> You can generate infinite recognizable Basquiat from an AI, but is it Basquiat? No, of course not, because Basquiat's style operates within the context of a specific individual human making a point about expectations and the interface between his race and his artistic boldness and audacity as experienced by his wealthy audience.
I'm not sure how I feel about this - I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. For me, AI-generated Basquiat is not Basquiat simply because he had no ownership or agency in the process of its creation.
It feels like an overly romantic notion that art requires specific historical/cultural context at the moment of its creation to be valid.
If I could hypothetically pay Basquiat $100 to put his own work into a stable diffusion model that created a Basquiat-esque work, that's still a Basquiat. If I could pay him to draw a circle with a pencil, that's his work - and if I used it in an AI model, then it's not.
It's about who held the paintbrush, or who delegated holding the paintbrush, not a retrospectively applied critical theory.
On reflection, I'm going to say 'nope'. Because it's Basquiat, I'm pretty sure you couldn't get him to make a model of himself (maybe he would, and call it 'samo'?). I don't think you could pay him to draw a circle with a pencil: I think he'd have been offended and angry. And so that is not 'his work'. It trips over what makes him Basquiat, so doing these things is not Basquiat (though it's very, very Warhol).
Even more than that, you couldn't do Rothko that way: the man would be beyond offended and would not deal with you at all. But by contrast, you ABSOLUTELY are doing a Warhol if you train an AI on him and have it generate infinite works, and furthermore I think he'd be absolutely delighted at the notion, and would love exploring the unexplored conceptual space inside the neural net.
In a sense, an AI Warhol is megaWarhol, an unexplored level of Warholiness that wasn't attainable within his lifetime.
Context and intent matter. All of modern art ended up exploring these questions AS the artform itself, so boiling it down to 'did a specific person make a mark on a thing' won't work here.
This seems to me to confuse agency with interpretation - romanticising the life and character of the artist after their heyday and death, talking about what they would have done.
Any drawing Basquiat did is a piece of art by Basquiat, whether or not it fits into the narrative of a book/thesis/lecture/exhibition. The circle metaphor isn't important - replace it with anything else. Artists regularly throw their own work away. Some of this is saved and celebrated posthumously, some never sees the light of day in accordance with their wishes. Scraps that fell on Picasso's floor sell for huge amounts of money.
Does everything he did fit the "brand" that some art historians have labelled him with, or the "brand" that auction houses promote to increase value, or the "brand" which a fashion label licenses for t-shirts? No, but I suspect this is probably what you are talking about ie. a "classic" Basquiat™ with certificate of authenticity?
I'm not sure how I feel about this - I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. For me, AI-generated Basquiat is not Basquiat simply because he had no ownership or agency in the process of its creation.
It feels like an overly romantic notion that art requires specific historical/cultural context at the moment of its creation to be valid.
If I could hypothetically pay Basquiat $100 to put his own work into a stable diffusion model that created a Basquiat-esque work, that's still a Basquiat. If I could pay him to draw a circle with a pencil, that's his work - and if I used it in an AI model, then it's not.
It's about who held the paintbrush, or who delegated holding the paintbrush, not a retrospectively applied critical theory.