judgment day

Daring Fireball:

If your opinion of a work art changes after you find out which tools were used to make it, or who the artist is or what they’ve done, you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else. […] If an image, a song, a poem, or video evokes affection in your heart, and then that affection dissipates when you learn what tools were used to create it, that’s not a test of the work of art itself. To me it’s no different than losing affection for a movie only upon learning that special effects were created digitally, not practically.

Gruber is a tech writer, not an art critic, but his view is not uncommon, and I think it’s nonsense. Knowing how Chuck Close’s paintings were made changes the experience of them, and should.

Or consider this 16h-century Dutch miniature altarpiece — something I make a beeline for whenever I’m in the British Museum:

If I found out that it had been 3D-printed rather than meticulously hand-carved, that would change my experience of it, and rightly so.

In precisely the same way, I judge an essay differently — I apply different standards, have different reactions — depending on whether (a) it was written by a 20-year-old student who is wrestling with the things we’ve been discussing in class or (b) it was written by ChatGPT at that student’s prompt.

See also: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”

Gruber appears to be interested only in artistic product, not artistic process. I’m interested in both, as are most people, and our judgments of works of art are complex things that involve everything we know about both process and product.