With all the changes this essential part of society has gone through recently, one might wonder.
Although I have no definitive answer to this question, I would like to express my opinion, starting with another.
What isn't art?
When most of us think "art", we think paper and pencil; brush and a canvas; chisel and marble; books, songs, music, movies.
Some of us might think of buildings, product design, marketing.
Others might argue that even life itself, the path with all its detours and roadblocks, and the procedure of overcoming them, can be a form of art.
To me, the surface quality of a final product isn't what defines whether something is art or not.
I can think of countless examples that can be art, or not art, depending on several factors, but most importantly the person working on a product.
Even a factory worker, putting specific pieces of a mass-produced item together over and over again, can be an artist.
Let me instead demonstrate the idea with a fictional story, based on various cases I've come across:
I arrived home from college. It had been a stressful day. My mind was still filled with the test papers, data, numbers and formulae I had had to memorize.
I laid down at home, exhausted. It was only fall, far from the end of the school year.
I decided to go on the internet with no goal in mind, a most unhealthy habit of many.
Then, I saw a piece of art made for me by a person I had reacted supportively to the art of prior.
By no means was this artist a professional at the time. Just another college student, in the other half of the world, creating art for keeping the soul alive.
Any businessman present could've easily assured me there and then, that the art had little value. But it was worth a lot to me.
Of course, it was worth a lot to me, because it was a gift made for me. But that is not all. I also found value in it, as a piece of art, regardless of its status as a gift.
For hundreds of years at this point, products have been manufactured with little expectation in mind. Their only purpose, to function in what they're supposed to be employed to do.
As time went on, guidelines for this type of thing have transformed, turning standards into the expensive, multiple hundred page documents that they are today. However, this didn't change the fact that most of these products have still been designed to target lowest possible expectations.
In the late 19th century, the camera was invented. Painters around the world feared that with a relatively cheap way of creating highly accurate representations of reality, there would be no need for manually made pictures anymore.
But as physically precise as a photograph may be, a painting says more about what it depicts than the highest-quality photo cameras could, to this day.
A person well known by the painter can be drawn with such deep and meaningful qualities; ones that, perhaps, aren't visible to anyone not knowing the person at all, let alone a mechanical device.
Anyone who has come across any of thousands of medium-budget news sources on the internet has seen stock photos before. Those images created to represent something on its most surface level. The lack of invisible qualities mentioned above, perhaps not intentional, certainly not mourned by any creators of the genre. These images, lacking any specific style, almost scare me. They feel distant, unnatural, too artificial to represent anything real. No actual emotions or detail, that - intentionally or not - are naturally part of scenes of real scenarios in real life. I feel little different about the inhumanely neat and tidy rooms in a furniture store, or a television commercial where everyone is perpetually happy, using big words of literature to describe cleaning supplies or cough medicine.
As of writing this text, we are living in a world in which to the aforementioned examples comes computer-generated imagery. Not the kind that a person carefully sets up, organizing three-dimensional objects into a scene that might feel lively and believable even without utmost realism; but the kind in which every little dot on a displayed image is calculated by mathematical equations and averaging-functions on statistics based on real photos. Little to no human intervention is present between the beginning and the end of the process. This form of media, to me, is the climax of all that's been discussed above. An objective fact it is, that machines possess no feelings, emotion, memories and opinions. On the most surface level, a machine is capable of "knowing" how a specific thing looks like, or even how artists of a set style would design it. But to put a thoughtfully selected array of objects in relation with each other, taking into account the conscious - and, perhaps, even unconscious - context the artist is making them in, is beyond the scope of a machine's abilities, however well trained.
And why am I talking so long about all this human history behind and in front of all of us? Simply, to put into perspective all that I thought about after receiving the gift that started this entire story.
The value of the gift didn't lie in its visuals, and no businessman of any knowledge could assess its worth the way I could.
That picture, to some extent, contained all that its creator stood for. The artist's memories, victories and traumas in life, feelings and emotions, views, opinions, life circumstances and culture altogether led to the specific way that piece of art looked like. It was a work, only possible through the creation of that person. Not because of any college or university degree that no other student could succeed to earn, nor due to any interesting or perhaps, traumatizing experience exclusive to the creator's life.
It was incapable of being made by anyone else, because there exists, has only ever existed, and will only exist one instance of that person, the entirety of who was neccessary to create that drawing.
That's what made it human, what made it real.
And that's why, it was art.
~Legacy
2026. 05. 11.