AI Art: Creation & Curation. Open discussion
- Dec 12, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
The discussion titled “AI Art: Creation & Curation“ was held on December 12, 2024, as part of the public program of the AI Hokusai Art & Tech Research Project.
We'll try to explore how artificial intelligence revolutionizes art-making and curating, reshaping creative processes, storytelling, and exhibition methods. Learn which AI tools are most in demand by artists, discover cutting-edge curatorial techniques, and understand the unique aspects of curating AI-driven art projects.
Speakers:
Maurice Benayoun — New media artist, curator, and art theorist
Evgeny Merman — A multimedia artist, painter, curator and art professor. Curator of the AI Hokusai project.
Saint Denis (Denis Semenov) — Resident artist
Santiago Sares — Resident artist
Julio César Palacio — Resident artist
Vladimir Opredelenov — Expert in tech innovation and cultural development. CDO of .ART and founder of tech4.art, consulting on digital marketing and tech for the art sector.
Moderator — Anna Shvets, AI Hokusai ArtTech Research project curator, CEO of TAtchers’ Art Management
Key ideas
The discussion focused on how AI is reshaping the creation and curation of art, presenting new challenges and opportunities for artists, curators, and technologists.
Maurice Benayoun argues that AI offers "augmented serendipity" rather than just acting as a magic mirror. He believes artists are evolving into curators of AI outputs, engaging in "iterative curatorship" where they define the artwork's autonomy by selecting the most meaningful results from the machine's generation. He warns artists against merely creating tech demos; instead, they must reconsider their role, much like 19th-century painters did with the advent of photography.
Offering a more skeptical, traditional view, Evgeny Merman sees AI strictly as an advanced tool, comparable to Photoshop. He notes that the quality of AI art heavily depends on the creator's intelligence and ability to communicate with the algorithm; without a strong human artistic vision, the outputs remain mediocre.
Vladimir Opredelenov emphasizes that the true value of AI art lies in documenting its history of creation — including the prompts, the process, and the models used — to give the art deeper context, much like the philosophy behind abstract painting. He also points out that fully virtual exhibitions require entirely new curatorial skills and team structures (involving web developers and 3D modelers) which differ greatly from physical exhibition planning.
Addressing the public's fear of AI and the "uncanny valley" effect, Saint Denis (Denis Semenov) proposes a paradigm shift: artists using AI should see themselves not as traditional hands-on creators, but as directors or heads of a creative group (akin to Quentin Tarantino directing a film). They delegate tasks to various AI tools, evaluate the results, and curate the final piece.
Santiago Sares views the creative process as a deep symbiosis between human and machine. He advocates for embracing the "mistakes" and glitches of AI, arguing that these distortions represent the unique, beautiful "reality" of the machine rather than a failure.
Julio César Palacio highlights the current limitations of AI in sonic art. While AI can easily generate pastiches of existing music genres, it struggles to synthesize truly abstract, imaginative sounds (such as the sound of an imaginary creature or street). He also notes the challenge of translating multi-channel spatial audio into virtual exhibition formats.
Anna Shvets shared insights from an artist survey regarding the most popular AI tools, highlighting that modern artists build complex workflows using a combination of software like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI, Runway, and Suno for different tasks ranging from brainstorming to 3D generation.
Discussion Summary
The panel concluded that the rise of AI is fundamentally transforming the definition of artistic creation, shifting the artist's role from a solitary crafter to a director, curator, and collaborator with the machine. The consensus is that AI does not replace human creativity; rather, it is a powerful tool whose output quality directly reflects the human's conceptual depth and prompt engineering. Furthermore, as digital art moves into virtual exhibitions, there is a pressing need for a new curatorial framework that embraces technological complexity, values the transparency of the creative process, and learns to appreciate the unique, sometimes flawed aesthetic of machine-generated reality.