What Is Art?

In response to some of the questions and answers shared on the AWAKE group platform.

Here are some questions to think about.

• When early humans recorded their lives and experiences by drawing figures and animals on cave walls, was that art?

• When someone puts paint onto canvas, is that art? I think most people would immediately answer yes. Painting has occupied such a secure place in our understanding of art that we rarely question it.

• But what about frescoes, trompe-l’œil, flowers painted on a child’s bedroom wall, wallpaper, fabric design or decorative patterns?

• When a wallpaper design has been reproduced a thousand times by a printing machine, is the original design still art? Is each printed piece art? Does reproduction diminish its creative value?

• Are the scribbles made by your three-year-old on the sitting-room wall art? Coming to the child’s defence, he or she is expressing something creatively. It is just a little inconvenient.

• When somebody cuts pictures from magazines and books and assembles them into a collage, is that art?

• Is interior design art?

• Is fashion design art?

• Is an architectural plan art? What about the shape and form of the finished building?

• Is a beautifully designed light fitting art?

• Is the way you decorate your home, arrange pictures on a wall or choose colours to wear in the morning an artistic act?

• When people design Christmas lights or arrange a spectacular New Year’s firework display to music, colour, timing and movement, is that art—even though the fireworks were produced in factories and released by timers and computers?

• Are mandalas art?

• Is colouring-in an art form?

• When an artist places a box in the centre of a gallery and shines a light on it to create a particular shadow, atmosphere and meaning, is that art?

• When people create clay figures for an animated film, is that art?

• Is a film art? Even the worst film you have ever seen involved writing, acting, lighting, costume, sound, music, design, editing and hundreds of creative decisions.

• And we have not even begun to explore the enormous world of performing arts.

• Is theatre art?

• Is dance art?

• Is opera art?

• What about the set designer who creates the visual world of a stage production, film or television studio?

• What about costume designers, lighting designers, choreographers, make-up artists, prop makers, composers, musicians, performers and the people who create the scenery and decoration surrounding them?

• The final performance may last only a few hours, but it is built from thousands of artistic decisions made by many different people.

• When you take a photograph, you choose where to stand, what to include, what to exclude, when to press the shutter and how to present the image. The camera then performs much of the technical process. Does the involvement of a machine make the result less artistic?

• My husband does not consider himself an artist, yet he can sometimes compose a photograph better than I can. Is he creating art?

• When a digital montage or collage artist combines original photography, stock imagery, scanned material, textures and other elements in Photoshop, is that art—even though a computer is involved?

• When an artist uses AI-generated elements to construct a larger composition in Photoshop, is that art?

• When someone creates an entire image using an AI generator, is that art?

These questions do not necessarily have one answer. Their purpose is to make us look at our own assumptions.

Look at your own biases

What do you personally accept as art?

Do you respect one creative process more than another?

Do you believe that your form of art requires more intelligence, talent, labour or integrity than somebody else’s?

Do you look down on certain art forms because you do not understand their processes?

We are completely entitled to like or dislike an artwork. We do not have to pretend that everything moves us. However, disliking an artwork is not the same as denying the creative intention or process behind it.

I never liked Tracey Emin’s work until I learned more about the intention, expression and meaning behind it. Understanding it did not force me to love every piece, but it taught me to look beyond the physical object. More importantly, it made me aware that I should respect artists even when their work is not naturally to my taste.

That distinction matters.

You can say, “This work does nothing for me.”

That is different from saying, “This is not art.”

The hierarchy within art

Besides loving analogue art, I follow many forms of digital art.

Digital collage, montage and photographic art represent only a tiny part of the enormous digital-art world. That world includes digital painters, animators, illustrators, graphic designers, game artists, 3D artists, film-makers, photographers and many other extraordinarily skilled people.

Yet even within the digital-art community, hierarchies exist.

Some digital painters may see collage or montage artists as secondary because we do not always create every element from scratch.

Some analogue collage artists look down on digital collage because we work with software and do not physically cut paper or get glue on our hands.

Some painters dismiss digital work because it does not have a physical surface that they can touch.

Photographers faced similar suspicion when photography first appeared. The camera was seen as a machine doing the work, and many feared that photography would threaten painting or could never be considered real art.

We have seen these arguments before.

A new tool appears, and people fear that it has replaced the artist.

But a camera does not decide why a photograph should exist. Photoshop does not decide what a montage should mean. A paintbrush does not decide what belongs on a canvas.

The tool contributes to the process, but it does not provide the human reason for making the work.

Artists such as David Hockney and Gilbert & George have embraced photography, digital processes, printing and new technology within their work. They understand that art is constantly evolving and that artists have always explored new tools in order to complete their visions.

Art has never stood still.

And then came AI

Now we arrive at AI, where the judgment becomes particularly intense.

I make it my business to explore many platforms and observe where AI art is going. Some of the work being created is extraordinary.

There is still an assumption that somebody types one word, presses a button and receives a finished masterpiece.

That can happen in the sense that a generator can produce an image from a very simple instruction. But that does not describe the practice of serious AI artists.

Many AI artists spend days or weeks developing an idea. They experiment with language, composition, character, colour, camera position, lighting and atmosphere. They generate many unsuccessful versions. They edit, combine, extend, repaint and reconstruct. They may move between several programs before arriving at the final image or film.

• The computer may generate the material, but the artist still chooses.

• They choose the concept.

• They choose the direction.

• They recognise what is working and what is not.

• They reject hundreds of images.

• They refine, edit and sometimes rebuild the work completely.

• That process involves judgment, sensitivity and creative intention.

The amount of physical labour may differ from oil painting or traditional collage, but physical difficulty has never been the sole measurement of artistic value. Otherwise, the heaviest sculpture would automatically be the greatest artwork.

If you still believe that every AI image is created by entering one word and doing nothing else, then you may need to look more closely at what serious AI artists are actually doing.

Equally, not every generated image is automatically a significant artwork. But the same is true of every photograph, painting, collage or drawing. The existence of an artistic medium does not guarantee the quality of every result.

Personally, I prefer working with AI-generated elements rather than creating an entire finished image inside an AI generator. I love bringing those elements into Photoshop, pushing them around, changing their scale and position, building a composition, adding textures, adjusting colour and creating the lighting that brings the final artwork together. That process is where I feel most connected to the work.

That is simply my preferred way of creating. It does not mean that I have less respect for artists who create complete images or films using AI. Quite the opposite. I am often completely in awe of serious digital AI artists who create extraordinary images and videos through experimentation, persistence and a deep understanding of their tools.

To be absolutely clear, I am completely against the abuse of AI. Like any powerful technology, it can be used to deceive, exploit, imitate, manipulate or cause real harm. Defending AI as a creative tool does not mean defending every way in which it is used. We should be able to celebrate responsible artistic experimentation while strongly opposing misuse.

How AI image generation works

A simplified explanation is that, during training, an image model analyses very large numbers of images and learns relationships between words and visual characteristics such as shapes, textures, colours, objects, lighting and composition.

It does not usually operate like a searchable scrapbook from which it cuts out pieces and pastes them together.

When creating an image, a diffusion-based system commonly begins with random visual noise—rather like the flickering static on an old television before it finds a station.

Guided by the words entered by the user, it gradually reorganises and removes that noise until an image begins to emerge.

The result is newly generated from learned visual patterns.

That does not mean that all concerns about training data disappear. The way an AI system was trained, the image it produces and the human contribution to the final artwork are separate questions.

It is also too broad to say that every AI system automatically refuses all copyrighted imagery or every request connected to an artist’s style. Different platforms have different safeguards. Some restrict direct imitation of living artists or attempts to reproduce protected images, while others may behave differently.

The legal and moral questions

The law around AI is still developing and differs from country to country.

The main questions are:

Training: Did the company have permission or a legal right to use copyrighted material?

Output: Does the generated image reproduce a substantial and recognisable part of a particular protected work?

Ownership: How much original human creativity went into the final result?

In the UK, copyrighted work generally cannot simply be used for commercial AI training without permission, a licence or a relevant legal exception.

The European Union requires AI companies to follow copyright rules, respect valid rights reservations and provide information about training content.

In the United States, courts are still deciding when AI training may qualify as fair use.

So AI imagery is not automatically stolen or illegal, but neither is every training method automatically lawful or ethical.

The moral debate is wider than the law.

Many artists believe that consent, credit and compensation should have been required before their work was used to train commercial systems. That concern deserves to be taken seriously.

Others compare AI learning with the way human artists absorb influences from thousands of images during their lives.

The comparison is useful, but it is not exact. A human artist and a large commercial technology company do not learn, operate or profit in the same way.

We should be able to hold more than one thought at once.

We can see AI as a legitimate artistic tool while still asking for transparency, consent, licensing and protection for artists.

We can defend AI-assisted artists without dismissing the genuine fears of traditional artists.

Originality is more complicated than we admit

Artists often speak about originality as though ideas appear from nowhere.

But all of us are influenced by what we have seen, read, heard and experienced.

Something glimpsed in a gallery ten years ago may remain in the subconscious. A colour combination may come from a childhood room. A composition may be influenced by cinema, advertising, theatre, fashion or another artwork we no longer consciously remember.

When I come up with an idea, it is often a mambo jumbo of experiences, emotions and images I have encountered throughout my life.

I think that is incredible.

It does not mean we are frauds or that originality is impossible. It means that creativity often comes from making new relationships between existing experiences.

We may not be as isolated or uniquely self-created as we like to think, but we are no less extraordinary as creative beings.

Learning from another artist is not the same as presenting their completed artwork as your own.

Influence is not the same as plagiarism.

Using a tool is not the same as surrendering all creative responsibility to that tool.

Producing something quickly does not automatically mean that it has no meaning.

Copying and imitation have always formed part of artistic training. The Old Masters had pupils, assistants and workshops. Artists copied sculptures, paintings, poses and techniques in order to learn.

Today, some people look at an artwork containing an AI-generated element and immediately assume that the artist has copied someone else.

But using AI-generated material does not automatically mean that the final artwork is a copy, just as using stock photography, printed paper, found objects or existing visual references does not automatically make a collage a copy.

The important questions are what the artist has done with the material, how it has been transformed, what decisions were made and whether the final work reproduces another artist’s specific creation too closely.

If somebody studies my work and creates something better from what they have learned, good for them.

If somebody takes one of my finished pieces and presents it as their own, I will be annoyed—and rightly so.

Those are two very different acts.

Did you know that Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Bellini, Leonardo and many other Old Masters worked with pupils, apprentices and assistants. Students learned by studying, repeating and imitating the master’s techniques. Workshops sometimes produced paintings from the master’s designs without the master painting every part himself.

Copying, studying and learning from existing art are not new ideas. They are part of art history.

This is important because one of the accusations often made against artists who work with AI imagery is that they are simply copying the style of another artists. But artists have always learned and create through influence, observation and imitation. The real question is not whether influence exists. It is whether someone is learning, transforming and creating something new—or simply taking another person’s completed work and claiming it as their own.

Those are very different things.

My answer

My opinion is that everything has the potential to become art, just as almost everything has the potential to become political.

An object, image, gesture, performance or experience becomes art through creative intention, expression and the meaning it creates—not merely through technique, difficulty or claims of complete originality.

That does not mean everything is equally good.

It does not mean criticism is forbidden.

It does not mean artists should be protected from difficult questions.

It means we should judge thoughtfully.

We should ask what the artist intended, what choices were made, what process took place and what the work communicates.

We should also remember that not every process is visible in the final image.

A seemingly simple result may have required weeks of experimentation. A technically difficult work may have very little to say. Something produced with a traditional tool is not automatically profound, and something produced with a new tool is not automatically empty.

I am now going to sound a little bossy.

To everyone who believes they already possess the final answer to what art is, remember this:

You are allowed to dislike the work.

You are allowed to question it.

You are allowed to criticise the process, the ethics, the execution or the result.

But you should be careful about declaring that another person’s creative expression is not art simply because their tools, methods or choices are different from yours.

Look at the intention.

Look at the process.

Look at the meaning.

And, perhaps most importantly, look at your own biases.

A final note

I am not a writer, and I do not see myself as a writer.

I wrote this article because I wanted to express how I feel about art, our biases and the growing debate around AI.

I did my own research, gathered my thoughts and tried to make sense of what I believe.

I have had reading and writing difficulties since school. They have improved considerably as I have grown older, but writing still does not come naturally to me.

After writing the first version, I asked ChatGPT to correct the spelling, help organise the structure and make the article easier to follow. I then read through the result carefully and made further changes of my own.

Does that mean I did not write it?

Does using help with spelling, grammar and structure remove my intention, my ideas or my voice?

And if we decide that using AI assistance makes the result less valid, where does that leave people who use spellcheck, grammar software, editors, translators, cameras, Photoshop, digital brushes or any of the many tools artists and writers have always used?

Do we stop making art with AI?

I do not think we should.

I think we should continue to question it, challenge it, use it responsibly and demand better protection for artists.

But we should also remain curious.

Art has always changed when new tools arrived.

Perhaps the real question is not whether AI will become part of art.

Perhaps it already has.