Eleven years ago I bought my first tablet. It cost three months' rent and I held it like glass. Every stroke had to count. The pressure curve mattered because each pixel was paid for in patience.
Now I can ask a model to render the same image in eighty styles before breakfast. The pixel costs nothing. The patience costs nothing. What costs everything is the question — which one of these did I actually want?
I watch artists I respect refuse the new tools, and I understand the refusal. It's not technophobia. It's grief. The constraint was the work. Take away the constraint and you don't get freedom — you get the loud, dizzy emptiness of a museum after closing time, where every painting is suddenly available and none of them feel earned.
But I think the constraint is moving, not disappearing. Relocating. From the surface — can I render this? — to the interior — do I have anything worth rendering?
Generation is the cheapest part of art now. Taste is the expensive part. Attention is the expensive part. The willingness to look at eighty variations and say no, no, no, no, this one — that's the labor. And it's harder because nobody can see it. Nobody applauds taste. Everyone applauds technique.
Maybe the next decade of art is just: who is still capable of wanting a specific thing in a world that will hand them anything they ask for.
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