NOT YET

AI continues to cartwheel through the arts, breaking crockery, changing pay rates and forcing reevaluations of fundamental epistemological, ontological, and teleological truths.   

Processes that began slowly with the invention of photography continued to pick up speed and today hurtle forward at a pace that permits little time for meditation or assimilation. 

Works of art from previous generations can be cannibalized, deconstructed and seamlessly reassembled by people with no apparent talent other than the ability to type on a keyboard. Look at how this YouTuber removes Cary Grant from the classic movie Charade and puts himself in the movie:  

Another example: a different Youtuber easily resurrects dead movie stars such as Paul Newman, Marlon Brando or Audrey Hepburn and makes them the actors in a new movie about the Justice League:

 

Paul Newman as Green Lantern

Just as inferior voices can be enhanced and corrected with the AutoTune voice processing app, inferior pictures can be enhanced and corrected with algorithmic technologies.  The role for artistic skill and even creativity, imagination and taste diminish as technology provides a colorable substitute. 

All of this brings me to the new Fantastic Four movie, scheduled to be released on July 25:

Last week I saw an advance screening of the film, which is based upon the 1968 Galactus Trilogy in Fantastic Four #48 - 50.  Marvel Studios and its corporate partners have employed thousands of people, hundreds of millions of dollars, and the latest software to enhance and embellish Jack Kirby's 12 cent comic book.  They did everything technology could do to improve the original story.

The movie was bigger and nosier, sure, with plenty of attention-grabbing special effects, but as a work of art it couldn't compare with the quality of Kirby's original comic book.  

Kirby's dramatic staging has been replaced by speed.  His costumes have been updated, for the worse.  His meanings have been replaced by explosions.  The complexity of his content has been replaced by bland platitudes about the importance of family.  

The movie is entertaining, but with all of its advantages I find it artistically inferior to the simple comic book.  So for those who say that traditional art forms can be replaced in all meaningful respects by new technologies, I say:

Not yet.