Featured on Portsmouth Point: What is the nature of art?

By Samuel V, Year 12

There will always come a time in an Artist’s life where they have to grapple with the fundamental question of why they are doing what they are. Telling people I want to be a screenwriter always brings me a mix of joy and fear, watching the cogs turn in their heads as they try and work out why I would commit to such a useless profession. I think it is understandable, in the over-saturated and bloated state of modern media, to question why someone would wish to undertake a job in that rotting carcass, quickly overrun with ten thousand thousand AI artists. To answer that, we must examine what it is that Artists create, and what it is that AI artists do not.

H.P Lovecraft had problems. To explain them all would require the whole of this issue to explain in full. Deeply racist, paranoid, sexist, obsessive and sheltered, he was a man without many redeeming qualities. Save of course, his writing, a feat so great as to hide all his other questionable qualities from a lot of the population. Born in Providence, Rhode Island to Wealthy anglo-saxon parents, Lovecraft was used to a comfortable life. Then the deaths started. His father was institutionalised, going mad before dying of “general paresis” - Syphilis, a shameful disease at the time - in 1898. After being taken in by his Mother’s family, his grandmother would die also, leaving the family in “a gloom from which it never recovered,” He was plagued by nightmares, his school career marred by disease and illness also, and the complete financial ruin of his grandfather and family brought him to the Brink of suicide. You may ask what relevance this has to art, and rightfully so, if I wanted to write a full biography on that man, I could (with a lot of painful research). But the fullness of his life is not relevant, only the basis of it. For I hope you may pick up on the shadows of Lovecraft’s work held in his own life. Madness, disease, familial strain, nightmares all form the foundation of Lovecraft’s work, his coping mechanism for the cruel and macabre life he found himself in, the delight in writing such abstract horrors on the page, as to control them. Lovecraft was an Artist of the truest sense, whose work would go on to define early 20th century horror, and found his own genre in his name. His art was formed by the trauma of his youth, its afterburn and metamorphosis into the page is what strikes about Lovecraft's writing. Perhaps it is the remoulding of youthful memory that gives Art its memory.

To remember your youth. Such a violent Act. Memory, science believes, is held in the connections between hundreds of thousands of neurons firing together in the same way they did when an experience was experienced for the first time. It is never complete. The memory photo-copied 100 million times, so many that it loses edge, and focus, and forms so much that we must re-shape it as we age. We pull apart and put back together that experience in our heads to build it anew. We remember our experiences. Such a violent Act….

Perhaps violence instead is the nature of Art. For evidence, we turn to an unlikely source. Seamus Heaney (I hope Ms Hart doesn’t read this.) In his poem Harvest Bow, he says this:

“The End Of Art Is Peace.” Beautiful, no? The work of Art to heal, unite, and bring life to peace. This is true of Art, but only in conjunction with a deeper and more profound truth. In what is implied, and omitted from that statement. If Art trends towards peace, what does it move from? From where is Art conceived? If it ends at peace, then it would follow that its inception lies in the antonym. War.

George Orwell’s writings transcend words to describe. Reading them is less like reading dystopia, and more akin to gothic horror, invoking emotions of Lovecraft mentioned previously except directed towards the incomprehensibility of state apparatus, in place of elder gods. His Artwork entered the cultural zeitgeist in a way only a handful of others’ have, exemplifying fears of control, loss of identity, subsumption to the state and the abuse of power. Despite his dark subject manner, war is far from the focal point of his writings, more set dressing to the pressing issues of his novels. The Grand War pitting Oceania against Eurasia in 1984 paves the necessary backdrop to the exploration of the abuse of language and complete domination of the sovereign over his subjects, the battles in Animal farm necessary inclusions for a historical allegory. So how can I call this Artwork, based on the previous definition of Art? Well, I speak of War not in the modern, societal state but in its primordial definition, spoken of in Hobbes’ Leviathan. War as the state of conflict between beings. Orwell’s writings are of this nature, of conflict. Between State and man, Victor vs oppressed, the broken face vs the Iron boot. But ultimately, there is the deeper statement that fuels Orwell’s writings, hangs over him like a cloud, chains him, imprisons him, and lead him to (I imagine) toss in his bed. The conflict between Individual Freedom and Collective Slavery. The macabre irony of a mass whose individual strength in sum has the power to destroy and institution, but whose collective acceptance keeps them in bondage. Between Orwell’s experience in Spain, where Anarchist and Stalinist forces tore themselves to shreds, gleefully watched by fascists, or in England where he lived homeless under an empire, it is clear to see where this obsession stems.

The inherent conflict at play in Orwell's Artworks exemplifies the grounding force of all art, the exemplification and mediation of forces of conflict. Each artist will be obsessed with their own manner of conflict, it sat close in their mind as their pen folds and tears across the solid lines of the page. We dream of these conflicts in our sleep, walking the same sunken cities, they are omnipresent in our rooms, overwatching our lives. Each artist's work can be summarised in a conflict statement, I believe. For Lovecraft, the insurmountable forces of nature vs the pitiful wants of modern man, Orwells has been mentioned previously. Dickens was obsessed with the conflict between the struggling, kind hearted poor and the greedy and uncaring Wealthy. Tolkien with the most fundamental conflict statement of art. Good vs evil. For me, the conflict at play in the art I create is between belief and action, faith and work. To summarise it in a sentence would be to annihilate it in absolute, but it is nevertheless necessary to do. My conflict statement would be: what we believe morally and intellectually, and what our emotions and the world forces us to actualise. This is … a poor definition, probably, and so are all the other conflict statements I've mentioned. It is hard to verbalise what is, essentially, an emotional concept. But nevertheless, the concept holds.

These conflict statements are what break us apart from AI Art. ChatGPT, for all its marvellous coding, has no feelings (no matter what you are told) and so therefore cannot understand and exemplify these conflicts. What separates Starry night from any other piece of Art in that style made by any random website is not its age, not quality, not pigment or price tag, but in the knowledge of its authorship in conflict - I would summarise Van Gogh's conflict as between ecstasy and depression. Starry night is not the pigment, nor light rays, nor the brain decoding these things. That is merely the vessel of its existence. Starry night is the distilled conflict between Van Gogh’s depression and life’s ecstacy. It is that idea which gives art its meaning.

Why do I aspire to be an artist, then? (and yes screenwriting is an art, but that's another essay.) Because I am plagued by this fundamental question, I see it in all things. I have an innate desire to share it, to understand it and mediate it out of my system, to settle it through ink. It is belief, that consciously or subconsciously, it is this feeling which drives all artists to create, and cuts us away from AI Art, and until machines develop sentience - which I believe is never - the conflict at the heart of Art will continue to preserve it for generations to come.

Image created by author using AI