Eh, when they’re updating the teaching materials for art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries then. Whatever your flavor is.

It took less time than you think for exactly the reason you might guess. I guess I just see a different ‘brush’.

I’m glad you disagree. I’m fortunately old enough to remember being told that digital art wasn’t real art, and do be alive today where nobody cares, oil painting is cool, brushing up your oil painting in GIMP is also cool, using GIMP alone, still cool.

Just take your same argument and fast forward 30 years and you’ll get ahead.

There are undiscovered art forms and new/reset expectations just around the corner. The first real artist (with real artistic genius) to adopt the tools is going to be in every MOMA around the world.

I spent a little bit but not too much time on this, I hope you enjoy it.

Every generation that decides a new image machine is rotten thinks it noticed first. It didn’t, and there are receipts.

Grant Taylor’s essay “The Soulless Usurper” walks through how the art world greeted early computer art, and the complaints are the same ones being made about generative images right now: mechanically sterile, nobody actually decided anything, a machine getting slipped into a chair reserved for the artist. This you?

Taylor documents sabotaged machines and physical attacks on artists in the late '60s and early '70s, plus a long tail of milder stuff — eye-rolling, flat refusal to call it art at all — running from the medium’s start in the 1960s to the early '90s. His verdict: computer art was “possibly the most maligned art form of the twentieth century.”

Two dates worth holding together. That period is half a century behind us, and the takes aged badly — the plotter drawings critics wouldn’t call art hang in museums now. And the essay came out in 2012, a decade before Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. That’s what makes it useful: Taylor isn’t arguing about AI. He’s describing the previous fight, written before anyone had a stake in how the comparison would land.

Source: Grant Taylor, “The Soulless Usurper: Reception and Criticism of Early Computer Art,” in Mainframe Experimentalism, ed. Higgins & Kahn (UC Press, 2012), p. 18.