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Friday Slide Show: Blown Glass
23 May 2025
We look at this glass vase every day. It seems to have always been there on the little table above the heater vent in the dining room. But we can't recall how we came by it.
It must have been a gift, and if so, we have a good idea who gave it to us. But we don't remember. We would be making things up.
For all the noise about the inroads artificial intelligence is making in the arts, it's important to remember it isn't making art. It isn't creating. It is recreating. Without some archive of what has already been done, it could not produce anything.
The arts have often been described as mimetic but in the sense they mimic life, not art. AI is only mimetic but miming art, not life. It cannot imagine. It can only recombine.
It can not make things up.
We do look at this vase every day. We get lost in its swirls and patterns and colors that we are sure are unique to it, cannot be reproduced or copied, no matter how gifted the artist.
Because artists are not machines. They dance with their props to the music of their dreams.
They welcome what we call serendipity, the collision of the unplanned and the fortunate. The artist takes credit for having attended the birth, and rightly so, but cannot recreate it. The artist recognizes it and plays it out but does not control it as one might paint by numbers.
The vase's color is the most obvious example of that serendipity. Accidental beauty, you might call it. But the lip of the bowl is what gets us. The waves of it that recall just how molten the glass was as the artist let it hang on that side a moment longer than another.
We are fond of pointing out photographic choices because they argue for the art. You could, as a photographer, shoot the same thing many different ways. But you pick one approach.
And if the wind is right, serendipity will swing your way and you will hitch a ride and see in something as brittle as green glass the tides of an ocean holding unimaginable lifeforms within it.
