That’s a good point, he definitely did less. And that seems intentional, perhaps Duchamp would have supported the freedom to call AI outputs art.
But there’s also more going on. He lived in a political context where art was being gatekept by fascists trying to limit cultural expression, he chose an object that is perceived as vulgar and unbelonging in an art installation, and he placed it somewhere in a social strata where it was considered to not belong. These are artistic choices, the art was in what he did and not the toilet itself.
You could say that you can do all those things with an AI creation. I think it would take a lot more work than feeding a prompt and getting an image. But maybe getting an image of something like one of those hideous AI slop babies and putting it in an museum would suffice. Or projecting it on a underserved community from a place where only tech moguls can see it in full resolution. I’m admittedly pretty stupid but it would make me reconsider.
That’s a good point, he definitely did less. And that seems intentional, perhaps Duchamp would have supported the freedom to call AI outputs art.
But there’s also more going on. He lived in a political context where art was being gatekept by fascists trying to limit cultural expression, he chose an object that is perceived as vulgar and unbelonging in an art installation, and he placed it somewhere in a social strata where it was considered to not belong. These are artistic choices, the art was in what he did and not the toilet itself.
You could say that you can do all those things with an AI creation. I think it would take a lot more work than feeding a prompt and getting an image. But maybe getting an image of something like one of those hideous AI slop babies and putting it in an museum would suffice. Or projecting it on a underserved community from a place where only tech moguls can see it in full resolution. I’m admittedly pretty stupid but it would make me reconsider.