Art Is the Attitude, Not the Output

Post‑AI art shifts value from the image or object to the protocol, system and creative stance. Artists (Singer, Denny, Herndon, Dryhurst, Raf‑man) claim that authorship, output and metaphor are gone

You sit in front of a generative engine.

You type: “Sunset at the end of the world, saturated with memory.”

The model responds: ten variations, in full resolution. Each one beautiful. Each one hollow.

They shimmer with plausibility — with that polished vacuity that machines are now so good at. The shadows fall in cinematic gradients. The clouds feel vaguely Symbolist. One even resembles a childhood photo you can’t quite place. And yet: none of them feel like yours. Not because they’re wrong — but because they’re right in all the wrong ways.

You don’t feel lied to. You feel unseen.

That’s when it hits you: the problem isn’t the medium, the metaphor, or even the model.

The problem is that output is no longer the place where meaning lives.

This is the world that a new group of artists has stepped into — or rather, has begun to remake. A few months ago, a conversation was published between Avery Singer, Simon Denny, Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Jon Rafman. But this was no ordinary panel. It read like a disguised manifesto. They weren’t describing trends. They were articulating a shift in gravity.

This is a generation of artists fluent in networks, saturated in memes, and deeply aware of how thoroughly the internet has collapsed the categories of originality, authorship, and even artistic intent. And yet, instead of retreating into nostalgia or technophobia, they propose something more radical:

“The romantic author-function has been sunset.”

“The work is no longer the object. It’s not even the metaphor. The work is the system. The protocol. The attitude.”

In other words: art no longer lies in the artifact. Not even in the idea behind it. It lives in the approach, the stance, the reason it was made.

To understand what this means, you have to see what these artists actually do.

Take Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. They didn’t just generate music using AI. They created Spawn, an AI child, trained via ceremonial live performances with human singers. This was not about optimizing fidelity. It was about introducing reverence into machine learning. The art wasn’t the song. It was the process — a public, sacred training event. When they released Holly+, a voice-cloning platform open to the public, they didn’t focus on how it sounded. They focused on who was allowed to use it, and under what ethics. The art was the stance toward the tool.

Or look at Simon Denny, who builds installations out of GPT-generated nonsense — like a fake podcast between VCs and their algorithmic doppelgängers. The content is ridiculous on purpose. That’s the point. The real “work” isn’t in the form. It’s the gesture of exposure, the tone of critique. The art lives in the absurdity that is shown, not hidden.

Jon Rafman’s digital avatars float through glitchy elegies for an internet that has lost its sense of place. His films don’t offer arguments. They offer tone. A kind of low-grade grief for lost coherence. What you feel, watching his work, is not “this is clever” but “this hurts and I can’t say why.” It’s not conceptual. It’s attitudinal. It’s mourning disguised as media.

And Avery Singer wants to write papers that write themselves — endlessly mutating texts, partly generative, partly human, never complete. She’s not being speculative. She’s not saying “imagine if…” She’s saying this is the attitude now: No finals. No ownership. No perfection. Just motion.

In each of these cases, the image, the file, the “artwork” is almost a decoy. The real thing is what the artist does with the medium — or more precisely, why they do it.

This shift has a corollary in the article: a diagram of an orange.

Layer 0: The physical orange.

Layer 1: The juice.

Layer 2: Futures.

Layer 3: Derivatives.

And scrawled next to Layer 3: “Value Exists Here.”

The metaphor is clear. The further you get from the physical object, the more abstract — and in some cases, more valuable — the product becomes.

In art, we’re now at Layer 3. The surface is meaningless without the attitude behind it. A perfect image of a forest means nothing. A corrupted image of a forest, generated through a broken system that was itself a metaphor for ecological collapse — that carries weight. Not because of what it looks like, but because of the direction it’s aimed in.

Art, in this model, becomes a vector — not a noun, but a verb. Not a thing, but a trajectory. Not “what is this?” but “what is this trying to do?”

You can’t evaluate the new art by looking at it. You have to evaluate it by asking:

What did the artist bring to it that a machine couldn’t?

This is the hardest part to explain to people still locked in 20th-century aesthetics. They want style. They want originality. They want finality. But those are precisely the things that AI — and the internet — erode most effectively.

The internet turns every style into a meme in three hours.

Generative tools make originality indistinguishable from accident.

Finality vanishes when your work can always be remixed.

So what remains?

Only the artist’s attitude:

Why did you make this?

What do you hope it changes?

What are you refusing to imitate?

What are you trying to remember?

These questions don’t produce neat answers. That’s the point. They’re orientation questions. Not evaluations of skill, but glimpses of soul.

Criticism, too, will have to evolve. Critics can no longer ask “Is this good?”

They’ll have to ask: Is this honest?

Is this brave?

Does it carry intention, or is it just a gesture at cleverness?

We are entering a time when polish is cheap. Intent is rare.

If the work doesn’t cost the artist something — a belief, a risk, a refusal — it probably isn’t worth looking at.

Back at your screen. Ten more dusk images. All perfect.

You delete them all.

You change the prompt. You change the system.

You write a line in the source code: “Do not end unless it means something.”

You don’t know what it will generate.

But for the first time, you feel like you’re making art again.

Not because of what you’re making.

But because of what you’re bringing to it.