Little in 2022 split the art world as much as its turbulent relationship with technology in a year marked by several crises. On the one hand, Christie’s recorded a 96% fall in NFT sales over the course of the year, despite the fact that the entry of artists like Takashi Murakami into the NFT arena has given the space some much-needed respectability.
Numerous creatives and platforms continue to investigate methods to use the technology, with uses ranging from practical to abstract, social to commercial, even if the medium is still vulnerable to the same issues as the crypto market.
As long as meme art tokens continue to oversaturate online marketplaces, some will continue to question the viability of NFTs as a creative medium. After the excitement subsided, concerns have been expressed regarding the supposed “worth” of NFT art, which consists of conceptual pieces that are simple to produce repeatedly as opposed to actual works by contemporary artists.
In other places, advocates of blockchain continue to hold fast to the utopian vision that the technology is helping to build — whether it be as a way to confirm provenance and authenticity or as a promised land of opportunity for up-and-coming artists.
The year of artificial intelligence was 2022, not 2021, which was the year of NFTs. The rise and publication of AI image generators over the past 12 months, like Dall-E and Midjourney, has provided an unmatched window into exactly how potent these algorithms have become.
By entering “Arab man drinking coffee in the style of Van Gogh” and witnessing it produce a precise representation in under a minute, there is no easier or more concrete way to experience the power of a contemporary AI system.
Since this power, many people in the arts and cultural fields are debating where the boundary should be drawn. When do we cease appreciating the distance between the artist and the brush as well as the distance between the brush and the canvas? When is the physical media no longer necessary? Where does it all end, exactly? The modern question is, “What is creativity?,” as Murakami noted.
Automation has long been a problem in many other industries. The argument regarding the upcoming waves of automation, particularly in the creative realms, may be led by AI art as the Fourth Industrial Revolution progresses.
Perhaps there will be a larger push from artists toward the decentralising forces of NFTs if monopolies like Meta attempt to enforce control over these digital spaces, lest the constraints of algorithms created to further commercial interests stifle their creativity. What function does art perform in this result, and what can creators do to safeguard virtual cultural spaces in a society where the attention span of consumers is a commodity to be sold to advertisers?
The topic will undoubtedly change, and given the speed at which technology is evolving, it is hard to accurately forecast how events will turn out. But one thing is certain: the union of art and technology will undoubtedly continue to be a balancing act of promise and issues for some.