copying is not art

art breathes new ideas to life

when i first started drawing, i was intimidated by the pieces that copied real life as close as possible. those pieces where you weren't able to tell the picture from the drawing, where the artist went through the aggravating process of photo-realistically translating each shadow, light, and texture into pencil graphite.

i thought i had to be able to do that to be a good artist, and the 'measure' of skill was in attention to detail.

but not long into drawing, i realized how boring it was to copy something instead of making something of my own.

growing up, rather than focusing on learning best practices for shading and fundamentals of light and shadow, i adorned the pages of my sunday chinese school textbook with line art doodles of long necked cats, mushroom characters, and mental reincarnations of pokemon, dreaming of a world in which my characters were breathed to life and frolicked the green pastures in fluidity.

by ignoring the railroad tracks that others around me defined as 'art', i let my ideas take flight on paper instead of tunneling myself into unnecessary details.

but i was scared. i didn't have the still life drawings to prove that i could draw so i thought i didn't deserve to call myself an artist. if i only had ideas and a story i wanted to tell, was that enough? doesn't skill trump self-expression?

these days when i look at ai-generated "art", it makes me frustrated because we’re once again comparing the 'skill' of replication over ideas. ai art has no life of it's own, it is a conglomeration of existing ideas. it is a replication of the past. it's slicing pieces of past still life and gluing it together into one soulless mass.

without life and a story, it's not art.

earlier this semester, my blockchain professor showed us fine art pieces that were auctioned at the sotheby's and had us guess the prices. we lowballed each time, being tens of millions off from the selling price. at first, i was super bewildered by the expensive price tags. but then he explained that the value to art comes from creating a shift in culture. he revealed the story behind each of the art pieces and the shift in history it cuased.

to create art is to invent and redefine history.

art was the first abstract piece was submitted to a gallery in juxtaposition to centuries of realism. art was the first urinal that was rejected from a gallery even though it was submitted anonymously by a respected artist that gets his work accepted in every gallery. art was the first collection of generated avatars on the blockchain that was given out for free. art’s value comes from the story behind starting a cultural shift. there’s no formula to successful art, art invents the new paradigm that others follow.

i get frustrated these days by copying. ux designs that copy the same mistakes and patterns instead of thinking about what could be made better. the same hype cycle startups that pop up and then copy each other each time there's another 'hot' new topic trending on twitter. by copying instead of taking a pause to rethink our world, we'll forever be stuck in the past. just like the ai art pieces generating and regurgitating the past back us, we'll never be able to take leaps forward if we only think about the past.

ai "art" does not kill art. art is here to stay and always will be. art is the contrarian in the room, scheming what the next shift will be. it's the belief we have in another world and slowly bringing it to life — one stroke, line of code, or line of poetry at a time. with each new paradigm, art finds another corner to creep in and redefine itself.

I’ve always been curious why history books aren’t written in reverse chronological order: as a kid I never cared for Neanderthals, or how Yu the Great controlled the floods. I’ve always wanted to know why things are the way they are today — so a curious mind digs into the history of yesterday, and the day before that. The puzzles are already there. —tianyu fang