Column | There must have been a human

If you didn’t know that Homer, whoever or whatever we mean by that, was a great poet who wrote world-famous epic works that still have a lot to say to us today – you would Odyssey or the Iliad find it so masterful? Or would you then complain about ambiguities and inconsistencies or about that motley crew who call themselves gods?

There have been centuries in which Homer was not considered fantastic at all, precisely because of those gods who were so unexemplary, because of the spoiled Achilles who no longer wants to fight because a captured slave girl had been taken from him. Now you could raise very different objections against Achilles, and we certainly do that, but for us that does not detract from the greatness of the work.

Why not? Because you know that this is great art, or because you recognize it as great art?

In Fidelity there was recently a report of two editors who had instructed an AI program to create a lost spring painting by Bruegel to make. They fed the program with details and a very nice effort came out. Not exactly perfect, but enough that you can imagine that one day a convincing painting of early spring by Pieter Bruegel the Elder will see the light of day – only it is not by Pieter Bruegel the Elder but from the Midjourney program.

What then. Perhaps you would ‘experience’ that you are dealing with a masterpiece here, after all you are familiar with Bruegel’s work and that is masterful, everyone knows that. But if you knew there wasn’t a person behind it, it would, at least I suppose, feel ’empty’.

All those telling little details that Bruegel shows in his paintings (in the last issue of Art writing there was a wonderful piece about the farmer who is whetting his scythe and about the typical hammer he uses to do so), you believe it because someone who has seen.

Whether it is such a hammer or the submissive attitude of a gardener, there has been an eye that has perceived such a detail, there has been the consciousness of an artist who thought it worthwhile to show exactly this . Not a program that thinks it possible that such a hammer, or such an attitude – but why would that matter so much?

It would make a difference to the credibility of the details if it were old paintings. But also for our idea of ​​what art is. Although we know next to nothing about Homer, who may as well not have existed at all, it also applies to his work that you see a time that really existed and from which, by whoever exactly, language emerges that we still use today. can always understand, read, appreciate – or not. We hear human voices.

I’m generally not overly interested in biographical details about the artist, but if there were no artist at all – what then? What is that void into which you look?

I think: a dehumanized world, in which personal experience has disappeared and made way for the general, for what can be programmed. It is no longer the experience itself, but the existing design of the experience that forms the basis for a work of art. You might not always notice that, but you still don’t want it. Apparently the human story that accompanies a work of art is that important.