The Expanding Canvas: What Counts as Art?
Introduction: The Shape-Shifting Definition of Art
In late 2022, a science-fiction inspired canvas titled Théâtre D’opéra Spatial took first prize in a Colorado State Fair art competition. Nothing unusual—except the “artist” was an AI algorithm. When the news broke, many human artists were outraged. “We’re watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes,” one illustrator vented on Twitter vice.com. Across social media, creators echoed the alarm: if a machine can make award-winning art, what does that mean for art itself? This anxiety might feel ultramodern, but it is only the latest verse in an old debate. From ancient philosophers to avant-garde provocateurs, people have long wrestled with what art truly is and who gets to call themselves an artist. The answers have never been static. Art’s definition has expanded continually across history – from Classical ideals of skillful imitation and beauty, through modern rebellions that declared everyday objects and splattered paint to be art, and now into the era of digital and AI-generated works. Each new medium or movement that once seemed to “kill” art ultimately became part of its evolution.
This feature explores art’s broadening boundaries across time and culture. How have thinkers like Leo Tolstoy, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Danto or Martin Heidegger defined the essence of art? Why did photography, abstract painting, or a signed porcelain urinal once spark outrage as “not art”? And do today’s AI creations belong in the gallery alongside Michelangelo’s sculptures and Van Gogh’s canvases? By examining past controversies and philosophical insights, we’ll see that artistic legitimacy has always grown with new tools – and that intention, interpretation, and impact have always mattered more than the tool itself. In the end, the question “Can AI art be real art?” may be answered by recognizing how fluid the definition of art has always been. The canvas of human creativity keeps expanding, and with it comes vigorous debate – exactly as it always has.
From Mimesis to Expression: Evolving Ideas of Art
For centuries, art was defined within fairly narrow confines. In classical Greece, art (Greek techne) was associated with skilled craft and imitation of nature. The philosopher Plato famously viewed art as mere mimesis, an imitation twice-removed from truth – beautiful perhaps, but potentially deceptive. His student Aristotle took a kinder view, seeing art (especially tragedy) as cathartic imitation that could stir and purge emotions. In both cases, art’s value was tied to how well it mirrored reality or ideal forms. Through the Renaissance, this mimetic theory prevailed: “High art” meant paintings and sculptures that showed mastery of technique, lifelike perspective, and pleasing beauty, often guided by academic rules. Fine art was serious, skilled work; everything else was “low” craft or decoration pbssocal.org, pbssocal.org.
But even as those classical ideas endured, new thinkers started probing art’s emotional and conceptual dimensions. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant broke from the purely mimetic view. He argued that true art (fine art) does more than copy nature – it engages our imagination in a “free play” beyond concepts, giving us disinterested pleasure in form and meaning. Kant wrote that fine art must appear purposive (orderly, unified) without serving a literal purpose, “purposiveness without purpose” in his famous phrase. Crucially, Kant believed fine art requires genius – an innate creative spirit in the artist that produces something original and rule-breaking iep.utm.edu, iep.utm.edu. In other words, art is an outpouring of human imagination, not just technical skill. This was a radical shift from seeing art as skilled craft; it planted seeds for Romanticism’s emphasis on the artist’s creative intuition.
By the 19th century, the definition of art was shifting further from pure representation to expression. The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, in his 1897 essay What Is Art?, boldly dismissed the idea that beauty or skill alone make art. “Art is not a handicraft,” Tolstoy declared, “it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced” redtreetimes.com. For Tolstoy, the purpose of art is emotional communication: the artist consciously infects the audience with a feeling they have lived through, creating a shared human experience. As he put it, by means of art “one man transmits his feelings to others” and “infects” them with the same emotion thecollector.com. A successful artwork, in Tolstoy’s view, is one where the viewers catch the fire of emotion that the creator kindled in themselves home.csulb.edu, thecollector.com. This expressive theory widened art’s scope to include the personal, spiritual and ordinary: if a humble folk song or a child’s drawing sincerely conveyed feeling, Tolstoy would count it as true art, perhaps more so than an academic oil painting done without heartfelt intent.
Not all agreed with Tolstoy’s emotional yardstick. Modernist thinkers offered other criteria – formal innovation, for example. But the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a blossoming recognition that art could be conceptual and subjective, not just a mirror of nature. The stage was set for revolutions in what would count as art. As these new ideas took hold, the art world soon faced unprecedented controversies: inventions and styles that upended every traditional assumption of what art should look like.
New Tools, New Turmoil: When Photography “Killed” Painting
Perhaps the first technological shock to art’s system came with the camera. In 1839, the invention of practical photography prompted a culture-wide identity crisis for art. Until that moment, realistic images of the world could only be made by trained human hands. A painter’s skill in capturing life – a glittering oil portrait or landscape – was unique and treasured. Now suddenly a machine could freeze reality with the press of a button. Early photographers and their clunky devices were initially seen more as scientists or technicians than artists. After all, was it really art if a machine did the work?
Many traditionalists loudly said no. From the outset, painters and critics dismissed photography as a mere mechanical trick. The French artist Paul Delaroche, upon seeing a daguerreotype (an early photo) in 1839, reportedly blurted out, “From today, painting is dead!” medium.com, medium.com. To defenders of academic painting, the camera was a threat to “real art” – it required chemical know-how, not the imagination and hand of a trained artist. Two decades later, poet Charles Baudelaire sneered that if photography were allowed into the realm of art, it would “supplant or corrupt it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally” medium.com, medium.com. In other words, Baudelaire feared the public, enchanted by literal camera realism, would lose taste for the higher truths of painting. Early debates raged: Is photography art, or just a soulless copy of reality? Some said it was useful as a tool for painters (for reference images), but not an art equal to drawing or painting medium.com. Others – a minority at first – argued that photography could be an art in its own right, an “engraving produced by light” with its own creative potential medium.com.
Photography’s impact on painting was paradoxical. Rather than extinguish art, the camera’s arrival pushed art into new territories that cameras couldn’t go. Once photographs could cheaply capture a precise likeness, painters felt freed from literal replication. As the 19th century progressed, artists asked: if a “perfect” realistic image can be made by mechanical means, what is left for the human artist? The answer, for many, was to do “something beyond” mere reality. In 1875, American painter James McNeill Whistler debuted an atmospheric, impressionistic style in works like Nocturne in Black and Gold, deliberately hazy and suggestive rather than sharply detailed. Whistler pointedly wrote: “The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only what he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.” medium.com His contemporaries – the Impressionists and later the Symbolists and Expressionists – took this to heart. They abandoned strict realism to photography and explored light, color, emotion, and imagination on canvas instead medium.com, medium.com. As Vincent van Gogh put it in an 1888 letter, “accurate drawing, accurate color, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality…in a mirror, if it could be caught, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph” medium.com. Photography, ironically, spurred painting to discover abstraction and subjective vision.
And what of photography itself – did it remain a mere technical craft, or join the pantheon of fine art? History shows that initial skepticism gave way to acceptance. By the early 20th century, pioneers like Alfred Stieglitz in New York were exhibiting photographs as art, using soft focus and composition creatively to prove the camera’s artistic possibilities. Over decades, the “camera image” gained legitimacy: museums began collecting artful photographs; photography divisions were established in major art institutions mid-century. The art establishment that once scoffed came to recognize Ansel Adams’s majestic landscapes or Dorothea Lange’s haunting portraits as undeniably artful and human. It took time and many debates, but the consensus eventually flipped. As one retrospective analysis noted, photography became respected as an art form, and this history offers lessons for new technologies like AI medium.com. In fact, the pattern is clear: the shock of a new medium (camera, video, digital) initially brings rejection and fear, yet ultimately expands the definition of art rather than contracting it. The same pattern would soon play out on an even more provocative stage – one involving not just new tools, but new ideas about art’s very nature.
“Everything is Art”: Duchamp’s Provocation and Conceptual Revolutions
Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) – an ordinary urinal turned on its back – became the 20th century’s most notorious artwork. Critics in 1917 called it disgusting and childish; today it’s hailed for forever expanding what art can be. Image: Wikipedia
If any single moment marks the birth of conceptual art, it was in April 1917, when Marcel Duchamp unveiled a piece titled Fountain. The artwork was, quite literally, a porcelain urinal – the kind found in any men’s bathroom – which Duchamp purchased from a plumbing supply store and submitted (under a fake name “R. Mutt”) to a New York art exhibition. Duchamp had simply flipped the urinal on its side and scrawled a signature, daring the art world to reject it. And reject it they did: the show’s organizers were aghast and hid the piece from view, arguing it was an obscene prank, not art. Duchamp’s avant-garde gesture sparked a ferocious debate. Traditionalists fumed that it was an insult: how could a mass-produced toilet fixture be considered art in any meaningful sense?
Yet Duchamp and his supporters had a sharp philosophical point to make. In an anonymous defense published at the time (in The Blind Man magazine), one writer argued that Fountain was art precisely because of the artist’s creative act of choice and context. “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.” bbc.com In other words, the art lay in Duchamp’s concept and intention. By selecting a banal urinal, stripping it of function, and re-framing it as an object of contemplation, Duchamp proposed that art is in the idea and the context, not the craftsmanship. This was a frontal challenge to every conventional criterion – skill, beauty, effort – that had defined art up to then.
Duchamp’s prank turned paradigm shift permanently expanded art’s borders. No longer was art limited to paintings and sculptures made by an artist’s hand; anything could be art if the artist intended it to be and the art world agreed to treat it as such. This notion of the “readymade” (Duchamp’s term for a pre-made object elevated to art) was outrageous in 1917, but it unleashed a tidal wave of developments. As the BBC’s art writers note, Fountain “changed art forever” – remove it from history, and you must also remove a vast array of subsequent art movements bbc.com. Pop Art’s celebration of mundane consumer objects (Warhol’s painted Campbell’s Soup Cans or Brillo Boxes) descends directly from Duchamp’s innovation bbc.com. The minimalists and conceptualists of the 1960s – who might place a row of bricks on a gallery floor or display a single word as artwork – were unthinkable without Duchamp. Even the shock tactics of late-20th-century art (think of Damien Hirst suspending a shark in formaldehyde, or controversial installations like a disheveled bed presented as art) trace back to that single urinal in 1917 bbc.com. Fountain became, as one critic put it, “the yardstick against which outrageousness, as an aesthetic quality, would subsequently be measured” bbc.com.
Philosopher Arthur Danto latched onto Duchamp’s revolution to develop a new theory of art. Danto was struck by the question: if Duchamp’s urinal and, later, Andy Warhol’s painted Brillo soap pad boxes look indistinguishable from ordinary objects, what makes them art when the originals are not? In 1964, after seeing Warhol’s Brillo Boxes exhibition, Danto concluded that art is defined not by visible features but by interpretation and context. “What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo box is a certain theory of art,” Danto wrote. “It is theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is… The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less than the real one” hyperallergic.com. To see something as art, in short, requires an “atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” hyperallergic.com. Danto’s insight was essentially a philosophic validation of Duchamp. Art is not a fixed category but a status conferred within a cultural context – by the artist’s declaration, the critical dialogue around it, and the audience’s willingness to play along. An everyday object can become art if it fits into the evolving narrative of what art is supposed to be at that time. Conversely, a painted canvas might not be art if it lacks that artworld context or intention.
This “institutional theory of art,” later formalized by philosopher George Dickie, might sound cynical – as if art is only what galleries and experts say it is. But it simply reflects that the definition of art is historically contingent. As standards and ideas shift, the artworld collectively agrees upon new possibilities. A pile of scrap metal welded together might be junk in 1850, but by 1950 it’s acceptable as David Smith’s abstract sculpture. A provocative photograph of a mundane object might be dismissed in 1917, but by 2017 the Museum of Modern Art is acquiring Instagram photos as art. Duchamp’s gambit proved that art’s boundaries are not policed by nature or absolute rules; they are as elastic as our willingness to expand our aesthetic theories. And expand they did – sometimes contentiously, sometimes gleefully – through the 20th century.
“My Kid Could Paint That!” – Abstract Art and the Public Eye
If photography and Duchamp’s readymades rattled the art establishment, another 20th-century leap left much of the public scratching their heads: the rise of pure abstraction. In the decades after World War II, artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning eschewed recognizable subject matter entirely. They splattered paint, drew wild gestural strokes, or filled canvases with luminous color fields. Critics championed these works as deeply authentic – the artist’s raw psyche spilled onto canvas – but many ordinary viewers reacted with bafflement or scorn. Abstract Expressionism, as it came to be known, met the classic dismissive refrain: “Ha, my child could have done that!” bc.edu.
Indeed, the apparent simplicity of some abstract art made it an easy target for skepticism. Drips, blobs, and geometric shapes didn’t obviously display the traditional “skill” people expected from fine art. There’s a revealing story: in the 1960s, a clever critic submitted a toddler’s finger painting under an invented artist’s name to an open abstract art show – and it was accepted, even praised, by the judges. Such anecdotes fueled the popular notion that abstract art was a hoax or a case of the emperor’s new clothes. As one academic study noted, even highly educated folks would deride abstract works as “requiring no skill at all,” casually saying “my kid could have done that!” bc.edu. To many, these messy or minimalistic canvases violated too many norms: they didn’t look like Art-with-a-capital-A. Lacking realistic subjects or obvious meaning, abstract paintings were accused of being random at best, fraudulent at worst. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower – hardly an art expert but echoing public sentiment – saw some modern paintings and allegedly quipped that “Jackson Pollock… that’s not art.” Harry Truman, his predecessor, had been even more blunt years earlier: viewing an exhibition of non-objective art, Truman proclaimed, “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.”
Yet, just as with photography, time and context changed the narrative. The intentions of the abstract painters and the interpretations of critics eventually reframed these works as profound rather than pointless. The artists themselves argued (and demonstrated) that far from lacking skill or thought, their art required a different kind of mastery – a mastery of composition, emotion, and idea rather than illusionistic detail. Abstract Expressionists valued spontaneity and improvisation, but they also cared about composition and depth. They saw their splashes and strokes as capturing truths about the human spirit that realistic art couldn’t. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes, these painters “introduced radical new directions…breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter” in an effort to put personal psyche and universal emotion on the canvas metmuseum.org, metmuseum.org. A Pollock drip painting, they argued, had an intense, if unconventional, order and harmony. A Rothko color field could move viewers to tears with its delicate balance of hues conveying tragedy or ecstasy. Over time, many viewers did start to feel something in front of these works – something a child’s scribble did not evoke. (Indeed, psychological experiments have found that non-artists can usually tell the difference between an abstract painting by a renowned artist and random paint splatters by a child or animal, even if they can’t articulate why bc.edubc.edu. There is an ineffable intentionality in the former that the eye picks up.)
By the 1960s and ’70s, abstract art was firmly ensconced in museums and art history books, its once-radical break now celebrated as a pinnacle of artistic freedom. The “my kid could do that” crowd still exists (as any museum guard will attest!), but the artworld no longer doubts the status of abstract painting as capital-A Art. What changed? Not the medium (canvas and paint stayed the same) but the collective understanding of what art can be. The field of art expanded to accommodate pure form and feeling. Critics like Clement Greenberg helped by analyzing the formal properties of abstract works – showing the public how to see them not as “nothing,” but as explorations of color, line, and space as meaningful as any landscape. Over decades, education and exposure did their work: the shock faded, the once-scandalous becomes the new normal. This cycle had played out before (with the Impressionists in the 1870s, derided for their blurry scenes that today hang revered in the Louvre) and would play out again with newer forms. It’s a reminder that when we push the definition of art, initial confusion or hostility is almost a tradition in itself. Today’s outrage often becomes tomorrow’s old master.
Art in the Eye of the Beholder: Intention, Interpretation, Impact
Surveying these episodes – photography, Duchamp’s Fountain, abstract expressionism – a striking pattern emerges. In each case, the eventual acceptance of new art forms hinged on three key factors: the artist’s intention, the viewer’s interpretation, and the emotional or intellectual impact of the work. These factors, more than the physical medium or technique, seem to define art’s legitimacy.
Intention: Duchamp’s urinal famously forced the question of intention into the spotlight. If an artist says it’s art and presents it as such, does that make it art? Duchamp’s stance – and that of conceptual art ever since – is yes: art is an act of intention and declaration. The object is incidental; it’s the idea that counts. While critics derided this as a kind of emperor’s-new-clothes trick at first, it highlighted a truth: artists throughout history have imbued ordinary materials with meaning through intent. A cave painting is just pigment on rock until one realizes it was meant to depict a sacred hunt or ritual. So, artistic intent became a cornerstone of modern definitions. Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, went so far as to say art isn’t just a thing, but a process in which truth happens – the artwork is a site where the creator’s intent and the world’s meaning meet to reveal something new en.wikipedia.org. “Art is not just a way of expressing the element of truth in a culture, but the means of creating it… a springboard from which ‘that which is’ can be revealed,” Heidegger wrote en.wikipedia.org. In this view, the artist’s guiding intention can set a whole new reality into motion through the artwork. Even Tolstoy’s emphasis on the sincere intention to communicate feeling fits here: without the conscious intent to share a feeling, there is no art home.csulb.edu, thecollector.com. That is why Tolstoy discounted a spontaneous yawn or a reflex cry of pain as art – there was no intent to communicate, even if it did transmit feeling for a moment home.csulb.edu. Art, in his eyes, begins when someone deliberately organizes a work to evoke a feeling in others home.csulb.edu. So intention is vital – it differentiates art from accident or mere decoration.
Interpretation (and Context): Of course, an artist’s intent alone isn’t enough; it takes a receptive audience (or “artworld”) to recognize and interpret a work as art. Arthur Danto’s theory made this plain: to see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – knowledge of art history, an “atmosphere of artistic theory” hyperallergic.com. In other words, interpretation completes the artwork. The viewers and critics apply context and cultural meaning to the object, elevating it to art status. This is not a bug or fraud; it’s how art has always functioned. When Beethoven wrote his late string quartets, it required the interpretive framework of Western classical music (and educated listeners attuned to it) to appreciate them. An alien landing on Earth might hear just screechy noise unless they learned the context. In the 20th century, the interpretive role became even more pronounced. A pile of scrap metal or an all-white canvas needed the narrative from artists and critics to be understood as intentional art – a comment on industry, a meditation on purity, etc. Once provided, the interpretation allows viewers to find value in the work beyond its face value. George Dickie’s institutional theory basically says art is an artifact recognized by the artworld; context is king. This is not to diminish art – it’s to highlight that art is a relationship between object, creator, and audience. As viewers, when we approach an artwork, we bring our knowledge, emotions, and cultural cues to bear. The meaning isn’t only embedded by the artist; it is co-created through interpretation. A Mark Rothko canvas of floating colors might mean nothing until someone tells you Rothko intended it to invoke the sublime, and you stand there long enough to feel a spiritual hush. Then it can hit you like a ton of bricks. Interpretation, combined with intent, is what unlocks that impact.
Impact: Ultimately, what makes something “art” for most people is that it moves us – it has an impact, whether emotional, intellectual, or sensory. The mediums and methods have broadened wildly, but art’s core purpose arguably remains what Tolstoy described: to connect human minds and hearts, to “infect” us with thoughts, feelings, or new visions of the world thecollector.com. Great art, be it a Renaissance fresco or a VR digital installation, leaves an impact on its audience. A photograph can haunt us with its beauty or sorrow; an abstract sculpture can challenge how we perceive space; a piece of conceptual art can provoke deep questions. In Tolstoy’s formula, if a work succeeds in transmitting the artist’s feeling to others such that they experience it too, it fulfills the function of art home.csulb.edu, thecollector.com. Modern psychology echoes this idea in the concept of aesthetic experience – that sense of wonder, empathy or insight we get from encountering art. Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, known for his study of creativity, described how flow and transformation occur in both artist and viewer. He even proposed a systemic model where creativity (and by extension art) is validated when the field – gatekeepers like critics, curators, peers – acknowledge a novel work and pass it into the cultural domain rochester.edu. If the work resonates, it spreads to public consciousness and can influence how people feel or think. By that standard, each controversial art form we’ve discussed did eventually prove its impact: photography gave people new eyes on the world (and even helped change social consciousness, e.g. Lewis Hine’s photos of child labor stirring reform). Duchamp’s conceptual art made people interrogate the nature of art itself – a profound intellectual impact. Abstract art opened interior emotional worlds to viewers, once they learned to read its language. In short, if something created as art finds an audience and affects them, it tends to become accepted as art over time. Its legitimacy is earned through impact.
These three I’s – intention, interpretation, impact – offer a flexible lens to judge new artistic phenomena. So when a new technology like AI enters the scene, disrupting how art can be made, we can ask: is there an artistic intent behind the work? Is there a context or theory that allows us to interpret it meaningfully? And does it have an impact on viewers? If those are satisfied, history suggests that initial objections about “but how it was made!” fade away. After all, similar objections were raised to the synthesizer in music (“the musician isn’t playing the notes, a machine is!”) or digital cameras in film – yet artists adapted these tools and still produced works of true artistic merit with them. The tool became largely irrelevant to the audience’s experience; what mattered was the result.
The Next Frontier: AI Art and the Human Touch
This brings us back to the burning debate of today: Can art created with the help of Artificial Intelligence be real art? The specter of “soulless” machines making images understandably triggers anxieties, just as the camera did 180 years ago. Art, many insist, is a fundamentally human endeavor – how can an algorithm replicate the creativity, emotion, and intentionality of a person? Some artists and critics argue that it cannot, by definition. To them, AI-generated work feels like cheating or even theft, not a genuine creative process.
Illustrator Rob Biddulph voiced this common skepticism bluntly: AI-generated art “is the exact opposite of what I believe art to be. Fundamentally, I have always felt that art is about translating something that you feel internally into something that exists externally…true art is about the creative process much more than it’s about the final piece. And simply pressing a button to generate an image is not a creative process.” theguardian.com In this view, art without a human hand guiding each stroke lacks the internal feeling and struggle that imbue authenticity. Other critics claim that current AI art is derivative by nature – as one artist put it, “AI doesn’t look at art and create its own. It samples everyone’s [art] – then mashes it into something else” theguardian.com, theguardian.com. Because generative AIs are trained on databases of human-made images, there’s an argument that these outputs are a collage of existing artwork styles, not a novel creation ex nihilo. Moreover, there are ethical and legal concerns: many AI models were trained on artists’ work without permission, raising alarms about copyright and exploitation theguardian.com, theguardian.com. No wonder many illustrators feel, as one Guardian headline put it, that AI art is “the opposite of art” and have launched campaigns like #NoToAIArt in protest theguardian.com, theguardian.com. The fear is not just losing jobs; it’s a sense that something essential – the human creative spark – might be snuffed out if machine-made images flood the world.
Given all we’ve seen about art’s evolving definition, how might these concerns be addressed? History doesn’t repeat in exactly the same way, but it often rhymes. The camera, too, was once accused of lacking creative soul, of “stealing” the images of reality. And indeed, early photographs often imitated the look of paintings until photographers embraced their own new aesthetic. Likewise, AI is a tool – a radically new and powerful one – but still a tool in human hands. Jerry Saltz, a senior art critic who has seen many art trends come and go, advises a balanced perspective: “Never think that [AI] is or isn’t art. It’s a tool like a pencil, a camera. Don’t forget in the 19th century, the most brilliant minds alive said the camera is going to end art. Of course, it didn’t end art, it extended human beings.” journal.everypixel.com The key question, Saltz says, is not if it’s art but is it good art or bad art? Right now, in his estimation, a lot of AI-generated imagery is “pretty crapola… It has no imagination or creativity” journal.everypixel.com – largely rehashing old styles and clichés. But that doesn’t mean the tool itself is hopeless for art. It means we have yet to see an AI artwork at the level of greatness. To use Saltz’s analogy: early photography mostly produced stiff portraits and postcards; it took time and human ingenuity to turn it into an art form that could rival painting. The same may be true for AI.
Importantly, behind every AI art piece is still a human (or team of humans) making choices: choosing the training data, crafting the prompts, curating or editing the outputs. AI art is collaborative art. As one analysis explains, while an AI image may be generated by code, “it’s a human’s job to create and type prompts for the machine. And the machine’s job is to translate those prompts into visual output that expresses human feelings or ideas. What’s important, those feelings and ideas are born in the human brain.” journal.everypixel.com In other words, the intent originates from a person – the AI is an intermediary, much like a camera or paintbrush (albeit a very complex one). Yes, the AI introduces an element of randomness and pulls from its data in ways even the user might not predict, but that can be seen as analogous to an artist collaborating with materials that have a mind of their own (think of Jackson Pollock letting gravity and fluid dynamics help shape his drips). The artist’s role doesn’t disappear; it shifts more toward guiding and framing the process. Some forward-looking artists have already embraced AI as “co-creators.” They compare it to working with a semi-autonomous apprentice: you give it direction, it provides a bunch of possibilities, and you apply your judgment and vision to refine the final piece. The intention is still there – the artist knows what concept or feeling they want to convey, and they steer the AI toward it through iterative prompts and tweaks.
And interpretation? Just as with any previous art form, we are developing a theoretical context to make sense of AI art. If Duchamp gave us the idea that the concept reigns supreme, AI art raises fascinating questions of authorship (Is the author the programmer, the end-user, the machine, or all of the above?), and creativity (Can a machine be creative, or is it just remixing?). These questions themselves are provoking rich discussions – which is often a sign that something is entering the domain of art. Galleries and museums have begun to exhibit AI-generated works, implicitly endorsing them as art. In 2018, the Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, an algorithm-generated “painting” styled like an Old Master portrait, sold at Christie’s auction for a staggering $432,500 journal.everypixel.com, journal.everypixel.com. The sale made headlines as the first AI art to hit the blue-chip art market, and it forced critics to pay attention. Since then, institutions from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to the British Museum have featured AI art in exhibitions journal.everypixel.com. We even saw the venerable magazine Cosmopolitan publish an AI-generated cover image journal.everypixel.com. These developments signal that the artworld is, however warily, letting AI art in the door. Theories are being formulated, justifications are being made – all part of the process of interpretation catching up with the new tool.
And what about impact? Does AI art move people? The jury is still out. Some viewers report being wowed or eerily fascinated by AI images – say, the dreamy, hallucinatory quality of a DALL·E-generated landscape that looks like a surrealist painting never painted. Others feel unmoved, sensing something missing beneath the surface polish. One could argue that we haven’t yet seen an AI artwork achieve the profound emotional impact of, say, a Van Gogh or a Frida Kahlo. But it’s early days. Remember that early photography was mostly valued for its accuracy, not emotional depth, until artists learned to use it expressively. As more creative people experiment with AI, the output will likely gain in depth and originality. Already, some hybrid AI-human projects produce striking results – for instance, an artist might use AI to generate hundreds of concept images, then physically paint a large canvas incorporating those ideas, marrying the algorithm’s complexity with the human hand’s nuance. The end result can be quite affecting, because it leverages the strength of AI (variation and complexity) with the irreplaceable human elements of selective emphasis and emotional resonance.
Certainly, legitimate concerns remain. Many artists feel violated by their work being scraped into AI datasets without credit; new ethical norms and perhaps regulations will be needed to ensure fair use and consent in the AI training process. Culturally, we will have to navigate the difference between mass-automated imagery (which might flood us with generic visuals) and genuine artistic endeavors with AI (which stand out for their thoughtfulness). But these are challenges that can be met with thoughtful policy and adaptation. They do not negate the possibility that AI can be a tool for art; they just mean we have to manage its introduction wisely.
Looking back at history, every time a novel art-making tool or method emerged, there were those who scoffed or panicked: Painters accused early photographers of cheating. Classical composers sneered at electric guitars and synthesizers. Many theater actors dismissed film acting as mere mechanical reproduction. In most cases, the new medium did not kill the old; instead, it enriched the landscape of art. Painting survived photography by going where cameras couldn’t. Live theater coexists with cinema, each offering unique experiences. Far from making human artists obsolete, new tools often spur them to innovate in ways previously unimagined. As art professor Howard Gardner noted in a 2024 lecture, the arts are “highly cognitive… involving thinking, problem-solving, problem-finding, and especially creating something new.” harvardmagazine.com He argues that our creative intelligences can even be “strengthened and supplemented” by technology. “Perhaps, working together with ‘smart machines’, we can accomplish what not even the writers of science fiction in my childhood could have imagined,” Gardner mused harvardmagazine.com. This optimistic view sees AI not as the artist’s replacement, but as a partner to extend human creativity – much as photography opened new vistas for vision, or digital tools expanded graphic art.
Conclusion: A Larger Definition of Art
In a famous anecdote, when someone told Picasso his child could have painted a particularly abstract piece, Picasso reportedly quipped, “Yes, but he didn’t.” The great artist’s sly response encapsulates something essential about art: it’s not just about what is made, but how, why, and by whom. Art lives in the creative act and the context as much as in the final artifact. Throughout history, each time the question “What is art?” is asked, the answer shifts a little to accommodate new human adventures in creativity. There was a time when art meant only realistic statues of gods and heroes; a time when it meant religious icons on gilded panels; a time when it meant scenes of everyday life on canvas. Then art became splashes of color and found objects and happenings and digital projections. Art’s definition has always been broadening – and each expansion often meets resistance before acceptance.
Today, as we stand on another threshold with AI-generated art, it’s worth remembering that history. What seems inauthentic or unsettling now may, in hindsight, be seen as just another medium finding its voice. The first photographers tried to imitate paintings; the first computer art in the 1960s was greeted with curiosity but not quite respect. Now we recognize early digital artists as pioneers. It’s likely that AI art will follow a similar arc: from novelty to niche experiments to an integrated part of the art world. Already we can sense this transition. The initial shock (AI can paint!) is wearing off, and more artists are incorporating AI alongside traditional methods. The focus is shifting from the mere fact of AI involvement to the quality and meaning of the resulting works. An AI-generated image that leaves viewers pondering their own relationship to technology, or moves them with its strange beauty, will find a place in art’s story.
Crucially, none of this diminishes human creativity – it only challenges it to evolve. Artists may need to adapt, learning to harness algorithms much as photographers learned darkroom techniques or digital artists learned coding. The role of the artist might expand (to be part curator, part programmer, part designer), but their creative vision remains at the core. In the end, art is a profoundly human endeavor, no matter the tool. It is our human capacity for imagination, empathy, and meaning-making that turns a slab of marble into a Pietà, a urinal into a Fountain, or a matrix of pixels into a powerful image.
So, what counts as art? The answer is as broad as human ingenuity. Art can be made with a paintbrush or a camera, a computer or a chisel, by solitary toil or with the help of an AI assistant. What matters is that spark of intent – the desire to say something to the world – and the reception of that spark in others. When that connection ignites, the medium becomes secondary. As Leo Tolstoy observed, through art we unite with one another, sharing in the vast range of human experience thecollector.com. That will remain true even if the paint is applied by a robot or the image is rendered by code. Art has always been more than the sum of its parts. It is a living conversation across time, constantly redefining itself. Each new tool, from oil paint to the AI algorithm, is just a new word in art’s growing vocabulary – and with it, artists will continue telling the story of what it means to be human.
Sources
Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? (1897). Excerpt on art as transmission of feeling thecollector.comhome.csulb.edu.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment (1790). Discussion of fine art and genius iep.utm.eduiep.utm.edu.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935). Analysis of art as a happening of truth en.wikipedia.org.
Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld” (1964). Quoted by Hyperallergic on art and theory hyperallergic.com, hyperallergic.com.
BBC Culture. “The urinal that changed how we think” (Kelly Grovier, 2017) – on Duchamp’s Fountain and its impact bbc.combbc.com.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Abstract Expressionism” essay – context for mid-20th-century art shifts metmuseum.orgmetmuseum.org.
Winner, Ellen. “Could Your Child Really Paint That?” Wall Street Journal (2018) – study on distinguishing abstract art from children’s art bc.edu.
Hertzmann, Aaron. “How Photography Became an Art Form” (2018) – history of photography’s acceptance medium.com, medium.com.
Vice. “An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place… and Artists Are Pissed” (Matthew Gault, 2022) – reportage on Colorado AI art controversy vice.com.
Guardian. “‘It’s the opposite of art’: why illustrators are furious about AI” (2023) – artists’ critiques of AI art theguardian.comtheguardian.com.
Everypixel Journal. “How AI is Changing (and Challenging) the Art World” (2023) – quotes Jerry Saltz on AI as tool journal.everypixel.comjournal.everypixel.com and discussion of human role in AI art journal.everypixel.com.
Harvard Magazine. “Howard Gardner at HGSE 2024” – on arts as cognitive and working with “smart machines” harvardmagazine.comharvardmagazine.com.
