Found this piece while egosurfing, by a blog called Inanimate Carbon God, by a blogger who apparently used to read my original blog some 20-odd years ago. Cool, I guess. But also not really.

In the post, like most reactions to my work recently on Threads, it is admitted they didn’t read the article because paywalled. Fine. And they didn’t read any of my books. Also fine. People can react how they want. So can I.

Carving it off piece by piece:

Somewhere deep down I think that, for all his bluster about AI leading him to new storytelling opportunities and shit like that, Tim knows there’s something not exactly right about all of this. I sense a degree of defensiveness in statements like this on his site:

Yes, I will tell you that having thousands of people over the course of a year and a half insult and threaten you – simply because you had the audacity to experiment with one of the most powerful new technologies of our times – makes one a wee bit defensive. But I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone’s shadow…

the question is, to what extent is there actual creativity involved when the art is, frankly, more or less completely made from someone’s work?

Oh no, the Creativity Police™! 🚨🚨 Everybody scatter!

They’re going to use their Magical Scanners to determine whether we passed an invisible magical threshold that doesn’t exist and has no bearing on anything. Help! They’ve got me dead to rights!

I mean, we can go back to Dada a hundred plus years ago when Tristan Tzara came up with his idea for creating Dadaist poetry; however random the ultimate arrangement of the words, you, the “poet”, have still chosen the article from which you made the poem.

As I argue in the article which this author didn’t read, yes, indeed, we should go back to art history. Nay, we must, to help us contextualize what is happening. Wikipedia’s Dada page, for example, contains a poem attributed to Tzara:

TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

“Unappreciated by the vulgar herd.”

Artist Cynthia Haller wrote on a Quora thread on a related topic about Dada artists:

They were breaking conventions, challenging rigid and quite frankly snobbish view of what art should be.

Dadaism got people to talk, everyone had an opinion, often a strong one on it. They also challenged this ridiculous idea that art has to be meaningful, or have a message, that it had to be intellectual and make sense.

More on Dada movement and their use of chance & readymades:

Artists like Hans Arp were intent on incorporating chance into the creation of works of art. This went against all norms of traditional art production whereby a work was meticulously planned and completed. The introduction of chance was a way for Dadaists to challenge artistic norms and to question the role of the artist in the artistic process.

Dada artists are known for their use of readymades – everyday objects that could be bought and presented as art with little manipulation by the artist. The use of the readymade forced questions about artistic creativity and the very definition of art and its purpose in society.

Also like this line from that article: “Their humor is an unequivocal YES to everything as art.” I am I guess then both an animist, in some sense, in that I believe/experience everything as not just alive, but also a Dadaist, in that I also see that everything is art – all creation and sub-creation reflecting the creator, the highest-lowest-and-in-betweenest.

One last bit, from the Salvador Dali museum:

Dadaism’s main purpose was to challenge the social norms of society, and purposefully make art that would shock, confuse, or outrage people. It thrived on counterattacking everything that was conventional in society.

Dada artists were the first apparently to use the term “anti-art.” Ok, just one more quote:

At first, the Dadaists used shock, provocation, and irrationality as a weapon against the culture that condoned the industrialized murder taking place. They became artistic anarchists who poked fun of the “seriousness”, formality, and sanctity of traditional art. Their solution was to purge Western culture and replace it with a new “elementary”, child-like art that would save mankind from itself. This new art was to be toy-like, anonymous, collective, and born out of spontaneity, chance, and provocation.

Difficult to find online, but I’ve also seen written in art history books (I believe by Taschen) that the early Cubists also were not hung up on authorship. They did not sign their works.

In fact, as I understand it, “authorship” is largely a modern invention of the last few centuries, particularly with the rise of Romanticism, and the notion of the artist as the ‘solitary genius’ (and idea I wholly reject btw) who like a Very Good Individualist™ wrested a work from the depths of their soul, rather than from a common pool of idiomatic cultural expression which was developed from the works of countless other artisans who toiled before them through the millenia.

Obviously, the rise of this notion also coincided with the development of legal concepts like copyright, which granted an artificial (read: imaginary) economic monopoly over an artistic product by its solitary-genius-creator. It’s an oversimplification, to be sure, but framed from this perspective of culture consisting of a common pool of shared resources, it might be analogous to say that copyright as a movement shared some key themes and elements with the Enclosure movement, which privatized public lands, and pushed people out of their traditional usage rights. The capitalist colonization of idea-space.

I could go on, but back to Carbon God’s original post text:

Cf. also Kurt Schwitters’ collages. If none of the elements of his collages were made by Schwitters, the end result was by him. There are deliberate decisions involved. As for Tim’s Matisse-copying, he admits to using a projector to trace the thing, but it was still his hand doing that work. It was still his effort. That copy of Matisse was ultimately by him.

Technically, it was not my hand doing the work of painting. It was the brush bristles and the paint and the canvas. Whether I used my hand, foot, a robotic arm, a paintbrush strapped to a dog’s butt, or any other thing to drive that movement (including other sources of random chance, like the Dadaists) is largely irrelevant to me personally. I’m still as much the “artist” as I am “not the artist.” It really doesn’t matter to me, and I don’t really understand why everybody is so hung up on this. My hunch is that people who create things are by and large much too possessive of their ideas, and their own conception of their own uniqueness within the grand scheme of things. I’ve long been a practitioner of “kill your darlings” – which is why my old website is no longer online, so I could not become too possessive and weird and controlling about these things that were in the end but fleeting ideas and fantasy, ephemeral expressions of a lived moment. Yes, live them fully, but then let them go to make space for the next and the next, ad infinitum.

ChatGPT helped me with this one last night:

Here’s another one we did together, that I had to finish in Photoshop:

The only thing I added by hand was the second word bubble at right. And I did some inpainting in Dalle to get the text in the bubble at left better. The rest is all the “creativity” inherent in Dalle which put that together. Am I the “artist” or not? Who cares! It’s a provocation.

How much of them are, indeed, by him in this sense? What’s he actually doing? Can he legitmately call himself the “author” of these things?

The answer is that it’s all mixed. Some parts are strictly by me. Some strictly by machine. Most a combination of the two. Do I need to have strangers consider me or any of it “legitimate” to serve its artistic purpose? Absolutely not. I reject your rejection. In fact, the “volcanically negative” response to the actually very boring and most mild parts of what I’m actually doing artistically simply proves that this is a rich mine to continue delving into. Until any of these people have actually *read* any of the books, they will simply have to be satisfied posting open-ended questions and taking potshots on social media. I’ll still be here doing my thing, following my own light. If I give that up because some random people are unhappy – even if they are legion – I will become lost to myself. If that’s how others choose to live, let them. Not me. My path is weird, narrow, and at times lonely, but it’s a happier one that that.

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