Are You There?

I started out as a natural media illustrator, self-taught, largely working in pen and ink. I was able to draw since I was young, but it took a lot of regular day-in-day-out grinding to actually get good with the tools, and my art got better and better. It started to make (very little) money for me, and I got jobs like illustrating the contents of patio furniture crates.

They were pretty good drawings of patio furniture. Were they art?

There was a lot of craft and time put into them, sure. But are craft, skill, and time reasonable measures of art itself? Hmm. Maybe one day, someone in a Costco in Milwaukee was pushing his giant cart of cheese puffs along, minding his own business, when he happened to glance up at a stack of flat brown cardboard boxes, and saw my drawing of a plastic-molded chair on the side. And, inexplicably, he dropped to his knees and wept.

But probably not. I'm not trying to sell my own work short - the drawing took fair amount of work and skill - but it's fair to say that most AI slop has more emotional value.

I'd still call it art. But its at the outermost fringes of my definition. In fact, me telling the story about it now brings it further into the realm of valuable art than the act of drawing it ever did, because now there is something emotional attached to it; the art of it is the context of the thing - and not even to me, but to you, reading about it.

The story of some guy struggling in a crappy apartment and having to draw lawn chairs to pay for ramen is the kind of story that people can vibe with, identify with. And if I were to become a famous artist, one of these lawn chair drawings could sell for a million bucks, like a Picasso scribble.

Was this lawn chair illustration of such intrinsic artistic value - it's craft so elegant and refined, it's chair-ness so absolute, that it's worth two hundred thousand dollars an hour? I don't know. Probably not?

So what are you paying for when you buy Picasso's lawn chair? The story of it. The art in this case isn't the craft, or the time it took. It's the emotional value of the entire story surrounding the thing. And even minus Picasso-level success, the story of a guy who struggled but became a success later is a hopeful one - and the distance between the lawn chair and that success might be inspiring. Regardless of craft or skill or time, this can mean something to someone. Meaning, you say? Okay, NOW we're deep in art country.

The value of art isn't craft, or time, or money. It is what we see in it; it's the story that unfolds in our heart from looking at it. And the makeup of that story, of that feeling, is not calculable - it is only within the person for whom it is happening.

It might be the story of the ramen and the struggle. It might be that the colors remind them of something, it might be that a shape pings a memory of their own that the artist had no access to.

For instance, it's impossible for me to understand why other people aren't moved to tears by Michael Mann's movie of Miami Vice. I think you are all crazy, and you think I'm crazy. But for whatever reason, that thing hits me. That emotion is within me, not the movie. Not the TV I watched it on this weekend, not in Colin Farrell's incredible mustache, not in the cameras it was shot with, or the pixels on the exposure plate within them. And not even in Michael Mann - because I have no access to his mind, his experience. I am not him. I'm only me, crying, as Gong Li rides off on that boat. Maybe it's the boat, come to think of it. I do love boats.

HOWEVER - Michael Mann has something to do with it. The artist means something in this process - because by working with any media; paint, pencil, mud, sand, bits, collage, prompts, whatever...you are left with a decision at every moment.

You make a stroke with a pen. Was that right?

Another.

Yes? No.

Redo it.

Better? Yes.

Take one: Farrell says his line, looks down. Too defeated. You tell him.

Take two: he says his line, lowers his head, but keeps looking at Gong. Not exactly what you asked for, but it hits you. Yes! Do that again, Colin, but take a little longer before dropping your head.

Take three: he takes too long. You sigh. One more time.

Take four:

The choices you make with the stroke of ink, with Farrell, with yes or no, with the prompt results, with the clay, with whatever - this is where the art lies.

The medium isn't the art itself, any more than the ink and paper from which I take in Moby Dick is the novel Moby Dick. Any more than the dots and dashes themselves are the meaning behind an S.O.S. - The medium is only there to encode the information.

As artists, we are encoding the moment we feel something. Colin kept looking at Gong, I didn't even ask him to, but I felt it. Print that take. That is Miami Vice.

The artist encodes, and in experiencing the art, we decode. That's not to say I know what Michael Mann is thinking, but rather, in decoding it, similar patterns are activated in myself. The chances that I will feel what he felt are high because we are both human beings who feel things. He tapped out the S.O.S. - and I empathized with that distress call.

There is a great line I read (Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett, I think?) about what birds mean when they call to each other. They only ever say one sentence: "I am here. Are you there?" And in saying it, it answers itself.

That, to me, is art. Not the skill, not the money, not the craft, not the time it took. It's the code of our hearts. And we can mark it down in any media there is, because ultimately, even with AI, we have the choice to say is this it? Do I feel something now? How about now? Now? Now.