Raw LLM Responses

Duchamp's Urinal piece brought up an interesting idea about what art is. He was very intellectual in his approach to art, and his idea influenced many generations of artists since then, as well as other contemporary ones. Even Lichtenstein and Warhol were influenced by the idea that you can take something out of context, stick it in a gallery, and talk about its form as though it's art, deciding through that process that it is. However, art and originality are ideas that go together, and the urinal trick can't get recycled without it not being thought of by those who are artists or art appreciators as at the very least not very interesting art any more. When Lichtenstein and Warhol used graphic design and comics as their sources for artworks, they changed a few things, that made it very meaningful art, and forced people to look at art differently again, creating original art in the process. Graphic design is not in itself art, as it's working to a client's specs, and often the client is in charge of so many aspects of the design, which is also created in order to sell products or services, that the designer has limited control over creative aspects. This is why I wouldn't class graphic design as art, nor would most Fine artists. As for digital art, I see a lot of what's produced, even when hand drawn, as not being in the realm of art, because the people who create it, who think of themselves as artists, are doing their best to copy styles they like, not always, of course, but originality is not much of a thing when it comes to art forms like Manga, with these creatives, and having something come out looking a bit like your favourite Manga creators work, with a touch of your own style thrown in, seems to be an aspiration with some of them. Also, they don't even try to say anything original in what they are creating, and acres of comic book, large dewy-eyed women and spikey haired teenage male heros ensue, which are every bit as kitch and dull as any AI produced "art". I wouldn't classify illustration as art either, by the way, and much of what digital creators think of as art is, to me, illustration. I'm not saying all of these are better or worse than art, but that they are not all strictly speaking art, not even in the way Duchamp's Urinal is, as a piece of ready-made, found art, once deliberately placed in a new context, and called art, challenging ideas about where art is, and what it's about, after people broadened their definitions of what art was, after the breakthoughs of Picasso and Braque and others, with Cubism at the forefront of the Avant-garde, in terms of creating new ways of expressing things in art, and visually expanding art's vocabulary. Art was very much something that was up for discussion, and we can still all argue about what art is. It's tied up with the idea of originality, which Duchamp and Warhol so brilliantly commented on, and AI productions are a big fail on this level alone. This is a personal view from a Fine Artist, however, and of course people are free to call anything art. Whether we all have to agree that it is is quite another matter.