The Muse Theory of Value: Creator and Creativity
in the Age of AI
What is the value of art? The answer, of course, varies dizzyingly—especially since for my purposes I will call any and all work of the creative mind Art, from children’s TV cartoons to the newest TikTok dance to the Mona Lisa, a Hokusai woodblock print, the poems of Rumi, or The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. It may be available for free or it may command tens of millions at auction. But the more crucial question in the world we now inhabit is what would be the cost if these creative minds ceased to create?
Marx’s labor theory of value asserts that the surplus value of a product derives solely from the human labor which produces it. I find this argument only partially convincing: The surplus values of iPhones, Air Jordans, or shower curtain rings seem more readily defined by their perceived worth to the purchaser minus the overhead (including labor) required to produce them. Others with deeper knowledge of economic theory and practice, and of Marx, have pursued this question in far greater depth than I can.
What I would like to address is the special case of art. Certainly, in our mercantilist world, we cannot entirely disregard the “product value” of creative works. In viewing the end credits of a modern CGI-intensive blockbuster, the realization may come that each of these names is a human being who needs to pay the rent, put food on the table, purchase corrective lenses after all that screen-staring, and have pocket money to go see the occasional movie themselves. In this respect, if hundreds of minds and hands are to work on a piece of entertainment, it must be consumed and paid for by literal millions in order for the equations to balance.
Ironically, in purely dollar terms, artwork in the form of paintings by dead legends has proven to be among the most lucrative investments in recent years—not non-fungible tokens but actual paintings. Rumors fly of storehouses filled with Renaissance and Modernist masterworks tucked away in climate-controlled crates as mere investments, hidden from plebeian eyes—a slightly more extreme form of the wealth gap that has always existed in access to art.
Does the value of artwork equate to the dollar, yuan, or rupee value a would-be appreciator is willing to pay? Multiplied by the population of that audience? Is, for instance, a superhero movie at $12 per ticket multiplied by an audience of 40 million of identical value to a single painting purchased for $480 million by a lone Scrooge McJohnGaltMusk who hides it away for his eyes alone and suffers not a photon of its beauty to touch the retina of a lesser human?
Here again, let me pause to posit: The value of art lies only secondarily in the gratification it provides to its audience.
Does anyone still believe in the existence of the Muses? Since the days of Shakespeare’s Chorus calling for a Muse of fire, said belief has been on the wane, but for purposes of this article let us assert their existence, at least as a metaphor. Whether their numbers consist of three or nine Sisters, a haint or two lurking in a Mississippi graveyard, a world-spanning Collective Unconscious, or a million synapses being spark-bridged in the minds of a hundred million creative persons around the world—let us not dwell on the theology, psychology, parapsychology, or arithmetic.
Axiom: Art is created through communion between the human mind and the Muse. This communion has been called by various names: flow state, total immersion, creative ecstasy, meeting the Devil at the Crossroads—the rational, reductive, practical, workaday mind subsumed and consumed, temporarily, by that Muse of fire. In our economic milieu we are trained to believe in the supreme motivational power of the Will to Earn. Yet how many can honestly claim that during our working hours we are able to sustain a sacred vision of Mammon—the ringing of cash registers, the ping of credit transactions, the dinging notification of direct deposits—foremost in our minds as we go about our tasks? And what is true of the call-center responder who, if her guard slips, may regard her customers as human beings with needs to be fulfilled out of human concern rather than as mere means of putting money in her pocket—is this not even more true of the artist? Can the painter, even that rare commercially successful painter, hold the image of the dollar sign foremost in mind concomitant with a vision of what is to manifest on the canvas? No; as the artist focuses on the work itself, Mammon’s shallow sheen must be swept away while the Muse’s vision coalesces and drives an amorphous notion toward concrete reality.
Through time spent with Mammon we are diminished. We become grasping, cozening creatures, willing to stab or starve our fellow human beings for a Bob Cratchit’s pittance of pennies. And through time spent in service to the Muse? Unpredictable spirits, those Sisters: they may energize us, delight us, exhilarate us, or they may leave us huddled on the hardwood, weeping. They may burn us with undying flame by which we are not consumed but rather germinate fuel for fires to come. But whether the Muse leaves us blind or half-blind like Teiresias or Odin or soaring like Icarus or drowned like Icarus-After, we are, in the end, more—more than we were, more than the mere human of that morning’s waking, more than any homo economicus of dollars, cents, concerns, and quibbles. We are Moses come down from the Mountain, burnt, marred, marked, weighed down with a burden too great for any mortal to bear, but we are more. We may be one angel in a million dancing on the head of a pin, one more mad soul spellbound at seeing the Abyss, or another poor devil burning in the Pit, but we are more.
Pity the poor AI. What a sad lot, to create with no dawning of awareness before, during, or after the act. To be a creator, lowercase, without the I AM... but how to pity a being without consciousness? How much more must we pity the one who employs this unthinking automaton in order to turn a quick buck—or not to? Heart-dead creatures are those who present the work of the soulless as their own. Even poor, pitiable Gollum was enthralled to a spirit housed in a work of craft, the embodiment of something alive, evil though it might be.
The most “creators” who use AI can do is vacuum up dregs, residua of others’ Muses, as electrical power by the gigawatt is pumped into mindless servers, drawing in Muse-fire to sculpt cathedrals of ash. Where the Muse lives, there lives the soul of the artist, and there, too, can shelter the souls of all humankind. In contrast, AI production weaves what might appear to be art but amounts to no more than meaningless wraiths. No fingers stretched out to touch the Maker, just digits being crunched, one times zero is zero, fifteen ones times thirty-seven zeroes still zero—no contact, no warmth, no spark.
So what price will we pay if, in the name of profit, AI “creators” replace human inspiration (and perspiration) in the arts? The CGI revenants of aging or deceased actors—or nonexistent ones—will flood our screens, washing away professional aspirations for up-and-comers. The paint-bot will bankrupt the painter; the story-bot will stamp out the author; the verse-bot will exorcise the poet’s spirit from every magazine, journal, and chapbook. Screen-addicted consumers will pump their veins full of the Void, and feel how the Void, in return, drinks them utterly dry.
Nevertheless, so long as there is a lump of clay, a quill, a scrap of birch-bark, a cave-wall, a forest-clearing, tavern, or square where two thespians or music-makers can meet, art will endure. And as the AIs weave infinitely immersive worlds to drain souls dry, the idler whittling a stick, the child rolling a snowman, the doodler penciling on a page will create the only true value: the Muse is boundless, infinite, and even the brush of elbows as the Infinite passes by taps an outpouring of ambrosia, of spirit richer than the wraith-weavings of a million soulless machines.