Generative Art: From Code Art to AI Creations and the Need for a New Manifesto

The article explores the rise of generative art, tracing its origins to 1960s code art and examining its current proliferation through AI. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Miguel Benasayag, in his book "La Tirannia dell'Algoritmo," argues that humans now delegate both rationality and creativity to machines. Researcher and artist Kate Crawford identifies a "generative turn" in the art world. Recent milestones include MoMA's acquisition of Refik Anadol's "Unsupervised," a generative work using the museum's visual archive, and Christie's New York's 2018 auction of Edmond de Belamy by the Parisian collective Obvious for over $430,000. The article raises unresolved issues of privacy and copyright, questioning authorship when algorithms play a creative role. It invokes Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as a parallel, suggesting a new manifesto is needed to define art's role in the AI era. Benasayag concludes that while machines express both rationality and creativity, humans must build a bridge connecting technology to their singularity and culture.