We live in bizarre times. For all of the tech industry promises that AI will unlock an age of abundance and innovation, it seems that so far, its greatest achievement is the mass proliferation of AI-slop anthropomorphic fruit TikTok micro-soap operas, which have gained billions of views in just a few months. An infinite tide of AI-generated video is torching our retinas and our souls. Is this it? Is this really the future of culture? An endless torrent of AI slop, engineered by an invisible Slopbeast.

Most agree we should reject the Slopbeast. Humanity is built for greater things than amusing itself to death in TikTok pleasure palaces. However, few agree on how we move forward. The difficulty is that changing culture requires changing norms. Yet, if we have no sense of what should replace our current norms, then the task feels impossible. At both the individual and collective levels, few have any idea what humans ought to be beyond pleasure-seeking machines.

But AI did not create the Slopbeast, it merely fed it. As Mark Fisher wrote, we are living through “the slow cancellation of the future,” and amid this pessimism, a toxic nostalgia has become entrenched. The process was already well underway when Fisher was writing in the early 2000s, evident in endless Hollywood reboots, the “retromania” turn in music, the constant band reunions, the upcycling of fashion trends. This zombie culture was intensified by recommender algorithms that trend towards what pleases (or simply does not offend) the most people possible.

It has reached its apotheosis with large-language models which, short of unleashing new forms of cultural production, simply remix the detritus of the past. Our techno-industrial system has created mass audiences and vast production capacity, owned by investors who are increasingly incentivized to favor low-risk rent-seeking and margin expansion over innovation. As Jon Askonas argues: “The incentives for investors skew more every year towards the marketing, exploitation, and further development (aided by deepfake technology) of the old over the discovery of the new.” 

In other words, cultural stagnation and the slop machine are the by-products of extreme market efficiency. And so, the dopamine-inducing delights of a Las Vegas casino have become the organizing logic of the economy. Hence the slide into what Fisher calls “depressive hedonia”, a hollow existence where we compulsively chase cheap digital thrills not to feel good, but simply to numb ourselves. Our economic model feeds this cycle of distraction, entirely blinding us to the question of how we forge the future.

What, then, is to be done? 

A spiritual war is brewing over the future of our culture in the age of AI. Two loosely connected factions have taken shape: I call them the Arcadians and the Prometheans. 

The Arcadians believe humanity can free itself from the meaninglessness of the slop by recovering a sense of rootedness from the past. They take their name from Arcas, the son of Zeus who taught his people to weave, bake, and farm. He embodies the pastoral ideal of a life defined not by conquering nature, but by deep rootedness within it. Arcadians take many forms: digital detoxers swapping smartphones for dumbphones; trad-wives baking sourdough to reject the girlboss grind; the tradcath movement; vitalists consuming raw milk and offal to escape industrial food; and RETVRN aesthetes posting images of classical architecture on X. Among the privileged, this manifests as Bopeas — or bohemian peasants trading doomscrolling for doomstrolling, retreating into nature, Waldorf schools, and the revival of heritage rituals.

While the Arcadians’ politics often vary wildly, they share a hunger for community and rootedness. Taking their cues from everyone from Jean Jacques Rousseau and Henry David Thoreau to William Morris and Martin Heidegger (and even Ted Kaczynski), the Arcadians believe the war against digital ephemera requires embracing friction and things that are “real”. To the Arcadians, the idea of craft has gained a magical reputation as the antidote to the algorithm. Whether it is the tangible crust of sourdough, the ink of a real pen on paper, or the labor of a woodworker, they look to craft as a source of stability. If slop is easy to create, consume, and forget, craft is the opposite. 

Now, many Arcadians have some good ideas. They are entirely correct that we ought to slow down and tune into the material world. There is profound wisdom lost to the efficiency of technological society, recovering some roots is essential.

Yet, as a political and cultural strategy, the Arcadian retreat is doomed to fail. Without some vast hidden fortune funding the lifestyle, or a genuine reduction in living standards, it is either financially inaccessible or a lot less aspirational than it looks on the screen. Further, the Arcadian appeal to some nebulous idea of “authenticity” can easily lead them to fetishize a pastiche of the past that never existed and no longer makes sense. People who learn from the wisdom of the past do not seek to live there. Aspiring to all live like chic bizarro Amish may ward off the slop for some, but it is unscalable. If we want to save the world, we cannot just retreat to the woods. We need a vision that is as powerful as the technology we face.

This brings us to the Prometheans. Named for the Titan who stole fire from the gods, they embody the industrial ideal of using power and technology to transcend our limitations. The Prometheans agree with the Arcadians: the slop must stop. Yet rather than retreat to nature, they believe we must seize the means of computation. They want to capture the raw power of AI, nuclear energy, and heavy industry to deliver a new era of civilizational dynamism. 

The obvious avatars of the movement are the modern oligarchs: Elon Musk with his visions of interstellar colonization; Peter Thiel and his dream of using Palantir to fuse the digital and real-world infrastructure; Jeff Bezos with his Project Prometheus AI Lab; and one crypto entrepreneur’s mission to build a 305ft Great Colossus of Prometheus on Alcatraz. But the energy spans the political spectrum. On the right, it animates the so-called Effective Accelerationist (e/acc) movement as well as Marc Andreessen’s “American Dynamism” defense tech fund and his Techno-Optimist Manifesto (inspired by the Italian Futurist, Filippo Marinetti). The Yuppiefuturists also live here. 

However, there are Prometheans of the left, too. Prometheanism fuels the emerging Abundance/YIMBY axis — progressives like Ezra Klein who argue we must aggressively deregulate and build our way to post-scarcity. Uniting them all is a hunger for agency. There was a strain of this thinking in Aaron Bastani’s decade-old vision of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, too. While the Arcadians crave rootedness in the past, the Prometheans demand mastery over the future. 

The Promethean worldview is most fiercely articulated in Palantir co-founder Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s manifesto, The Technological Republic. Karp mourns the collapse of Western ambition, lamenting an engineering elite trapped in a “thin utilitarianism” — building addictive social media and delivery apps instead of solving the hard problems of civilization. He argues for a new alliance between the state and software industry to reboot the West. 

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Yet, beyond energy abundance, fully automated industry, and unstoppable militaries, the Prometheans lack a vision of culture. The more trad ones say we can choose to re-engage in Western traditions. The progressives focus more on growing the pie to distribute goods. But what should this future look and feel like? Why are we doing all this? Do we want energy abundance, dark factories, and robot militaries, just so we can go back to mindless slop consumption?

Even Karp, unusual in Silicon Valley for his philosophy PhD from Goethe University, acknowledges the problem.

“Other nations, including many of our geopolitical adversaries, understand the power of affirming shared cultural traditions, mythologies and values in organizing the efforts of a people. They are far less shy than we are about acknowledging the human need for communal experience. The cultivation of an overly muscular and unthoughtful nationalism has risks, but the rejection of any form of life in common does as well. The reconstruction of a technological republic in the United States and elsewhere will require a re-embrace of collective experience, of shared purpose and identity, of civic rituals that are capable of binding us together.”

Nevertheless, this nod to shared culture lacks bite. Re-embracing a Western canon of shared texts, values, traditions, and rituals is easier said than done. Without reopening the endless debate of what constitutes “canon”, the real problem is that the social ecosystems and infrastructure that once enabled a canon to shape minds have been scrambled. 

As Tanner Greer has argued, the technologists of earlier industrial revolutions were animated by more than a love of money and a reading list. In the United States, industrialists “demanded coor­dinated action across economic, political, social, and cultural fronts.” To cultivate the flame of their revolutionary cultures, industrialists built institutions that rooted wealth and expertise in a shared national project: from Protestant civic culture and Union League clubs to elite schools, Ivy League colleges, and engineering societies that forged a techno-national elite.

Despite its aristocratic flavor of hierarchy, Britain followed a similar pattern. Its industrialists built both ambitious firms and moral worlds. Henry Tate, the literal sugar daddy industrialist, transformed wealth into culture, founding the Tate Gallery in 1897 to elevate cultural enrichment and taste. Meanwhile textile magnate Titus Salt’s Saltaire and chocolate king Henry Cadbury’s Bournville represented an attempt to build healthy, flourishing communities around the principles of self-advancement. We may laugh at such high-handed visions — or suspect the motives of those who advanced them — but still. Can you imagine a contemporary tech founder proposing anything remotely similar? 

In focusing on power alone, Prometheans risk falling into the same trap as Arcadians: cosplaying the past with no sense of the deep interrelation of cultural, politics, and techno-industrial progress. What matters is not rebuilding the institutions of yesterday but decoding what functions culture must serve in the future, and how ideas from the past can be revitalized, reimagined, or forged anew within institutions capable of sustaining them.

Reindustrialization is meaningless without an optimistic and popular future to build towards. A pure worship of computation and power offers, at best, a sterile utopia, and at worst, a narrow Nietzschean framework that prizes brute strength above all else. We need economic and technological dynamism — but we also need soul.

Perhaps this is where the Arcadians have something valuable to contribute. If the Prometheans wish to destroy the slop machine by building a harder, better physical world, maybe the Arcadians can enchant it. But where do we find the binding myths and practices to forge a cultural foundation for the Age of AI? How do we reconnect with our roots while unleashing dynamism?

Currently, the marketplace of ideas is highly theoretical. Andrew Bennett’s Sovereign Albion project seeks to revive a shared cultural framework rooted in deep British folklore, while also pursuing AI sovereignty and energy abundance. Meanwhile, various strains of Anglofuturism promote an archeo-futurist dream of small modular reactors, village cricket, and thatched roofs. 

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But for now, much of this remains trapped in the realm of ideas. Vibes are not enough; we must make the word flesh. Ideas may change the world, but to make meaning, they need to be seen and touched.

The Victorian polymath John Ruskin understood this better than anyone. For Ruskin, buildings were not merely structures but physical manifestations of moral philosophies. In The Stones of Venice, he argued that architecture reveals the inner life of a civilization: its ideas of the good life, its hierarchies, its sense of beauty. Ruskin defended Gothic revival architecture, arguing that rather than being twee and nostalgic, it was a rebellion against the efficiency-obsessed culture of Victorian industrial capitalism. Gothic revivalism, by contrast, embodied human imperfection, craftsmanship, and dignity. 

Contemporary culture is similarly obsessed with optimization. But where Victorian industrialism produced the factory town, today’s forces are globalization and high-tech capitalism. Soulless neo-modernist towers of glass and steel stand as monuments to a placeless world optimized for capital and mobility over roots. Ruskin diagnosed the spiritual cost of industrial modernity, but reviving Gothic today could never fully answer the problem once steel, concrete, globalization, and high-tech culture reshaped the world. The deeper question remains: how can a civilization become modern without becoming placeless?

Written over four decades ago, architectural critic Kenneth Frampton’s seminal 1983 essay, Towards a Critical Regionalism, offers a path through the Arcadia-Prometheus maze. Drawing on the French philosopher Paul Ricœur, Frampton highlighted the defining cultural tension of our time: “How to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.” Frampton offered a blueprint for navigating this exact tension. He argued that we must fiercely reject both the sterile, placeless monoculture of globalized modernism and the sentimental, kitsch cosplay of historical nostalgia. Instead, we must harness the universal power of modern engineering and technology, while remaining rooted in the local topography, climate, light, and tectonic traditions of its specific place. It is a demand to use the machine to honor the local.

Today, this philosophy inspires some of the most compelling architecture in Britain. We see it in Witherford Watson Mann’s Stirling Prize-winning work at Astley Castle, where ancient, ruined masonry is seamlessly fused with ultra-modern glass, timber, and brickwork. We see it in Niall McLaughlin’s New Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which marries modern environmental engineering with centuries-old structural timber traditions, seamlessly blending in next to the neo-classical Pepys Library, its considerably older brother. Both blend technological and material innovation with the deep wisdom of heritage, culture, and aesthetics.

This dynamic fusion need not be limited to architecture. Several maverick technologists and makers around the world are rallying around an emerging new approach to design, aesthetics, and manufacturing that brings the Arcadian spirit of heritage craft together with the cutting edge of Promethean technology, fusing the best insights and capabilities of both to develop things that are not only useful and beautiful, but scalable. Their work falls into four paradigms of what I call “artisanal intelligence”: resurrecting lost styles, augmenting struggling crafts, pushing aesthetic frontiers, and scaling the genius of craft into entirely new domains.

Some are reviving dormant aesthetics for a mass audience. Not Quite Past uses generative AI to design personalized delftware and chinoiserie-inspired ceramics, digitally printed in Stoke-on-Trent, Britain’s pottery heartlands, making a dying aesthetic once reserved for the wealthy accessible to all.

Others use technology to augment crafts on the brink of extinction. Monumental Labs pairs CNC-milling robots with stonemasons to produce ornate statues and facades, absorbing the apprentice toil that is no longer sustainable. Meanwhile Sony has trained AI on centuries of Japanese archives to generate new, structurally complex kimono weaves for master artisans to execute.

Others push aesthetic frontiers altogether unreachable by just hand. At Shanghai’s Chi-Se gallery, Archi-Union programmed robotic arms to salvage and re-lay recycled bricks with inhuman precision, generating a fluid, undulating façade whose curves draw on the ornamental tradition of jali brickwork, a form that could never have been achieved by conventional masonry.

Finally there are those that are transcending traditional craft logics and aesthetics by unlocking their deeper logic and pushing them into entirely new domains. Petit Pli merges the ancient geometry of origami with advanced materials science to create children’s garments that grow alongside the child.

This virtuous fusion of heritage craft and cutting-edge technology is more than an aesthetic choice — it is a path to a glorious, techno-crafted future. A future with a soul, even. Empowering craftsman-technologists to unleash this artisanal intelligence to build the magical products, processes, and industries of tomorrow is essential. Indeed, the digital age itself was born from the workshop: the modern computer would not exist without the Jacquard loom, where the ancient craft of textile weaving birthed the concept of programmable punched cards. What other world-changing innovations might we unlock by bringing the invisible wisdom of master craft to the bleeding edge of the technological frontier?

Today, however, the tech elite defaults to a deracinated, placeless approach to design and innovation, while traditional makers remain deeply skeptical of the machine. These two worlds need not be at war. As Askonas argues, the machine has no innate tradition — it must be given one. Following Simone Weil, Askonas argues the future relies on an act of enracinement, or intentional re-rooting — refracting innovation through active participation in a community that preserves ancestral treasures to anchor our placeless technologies in local, material culture.

A vision of how this might look in a British context is found in historian Alexander Langland’s 2017 book Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts. Examining King Alfred the Great’s ninth-century translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, Langlands notes that cræft — the forefather of today’s “craft” — rarely meant simply “handmade.” Rather, in contexts ranging from statecraft to navigation, cræft referred to the virtuous application of power, skill, and knowledge to forge excellence. As Langlands writes, Alfred used it to translate the Latin concept of virtus into an Anglo-Saxon context. Cræft blended moral excellence, power, and capability into “an almost undefinable sense of knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness.” It was not simply the physical labor of hands — but a profound, embodied coordination of the hand, eye, and mind, representing a state where physical execution and deep intellectual ingenuity are at one. 

This older, deeper definition of cræft is what we must recover in the age of AI. “In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool,” Marx argued in Das Kapital, “in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”

In previous Industrial Revolutions, the factory liquidated the cræft of the weaver and the smith, replacing the dynamism of what David Pye calls the “workmanship of risk” with a “workmanship of certainty,” where inputs and outcomes were entirely predetermined. In a mature industrial society, whether producing a chair or a SaaS tool, certainty is baked into the system. The human exists simply to ensure the machine does not jam.

While AI, as the ultimate machine of prediction, could be the apotheosis of this logic, it cannot replace the hazardous magic of genuine creativity. Such work is more than pattern recognition and regurgitation, but an exercise in is restraint, deep storied insight, and cræft.

To catalyze this, we need maker-technologists to embrace a new vision of the workmanship of risk — where the CNC mill, 3D printer, and AI-powered software handle the tedious toil to unleash deeper creative work. We already see this in Monumental Labs’ delegation of rough cuts to robots. Meanwhile, facing a shortage of apprentices, luthiers are turning to CNC mills to raise their ambition, making kooky new types of stringed instruments that were previously too risky to attempt. It is in this bold synthesis of artificial and artisanal intelligence that the future of humane, cultural excellence lies. 

Where do we go from here? The opportunity is vast, but action is more limited. If we want to tame the Slopbeast and root our future technologies, we must refuse to be trapped cosplaying in Arcadia, nor should we blindly worship the brute power of Prometheus. Rather than succumb to the AI fruit slop, the builders of the future must unleash the spirit of artisanal intelligence and breathe meaning into the machine. It’s time to cræft.

The episode reminded me that while toddler art is probably not worth that much money, it was the original impetus for my accidental second career as a writer. When my daughter was in preschool, I used to swap photos of her latest finger-paintings and collages with an art-world friend, accompanied by titles, dates, and solemn thematic commentary in the style of a contemporary gallery. Then I posted a few of these online, and was surprised when the blog went modestly viral. Another friend saw it, encouraged me to write more, and now here we are.  

But what even is “art”? What is it for? How can anyone tell when something is “art”? The whole bit for that toddler-art blog was the fact that sometimes it’s genuinely hard to tell whether a painting was done by a graduate from Central St Martins or by a sticky preschooler in a bib. Nothing, that is, except where it’s displayed, and the price tag. Sometimes not even that: German child artist Laurent Schwarz, now four years old, regularly sells paintings for thousands and recently landed a marketing deal with paint manufacturer Relius. 

We might be forgiven for wondering whether the definition of “art” isn’t as elusive as the one given in 1946 by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, to define “obscenity”: “I know it when I see it”. But there is surely more to the question than just personal judgment, not least because not even “art” is immune to today’s omnivorous, omnipresent culture war. 

Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than in the public art installed on plinths and in high-traffic areas, where new works routinely attract Right-wing complaints of “wokeness”, or of ideologically monolithic elites imposing weird, mutant iconography de haut en bas. The painter Alexander Adams, one of Britain’s more vocal conscientious objectors to this moral monoculture, writes furiously of an insular internationalist consensus that has sewn up government and philanthropy, and now operates as a closed shop. So what is this closed-shop promoting? 

If we’re to believe the Box venue in Plymouth, it’s art as a kind of therapeutic emollient for the soul. The venue recently published an independent report claiming it has made a £43-million contribution to local communities, including by reducing dementia and depression, and improving visitors’ health and productivity. In this view, an arts venue can be seen as contiguous to, and as a kind of extension of, other municipal “services” such as leisure centers and doctors’ offices. But this suggests nothing grander in aspiration than “art” understood just as a supplement one can take, like cod-liver oil, in order to function more effectively as a fungible work unit: as something barely distinguishable from any other kind of improving leisure activity, such as swimming or studying Spanish.

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Is that all? Some might say the only thing that makes modern “art”, as per the joke of my old blog, is a context which signals to the viewer that they should perceive something as “art”. To take one famous example, a urinal is for men to pee in, until it’s signed and submitted to an art gallery, as by Marcel Duchamp in 1917. At that point it becomes “art”, or maybe a lightning-rod for debate about the nature of art, or indeed more recently a byword for the absurdity of recent efforts to “Westernize” Afghanistan at gunpoint. 

In this rarefied and highly intellectualized context, then, we might claim that it doesn’t matter if the toddler did the painting, or if the banana duct-taped to a gallery wall is the “original” banana or a replacement after another artist ate the first one. What matters is everyone playing along that this really is an “artwork”.

But if it’s all really that abstract, why the concerted efforts now afoot across the developed West to re-moralize art? No major gallery seems immune to curators hell-bent on “reimagining” and “decolonizing” the archives, or public-art consortia commissioning works on leadenly pious progressive themes. Taken together, it all suggests (implicitly at least) an intuition that there’s still more to “art” than just whatever I like or find intellectually stimulating, or else (as in Plymouth) therapeutic leisure for “communities”.

When “art” is so contested, it’s difficult to see why this would be the case. For a clue, though, take a walk round the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, which houses medieval and Renaissance paintings. Do that in the right frame of mind, and you can sometimes catch a glimpse of what “art” used to be, before it was “art”. But it’s tricky; for unlike modern “art”, which sometimes only reads as such because of the gallery context, premodern paintings have to be considered outside the gallery context before they become legible. 

Even though, today, the National Gallery hangs these works as though they are “art” in the modern sense, many were originally painted for churches or private chapels. In their original context, these were not “art” in the sense of something nice to look at on the living-room wall. They were for spiritual use: devotional objects that happen to take the form of pictures. 

Artistic works with a spiritual orientation, such as paintings of scenes from the Bible, rest upon a radically different set of assumptions about their own grounding. The older stream of Christian thought within which such works were created believed these should point beyond human experience, toward what classical philosophy called the “transcendentals”: a dimension that now survives only in classical Christian pedagogy, under the heading “the good, the true, and the beautiful”.

It’s difficult to imagine a mainstream contemporary artist today talking in these terms. Why? The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar argued that, especially since the Renaissance, the West has by degrees turned away from this transcendental approach to aesthetics, replacing it with a more human-centric approach to the creative arts. In the process, the arts came adrift from the divine. Churches were cleansed of imagery by Puritan iconoclasts; in the wake of this rupture, across the ensuing centuries, “art” flowered in its familiar secular form. 

These are the kinds of works that would, in time, occupy the “gallery” setting: artifacts that hover awkwardly between decoration and their former link to the spiritual world. This association still persists, albeit in degraded trace form, in the instrumentalist view of an art venue as a kind of spiritual cod-liver oil. But beauty gradually came to be understood as “for” only itself, then as something entirely subjective — and finally as irrelevant to the real domain of “art”, which is pure idea. In this outlook, it doesn’t matter if the banana gets eaten and replaced; there is no banana, just the idea of one. Now, though, this economy of abstraction may be approaching a terminal state — and, out the other side, showing early signs of re-moralization. 

The most recent sale of the banana “artwork” was for a whopping $6.2 million, to a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur, who vowed to eat it (again) as his contribution to the “work”. And what makes this so intriguing a development is the parallel between this kind of “art” and the cryptocurrency that paid for it. Cryptocurrency’s purely abstract, un-grounded economy and its mimetic process of assigning value bear a strong resemblance to the one in which this kind of conceptual art acquires value and is traded. 

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Just as crypto has no material referent, and gains its value via the aggregate of purchasers’ belief in its value, so “art” in the banana or urinal (or toddler painting) sense floats largely free of any stable aesthetic, cultural, or even material referent. These meme-worlds in turn come together in the lively market for “artworks” in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), such as the “milady” and “bored ape” genres. 

But this isn’t the only way the internet is shaking up art’s state of terminal abstraction. As well as threatening mediocre creators with a tide of AI-generated “slop” imagery, those deft enough to use it, and clear enough in their vision to build a following, are finding ways to thrive outside the state-art cartel — whether by connecting like-minded dissidents, as Adams observes, or by enabling sales directly to customers. 

And here, notwithstanding the slop-tide, there’s still demand for real work, by real artists. But the kind of art that enables an artist to build a platform in this environment is very different. The self-taught British painter Ross Baines, for example, paints portraits for MMA fighters, along with themes from pop culture and (and not very progressive) politics. Recent works in this vein include a portrait of the murdered American conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and a work based on a viral photo from the recent Unite The Kingdom rally in London, showing a man atop a stone lion on the South Bank, holding a cross and St George’s flag. There is no way on earth Baines would be able to sell prints of a painting from a Tommy Robinson rally if he relied on mainstream galleries to stock his work. 

The internet, then, is driving “art” out the other side of abstraction in search of engaged buyers. Is a painting of a Tommy Robinson rally “the good, the true, and the beautiful”? Debatable; but it’s a step in the direction of reconnecting painting with a moral vision. And the same trend is even discernible, albeit mostly negatively, in the kind of “woke” public sculpture conservatives love to hate. For unlike the kind of abstract public art that characterized the 20th century, the “woke” kind is progressive precisely in its attempt to “subvert” some variation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. And this still means tacitly acknowledging the transcendentals themselves. 

Meanwhile, outside the progressive arts-industrial complex, creators are less self-conscious about re-moralizing their work. Baines isn’t my cup of tea, but he’s creating heroic iconography for an audience of (I’d guess) largely secular Right-wing men. His work seems to find buyers. Others, such as the podcaster and Greek Orthodox icon-artist Jonathan Pageau, are more frankly spiritual in their subjects — and likewise seem to find buyers. Notably, Pageau has done an end-run round the gallery ecology, selling his work exclusively via a digital portal he himself controls. But importantly, his work is not “art” in the modern gallery sense; it’s closer in intent and function to the paintings now, misleadingly, hung as “art” in the Sainsbury Wing. 

It would be a mistake to read any of this digitally enabled creativity as an “art movement”. It’s the opposite: a movement away from “art”, as such, in the anthropocentric sense we’ve grown accustomed to, toward a reunification of aesthetic and spiritual values. Whether in negative “woke” form or (however clumsy) dissident attempts at positive ones, the transcendentals are coming back. 

If there’s a struggle ahead, it won’t be over what “art” means, or which style of painting is desirable, or whether the banana is real. It’ll be over the fundamentals. What do we mean by “good”, “true”, and “beautiful”? The internet has freed a new generation of creators and visionaries to grapple with that question. We’d better hope they come up with something before the tide of AI imagery drowns us.