Disclaimer: This essay was planned and written in collaboration with Claude Sonnet 4.
In an age of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, the question of what counts as art—and who counts as an artist—is being radically redefined. Works generated by machine learning models can flood the internet with infinite variations in seconds. The uniqueness once tied to the artist’s hand now seems almost quaint. But rather than lamenting this shift, we might ask: what kind of art is this, really? And what kind of attention does it demand?
One way to understand what’s changing is to look at how art has evolved across three distinct historical eras, each shaped by its dominant mode of production. What we see is not the end of art, but a transformation in how it works—and what it’s for.
In the first era—the era of artisanal production—artworks were handcrafted and unique. Think of a Renaissance painting, a sculpture, or a ceremonial mask. These works had what the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin called aura: a sense of presence, authenticity, and singularity. They invited slow, contemplative engagement. You might travel to a cathedral or gallery to see them. You might stand alone before one in hushed reverence.
Then came the mechanical age—printing presses, photography, cinema. Art became reproducible. You no longer had to be near the original to experience it. Benjamin argued that this mass reproducibility caused the aura to fade. In its place, a new kind of aesthetic emerged: more psychological, more cinematic, more tied to identification and interpretation. Meaning became mobile. The artist became less a solitary genius and more an editor or assembler—someone arranging signs, rather than making sacred objects.
Today we are entering a third era. Call it the automatic. Art is not just reproducible—it’s generable, endlessly so. Algorithms trained on vast swaths of cultural data can produce images, music, text, and video with no need for a human “creator” in the traditional sense. The role of the artist has changed again: from author, to editor, to something stranger and more diffuse.
This new figure isn’t best described as a “maker” at all. Instead, they resemble an explorer or navigator—someone who plays within a sea of existing material, prompting and guiding the outputs of autonomous systems. They operate not from a blank slate, but from within a dense web of cultural echoes.
And here’s the crucial shift: in this new context, aesthetic power lies not in the object, nor in the individual who initiates it, but in how a work moves. That is, how it circulates, resonates, and catches the attention of others. What mattered before was presence; now, it’s pattern. We might say that the aura hasn’t disappeared—it has simply changed form. What once glowed around the original now shimmers across the swarm of all texts and minds, past and present.
This shimmer is fragile and fleeting. It’s not about permanence, but about recognition. It happens in the moment something spreads, is remixed, goes viral, or sparks a chain of responses. The artwork is no longer a static thing, but a node in a network, an event in a feed. Its meaning doesn’t come from what it says, but from what it does in circulation.
As a result, traditional categories like originality, authorship, and even creativity are being reconfigured. The question is no longer “who made this?” but “how did it move?” and “what did it activate?” In this system, value isn’t based on rarity or economic exchange alone—it’s based on position within a social field of attention.
So what is art in the age of AI? It’s not the death of the human imagination. But it is the end of the artist as sole origin. Instead, we are all becoming participants in a broader process: watching, sharing, prompting, curating, iterating. We don’t create meaning alone—we find it in patterns, together.
The shimmer is real. But you have to be looking in the right direction to see it.