Art in the Age When Everyone Can Make It
If technology makes everyone virtuosic, the true value of art returns to thought
If technology makes everyone virtuosic, the true value of art returns to thought.
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A specter is haunting the world of art—the specter of total accessibility.
For centuries, art was a difficult territory. Creating a work required technique, study, discipline, and years of practice. The ability to produce extraordinary images was rare, and precisely for that reason it carried value. Yet something is now changing rapidly, and the change closely resembles what, a few decades ago, radically transformed another creative field: music.
For a long time, producing music meant having access to expensive recording studios, professional instruments, sound engineers, and complex technical skills—ultimately even the ability to read a score. Then came music production software, digital workstations, virtual synthesizers, and algorithmic composition tools. Today, anyone with a laptop and relatively inexpensive software can produce technically flawless tracks, perfectly mixed and often spectacular from a sonic point of view. Not to mention AI software that can compose an entire piece from beginning to end, simply inspired by a voice note of you humming a melody.
Technique, of course, has not disappeared. It has simply become accessible. And when a skill becomes accessible to everyone, it ceases to function as a distinguishing element.
Something very similar is happening today in the field of digital art.
Contemporary generative tools—from artificial intelligence models to visual generation software, from procedural systems to algorithm-assisted creative platforms—now make it possible to produce images of extraordinary aesthetic complexity with a degree of ease that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. What once required advanced programming skills, years of research in generative art, teams of developers, or extremely expensive hardware can now be achieved by a single artist in front of a screen.
This transformation is not merely technical. It is cultural, because it implies an inevitable consequence: technical virtuosity is gradually losing its value as a distinguishing factor.
One might have accepted the algorithm entering the creative chain as just another production tool, at a historical moment when knowing how to use it still implied a certain mastery on the part of the user, and therefore a decisive level of control capable of filtering the peculiarities of artistic intention.
But if today anyone can produce spectacular images, then spectacle itself ceases to be a meaningful criterion of judgment. And at that point the question becomes unavoidable: where will the value of art move?
When Art Was Young
To understand this transformation, it is worth taking a step back in history.
For a very long time, art was deeply tied to the technical dimension of representation. From Greek sculpture to Renaissance painting, from Mannerism to the Baroque, a central part of artistic research consisted in refining the ability to represent the world more and more convincingly. Perspective, anatomy, light, movement, and the illusion of space were all technical conquests that required years of study and practice.
In a sense, art was still young. And like all young disciplines, it was busy exploring and pushing forward its own technical possibilities—like an adolescent eager to display his abilities.
The great artist was the one capable of bringing these possibilities to a level never seen before.
With modernity, however, something changes. With the twentieth-century avant-garde movements, art gradually begins to abandon the purely technical pursuit in favor of an increasingly conceptual dimension.
When Marcel Duchamp exhibits a urinal and presents it as a work of art, he demonstrates that the value of an artwork does not necessarily lie in its technical realization but in the conceptual gesture that defines it as such. In the following years other artists radicalize this intuition. In 1958 Yves Klein inaugurates in Paris the exhibition Le Vide, completely emptying a gallery and inviting the public to confront a space devoid of objects: art is no longer something to look at, but a mental and perceptual condition. Shortly afterwards Piero Manzoni pushes this logic even further with works such as Artist’s Breath, where the artwork consists simply of a balloon inflated with the artist’s own breath. In all these cases technique becomes irrelevant; what matters is the conceptual device that transforms a gesture, a void, or even a physiological act into a work of art. When Joseph Kosuth later states that art can be language, the transition is complete: the center of the artwork is no longer its material realization but the structure of meaning that sustains it.
With conceptual art, the center of gravity of the artwork shifts radically. Its value no longer resides in the artist’s hand, but in the idea.
The Case of Refik Anadol
In the landscape of contemporary digital art, one of the most emblematic examples is the work of Refik Anadol, and in particular his piece Unsupervised, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.
The work is a generative system fueled by datasets drawn from the museum’s collection, capable of producing endless visual configurations through machine learning models. The impact of the installation is striking: its monumental scale, technological complexity, and the visual power of the generated imagery have made it one of the most impressive manifestations of contemporary algorithmic aesthetics.
But let us imagine a very plausible scenario.
Suppose that within a few years similar tools become widely accessible: pre-trained models available to the public, open datasets, ready-made generative pipelines, and increasingly affordable hardware.
In such a situation, hundreds of artists could produce visually similar installations. At that point the question becomes unavoidable: what will truly distinguish one work from another?
If the visual effect can be replicated with ease, art will inevitably have to relocate its center elsewhere.
The Shortcut of Finance
One of the responses emerging within the world of Web3 attempts to shift the value of the artwork onto an entirely different plane: the economic one.
On platforms such as SuperRare, some projects experiment with works linked to advanced smart contracts in which the appearance of the artwork changes in response to external data, such as the market performance of an asset or other financial parameters, through oracle systems.
From a technological perspective, this is a fascinating solution. The artwork becomes a dynamic system reacting in real time to data from the world.
But from an artistic perspective, the risk is evident. The value of the work risks shifting from its symbolic dimension to a speculative one. The experience of the artwork begins to resemble an economic mechanism or a sophisticated form of financial gamification.
This direction is not necessarily without interest. Yet it is difficult to imagine that it could restore to art the depth of meaning that has historically made it necessary.
The Example of Sasha Stiles
To understand where the value of digital art might instead move, it is worth considering the work of Sasha Stiles.
From the very beginning of her presence in the Web3 world, Stiles has taken a path almost opposite to the technological spectacle that characterizes much of contemporary digital production. Her works do not seek visual power or special effects as an end in themselves. On the contrary, they often appear formally simple, almost minimal.
Yet this apparent simplicity conceals a far more radical inquiry. Stiles’s work focuses on a poetic reflection on language in the age of artificial intelligence and on how the relationship between human and machine reshapes cultural production.
In this sense, her practice constructs a genuine poetics of the digital. Technology is not used to impress but to question the relationship between language, algorithm, and identity.
In some works, she performs a particularly powerful conceptual gesture: transforming digital language—made of code and computational structures—into something that takes on an almost calligraphic elegance, as if the language of the future could suddenly assume a form that belongs to the aesthetic memory of the past.
The Return of Poetry
If technical production becomes increasingly automated, and if tools allow anyone to generate spectacular images, art will inevitably have to shift its center.
The value of the artwork will no longer reside in its technical complexity. It will have to be found elsewhere: in its conceptual density, in its capacity to produce meaning and open new imaginaries.
In other words, the value of art will increasingly return to what for a long time was considered secondary: poetry.
Not poetry as a literary genre, but poetry as the ability of an artwork to create a space of meaning that extends beyond its visual surface.
If technology makes everyone potentially virtuosic, then the only real difference between artworks will be their capacity to be necessary.
And in this sense, art perhaps returns to its most ancient function.
Not to demonstrate how skilled we are at making something.
But to remind us why it is worth making it at all.