The Work of Art

The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 8

Welcome to a brief installment of the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. I have three drafts in various states of completion, so you may see an uptick in the pace of posts coming to your inbox over the next two or three weeks. Meanwhile, this installment raises the question of the relationship between labor and creativity. In fact, it is just a variation on a question of increasing importance: how do we avoid offloading or automating the kind of work that is critical to our well-being?

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Sometime last week, I began to see an image floating around social media featuring the following quotation from sci-fi/fantasy author, Joanna Maciejewska:

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”¹

It’s a perfectly understandable reaction, particularly from an artist, to much of what’s been sold and marketed as AI over the past year and a half. As I wrote last month, Apple’s ill-conceived ad, “Crush,” had the (unintended) consequence of reinforcing the well-grounded fear that the big tech companies have little to no regard for artists and their work.

But I found myself somewhat uncomfortable with the underlying logic of the expressed desire. It is the same logic that has underwritten the marketing of new technologies for more than a century, and, in my view, it is tragically flawed. I’ve written before about the problems with the logic of “time-saving” or “labor-saving” technologies, so I will simply point you to one of those posts, which includes the following observation:

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.

“If the point is to care and to love and to keep faith,” I concluded, “then what is to be gained by outsourcing or eliminating the very ways we may be called upon to do so?”

In that essay, I was not thinking primarily about the artistic endeavor but rather about the moral dimensions of ordinary experience and about the character of a life well lived. Given Maciejewska’s expressed desire in those viral lines, however, I find myself wanting to make a similar more specific argument with regard to the artistic process.

I, however, would not consider myself an artist, so I want to tread with a due measure of humility. I suppose my modest question is whether there is not a more intimate link between the tasks Maciejewska would rather have a machine perform for her and the nature of her work as an artist.

I wonder, in other words, whether the work of doing the laundry or washing the dishes—these are almost always the examples, but they stand in for a host of similar activities—might not provide a certain indispensable grounding to the artistic endeavor, tethering it to the world in a vital rather than stupefying manner. Or, to take another angle, whether a fidelity to such tasks might not yield certain virtues that might also sustain the artist in their labors: attentiveness, patience, perseverance, or humility, for example.²

I think, too, of these lines from the 19th century artist and critic, John Ruskin: “Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”³

This is not exactly what Ruskin is saying, but it seems to me that something like this can be said about creativity as well as it can about thought (perhaps because thought and creativity are linked quite intimately together).

Perhaps the best expression I know of the sentiment I’m trying to convey is from a poem by Marylin Chandler McEntyre, “Artists at Work,” from her collection inspired by Vermeer’s women:

The craftsman who made the rose window at Chartres
rose one morning in the dead of winter,
shivered into what layers of wool he owned,
and went to his bench to boil molten lead.
This was not the day to cut the glass or dye it,
lift it to the sun to see the colors dance
along the walls, or catch one's breath
at peacock shades of blue: only, today,
to lay hot lead in careful lines, circles,
wiping and trimming, making
a perfect space for light.

When Wren designed St. Paul’s, he had to turn away
each day from the vision in his mind's wide eye
to scraps of paper where columns of figures measured
tension and stress, heft and curve, angle and bearing point.
Whole days he spent considering the density
of granite, the weathering of hardwoods,
the thickness of perfect mortar; all
to the greater glory of God.

And Vermeer with his houseful of children
didn't paint some days, didn't even mix
powders or stretch canvasses, or clean palettes,
but hauled in firewood, cleaned out
a flue, repaired a broken cradle, remembering,
as he bent to his task, how light shone gold
on a woman’s flesh, and gathered
in drops on her pearls.

This poem, to my mind, makes the implicit argument that certain forms of labor, tedious and mundane though they may appear, are nonetheless essential to the work of being an artist. But as I mentioned earlier, I am not an artist, so I cannot support this claim with my own experience. Although, I would say that my writing, while at times certainly impeded by other labors, is, on the whole, improved by those same labors, chiefly because they tether my thought to the world and shape me in a manner that is conducive to clarity of thought and purpose.

Whatever you make about my claims regarding mundane labors and the work of the artist—and artists among you please do tell me how you think about this—I am quite confident that we must resist the temptation to imagine that the path to a meaningful or satisfying life is secured by the unquestioning acceptance of the promise of time-and labor-saving technologies. More often than we might realize, those labors themselves work on us, making us the kind of people who can make good art and fashion a good life.

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Detail from Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (c. 1657)

1. This seems to be the original viral tweet.

2. “Fidelity to daily tasks” is Albert Borgmann’s line, quoted in the same post I linked to a few lines up.

3. These lines can be found in The Stones of Venice. I’m poking around in Ruskin’s work thanks in part to Alan Jacobs, who first drew Ruskin to my attention some years ago.