What Will Happen To Art In The Age Of Next-Gen AI?

The Blur as Resistance

Gerhard Richter spent decades blurring photographs—dragging paint across photorealistic images until they became ghosts of themselves. This was not a technique for its own sake; it was philosophy rendered visible. In those surfaces, Richter insisted that memory is unreliable, that history resists certainty, that truth is layered and contested.

His work was an act of resistance against a world that demands instant interpretation. Each blurred portrait said, "You cannot consume this quickly." You must watch and think with ambiguity.

Now, in 2026, we face a different kind of blur. Not the artist’s hand dragging across wet paint, but the algorithmic generation of infinite variations. AI can produce a thousand Richter-style images in seconds. So, if you look at the current art market, what happens when everything can be generated with a certain code, and what value does a piece of art contain in the future, if it is done by a robot or machine?

The question is not whether AI can make art, but if art can survive in a world where creation has been decoupled from its direct creator and the stakes are economic (who gets paid), ethical (who is an author), and cultural (what counts as real expression).

Art as Friction, Not Product

Art has never been about the artifact alone. It has been about the gap—the space between intention and execution, between what the artist envisions and what their mortal hands can achieve.

We do not value art because it is perfect; we value it because it is human. A painting or a sculpture is marked by hesitation, revision, doubt, and the physical limits of the body.

Analog Resonance is the texture of reality that resists smooth replication. It is the sound of a vinyl record’s crackle, the weight of a book in your hands, the way a fountain pen forces you to slow down because you cannot erase. Friction, a long discussion in which every argument is weighed up, or a brainstorming session with your team about the inspiration they gained after visiting an art exhibition together can be useful. AI eliminates friction due to its design; it can copy, generate and perform tasks for us.

The Seduction of Frictionless Creation

AI art tools are seductive because they promise something we have always wanted: the ability to externalize our inner visions without years of apprenticeship or the humiliation of early failure.

Art is democratized; even more so with AI, Andy Warhol's philosophy becomes true. Everybody is an artist, no matter what your educational background is. Art should be accessible to all, seen everywhere on the planet, available on computers, and the smart glasses you are wearing should explain every painting to you while, at the same time, providing data about the people standing next to you in the museum.

But this framing conceals a deeper question: about the intention of an artist and what we are creating for.

If art becomes frictionless, if I tell a machine the prompt of a “beautiful summer field with sunflowers” and receive a perfect rendering in three seconds, then art becomes a commodity of convenience and content.

Content is not art; it is the opposite. It is optimized for consumption, designed to be scrolled past, and algorithmically surfaced to match my preferences.

Art, by contrast, is the decision to spend six months on a single canvas, not because it is efficient, but because the process itself is where the meaning lives.

When AI collapses the time between thought and output, it does not merely accelerate creation. It eliminates the possibility of discovery and of failure to produce. We also learn from what is not possible; we cultivate our feelings and see how far we can go with our creative possibilities. The painter who spends hours mixing a color stumbles upon something unexpected. The writer who deletes a paragraph realizes the essay was never about what they thought it was about.

Creation is thinking. And AI, by doing the creating for us, may be eroding our capacity to think deeply.

The Decoupling of Creation From Consequence

Including AI in an artist's creative process, Art can be generated on demand, infinitely, at near-zero cost. What happens when art loses scarcity? What happens when every person can have a personalized masterpiece created in seconds?

A separation of the human from the act of creation might happen when we let brilliant machines take over to work out a piece of art for us. And once that decoupling is complete, we lose something more profound than art. We lose the discipline of wrestling with our own limitations. We lose the humility that comes from failing publicly and the aliveness that comes from making something with our hands. The creation of a work of art makes us human.

The Lessons For the AI Age

Richter's blurred paintings are about resisting the pressure to reach an instant resolution. In a world that insists every image must “say something clear,” Richter’s work says: Some truths are far too complex for clarity.

AI will create images, music, stories, and films. Some of it will be beautiful, and some of it will be indistinguishable from “human-made” art. Our task in the future will be not to confuse output with meaning.

If art is merely decoration, then AI can replace it entirely. But if art is a mirror of our uncertain time, where truth is equated with opinion, Art has to be a way of understanding ourselves, our limits, our mortality.

AI will not destroy art, but we may destroy one of our most important skills: our ability to be creative.

We must resist the seduction of instant creation, because the question is not whether AI can make art.

If we can create beauty at will, will we still appreciate beauty that came at a cost—or will we have forgotten what cost is good for?

Visit this exhibition featuring the works of Gerhard Richter:
October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026
Fondation Louis Vuitton
8 av. du Mahatma Gandhi
75116 Paris