Schrödinger’s Author: Why Neuro Art Is Not Accepted in the Art Market

A recent scandal involving gallerist Marat Gelman, who, in a sharp move, refused to identify the poet and digital artist Evgeny Nikitin as a co-author of works at writer Vladimir Sorokin’s exhibition, sparked not only outrage in the art world but also another debate about the status of generative art. Critics rushed to discuss the legal and ethical grounds for Gelman’s action, which, in their view, sacrifices the banal rules of propriety to market whims. At the same time, artists and art historians are struck by how tenacious the ideas of originality and uniqueness of artworks remain, for it would seem that in the 21st century the “myth of the Author” should have dissolved. Philosopher Alexandra Tanyushina explains how this myth was formed and what its fate is in the age of digital creativity.

Art did not need the creator at once. In the archaic, ancient and medieval epochs, the maker of a visual work was mentioned only in rare cases—as a historical figure, a political or religious figure, or, at worst, simply a major authority. Art itself then fulfilled chiefly a cult function: it existed in close relation to religion, was displayed in strictly designated sacred spaces (or in rooms of high-ranking lords such as kings, emperors, who traditionally played the symbolic role of God’s representative on earth). Moreover, in Western European cultural discourse there long persisted the opposition between artes liberales / artes mechanæ, which sharply separated the ‘high’ free art from the ‘low’, i.e. the technical execution once assigned to hired craftsmen and slaves, and later to guild apprentices. There was yet no talk of elevating the figure of the Author.

It is commonly held that the Renaissance gave European culture not only a new form of visual logic linked to linear perspective, but also the phenomenon of easel painting, which allowed visual art to move beyond architectural surroundings (church altars, cathedrals, palaces) and take shape as an autonomous form—the painting.

The separation of the canvas from space, traditionally supported by the clear boundaries of the frame, became the reason the painted work came to be perceived as an object that could be moved from its usual context, endowing it with autonomous value.

The emancipation of the artist also began around the same time: major patrons gradually freed the craftsman from the power of the guild, which had long restricted any creative independence and reduced labor to the technical execution of a project. From then on, increasing value was placed on the uniqueness of execution and on innovative (to a degree) artistic techniques that broadened private commissions for painters.

As early as the 17th century in Northern European countries, objects of visual art began to be purchased by members of the middle and small bourgeoisie, somewhat displacing large merchants and the aristocracy. Thus a modern-type art market formed: artists increasingly created works without a prior commission, and developed a new genre system oriented toward depicting secular subjects (landscape, still life, animal studies, etc.). By this time the first art dealers appeared, and soon after specialized events where painters found their buyers (notably the famous Paris Salons, organized by the French Academy of Fine Arts as early as the era of Louis XIV and dictating artistic trends up to the end of the 19th century).

The Industrial Revolution and industrialisation led, on the one hand, to the strengthening of established market relations, but, on the other hand, to a reevaluation of established forms of art. The spread of technical inventions such as photography forced artists to view their creativity anew, providing a spur for the emergence of many modernist schools and movements.

The late 19th to early 20th century became a period of developing artistic approaches that reinterpreted the familiar ways of perceiving art (for example, Impressionism and Pointillism with their optical experiments), the role of the heritage of old masters (Futurism, which urged burning historical monuments and tossing the classics off the ‘ship of modernity’), traditional means of depiction (Cubism and experiments with combining ‘low’ and ‘high’ media in collages and assemblages), established norms of art exhibition (let us recall Duchamp with his readymades), and, of course, the role of the Author (Dadaism, praising chance and condemning the figure of the solitary creator, whom they called a remnant of bourgeois culture). Undoubtedly, during that period the works of many renowned figures of modernism and radical avant-garde were not understood by the general public and, consequently, did not receive due attention from art-market players (with the exception of rare dealers, such as Ambroise Vollard, who did their utmost to keep undervalued geniuses like Van Gogh afloat).

At the same time, another significant process took shape—the configuration of mass art. Urbanisation and the emergence of a class of skilled workers and employees fostered a demand for a new type of culture. From the 1920s onward, many philosophers and sociologists would harshly critique this culture, linking it to the uprising of the masses, the decline of morality and taste, the growth of the cultural industry, and, of course, the fading of the aura of authentic art.

If, in the last decades of the Modern era, the discourse of “elite” and “mass” art remained viable, in the postwar period the ideological foundations of “high art”— originality and authorship—collapsed along with the other narratives of the old cultural epoch.

Although Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco and other representatives of postmodern intellectual circles argued with zeal that the Author is dead, on the European and American art scenes of that era this thesis was interpreted in two ways.

On the one hand, already in the 1950s–60s the idea of blurring boundaries between author and viewer, which critics attacked traditional notions of how art should be shown and sold. For this, artists turned to performance and happenings, total installation, land art, etc. On the other hand, the market continued to prize works by modernists, abstract expressionists and pop artists, most often presented as classic paintings.

Indeed, despite the countless innovative directions the second half of the 20th century offered, the art market still demanded one-dimensional and flat ‘pictures’. In 1977 in New York, there was even a show of the same name—Pictures, lampooning the era’s tendency to proliferate barren and meaningless images.

For this reason, prominent philosophers of the time such as Frederic Jameson or Jean Baudrillard spoke of substantive and affective one-dimensionality of such art, the dominance of simulacra and even the art conspiracy (read, the art-market). Some critics even saw in traditional easel works a continuation of the logic of ideological domination (patriarchal, colonial, economic), since paintings displayed in a sterile “white cube” space emphasised the distance between the artist and the viewer, who experienced a passive contemplation of the work of the famed Creator.

The most innovative forms of art were forged as alternatives to the classical pictorial canon, created to overcome outdated perceptual formats. Many media-art movements began as attempts to rethink the traditional painting form with its static, visually confining expressiveness. It was media objects that were meant to replace the long-standing purely pictorial function of art with a strategy of full interaction with it and the surrounding space.

However, ephemeral interaction that blurs both the boundaries of the work itself and the boundaries of authorship is extremely difficult to enclose in a market format, which is why our experience of contact with art, as in the time of expressed by Allan Kaprow, “the artist, Allan Kaprow, was for a long time burdened by outdated reactions.”.

Today, the form of the classical easel painting remains the most in-demand. It is these art objects that are well received by a broad audience, are easy to exhibit and store in gallery space, and, of course, sell well. Their expressive language dictates the display rules for many other forms of art, including digital, which to this day is most often shown on a picture-like screen. Breaking out of the two-dimensional plane is also hindered by the relatively slow integration into everyday life of technologies capable, in theory, of bypassing many limits of painted vision and offering users not only a passive viewing experience but immersion in the media environment and bodily interaction with art objects.

Similarly, some researchers discuss problems of crypto art, showing how the NFT-authenticity doctrine tailors products of digital creativity to market needs, often turning them into flat “pictures”. Thus, art historian T. R. Ryan writes:

“Proponents of NFTs point to Walter Benjamin and argue that the blockchain gives digital works an ‘aura’, increasing their value in the face of market indifference to media-art products. But Benjamin concludes that the fading of the aura in the age of mechanical reproduction is precisely what mobilises aesthetics as a tool of radical politics. This suggests that instead of valuing the worth of digital artworks, NFTs have undervalued them: they embody property and platform capitalism just at the moment when digital art could contribute to discussions of alternatives such as decentralisation and sovereignty, which are defining features ofWeb3 … We need to focus not only on profit but also on protocols that support collectivism, participation and new ways of being that have always been among the core aims of digital art.

Thus, by forcing the aura, authorship and uniqueness back into the media sphere, some contemporary art practices turn digital art, which is fundamentally prone to creative inertia, into a set of repetitive images or, as postmodern critics would say, meaningless simulacra. The confinement of inherently ephemeral digital products into frozen or even material forms (which is particularly evident today as we witness rising popularity of phygital art) provides a stable market value for the latest artistic production, sustains the myth of authenticity and repeatedly resurrects the Author from the dead.

Scandals surrounding the periodic appearance of lone zombie Authors where they ought not to appear undoubtedly slow the development of the art sphere, where unconventional forms of creativity and interdisciplinary art already dominate. Collaboration, enabled by productive interaction among artists, scientists, programmers and engineers, has long become the new normal, and art historians, philosophers and media researchers are actively developing an up-to-date theoretical vocabulary to understand contemporary art in new terms and categories.

All that remains is to rely on the gradual establishment of coherent legal and market norms capable of guaranteeing the stable implementation of generative art and other forms of neural-network creativity. Perhaps, after this, the prompt engineer will finally become a human as well.