Why Artist Residencies Are Culture’s Best Defense Against Automation
A.I. is remaking our social, political and cultural fabrics, and even if we are at the beginning of what this new age will mean for humanity, it is already clear that few things will be the same—not for us or our children. More specifically, what does this new world portend for those of us who have made a home in literature, painting, film, scholarship or any of the other creative disciplines so often grouped together as the “arts and humanities”? If we understand these separate pursuits as comprising a shared and collective attempt to understand our world, our ideas and our humanness, what is lost when we relinquish even a small part of the act of creation to non-human intelligence? If images, conceptualizing or crafting a story or reporting an event can all be produced by the machinery of A.I., will we soon start to forget about the works of art that were created not by optimizing inputs, but through deep human introspection and rigorous iterative creativity fed by emotion, empathy and human intelligence?
A fundamental part of what makes us all human, and what has connected societies throughout the long sweep of recorded history, is the desire to create forms of written, visual and auditory expression that deepen our knowledge of ourselves, connects us and allows us to reflect on all that it means to be alive.
We have begun to see creative labor being automated, which is why now, perhaps more than ever before, artists, writers, creators and thinkers need to be supported not just with sentiments, but with space, time and resources. The great works of art that have moved our ancestors and which continue to inspire and confound us today, are not the result of some algorithmic process to find the meaning of human expression, or of collapsing meaningful distinctions between voices or styles in order to generate a talismanic image or text. Instead, they are created by artists who stay stubbornly committed to art as both practice and process, as something that can’t be shortchanged or sped up in the name of expediency or efficiency. The artists we remember are those who embrace difference and call upon the idiosyncrasies of their worldview rather than suppressing or even trying to “correct” them in the name of mass appeal. With critical arts funding being scaled down across the United States, residencies like MacDowell provide vitally important sources of support. The creative process matters, as do the places and institutions that directly support artists, thinkers and others who are also joined in this pursuit.
Founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and pianist Marian MacDowell, MacDowell is the nation’s largest and preeminent artist residency program, established to nurture the arts by providing exceptional creative individuals with an inspiring environment to produce enduring works of the imagination. MacDowell hosts 300 artists annually—including architects, composers, filmmakers, interdisciplinary artists, theater artists, visual artists and writers—from across the United States and around the world. For well over a century, more than 16,500 residencies have been awarded to distinguished artists such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, James Baldwin, Charlie Kaufman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Louise Erdrich, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ayad Akhtar, Moses Sumney and many others.
These artists, and the countless others who have spent time in residency with us, have gone on to create groundbreaking and paradigm-altering works, those made possible and directly supported by their time in residency. Therein lies the hidden importance of residencies like MacDowell’s: many of the works in the world’s greatest museums and libraries, or those of theater and music composition, were made at MacDowell and places just like it. Humans gathered in an environment that supports, encourages and demands deep introspection.
Art and culture are woven into the fabric of everyday life, and in this moment, at the dawn of the age of A.I., we still have the power to choose. Humans can choose to gather in community, choose to write, create and ideate, choose to support artists and thinkers and choose to hold on to what it means to be us, with our human minds and human hearts.
