Now
What comes next, nobody knows yet. In 2018, a portrait made by AI sold at auction for over $430,000. In 2021, an NFT artwork sold for $69.3 million. In 2022, an AI-made painting took first place at a state fair art competition in the United States — the judges weren't told it was AI-made. All of these numbers are real. But whether any of it will hold up as a style in art history, or simply pass through as a boom, isn't something any of us alive right now can judge. Even Barr's lineage diagram, the one this map takes its cue from, was redrawn by its own author again and again — he never called it final. So this last node stays open on purpose. I'm looking forward to whatever name eventually lands here. Knowing this map, it will probably start out as somebody's insult too. While we are here, a word about the term contemporary art. There is no node called contemporary art on this map. That is not an omission; it is the map's answer. Contemporary art is not the name of a style. It is a placeholder for whatever has not been named yet. Gothic, Impressionism, Cubism — every one of them was contemporary art at the moment it appeared. The name always comes later. What gets called contemporary art now is roughly the bottom third of this map: everything from Abstract Expressionism down to this node. And even where the contemporary begins has not been settled. Some date it from 1945, some from the 1960s, some from 1989. The dividing line itself has not been drawn. Which means the stretch you are looking at right now is a place that a map made a hundred years from now will call by several different names. One last thing, which concerns this map itself. Whether an image is lit here is decided by who holds the rights to it. In 2023 the US Copyright Office ruled that images generated by AI are not themselves copyrightable (the Zarya of the Dawn case: the text, and the selection and arrangement, were protected; the images were not). Pictures belonging to nobody are being made in enormous numbers, every day. This map's rule — light only what a museum has opened — has not yet decided what to do with them. Being able to leave an open question open is one of the good things about a map.