Collecting rocks

The rise of a collecting class in direct opposition to AI

One of the things that comes into clarity in retrospect is the pendulum swing of trends and aesthetics and human nature to push back against something we get bored by or is oversaturated. There are a slew examples of this but a few very clear ones off the top of my head -

• Minimalism and Abstract expressionism

• 90s grunge after 80s glam

• Pop Art in response to Abstract art

• Naked dresses in response to the rise of spanx

• Every mid-term election*

• Street art after the rise of slick installation and fabricated art

• Celebrities puling archival vintage in response to influencers being gifted current season designer

Jay Kvapil Ceramics

When people talk to me about AI and art and how people will react, all I can think about is the diametric opposition to AI which is collecting rocks. Ask anyone what their first collection they ever had was, and 99% of people will say rocks. Or maybe shells if they lived near a beach. Different themes like cool shapes, colors, momentos of specific walks, but the end is the same, a sweet pile of rocks that you can look at and touch and organize and stack and line up and talk about and cherish and move around and enjoy. A lot of times we are used to a reaction that is a one to one, visual to visual, for example, but with AI and the art world that won’t work. Tech is moving too fast and the art world is too slow, by design. We are already seeing people talk about wanting videos and photographs on social media being authentic and not as polished to combat the AI slop, but AI will hoover that up as well and start recreating those images and we will be playing whack-a-mole for the rest of our lives trying to express ourselves and share in a real way without being accused of slop. That is why I think the reaction is going to be more physical, more collecting, more stuff. It’s easy to AI a minimal room, harder to do with a bookshelf full of knick knacks. It’s easy to AI a bucolic landscape photo, impossible to AI a fingerprinted ceramic or a hand stretched canvas with gloopy paint. We will (and arguably are already) see more demand for the dead artists and the antiques and vintage. Things that can’t be replicated and can’t be denied as handmade. The value for these will go up as people doubt the origination of ideas in contemporary art. There has been an uptick of “where do they get their ideas” “how do they make their composition” chatter in circles lately that is demonstrably different than the usual “what is your inspiration” conversations we are used to. Last year I spent quite a bit of time in Mayfair London while working on an exhibition and the thing that really stuck out to me was all the displays in the high end windows were craft based or BTS how we make our items. The emphasis on the hand crafted nature was everywhere. Cobblers making shoes, tailors smoothing fabrics, hand cut paper behind the fine jewelry and bags. The 1% is already looking for and responding to reassurances of the human in their goods and shopping experiences, especially as costs are high for labor and goods that it won’t be able to trickle down to the masses in a way that they will find distasteful like they have in the past (quiet luxury designs, wet paint affordable emerging artists) where they turn their back on these ideas as soon as they are widely adopted. I bet we see a rise in performance art with souvenirs to prove you were there and conceptual arts with installation instructions a la Sol Lewitt Wall Drawings or Lawrence Weiner installations. There has already been a rise in in-person performance art experiences and Broadway sales. While the “Timothee Chalamet or Pedro Pascal Look-A-Like” contests held in parks or the “come watch me fold a fitted sheets” might not look like that casually, but it is at the core. They are radical reshuffling of the options people have of how we spend our time, who we spend our time with, and what we do with it. As the entertainment companies are fighting for our attention and arguing for more AI, more vertical stories and more mindless entertainment, the population is responding to (with fervor) to unique honest stories (hello Heated Rivalry) and interesting new perspectives on accessible live performances. I think the collective frothing we saw of Anne Imhoff’s DOOM last spring is an indication of these desires manifest in the loyal art crowd. In a time of untethered unreality, what can hold you down better than an mass psychosis obsession or….a collection of rocks.