What I find amusing about Marcel Duchamp is that despite having demonstrated a remarkable talent with painting, he ultimately attacked “retinal” art and the fetishization of craftsmanship. He gave up painting to explore the world of readymades, where he would for example find a urinal and make it his. It was his declaration that this urinal is not just a utensil for gathering urinary expenditures, but it's a physical form that surpasses its utility. Its existence should not only be imagined on a different plane than the utilitarian one, but even celebrated. He was quick to dismiss these as ideas, artworks or even art objects, instead comparing them as one might enjoy making steps walking down a particular street. To wit, he was interested in separating the actual "grey matter" that that is the actual idea or vision of a thing as much as possible from the manual execution of it. Not only this but he also was fascinated with chance and probability and used them for example in 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-194) where he released three strings with a length of one meter each onto canvases and preserved the random curves they generated in varnish, using the output to playfully create new units of measurement (one might say "Duchampians?"). My take is that he would certainly not care about any of the realistic looking images that these models can generate (although most are still obviously apparent it was), he would even find it abhorrent. Being as well read and erudite as he was while at the same time always preserving his inner child and never taking things too seriously (including himself), I do think he'd manage to have a passing fun with it in his own way. And I think he'd also be intrigued by the ability to elicit a visual response from just text, since no manual craftmanship is involved. Being that it takes a kernel of an idea and some models that operate on probability, maybe he'd develop a system of seemingly nonsense prompts and take pleasure in watching the seemingly random visuals they generate. And instead of displaying the visual results, only display the prompts or tokens themselves in some clever way. When it comes to the AI doom and gloom that, we the living, found ourselves in right now, it's entertaining to imagine what he'd do with AI, or what he'd consider it. But who really knows. What do you think ?
Would Marcel Duchamp Have Detested GenAI/LLMs?
@aaronzomback
opened this thread · 13h ago
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