david ingemarsson
Active Member
Nick Cave:
"Free speech is a tool to 'liberate the soul of our world'.
Art’s 'sacred duty' is to make you reconsider, sometimes by provoking outrage, motivating you to act differently. We need dissonance for our health as a society."
In The Sunday Times magazine ("my son's death brought me back to church" 5/3/23) former archbishop Rowan Williams is having a rather interesting and substantial conversation with Nick Cave.
Towards the end of the talk (no signs of any journalist) the subject turns to artificial intelligence and a recent such software that allegedly has the ability to, at the press of a button, 'create' songs in the style of Cave. When reflecting and responding to this he lets out some thoughts and opinions that you these days almost only hear from a certain other artist...
Our time is almost up. But I want to touch on one last topic. Cave has attracted some media attention recently for his reaction to an artificial intelligence programme producing songs allegedly in his style. “Replication as travesty” and “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human” were some of the more printable comments in his response. Cave reminds me that this isn’t the first time the issue has come up. He has commented before on the idea that AI could compose “bespoke” songs, designed to press exactly the emotional buttons that you wanted pressed. But “art really is about human audacity, the courage to reach beyond our limitations”; AI doesn’t have that sense of limitation. “It’s not vulnerable enough to create something that’s convincingly transcendent,” he says (a phrase that could take a few years to digest adequately).
Art comes from a specific, unique human place — particular and unrepeatable experiences of grief and joy. What would the consequences be if we start expecting art to give us the emotions we think we want? Isn’t art more to do with discovering what we didn’t know we needed? “Exactly right,” Cave says. “Art has within it that thing that you don’t know you needed.”
Which is also why we should look with some wariness at any pressures to self-censorship. Writing in the Red Hand Files last June, Cave called free speech a tool to “liberate the soul of our world”. Art’s “sacred duty”, Cave says now, is to make you reconsider, sometimes by provoking outrage, motivating you to act differently. We need dissonance for our health as a society. “What has made us so fearful of ideas?” Cave asks. Do we even want to grow and change?
