You can always spot art by the way it behaves.
It can say things indirectly.
Make pointed commentary without naming a name or speaking a word.
In a second, a correctly placed object can capture your imagination, terrify you, or make you fall in love.
One thing I've learned recently, after almost 40 years of doing it, is that setup and context matter almost as much as the object itself.
A drawing of a pair of scissors can say nothing, or everything, if you frame it right.
Salvatore Garau is a name I keep bringing up, but he's a master framer, and worth a serious study.
He's so good at doing it that he doesn't even need a physical object to set the context for his art, which is an absolutely remarkable skill to have as an artist.
He sets the stage with nothing, and lets your imagination contemplate something irresistible. Even if you write off his invisible sculptures, you can't help but consider them; even if only for a minute.
Incredible.
The rest of us struggle with this, often without knowing why, or what we're doing wrong.
And what's more is that art can lie to you, intentionally.
Make you question your assumptions in a way that nothing else can.
A single image and well placed word is all you need.
I've reviewed a lot of the art by people who criticize AI, and listened to what they have to say. Respectfully, and sometimes not so respectfully, I disagree with them.
But I can disagree with someone and still respect them as artists.
When I say I don't respect this crowd as artists, it's not because I disagree with their opinions on what art is.
The reason I don't respect them is because they're (for the most part) incapable of creating work that behaves like art in the first place.
A lot of algorithmic artists miss this too, but as a rule, they're consistently better at it than the "traditional" art crowd.
And that's interesting.
Algorithmic artists are better at articulating what they like about specific art movements. And they're more literate about art philosophy and history than the trads could ever hope to be.
So I guess it's not all that unexpected. At least when you sit down to think about what different mediums do, and how they expect people to behave within them.
Digital asks very little of you. Can you move a brush? Can you apply pressure with said brush?
AI requires some fairly advanced knowledge of technology, technical failure states that only exist in this medium, often SEO or VFX skills, and some knowledge of art history to do it well.
It's the difference between knowing when something is an abstract, and understanding that it's late impressionist cubism, a replica, printed on a garbage bag with putty knives and a scalpel, a copy of a painting by a man with two ears and one eye. Long dead, sadly.
See the difference?
I blame poor art literacy for this problem.