The Future of Art?
Information
Lev Manovich, The Future of Art?, 2026.
From the article:
Is art making still meaningful or even necessary when AI can often do it as well as or better than humans? Perhaps this type of human behavior has fulfilled its function in our cognitive and social evolution. As a result, it may gradually fade from our lives, replaced by new activities we can't yet imagine. Although we may have difficulty imagining this new world today, it is logically conceivable given AI's rapid progress.
This potential transformation will not be without precedent in art history. Consider how modern art reinvented itself between the 1860s, 1910s, 1960s and 2000s. Abstract art, unimaginable in 1860, materialized by 1913. Installation, performance, land art, and multimedia, inconceivable in 1913, flourished in the 1960s. The next transformation was equally dramatic––thousands of new museums and biennials around the world turned modern art from a Western-centric practice into a global phenomenon by the 2000s.
Given these dramatic shifts in what constitutes 'art' and how it's created, another major transformation in coming decades is entirely plausible––but unlike previous shifts that expanded artistic possibilities, this one may make most forms of human art-making obsolete.
After all, "art" — as a single concept encompassing diverse activities, artifacts, and behaviors across many thousands of years — is itself a recent invention, generated by the rise of museums, mass education, and photographic reproduction. Whether all these activities indeed have enough in common to justify placing them under a single conceptual umbrella is far from obvious. It is even possible that a transformation is already underway — but we have not noticed it, because our concepts and intellectual frameworks lag behind social reality. "Art" today may be happening in very different places than we normally associate with it, created by new actors.