting it on canvas. Some people just said those were AI too!! The whole “Methinks thou dost protest too much” thing kicked in, so the more I tried to prove myself, the more suspicious people got.

    So I thought: what am I actually trying to prove? What's the point of what I do?

    I like painting. I also like feeding my own drawings and paintings into my local AI and seeing what comes out. I can spend hours doing either.

    So what do we do now that anyone can push a button and make an image? Nothing. If pushing the button makes someone happy, cool. If someone glues newspaper to cardboard and leaves it outside for a year, also cool.

    For me, the fun is fucking around with a bunch of shit and and seeing what happens. It can be easy or difficult, fast or slow. If I like the result, great. If not, I throw it away and make another.

    Creative work has never been a guaranteed career anyway. AI creates real problems for commercial jobs, but cheap outsourcing w offshore countries did too.

    If I’m doing it for fun, who gives a shit whether everyone else thinks it counts? That's how I came to embrace it all.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    It makes a lot of sense that Dada is an inspiration of yours, when I read the manifesto that was my first thought. Also Fountain is a piece I think about a lot.

    You bring up one of my own struggles about art with a lowercase "a" or an uppercase one. The trouble you've mentioned with the audience for your work is interesting because it sort of intersects with a few issues. I have nothing useful to say about the futility of defending your work against accusations of AI generation, but it poses an interesting question. If the ideal is art for it's own sake with no other motive, why show it in the first place.

    Most people who consider themselves artists never have much of an audience for thier work in their lifetime or after. Fundamentally art is intrinsic to the human experience from cave paintings and pottery to kinetic sculpture and street murals. Some of us are hardwired to make art. But given how ubiquitous it is most art is only ever appreciated by a small number of people. It makes me think of Goya's Black Paintings. They were never intended to be seen by anyone, he painted because he needed to.

    I dunno, maybe I'm too hung up on the metaphysics. The intention is probably too navel gazey to be anything substantive. But I do wonder often about my own paintings and drawings why I'm putting so much work into something no one but me will ever see.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 week ago* (2 children)

    If the ideal is art for it’s own sake with no other motive, why show it in the first place.

    For me, on this platform, it's mostly for the interest in seeing the hateful insults I get (maybe that makes me sort of a troll though?). And hopefully to inspire others to fight against the tide of hate that I see becoming the norm on here. The fact that I've had people tell me to kill myself or that my wife should leave me, just because they are unhappy I used AI, says a lot. They get lots of upvotes when they say stuff like that too.

    So I post for fun. Definitely not for validation, since I would not get any here. BUT it brought your conversation here, so it's already paying off, as I think this is a fun topic! So thank you for this!

    It makes me think of Goya’s Black Paintings. They were never intended to be seen by anyone, he painted because he needed to.

    I've thought a lot about this too. I'm not sure I have a need to create. Sometimes I go months without the urge. Then I will go several months doing it nonstop. But for enjoyment more than need. I've been this way all my life, so when I was a professional artist, that was difficult, as I usually just work when "I'm in the mood" to. Deadlines were horrible for me. lol

    But even when I painted professionally, I felt strange calling myself an "artist." I'm not sure why. And when other people call me that, I feel weird. When my wife introduces me to friends I cringe when she refers to me as an artist. I usually just say I'm a painter, and that I paint ugly little paintings or that I am best known for designing junk mail that people threw away.

    I've recently taken to calling myself an anti-artist and it's been great fun.

    As for your stuff, I hope that none of this has caused you to stop. Stop only if you feel like stopping. Continue only if you feel like continuing. Don't get lost in the weeds of contemplation. People like us tend to overthink stuff. Once I stopped doing that, I have much more happiness in doing what I do.

    Probably best not to listen to me though. After all, I did post a picture of a mans head screaming while stuck in an icky strawberry amongst a field worms today. So...

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I don't paint or draw as much as I'd like to for sure. But what keeps me from picking up my brushes or pencils is not really a question of purity of intention or some other high minded ideal. It's mostly perfectionism. I have a hard time doing things badly and I get very frustrated when I can't execute an idea to way I envision it.

    I know intellectually that the only way I can get to the point where my work reflects my vision is to make a lot of stuff that doesn't first. It's hard for me to practice it though. There are other factors at play too that are only tangentially related to the practice of art, but they're not worth mentioning here.

    The older I get thought the more frustrated I am by the seemingly impossible to be rid of need for perfection. If I had spent every second I've wasted on perfection on making art, I'd be a master able to create anything I could dream up. Instead I am perpetually trapped as an intermediate artist constantly trying to relearn everything from scratch.

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