Can a machine rival Vermeer? Credit: OpenAI

Among the most ingenious moments in Kraftwerk’s admirable oeuvre is the point in 1981’s “Pocket Calculator” when a human voice self-contentedly sings: “By pressing down a special key / It plays a little melody.” The melody follows in confirmation. The genius here seems to lie in the blunt honesty of the singer, owning up to the contemporary condition of music as an art form that has largely been outsourced to machines. It’s not that the German electronic band invented the technology, nor that they were the first to make use of it. They are simply among the first to figure out how to elevate it to self-awareness, and to press it into a gesture of timely irony and potentially timeless beauty; that is, to make art out of it.
The little melody in question is of course a pre-set. Its sequence of notes is planned in advance, and once the key is pressed, the machine may be relied upon to do only the thing it has been programmed to do. The melody, it goes without saying, is no Bach fugue. It is simple, naïve, kind of dumb; and within the context of the song, it is utterly compelling.
Several conditions — technological, cultural, historical — had to fall into place in order for this melodic interlude, with its verbal introduction, to come across to the critical listener as an expression of genius. All of these conditions might be cited in response to any philistine tempted to declare, of the pressing down of that special key, that “I could have done that too”. We are used to hearing such petulant ressentiment, especially in connection with the 20th-century avant-garde in the figurative arts: “I could have entered a urinal in an exhibition, too”; “I could have painted an all-white monochrome, too”; etc. The simplest response is, “Yes, but you didn’t”.
But this is probably too succinct to teach the philistine anything new about how art works. It is going to be particularly important to sensitise people to the logic and dynamics of artistic creation as we enter the new era of AI-generated artworks and are bombarded with new images created by machines following the input of a mere verbal prompt from a human being: DALL·E 2 being a prime example. Among other unpleasant prospects this new technology opens up, we will have to brace ourselves for a new wave of declarations from philistines telling us of the things they could have done too. It will be useful to have something new to say to them in response.
While technical competence is unmistakable, genius has a strange way of horseshoeing with idiocy, which is why we need critics to help us tell the difference. Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire is genius; a suburban kid in 1967 attempting the same, in his parents’ garage, is idiocy. Context matters, and by 1967 Hendrix was almost uniquely positioned to change the world, at least a little bit, with a gesture that would have been merely wasteful if attempted by nearly any other human alive.
Catchphrases that we associate with a particular artist or character are almost always banal in the extreme, but when Jimmy Durante says “Ha-cha-cha-cha” or Jimmie Walker says “Dyn-o-mite!”, we are witnessing a gesture of something like genius as well, or at least of idiosyncrasy, which is akin to genius in that it flows from an individual’s unique ingenium or natural aptitude, and proves to be mostly unteachable and entirely untransferable. I can of course go around evoking “dynamite” whenever I am enthused about something, but it will come across as perplexing at best and pathetically imitative at worst. When Jimmie Walker said it by contrast, he became himself a flash of light, a rupture in our ordinary expectations of the world. I’m a critic and I’m here to tell you that that’s genius.
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