Are Artists Obsolete?

Several years ago a couple artist friends and I were at the mall.  There was a photo booth that did your portrait in the style of (select one: Rembrandt, Renoir, Ingres, ...).  "We might as well just quit now," one of them moaned as a digital hand moved a digital pencil and drew examples.  Walter Benjamin could not have foreseen this when he penned his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  That was worry over reproduction, after all, and this was . . .  creation?  Why not; computers now write poems and novels, play chess, suggest restaurants you might like, and even can draw pictures of your thoughts or identify words you are thinking.  So why don't we just quit now?  What is there for a person to do that isn't automat-able?

The memory of that moment came to me when my old computer started to fall apart, requiring a replacement.  The new one came with new toys preloaded, including one called "Photo Booth."  It works a bit like the one in the mall except the only specific artist in the selections is this one illustrated above, called 'Pop Art', but obviously it is like a Warhol.  May I have my 15 minutes of fame now?

There were other ways to shoot oneself with this app, or whatever you might manage to get in front of the computer.  At first I thought this was some scheme to appeal to narcissists (maybe I can get the cat to pose) because it seemed the only thing this was good for was self-portraits.  So I tried the drawing version:

This caught me in profile and set me to remembering a page in my earliest hardbound sketchbook from the early 70's (my teen years).  So I hunted it down and photo'd it (above).  It is from near the end of the book and so I am around 19 or 20.  I did not own a camera at the time, and xerox machines did not yet exist.  So to get this profile, two mirrors had to be set just right so that looking into one I could see my profile.  It appears that the claim that one's nose continues to grow must be true.  The mechanical drawing is decades later.  The old sketch was done very quickly and is marred by transfer from the opposing page and stuff bleeding up through like a palimpsest. But clearly the nose is shorter but much lumpier in the old sketch.  Was I imagining that or exaggerating what I saw as a fault?  The human-made sketch records perceptions that the photo can't, even given that there are decades between the renditions. The computer -made drawing has the illusion of being more accurate, but don't believe it.  Every attempt at a photo looks different, sometimes like a completely different person.  The insistently slanted lines get boring after a while. Humans when they draw well vary their line direction and quality, and can thereby get a more interesting and expressive result.  So far.  

This notebook page set me to thinking about other occasional self-portraits I've done over the years.  Nostalgia set in and I flipped through some old boxes of drawings.  I will post some and continue thinking in my next post about the question of whether artists can be replaced by automation the way many other occupations have been.