Can abstract art save the world from AI?
Will we embrace human creativity or surrender our humanity to machines built to subjugate us?
Originally published in AMA Art Magazine
Turn off your AI for a minute. We need to talk about the invisible elephant in the empty room — abstract art. Do you remember it? That enigmatic stuff on the walls and floors and city streets, waiting patiently for us to spend time with it? We have been ghosting it, preferring spectacle, passive entertainment and outrage theatre to silent contemplation. Maybe we were annoyed. Abstract art left us feeling confused, inadequate, like we needed a PhD to understand it. But it was never here to be understood. It helps us understand ourselves. It does not tell us what to think, it helps us teach ourselves how to learn. It encourages curiosity and imagination. It answers no questions… and usually asks none. We are the question and the answer. It is a doorway to revelation, a stage on which we express our thoughts and emotions.
AI is not that. AI is obvious. It is a shortcut. It gives us the questions and the answers so we do not have to bother thinking for ourselves, talking with experts, searching for information in the real world… or even scrolling two centimetres down a page of Internet search results. It tells us we are inefficient and that efficiency is what matters most, so we should let it do the work, then we can sit around and collect a basic minimum income from our tech overlords, who meanwhile are floating on yachts or hunkered in underground bunkers filled with abstract art, expanding their minds while the monster they built destroys ours.
AI is the perfect tool for the “daddy culture” we now find ourselves in, where we happily give our power away to anyone who can tell us what to think and how to feel. It replaces freedom and imagination — which is scary and asks so much of us — with predictability, which is safe and easy. So what will it be? Will we embrace our human need for effort, creativity and mystery? Or will we surrender our humanity to machines built to subjugate us? Would you rather be efficient, or truly alive? A mindful creator, or a mindless consumer?
Degenerative intelligence
Abstract art predates human civilisation. It is found among the oldest cave paintings. AI just got to the party. Most of us thought AI was science fiction until 2023, when the CEOs of various tech companies began parading their AI clunker-bots to the world. That year, journalist Scott Pelley interviewed the CEO of Google on 60 Minutes about Bard, that company’s AI chat clunker (which was recently rebranded Gemini, a cynical nod towards an astrological sign associated with curiosity, which AI is here to replace). Pelley’s test of the technology was to challenge it to “finish” Ernest Hemingway’s famous micro-story, “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” The story was allegedly the result of Hemingway betting his writer friends he could write a complete story in six words. The AI’s response was to add back all of the extraneous, trivial details Hemingway left out. Hemingway’s achievement was brevity. AI’s was a bloated cliché. Yet, Pelley and the Google chief ooh-ed and ahh-ed as the so-called “super” computer barfed our culture back at us, half digested and foul.
That nauseating moment of televised asininity should have caused Google stock to implode. Instead, it was a sign of things to come. AI has only gotten more popular. It is responsible for the current stock market bubble that could bring the world economy to its knees any day. Meanwhile, hordes of artists in every medium are proudly proclaiming they use it. Imagine — human artists abandoning their freedom to a technology designed to make them irrelevant, producing gee-gaws that museums and collectors are eagerly gobbling up, while ignorant reporters tout this laziness as a breakthrough.
The same year Google’s AI massacred Hemingway’s six-word story, the Museum of Modern Art in New York made history by purchasing what they say was the first AI artwork to enter a major museum collection: a computer programme devised by Turkish American artist Refik Anadol. The word artist is being used loosely here; Anadol is more of a tech executive whose company instigates aesthetic phenomena marketed as “enthralling and immersive media art intended for anyone, any age and any background”. The AI programme he sold MoMA, titled Unsupervised was designed to analyse the existing artworks in MoMA’s collection and then interpret those works into an ever-evolving digital mishmash, which is then broadcast on a wall-sized screen in the museum. It looks like something that should be playing in the background of a check-in desk at a hipster hotel in Miami. There are bigger TV screens at football games. By Anadol’s own admission, the thing is derivative. It devoured thousands of actual artworks and is now endlessly flatulating a digital response.
How silly that the inventors of AI co-opted the term “generative” to describe it. To generate is to cause something new to come into existence. Unsupervised is an example of how AI does not generate — it digests then defecates. We can correctly call it defe-cative. Or at best, re-generative. Unsupervised is the kind of trash that would naturally be expected of something called “artificial intelligence”. The question is, should artists not aspire to authentic intelligence? The presence of Unsupervised in the MoMA collection is an insult to the artists whose works Anadol trained his AI on. It begs the question: how many of those artists gave their consent for their work to be used in the making of this catastrophe?
And how many viewers want to be confronted by a massive, everchanging digital screen while they are in the museum anyway? Eva Reifert, curator of 19th-century and modern art at Kunstmuseum Basel, is amongst the few in the art field today pushing back against this kind of techno assault on museum visitors. “We should offer spaces that are for digital detox, Reifert says, which is why I am adamant to say we do not need screens everywhere. We do not have to have a digital experience for the collection. You are encountering in a painting — or a sculpture, or something that has been handmade by someone, even if it is minimal art or minimalistic art — the tangibility of the object, and the relationship to the space, and the old thing about aura, authenticity, originality, seeing the brushstroke and getting a feeling for where that person was when they made the work, what was going on in their heads, what they were trying to say. Or do you want the digital experience, that is always a sort of simulacrum?”
Abstract art, the anti-AI
If we are going to salvage humanity from the pit of lameness AI is digging, we need something truly generative; something that is the result of intuition, imagination and experimentation. We need abstract art. Even if they have a plan, abstract artists venture into the unknown every time they start working. They are uncertain exactly what characteristics the thing they are making will end up having; how it will respond to whatever environment it is placed in; and how it will be received by the humans who interact with it. Even if the artist offers to explain the work afterwards, every viewer must ultimately take on the responsibility of finding their own meaning in it. Abstract art asks something from us, but it also respects us as independent, autonomous, sentient beings, and lets us decide for ourselves what we are sensing and what it means to our sense of being. It is the anti-AI.
“It is about trying to put a lens of abstraction over the thing we think we know, and then in that abstraction, doing a different kind of value assessment or formal interpretation,” says Michelle Grabner, artist, curator, gallerist, critic, professor and Guggenheim Fellow. Grabner curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and was named by Artnet as one of the 100 most powerful women in art. Her work blends abstract visual strategies with hints of everyday life, like jam lids or table cloth patterns, which invites viewers into what she calls an “intellectual engagement” with the familiar. This leaves some viewers behind, she says, because people have become so literal. If they see something that looks like a tablecloth, they end their interpretation there. “Instead of taking it for granted, let it command our attention in a different way, Grabner says. Having somebody tell you what it is — I find that just dreadful. Why would we want to not have to deeply assess, and wildly interpret? And it is not about being right or wrong. It is about the activity of critically thinking.”
Imagine an AI company saying what they do “it is not about being right and wrong, it is about the activity of critically thinking.” That would be crazy. AI is here precisely to tell us what is right, what to do, what to say and what to think. When it is wrong, it is not only useless but dangerous. Abstract art can never be wrong. It is often confusing, odd, silly and sometimes pointless. But that is part of its beauty and value. It is like us — deeper than its superficialities suggest. When we grapple with its existential nature, that process connects us with our own, which makes us more human, and more humane. Now is the moment when our species needs to decide whether that matters.
Gestalt shifts
Mumbai-based abstract artist Manish Nai also uses bits of the everyday world in his artworks. His favourite materials include jute, newspaper, second-hand fabric, found metal and old books, things in great supply in contemporary India. Nai does not begin a new artwork with an idea of how it will turn out. He lets the materials guide the process and, perhaps later, in retrospect, gains understanding from it. “Most materials I use — cloth, newspaper, jute, metal — are already loaded with history, Nai says. I do not add meaning; I try to reveal what is already inside them. I often discover the final form only after the process is complete. That unpredictability keeps me engaged — it is like collaborating with the material rather than shaping it.”
While exhibiting in institutions around the world, Nai has noticed that reactions to his work vary widely depending upon where he is geographically. For example, he says Indian viewers respond more easily to the materials he uses, while Western viewers respond more to the forms. This reveals how cultural predispositions can easily shape how someone reacts to abstract art. What is perhaps more important, however, is not whatever assumptions or preferences a viewer comes with, but what new levels of thinking and feeling emerge as they spend time with the work.
Julia Bland is a New York based artist who spent several formative years living and working in Morocco, where she often found herself immersed inside of the abstract patterns that are integrated ubiquitously into Moroccan architecture and design. Unlike when she was simply looking at an artwork hanging on the wall, she found it impossible to identify the centre of these all-over visual compositions. Or rather, the centre constantly shifted whenever she moved through the space or changed her point of view. She describes it as a Gestalt shift — when a person’s understanding changes suddenly because of a new perspective.
“Abstraction is in every culture, and it is everywhere, Bland says. Maybe in its ubiquity, it can become invisible, but it is a huge part of the way people think. We make a lot of assumptions about things that we are used to seeing all the time. So one of the things that abstraction can do is make you look at something closer and think twice about something that you think you understand. But that is in the hands of the viewer, if they are going to take this step to think about something twice or rethink something that they already thought they knew.” Bland has introduced a similar visual approach into her abstract weavings. If she can instigate a Gestalt shift for viewers, she hopes she can get them to question the nature of what they are perceiving and become more open to other possible interpretations.
Grabner, Nai and Bland all make different kinds of abstract art, but they are all inviting us to engage in a similar intellectual conundrum. What are we supposed to think about them, or say about them out loud? Is it okay to just feel something? Would it be okay if we just danced or sat on the ground or started laughing or crying when we looked at their work, like children do? At the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, curators have started adding the reactions of children to the wall didactic. Children do not have the same hangups as adults. They say and do whatever they feel in the presence of an artwork. Can we become more like them? According to the museum, a majority of adult visitors now say that reading the children’s thoughts makes them feel more free to express their own inner feelings. This is important. The agency humans have to think for ourselves is precisely what AI is designed to eradicate.
Abstract artists who struggle every day with abstraction in their studio report a sense of never-ending evolution of their own understanding of what they are doing. They may not be entirely comfortable in that space of unknowing, but they stay there because it brings them into contact with their intuition and intelligence. That is the point. We are in a cultural moment when too many of us are giving into easy answers. The truth is more complicated than AI, algorithms and daddy politicians are making it seem. It is time to get the kids, and ourselves, off social media and go look at abstract art in real life; to stay as long as possible in a space of nuance and questioning; to ask our own questions and find our own answers; to reject the toxic certainty offered by AI and embrace the very human nature of the unknown.
