The Death of Painting, Again

The word out there is: in 1839, the painter Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype (one of the first photographs) and screamed: "From today, painting is dead."

I'm not sure it actually happened. But that's not the point. The point is the question every painter woke up to that morning: how do you compete with this thing? You've spent twenty years learning to render a face accurately, and now a box does it in minutes, cheaper, and it never misses. As a painter, how could you ever out-photorealism a machine?

The funny thing is what came next. The decades after painting "died" turned out to be its golden era:

These painters saw the camera's game and were like "Nah, I'll do my own thing."

So maybe photorealism was never the point after all.

So what actually died in 1839?

Painting had a job before photography. If you wanted your face to outlive you, you hired a painter. If you wanted proof you owned land, met a king, survived a war: painter, painter, painter. Accuracy was the product.

Then a box did it better. Cheaper, faster, and it never missed. The portrait market collapsed within a generation. And painters were left with an uncomfortable question: if a machine can do the thing we've been selling, what were we actually doing all along?

Well, Monet answered that question by stabbing the canvas with quick strokes to create an impression of the view, instead of the view itself. Picasso answered it by breaking a face into planes and showing you all of them at once, something no camera can physically do. Hopper answered it by painting rooms so quiet they feel like a held breath.

And here's the kicker: they were hits. Not despite abandoning accuracy. Because of it.

Monet's answer wasn't the only one. When a machine walks into your craft, history says people tend to react in one of three ways.

1. Redefine. You just watched this one happen. Give the machine what it does better, then go find the part of the craft it can't touch. The impressionists gave up accuracy and found perception. This is the reaction everyone hopes they'd have.

   

2. Worship. A few decades later the futurists looked at engines, speed and industrial machinery and fell in love. Marinetti declared a roaring automobile more beautiful than any ancient sculpture. They saw the machine coming for their world and their response was: good. A literary critic named Renato Poggioli later called this posture agonism: embracing your own obsolescence as a sacrifice to whatever comes next. If that sounds familiar, it's because your LinkedIn feed is full of it. The "coding is dead, and honestly good riddance" guys are, in fact, futurists.

   

3. Sabotage. The dadaists watched the printing press flood the world with cheap mass-produced text and responded with scissors. Tristan Tzara's recipe for a poem: cut the words out of a newspaper article, shake them in a bag, pull them out one by one. Feed the machine's flood back through a shredder and publish the result as art. Sound familiar again? AI slop as an art form. People posting the machine's garbage on purpose, as a joke and as commentary at the same time. Pure dada.

   

So what's the point of this post? Is AI coming for us? Probably, yeah. But it's also made things much better for me lately.

As an engineer: I've been cooking. I still get paid. And I actually get to spend my time on complex business problems instead of drowning in implementation details.

As a musician: I just spent 2000 euros on a 1970s reel-to-reel tape recorder, purely for that sweet tape saturation. This in an era where I could generate a full track with Suno. They even teach Suno at Berklee now. And yet here I am, threading tape.

I guess these days I'm a bit like Monet.