In the inevitable future of cost optimization and highly automated workforces, it’s reasonable to pose the question: is art justified? The truth is: it isn’t, at least monetarily. There is such a thing as corporate art, or design, that shows its value through monetarily justifiable means, but the grand majority of art cannot be represented in that way. At best, it’s up to individual collectors and investors to grasp at, store, and create value for artworks over time, a process that large public organizations are woefully incapable of justifying. I personally believe this fact is what makes art so important though. In the age of trying to quantify everything, including the quality of an artwork when training a neural network to produce artwork, art itself falls short of that quantifiable nature. In fact, art is the pure unadulterated essence of the unquantifiable. It’s human, or at the very least experimental and non-computational at its core.
