*Still from the video from the Weyes Blood song It's Not Just Me, It's Everybody*

The last time Weyes Blood (real name Natalie Mering) came to New Zealand, it was immediately before the COVID-19 lockdown. The vibes might have been off but they fit the tone of Titanic Rising, then her most recent album, which foregrounded hope in the face of apocalypse. Although Mering’s stage presence veers comfortably between elegance and goofiness, she was visibly rattled at this 2020 show. A vocal supporter of left-leaning Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, he was about to drop out of Democratic Primary in response to the pandemic (making way for the self-proclaimed ‘most pro-union president in American history’) and Mering clearly wasn’t sure what kind of America she would be going home to. This was the last concert that I, Mering or anyone else would attend in a while.

Last week, I had the privilege of seeing her again as part of her Holy Flux Tour. The highlight of the night was the Adam Curtis-directed visuals for God Turned Me Into A Flower from last year’s album And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow. A collaboration between the musician with the best taste in film and the filmmaker with the best taste in music seemed like a pairing intended to excite me specifically. Soon after this live music video, Mering asked the audience “Do you like AI?” Anyone with a passing awareness of her political or artistic inclinations would know that she was taking the piss out of the recent push from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to outsource our humanity to artificial intelligence. However, Wellington being Wellington, some bloodless policy wonk in the audience enthusiastically responded “YES!”, immediately threatening to break the spell that Mering and Curtis had cast on us.

My experience at these two concerts was coloured by what was going on when I attended–a convergence between performances of everything I love about art and contextual forces hostile to its continued existence. The role of the artist in our society is being devalued at an alarming rate, with the winds of conservatism, neoliberalism, isolation, anti-intellectualism and, yes, artificial intelligence accelerating this shift.

On the way home from the Opera House, I walked past a series of posters for the new single by BENEE, Bagels. You’ve probably seen ads for this song in Phantom Billstickers zones or before Youtube videos. Bagels is a collaboration between ASB and Youthline, pairing the pop star with neuroscientists to compose a song with anxiety-relieving elements. Nevermind the fact that an ASB X Youthline collab contains nearly as much distasteful irony as Lowe & Co’s reputation-laundering attempt to promote Silent Night last year, the single seems like a blatant example of the reduction of art to the purely functional. No shade to BENEE, she’s one of my favourite New Zealand pop stars to emerge over the last few years, but the idea of a song created in a lab to serve a specific emotional purpose seems somewhat obscene.

*Advertising campaign for BENEE's new single Bagels*

Art created for cynical purposes is nothing new, of course, but the scale of the shift paired with changing consumption habits has elevated the functional above all other considerations. When I want to focus at work, I chuck on a Spotify playlist called something like “lo-fi pokemon sun and moon remixes for writing cabinet papers” in order to get the job done. Film, an artform defined by the visual, has been reframed to be all about ‘plot’. All over social media, people are criticising sex scenes, action set pieces or other ‘superfluous’ parts of a film for not serving a specific function or advancing the plot. Streaming has escalated this of course, it is only natural that the visual elements of film are de-emphasised when people are increasingly watching it on smaller devices and with access to more ‘content’ than ever, I understand the impulse to try and get through it as quickly as possible. But I am most worried about the internalised neoliberal impulse to deify productivity–if we’re always hustling then we don’t have as much time for non-productive outlets and art increasingly falls by the wayside unless it’s serving a purpose in support of this grind.

*Still from Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982) Dir. Alan Parker*

At the same time, there have been a number of high-profile examples of those with power stubbornly asserting their right to interpret art in the most literal, bad-faith way possible. Berlin police, in the latest example of the German inclination to learn all the wrong lessons from the Holocaust they undertook, recently began an investigation into former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters. Waters’ crime was using Fascist imagery in his anti-fascist performance, a motif he most famously employed 40 years ago in The Wall–a filmed version of the Pink Floyd album of the same name. Anyone who has seen that film will no doubt balk at the idea that its themes could ever be characterised as ‘too-subtle’.

In the US, Aussie comedian Hannah Gadsby is opening a Brooklyn Museum exhibition It’s Pablo-matic (!!!). This work continues the anti-art impulses of her Netflix sensation Nanette. While the earlier piece framed comedy as inherently reactionary and queer artists as incapable of elevating it, her new one views art history as so tainted by bad men that it forgets to engage with art by women.

On social media, ‘film bros’ have become fodder for jokes where the punchline is that championing film history, challenging films and non-English language films is inherently problematic. Anything too-ambiguous, too-abstracted, too-contradictory must be immoral. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this trend disadvantages artists, especially those who are already silenced by structures of power because of their positionality, and plays into the hands of corporations who are able to market their bland, functional products as morally superior because they engage in the most surface-level politics of representation.

Jesse Armstrong’s celebrated TV show Succession recently aired its last episode, satisfactorily concluding its depiction of the way that excess wealth erodes the human soul. Credulous tech utopianists weren’t satisfied however. They asked “yeah but what if there was another season one of its broken characters created a start-up that changed everything.” The same blue-checkmarked dullards opined that AI could make great paintings even greater by generating what lies outside their frames. Using generative-AI to build upon existing work in such unimaginative ways demonstrates that so many of those in power don’t have even the most cursory understanding of the pieces they claim to admire.

While many of these examples are extreme and rightfully elicited ridicule, the multi-pronged assault on the very concept of art is chipping away at the public’s perception of artists. The WGA strike is well into its second month and there is still no sign of the studios coming to the table (despite some platitudes from the ostensibly pro-labour guy in the White House). Hollywood’s writers are fighting for their workplace rights and fair compensation for their labour, but they are also fighting an existential battle with stakes that include the very idea of art as we know it. If more and more TV shows are written by AI, these shows will increasingly elevate the functional, the empty and the reassuring over the messy, the difficult and the subversive.

A few weeks ago I was at a party where the topic of the WGA strike came up. I impishly claimed that I would never support AI art because robots don’t have souls and are therefore incapable of creativity. Someone (possibly the guy who heckled Weyes Blood, who knows) shot back “I don’t believe in the soul so I don’t have any problem with AI art,” which I think somewhat misses the point. Sure, this trend hurts me on a spiritual, aesthetic level, but I believe there’s material reasons that we should be concerned about the devaluation of art. Art needs to be challenging and problematic and human. It needs actual people on both ends of the equation in dialogue with each other in order to qualify as art–whether or not you believe in the soul. AI art is a mockery of this and it is being allowed to be pushed because our current material conditions are so hostile to artists as workers and human beings.

I don’t give a shit how many robots can create a soulless simulacrum of “Lord of the Rings directed by Wes Anderson”, there will never be a machine that can replace artists like Weyes Blood.

Jimmy Lanyard is an unexceptional Pākehā public servant from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. While he is not doing Borat impressions for the graduate advisors, he enjoys matching his sneakers with his Barkers suit, drinking almond flat whites and watching supercuts of Air New Zealand safety videos. Listen to Jimmy talk about film on Dinner and a Movie podcast with Nabilah Husna Binte Abdul Rahman.

Weyes Blood, Benee and the Devaluation of Art