> As long as “invention and feeling constitute essential qualities in a work of Art,” the writer argued, “Photography can never assume a higher rank than engraving.”
Ha, dissing engraving at the same time as photography.
Though I wonder if the 'write' meant engraving of a design someone else already produced, or any engraving work at all.
Both reactions always happen. With basically anything new, people will select some points via happenstance or bias, draw one of a few basic trend lines [1], and give a hot take. Because they generally think only about first-order effects and don't imagine other things that could happen, the hot takes are often of the utopia/dystopia variety.
These hot takes generally tell you more about the opiner (or the audience they're playing to) than the reality to come. It turns out it's hard to model en entire universe using 3 pounds of meat.
True, but then we've essentialy had limitless image generation capabilities since we've had the tools to make marks. I guess this is faster, and in other ways it offers promising new opportinities for people who can't / don't want to learn to create stuff directly.
Others are interpreting my original comment as "this is not art", but I'm not really trying to make that argument. Art is entirely subjective and i don't presume to define what is or isn't art.
I guess my point is more specifically "what itch does this scratch"?
It's really cool, and that may well be the answer tbh.
people who can't / don't want to learn to create stuff directly.
That’s 99% of the people. I mean even to learn prompt engineering will probably be too much for majority of those 99% people, but it’s a huge step forward in user friendliness, compared to, say, photoshop.
”what itch does this scratch"?
How many people post pictures on social media? Many of those pictures are not personal, they show something pretty, cool, or interesting in some way. All of those people can potentially use image generators to achieve the same effect.
Did they? Because I don't think they did. I think most people were amazed by all these technologies.