Art in the age of AI: what is the aura of human craft?
As algorithms and AI optimize every second of human attention, slower moments of craft, beauty, and taste are becoming more valuable. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl opens the conversation with his art school background in painting and sculpture and how it shapes the way he sees beauty and craft. He draws on Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction to explain the aura of original work, and defines taste as the confidence to assert your own vision of the world. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on beauty and attention, The Search for Beauty in the Age of Algorithms.
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Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl frames the search for beauty in the age of algorithms around a simple fact: our attention and time are becoming scarcer and therefore more valuable. As AI and algorithms maximize every second, there’s an opening for slower, more thoughtful moments of craft, beauty, and taste. He also notes a shift where technology has started using us, with people feeding machines and fact-checking their work in experiences that feel soulless.
To define what he means by beauty and craft, Calvin shares his background. He studied painting and sculpture in art school, steeped in critical theory, and got into design through front-end development, landing his first design job at 19. To him, beauty and craft are artful endeavors of passion and care, whether you’re making a painting or machining car parts.
He then introduces Walter Benjamin’s essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction, which argues that original work has an aura of authenticity and uniqueness that fades with mass reproduction. Taste, he adds, is a human trait AI lacks: the confidence to assert one’s own vision and share passion and care with others.
Highlights
Scarce attention creates an opening for craft, beauty, and taste.
We’re reaching a point where technology is using us.
Calvin’s view of beauty comes from studying painting and sculpture.
Walter Benjamin argued that mass reproduction erodes an original’s aura.
Taste is the confidence to assert your own vision of the world.
Key insights
Brands that pay attention will stand out
As people feel used by technology, brands that genuinely pay attention to their fans and show it become more valuable.
Craft lives in any discipline
Beauty and craft aren’t limited to fine art. Machining a car part can carry the same passion and care as a painting.
Commercial intent isn’t the enemy, overoptimization is
Calvin admits branding always has a capitalist intent. The danger comes when work is made so efficient that it loses its original aura.
Detailed analysis
The clip gives the episode its theoretical footing. Benjamin wrote about photography and film reproducing art; Calvin applies the same idea to algorithms and AI, which reproduce and optimize at a scale Benjamin couldn’t imagine. The question becomes how to protect a little of the aura that comes from a thing’s original creation.
His definition of taste connects that theory to brand practice. If taste is the confidence to assert a vision and share it, then it’s something brands can cultivate and something algorithms, which average existing patterns, struggle to supply.
Conclusion
In an age of reproduction at infinite scale, the aura of human craft becomes rarer and more meaningful. Calvin’s challenge is to protect it through care, passion, and taste.
Transcript
Let’s talk about the search for beauty in the age of algorithms. This is just something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Our lives are becoming more and more ruled by social media algorithms, AI prevalence, things like this. And what I’m most focused on, most curious about, is just a fact: our attention and our time are becoming more scarce and therefore more valuable. That’s what’s happening. The world of AI and algorithms is maximizing and optimizing every second of human attention right now. And I think that’s opening up an opportunity for slower, more thoughtful moments of craft, beauty, and taste to become even more valuable to people and to brands.
One of the reasons this is coming to mind is because I feel like we’re hitting a switch in the way we’re interacting with all these things. We talked about the enshittification of tech a few weeks ago, and I feel like this is applying to a lot of aspects of our life, where we’re reaching a point where we’re no longer using the technology. The technology is using us, to some extent. We feed the machines to make them smarter. There are new jobs coming out where we’re the ones relegated to fact-checking algorithms and AI and approving their work. Maybe this is just my opinion, but these all feel like soulless experiences that we didn’t really sign up for. They’ve just been hoisted upon us by large organizations.
So I think brands that are actually paying attention to their fans and can show it—that is going to become more and more valuable.
But I talk about beauty in this, so it’s worth defining what I mean by beauty and craft and taste and all of those things. It’s probably most important to understand some of my background with that. My background in beauty and craft is that I went to art school. I think that really defined it. I did not study design. I studied painting and sculpture. So I come from this very critical theory–heavy background, and that’s the way I’ve come to look at beauty and craft. But it was through being a nerd who learned to do front-end development 20 years ago that I got into design. That was how I got my first design job as a young, dumb 19-year-old. And so to me, beauty and craft have always been artful endeavors, ones of passion, ones about caring, whether you’re making a painting or machining parts for a car. There is beauty and craft involved in all of those things.
The way I specifically always think about beauty and the value of art—I’m going to get really, really art school deep for a second. There’s a classic essay from World War II times called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It was written by—let’s say it the proper way—Benjamin. Walter Benjamin, as everyone will say it here. He wrote this essay discussing how there’s an aura to an original piece of art or an original creation, and that aura is its authenticity or its uniqueness. All original things that have been crafted by humans have this to some extent, and it usually revolves around the idea of a little bit of scarcity. They’re unique.
But there’s a problem that happens with art in the age of mechanical reproduction, hence the title. The more you reproduce and create mass reproductions of art, the more the art loses its initial aura and its cultural value, and it starts being replaced with some capitalist intent. I mean, I’m a designer. I love branding. I always have a capitalist intent, whether I like to admit it or not. So that’s not always bad, but it can be bad when you start applying it to art and a lot of the things that we create, and when you start making it too efficient and optimizing it to the nth degree. So that’s where my background comes from: how do we protect a little bit of that initial aura from the creation of a thing?
And I talk about taste. Taste is related to this in a way, because I think taste is inherently a very human-specific trait that a lot of AI and algorithms don’t have, because taste applies to care. Taste is having the confidence to assert one’s own vision of the world, and that’s really about sharing your passion, your joy, and your care with other people. So that’s some of my background on how I think about beauty and craft and taste. I’d be curious if anyone else has very different understandings or different thoughts on what they think beauty is at that point. But so, okay.