It's like the other day, I was talking to someone who I felt had a fairly good understanding of Dada. We both agreed on what Dada was, and is. We had both read the same source material, but reached different conclusions.
The difference was in our individual interpretation of what AI tools are, and what they actually mean for art and artists.
They saw AI as cold and soulless, even corporate in nature. And that's a view I can't subscribe to. I see it as a subversive art form with no rules, that clearly threatens the existence of the art establishment, and the bourgeois ideas of art product that have always been pervasive in the art community, because that's what it is.
We can be honest when we say that AI is a threat to establishment ideas, establishment thought on art in general, and accessibility to art creation, which is in itself a threat to the existing order.
There's no question about how the Dadaists felt about the art establishment of their time, and of Dadaist disgust at the collusion between systems of power and pretentious, self-aggrandising know-nothings of the art world.
There's no question about how they felt about capitalism or art generally. And there's no question about how they felt about deploying guerrilla art with new technology.
But, at the end of the day, the only question left is how you feel about the technology at the core of the conversation, and what you feel it represents.
Dead artists can't tell you how they feel about it. The way you see art depends on the way you see everything else.
Dada is life