The Sublime Tourist
Abstract art may be unique because the creative process is often at the forefront of the finished work.
A constraint-first approach to abstract creative emotion becomes palette limits, edge behavior, surface sheen, and compositional structure. When you peel away the noise, staged frameworks can isolate testing, failure modes, cultural critique language, and end with a piece of creative that sustains emotional states without relying on overt symbols or imagery.
Almost by design, abstract and modern art is overtly free from derivative influences.
It’s a fascinating framework for understanding the human experience of the creative process. It’s also an environment where I’m a tourist.
A writer, a musician, certainly. A designer, possibly. As a marketer and a business storyteller, I’ve worked intimately for years with visual artists of all sorts, particularly with fine artists, to assist in that bridge between pure artistry and the commercial world at large.
With the dawn of AI tools, there are leagues of tourists and foreigners jumping into this realm where creatives are the fluent natives. When the story itself is also art—an expression of some unique experience, decisions need to be made where a derivative is appropriate, and where it’s unacceptable.
Tourists are comfortable exploring limits. So far, every limit I’ve reached, a derivative doesn’t cut it.
“Do everything by hand, even when using the computer.”
One of the guiding mile markers I take with me on this continuous journey is this message from Hayao Miyazaki, one of the best animators and filmmakers of our time. He lends us the perspective of an artist who has transcended multiple technological barriers and shifts during a working career.
As a business professional, certainly a marketer working in-house, embedded within corporations where performance, budgets, and consensus are in ever-present balance, AI and the larger unspoken conversation of “where is derivative acceptable” has been one of those watershed moments.
Let’s get something straight. AI is no more artificial than it is intelligent. In fact, it’s the polar opposite of those two descriptors. It’s an automated resource that integrates within layers. It doesn’t think. It cannot do anything new. And it requires an operator that knows what good looks like.
In that vein, it’s best used at the individual, specific tactical level to automate tasks where immediate, continuous oversight is not required within tolerances.
For genAI, in practice, you need to understand how the magic box works; how and why automated processes are implemented and deployed. Comprehend how the individual source elements that make up a knowledge base are used, and know that while your building blocks are the equivalent of the same prescriptive bricks that make up the things you’re emulating…nothing unique can come of it.
Being unique requires the human touch. This is what separates this technological shift from previous automations such as digital cameras, digital brushes, and tools developed through shortcuts and macros in digital illustration suites.