Beyond the Algorithm: The Return to the Sacred
The art world is currently reeling from a technological "revelation." As reported in The Guardian, AI firms like Art Recognition are now using brushstroke analysis to challenge the authenticity of masters like Jan van Eyck. By training algorithms on "gold standard" works—such as the Arnolfini Portrait—machines claim to identify the "true" hand of the artist with cold, mathematical precision. Yet, this raises a fundamental question of authority: in a world where collectors have fudged provenance for centuries and masterpieces are often heavily restored, who gets to decide which image serves as the baseline for truth?
The Idol of Investment
Currently, authenticity is less about the quality of the object and more about its status as a financial instrument. As seen in the documentary The Lost Leonardo, the $450 million valuation of the Salvator Mundi was driven by a desperate need for a "label" to justify an investment. When we obsess over whether a work is "by so-and-so," we devalue the innate qualities of the art itself—the "shimmering light and supernatural clarity" of the Flemish masters—and replace them with the signification of fame.
Perhaps we have reached a point where the artist’s name should be irrelevant. Once a work exists as an object apart from its creator, its value should reside in its ability to facilitate a meaningful connection with the viewer—or, as I might say, in how well it moves us toward the First Mover. However, the modern art market is a closed circuit of wealth where "experts" hold the keys, often using technology not to find truth, but to provide a veneer of scientific certainty for lucrative attributions.
The Devaluation of the Transgressive
The rise of AI creation will inadvertently expose the hollowness of the current art establishment. For decades, Post-Modern art has sought to diminish tradition by elevating the irrational and the transgressive. It flips the hierarchical value system upside down, celebrating the "cheap" and the "propaganda" of the ego as a way to subvert the past. When art has no real value, the only substitute is the famous ego associated with it. Post-Modern art worships the artist's ego, and those who get in line look to connect to the significance of their own shallow connection to it.
Because AI mimics this Post-Modern practice—shuffling existing data to create "new" transgressions—it will quickly reveal that this style of art is a fraud and a mere commodity. If a machine can generate an infinite number of "edgy" or "conceptual" images in seconds, stealing shallowly from everything, then the results will lose their power. What was once "vogue" becomes white noise.
The Return to the Real
As Jonathan Pageau suggests in his analysis of the "Robot and the Artist," the disembodied nature of AI will eventually drive a "Return to the Real." AI can replicate a pattern, but it cannot participate in a relationship. It lacks what I call the "battlefield of the canvas"—the physical struggle, the human inconsistency, and even the physical injury that changes an artist's mark. In AI, there is no archaeology of the image because there is no history; human time has not made a mark.
We are moving toward a future where authentic interaction and experience become the highest values. In a world flooded with disembodied digital ghosts, the human mark becomes a rare testimony of reality. This shift will move people away from art as a cold investment and toward art that speaks to the actual human experience—art that we can engage with in a meaningful way.
The Liturgical Future
This is why liturgical art is poised to reclaim the foreground. Unlike Post-Modern "mutant" art that celebrates the self, liturgical art is a communal, participative language. It is "incarnational"—it involves the human hand, physical matter, and prayer being transformed into a window to the divine. Liturgical art possesses the unique ability to speak to both tradition and human intentionality simultaneously, offering an experience of art that is communal, traditional, and physical.
This is not to say that AI is not a valuable tool, but rather that it is not an end in itself. In some ways, its greatest value is that it is unintentionally filtering our values and helping us to identify what is truly human and what really matters. AI has clarified where real value lies: it is not in the easily recognizable patterns of brushstrokes that an algorithm can map or the names associated with a work of art. It is actually in the "mess," the intentionality, and the meaningful connection to tradition and higher principles that become evident on the surface of a great work of art. While the experts use AI to validate their investments, the rest of us may find that the machine has done us a favor. It has stripped away the fluff, leaving us with the only thing that truly matters: the pursuit of the sacred through the work of human hands.