Luigi Bonfante

Can Machines Make Art? The giant leaps of generative artificial intelligence confront us with a dilemma. If in the mid-twentieth century a brilliant scientist, Alan Turing, could imagine a machine capable of thinking like a human being, today ChatGPT and other programs do much more: they write texts, compose music, and create images that are now difficult to distinguish from the products of flesh-and-blood artists. Can systems like DALL-E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion truly replace humans in one of their most emblematic and elusive activities? Can art exist without an artist?To answer these questions—and many other queries on a topic of great relevance—Luigi Bonfante guides us through the discovery of the machina artifex: its mechanisms, potential, contradictions, and the theories shaping its evolution and its forays into the artistic realm. Starting from a concept of art as a process that necessarily involves human beings, the author takes a close look at AI creativity, highlighting affinities and divergences between the human and the non-human, as well as the possible dialogue between these two dimensions. Particular attention is given to those who, like Pierre Huyghe, have embraced the challenges of this new medium to outline a new "posthuman" aesthetic.Arte senza artista is a reflection spanning history, technology, and philosophy—an essay in which art, observed through the prism of artificial intelligence, still emerges in all its complex humanity. Getting to know the machine better thus becomes a way to understand our own expressiveness, and therefore ourselves.

The history of art, as Benjamin wrote, is a history of prophecies. Certain works of art can only be understood when the circumstances that they anticipated have matured. The century of the avant-garde movements was teeming with subversive enterprises, but there are some whose telluric power jolted modernity forever, creating a new paradigm to fill in the cracks. In fact, the seed of the contemporary first took root in one precise moment: the exhibition of Duchamp’s Fountain. The artist had bought a typical urinal in a plumbing supply shop in New York and sent it to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917, paying six dollars for the privilege to exhibit. The radical break was visible to all: indeed, the very nature of art was being brought into question. After this “alien spore” of non-art, the movement mushroomed through the continuous and systematic transgression of the limits of art. Exploring – to use Arthur Danto’s term – the art world of the dramatic catastrophes of the 20th century, this book recounts the stories behind revolutionary works, inseparable from the personalities and ideas of their authors, precariously balanced between provocation and prophecy. We learn, for instance, that the disconcerting rigour of Cage’s 4'33' of silence has everything to do with the emphasis on the conceptual and the obliteration of the boundary between art and life; that the impetuous Klein’s experiments with the void and Manzoni’s acerbic paradoxical works inaugurate the practice of constructing the myth of the artist, which becomes a work of art in and of itself, and that Warhol’s iconic Brillo Box upends the modernist hierarchies, spectacularly manifesting the cultural turning point that would come to be known as the postmodern. Luigi Bonfante reveals the importance of a retroactive vision able to recognize the most relevant characteristics of the contemporary in these fractures while simultaneously interpreting the ambiguity of the present, without being seduced by the unsolvable question dominating today’s aesthetic: Are we on the brink of an apocalypse or a regeneration?