On her blog this week, artist Tiffany Gholar introduced her assemblage Make Something Real, declaring in the process, “So far I'm not impressed with the metaverse, or NFTs, or A.I. ‘art.’ I need to get away from screens sometimes. I need to work with my hands. So what if it's messy.”1
It was the kick I needed to finally read Peter Korn’s Why We Make Things and Why It Matters. I bought the book as I was getting into block printing, maybe as a way of trying to cheer myself on, maybe as a way of assuring myself that my failure to achieve real competence in any number of arts and crafts was no reason to lament—that the important thing was that I was doing something with my own hands and getting something out of it.
Korn takes issue with the mind-body divide which so many contemporary societies have inherited: the assertion that results, among other things, in manual labor and skilled trades and crafts being looked down upon as devoid of intellectual stimulation or even content, and hence, as inferior, to, say, being the middle manager of an insurance giant’s regional branch. Before he’d finished college, Korn realized that he couldn’t accept that division, or the resulting understandings of what constituted a good life in the mid-twentieth century. First becoming a skilled carpenter, then moving on to become a master furniture builder and designer, and finally the founder and executive director of the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, Korn makes the case in this book that it’s not only the opportunity that craftsmanship provides for “trusting in one’s hands, mind, and imagination to work as a single, well-tuned instrument” that makes its practice valuable.2 In addition, in devoting ourselves to the production of quality objects that take on their own life in the world, we are also devoting ourselves to “self-transformation,” both as individuals and as beings who are inescapably tied to and dependent upon each other.3
Whether working with wood, words, or even the practicalities of administration, though, Korn asserts that “the essential structure of all forms of creative practice” involves “discovery, embodiment, and communication”—that is, “coming up with new ideas and implementing them;” bringing those ideas into tangible, finished form; and succeeding in the resulting object’s “register[ing] on the consciousness of a respondent.”4 Creative practice, then, although it shapes the individual, does so because that practice involves more than the task of simply getting something done—and more than just doing it and shelving it, or doing it to check off an item on a list. Whether interacting with a fellow artist or craftsman, customer, patron, student, or member of the city zoning board, the ways in which we shape objects and let them out into the world are also shaped by and continue to shape the narratives and the values that result from them, narratives and values that guide the ways we conduct ourselves with each other—maybe another variety of what art critic Dave Hickey called “the way people talk about loving things, and why.”5
In his discussion of why commerce is not by its very nature a bad thing, Hickey described how for him, hanging out in an art gallery or bookstore usually resulted not at its best in a purchase, but in conversation:
People would talk to you, not because you were going to buy something, but because they loved the stuff they had to sell. The guy in the Billabong Surf Shop… wants to talk about his boards. Even if you want to buy one, right now, he still wants to talk about them, will talk you out into the street, you with the board under your arm.6
Whether that guy’s craft is making the boards or just using them like a pro, the craft, the skill in making a quality product and in knowing how to use it reveals how the object, the love of it, the appreciation of its unique qualities and of what it took to achieve that quality, brings people into each other’s lives in ways that allow them to really see and be and communicate with each other.
I share Gholar’s failure to be impressed by any of the AI art generators now out there; my particular beef, though, more involved as I am with word- and not artcraft, is with ChatGPT, which seems recently to have sprung out of nowhere into the public eye. Recalling the nightmare of past teaching experiences identifying work that was not students’ own, when I first heard about the bot, I initially grew concerned about how much more difficult and time consuming it must be now for instructors to do anything about what Noam Chomsky called “basically high-tech plagiarism.”7
But it’s not just students’ plagiarism that’s an issue; it’s also those students’ willingness to use the bot in the first place that Chomsky sees as a sign of poor, unengaging educational practices based in “efficiency” such as “teaching to test.” As Korn might agree, the valuing of efficiency over real learning shapes what we think education is and should do, how and whether we will or are meant to grow and be transformed by education instead of just hoping to receive some sort of grade or certification or marketable skill—and consequently, what we’re willing to do and accept in order to achieve the outcomes that education is meant to produce. It makes sense that the results of an educational program focused on so-called metrics—on quantifiable measurements in lieu of the processes needed to internalize something about the matter at hand, or to understand something about oneself in mastering that matter—would feature not only a lack of encouragement or desire to “improve oneself” through doing one’s own work; not only approval granted for passing off a robot’s work as one’s own. Another probable upshot is the apparent willingness to accept output so poor, it’s laughable to anyone who takes the time to read it. Or as Jonathan Zeller’s article in McSweeney’s has it, “total crap:”
we are proud to bring the written word into the future with revolutionary technology that delivers the one thing readers are most passionate about: efficiency. The purpose of writing is to take up space, and this AI does that even faster… Without writers, editors, photographers, and photo editors, our company will incur almost no expenses when putting out Total Crap…
We are on the brink of a better world where humans won’t need to waste their time thinking or feeling.8
Maybe it’s all fine, if you’re just fooling around and seeing what kind of ridiculous responses a computer will hand you. But getting a bot to write your intro to psych paper is another matter, a devious point from which it’s easy enough to keep going. Witness the self-humiliating communiqué released by Peabody College’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Office at Vanderbilt in the wake of the 2023 mass shooting at Michigan State. Had the thing not been produced by a bot, I’d hope that whoever was responsible for it would have been taken to task anyway for having released such a poor-quality repetition of bland platitudes that completely failed to address anything at all about the shooting itself. As it was, though, whoever cast the piece of junk into the world didn’t bother to cover their tracks, failing to remove from the space between the end of the message and the sign-off of two deans and a graduate assistant the phrase “(Paraphrase from OpenAI's ChatGPT AI language model, personal communication, February 15, 2023).”
As many an outraged student pointed out, the email made a mockery not only of the university’s own policy against using the bot in student assignments (not to mention the fact that it came from authorities ostensibly teaching future educators how to do their jobs, and do them well); the message clearly seemed to indicate that the office viewed its communication as a box-checking exercise, and that it couldn’t be bothered to take the time to write it themselves, or even to summon up and share any of their own sorrow or sympathy.9 As then-Peabody student Bethanie Stauffer observed, “There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself.” Whether out of laziness, callousness, fear of messing up a delicate emotional situation, or maybe not caring at all, the message displayed the efficiency of total crap, and of the results of the type of education Chomsky criticized. In line with Stauffer’s comment, it also ran counter to the values and practices that would be evident in any educational institution supported by Korn: “A school is a community, pure and simple.”10 Or as Peabody student Joseph Sexton put it, “Automating messages on grief and crisis is the most on-the-nose, explicit recognition that we as students are more customers than a community to the Vanderbilt administration.”
The problem, then, was not that ChatGPT didn’t churn out a great essay. The problem was the intention in the first place not to take the time and effort to do one’s own hard, in this case, awkward, work. In an instance where the writing of an institutional communiqué should have been approached with the skill and patience of a master craftsperson, it was treated with either the apathy fostered by celebration of efficiency or a fear so strong of getting it wrong—and hence of not asking for help and going through the learning process that leads to competence, of not taking the time to review the message with others before it went out—that the office got it about as wrong as it was possible to be. And in being unwilling to do the “messy” intellectual work in putting that message together, the office staff also went far beyond the denigration of manual labor in favor of intellectual labor Korn wants to confront; in episodes like this one, even intellectual labor gets sneered at in favor of some other approach to life I just don’t know what to call, other than one as devoid of agency and responsibility as possible.
It’s no surprise that it was my middle school art teacher who refused to follow the efficiency model of education. Seeing how important it was to me that I get my clumsy ceramic bowl right, she let me keep working on it while everyone else moved on to the next unit on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. (How, though, a state assessment committee might have asked, would I ever be able to tick off all of the defining characteristics of those poor nostalgic romantics, if I didn’t keep up the pace?)
Having allowed me to embrace the process of engaged learning over efficiency, she also enabled a very uptight tween terrified of failure to understand that she could succeed in making something with her own hands, in her own style, even if it involved a lot of restarts and reshapings and a lot of time and frustration and mess that might not wind up being perfect: all necessary ingredients in a process that in this case led to at least a bit more self-confidence and ability to let go of the fear of not getting an A. In encouraging me to immerse myself in the worthy endeavor of making something real, and in making me do it on my own, that teacher also let me know it was not only OK to be excited about something, to reveal just a bit of who I was, to let myself revel in the joy Hickey described of people talking about things they love. She was also covertly highlighting and nudging me into what Korn would describe as the process of finding meaning.
That bowl sat on my dad’s desk, lopsided and vaguely resembling an inverted coil of dog shit, until some accident in my twenties or thirties shattered it to irreparable bits. He hadn’t been keeping the container visible just to be nice; it was, after all, big enough to hold a lot of office supplies. But it was also tangible evidence that I could make something someone could and actually was willing to use. That I could put something into the world that, humble and messy as it was, would matter, and would matter because I, and no one and nothing else, had taken the trouble to figure out how to make it.
Tiffany Gholar, “My newest assemblage—‘Make Something Real,’” tiffanygholar.com, 11 May 2023, https://tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2023/05/my-newest-assemblage-make-something-real.html.
Peter Korn, Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman (Boston: Godine, 2013), 53.
Korn, 7, passim.
Korn, 57.
Dave Hickey, “Unbreak My Heart: An Overture,” in Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 13.
Hickey, 13.
“Chat GPT is High-Tech Plagiarism: Noam Chomsky,” on Sociología Contemporánea, 28 March 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJi4VE-0MoA. Chomsky goes on to say that “A student learns nothing from this, of course. Absolutely nothing. It’s just a way of avoiding learning… This is a way of avoiding education.” The problem is education “designed for efficiency, what’s called efficiency… the kind of education that was ridiculed during the Enlightenment… it’s called teaching to test. Absolutely the worst form of education.”
Jonathan Zeller, “Introducing Total Crap, the First Magazine Written Entirely by AI,” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 13 February 2023, https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/introducing-total-crap-the-first-magazine-written-entirely-by-ai.
All quotations on Vanderbilt students’ reactions come from Rachael Perrotta, “Peabody EDI Office responds to MSU shooting with email written using ChatGPT,” The Vanderbilt Hustler, 17 February 2023, https://vanderbilthustler.com/2023/02/17/peabody-edi-office-responds-to-msu-shooting-with-email-written-using-chatgpt/.
Korn, 143.
"[T]he object, the love of it, the appreciation of its unique qualities and of what it took to achieve that quality, brings people into each other’s lives in ways that allow them to really see and be and communicate with each other."
Wow, geez. This is so right on.
In a lot of Surrealist play, the "rules" of each Surrealist game are shared even more gleefully than the results of the game. The intention is for others to try the game, too, to put their own spin on it and share back. You've got me thinking about how this "process over product" attitude is also a key part of the community-building.
Great post, Katy.