When Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery in 1917, the art world called it genius. It doesn't matter what the object is, they said. What matters is the intention of the artist.
When Warhol silkscreened ...
I get the point. If intention alone made the ready-made art in the era of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, then it's hard to suddenly argue that prompting an AI isn't also a conceptual act. That said, Duchamp and Warhol weren't removing craft from culture entirely. They were reacting against academic painting and questioning authorship. The irony is that now we're in a moment where people are reasserting the value of skill and embodied practice again. Maybe the tension isn't hypocrisy so much as the art world constantly swinging between concept and craft?
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