The Industrial Revolutions of Art Some reasons for studying this intersection, developed in an essay for Amfiteatru Economic
Excerpted from:
Jora, O.D., Iacob, M., Roșca, V.I., Nedelcu, M.R., Preda, A.F., Nedef, M.Ș., 2024. Artificial Intelligence and Artistic Imagination: Revisiting the Cultural Economy of Industrial Revolutions. Amfiteatru Economic, 26 (66), pp. 613-632. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24818/EA/2024/66/613. Full version: https://www.amfiteatrueconomic.ro/temp/Article_3315.pdf.
The bonds between cultural studies and economic science – timeless, as they endure “materially” married, yet peripheral, as they seem “spiritually” divorced – need to be revisited and reviewed with the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0). It is in the midst of the debates on the future of “humanity” (understood as species and spirit) – given the new technologies that affect and alter micro-/meso-/macro-/mondo- business organizations, production processes, consumption habits – that this research endeavour unfolds. Both cultural facts and economic tools are subject to an intricate intellectual “stress test”, therefore scrutinizing the “4.0” cultural concepts/definitions and attitudes/behaviours, observable in markets’ as well as in policies’ deliverables will help us to fairly (fore)see what we might risk losing or stand to win, culturally, as communities, nations, human kind.
Industrial Revolutions (IR) remain at the crossroads of several binomials: intellectual design and spontaneous emergence, institutions and technology, necessity and fortuity, and so forth. The shifts from mechanised production (IR 1.0) to mass production (IR 2.0) then to automated production (IR 3.0) and to the ascending scale/scope of digital transformation (IR 4.0) – with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as flagship technology – triggered mode(l)s of development, devised profound societal upheavals and fuelled worries about freedom and fairness. Culture(s) too host(s) such civilizational twists and turns – as spots of reflection on social disruptions, as sites of refuge from own uprooting, as spaces of sharable hidden energies – and IR 4.0 excites and upsets them via novel ideological biases, vanguard niche markets, public versus private spaces trade-offs, or geo-cultural/-political/-economic resets.
Somehow uncustomary for scientific literature, yet deliberately devised/designed as such, this review essay lays at the beginning (and not at the concluding point) of a research route. Investigating how the most spiritualized territory of human existence – culture/art – interferes with the technical-scientific – materially-prone – trait is worth of economists’ curiosity and concern at least for three reasons:
- “Of vision” (i.e., quasi-theoretically). An economics-informed parallel between entrepreneurs and artists might still prove to be of interest, observing their un/common features (however, critical in their hypostases as IR-drivers and/or IR-absorbers): making/breaking fashions and currents?; speculative/passive towards the change of tastes?; un/parsimoniously engaging their own wealth?;
- “Of revision” (i.e., historically). A synoptic and systemic study of the main economic-cultural mutations from one “generation” of IR to another is still missing. For starters, a sketch of transformational patterns can be observed in labour force (from fully-fledged artists to auxiliary personnel) and business structures (cultural entities or industries) in evocative timespans and emblematic spaces;
- “Of prevision” (i.e., foresight). Some goods/services, of which cultural ones are the most illustrative, are praised precisely because another human provides them, making them truly unique. No matter how productive AI, Machine Learning, Quantum Computing or Robotization get, IR 4.0 faces a limit: consumers’ preference for the human touch, epitomisingly etched in cultural/creative goods.
As it has always been the case with the Industrial Revolutions, no matter their moment in history, technological advancements also meant regional developments as well as disparities. The digital drivers and divides nowadays exists because of regional possibilities in terms of how far digital technologies are accessible to different societies in the world. Future research might explore how digital access can enhance or dampen the worldwide cultural economy. As the popular idiom has it – “AI was invented in the US and regulated in the EU” –, a geopolitical analysis might be interesting in order to find out how the millenary cultural cradle of Europe might lose pace in the digital economy of arts/culture due to stricter regulations of IR 4.0 (see the IA-Act) compared to the US. An open eye is to be kept on China, India or Russia (the latter involved in a cultural-civilizational warfare, where ideology – a cultural product – may be, and already is, weaponized with the “4.0 armoury”). The AI-faked political imagery becomes a kind of “deep societal pornography”.
Future research, more applied than theoretical (yet without excluding the latter), already featuring on the “radar” of the present authors, may target issues of freedom and fairness in producing/distributing/consuming AI-charged art. Thus, the following are worth of inquiry: the profiles of various art segments (literature, performative art, new art) where AI-toolkits mark their presence economically (e.g., efficiency in terms of time, usage of resources, environmental footprint etc.); the importance of AI marketing tools and digitalized selling platforms, such as auction houses and galleries, AI’s impact on international art trade, the involvement to the “4.0 generation” financial dimension (e.g., the role of cryptocurrencies, as against traditional money and payment instruments); the manner and measure in which AI-related platforms contribute to the diversity, equality, inclusivity of art experience, from the perspective of the art consumer, and how much customers are perceived to be recognizing/responding to/remunerating digital art, as compared to the more old-school art.
Also, future research might explore the anthropomorphisation of the cultural economy through AI-generated (ro)bots and how they manifest upon the artistic expression. Such a topic would be worthy of investigation in the context of the arguments brought in this paper that cultural production and consumption are, so long (and at least partially) safeguarded by “the human need for human touch” – without prophesizing, but not excluding either, the emergence of a non-violent, neo-luddite rejection of AI’s pretence in having a say in “real-deal” art. There is possible/plausible/probable (but preferable?) that AI-bots and AI-algorithms, fed with large amounts of data, learn to replicate human decision and behaviour, and, thus, replicate to even more of a finer detail the “human nature” in arts, not only in “techne”? Still, Cultural Economy 4.0, with its praised algorithmic creativity, user experience in culture, or human-AI artistic duets, cannot escape the “emptio-venditio” economic test for validating art: beauty is also in the eye (besides AI!) of the money-holder.
