Art School Confidential
Why art schools are surrendering creativity and how they might reclaim it
“In the future some people will excel at AI while the majority will have great TikTok accounts,” an AI researcher who builds generative systems lamented to us one evening. It stuck because it named a split that feels scarily familiar: a small group who can shape machine systems and a much larger group rewarded for performative polish and reach. This is a cultural problem, and it is clearly visible in art and design schools that claim they are defending human creativity while quietly reorganizing themselves around new tools.
“Today’s superrich no longer imitate a pseudo-aristocratic lifestyle with horse prints on the wall. Now, you better have a Koons and a Hirst or you’re going to look provincial.”
— Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s principal auctioneer
AI systems can now generate images, text and video on demand. Less visible is how those systems are bound up with the market logic that has reshaped art and design for decades. In the 1980s, the contemporary art market expanded dramatically. Works by Jean-Michel Basquiat from 1982 now fetch tens of millions and function as financial assets as much as cultural statements. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst turned spectacle and polished manufacture into repeatable vehicles of value. Owning the right names became a social signal. As Mark Kostabi argued in a 60 Minutes interview, that logic made the buyer the arbiter of value, often eclipsing the artist’s own intentions.
