For an Aesthetics of Choice, Reproducibility, and Imperfection

This essay on aesthetics seeks to advance a proposal along four main lines: a critique of the institutionalization of artistic value; a redefinition of the relationship between artist and technology; a reassessment of reproducibility and imperfection; and, finally, a claim for a direct relationship between image and viewer.The neologism **“Digital Deformalism”** is intended to designate a new artistic current capable of addressing the aesthetic implications of the contemporary algorithmic condition.

A Critique of the Twentieth-Century Art Ecosystem

The twentieth-century artist had to operate within a complex network of cultural, economic, and social relationships capable of determining both the value of an artwork and the artist’s reputation. This ecosystem can be broadly divided into two interconnected spheres: the commercial sphere, which generates economic value, and the institutional sphere, which generates cultural value. The market can establish a price; a museum can confer visibility; a critic can produce interpretations; a curator can construct a narrative. None of these operations, however, necessarily coincides with the aesthetic experience itself. This ecosystem is tied to mechanisms of cultural validation that are closely linked to the historical period in which they became established. It is therefore legitimate to ask whether they can still be regarded as fully authoritative. The places and modes through which artworks acquire visibility are changing, as are the ways in which they are produced, the roles of cultural intermediaries, and the entire system through which public relations are managed.

Far from proposing an ideological or political opposition to the key figures of art marketing—art consultants, art critics, museums, galleries, and major institutional exhibitions—it is nevertheless undeniable that the digital network is disrupting, in a profound and far-reaching way, the traditional rules governing authority throughout the entire art ecosystem. The internet, artificial intelligence, and social media are deeply destabilizing the traditional art-business ecosystem, challenging its historical mechanisms of intermediation, value, and authenticity. Rather than witnessing its total destruction, we are witnessing a radical process of **disintermediation** and the emergence of a hybrid model. If the art system was previously a relatively closed and hierarchical structure, regulated by a limited number of gatekeepers such as elite galleries and major critics, it is now evolving into a fluid, accessible, yet highly fragmented network.

Digital Deformalism occupies precisely this space of transformation. Social media are weakening the need for the gallery as an intermediary between artists and audiences or collectors. An artist can now present their creative process to millions of people, sell directly through personal e-commerce platforms, and retain the full proceeds of a sale. The role of the critic as a certifier of quality is increasingly accompanied, or even challenged, by forms of value measured through algorithms, follower counts, and engagement metrics. The focus therefore shifts from intrinsic cultural value toward viral visibility and recognition.

 Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Crisis of Authorship and Value

Generative Artificial Intelligence is increasingly challenging the concepts of **Author** and **Value** as we have traditionally understood them, raising unprecedented philosophical and economic questions. The romantic myth of uniqueness is losing its centrality, and with it one of the foundations of the classical art market: scarcity. We are inevitably confronted with a regime of virtually infinite abundance of visual works, endlessly reproducible. Its disruptive potential had already been anticipated, in different ways, by Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. While this condition is already evident in digital and commercial fields such as illustration and concept art, it cannot fail to affect artistic production that is not explicitly created for commercial purposes, but must nevertheless confront these dynamics. Legal and copyright contradictions are also emerging. AI systems are trained on billions of works produced by living artists, often without their consent. This is generating substantial legal and ethical friction between creators and major technology companies, challenging the very foundations of traditional notions of copyright.

One of the most radical points of the manifesto concerns the transformation of the artwork into a financial asset. A contemporary artwork may simultaneously function as an image, an aesthetic object, a document, a luxury commodity, an investment, and a device of social distinction. These dimensions, however, do not necessarily coincide. Digital Deformalism begins with the observation that an increase in price, now more than ever, does not constitute evidence of an increase in artistic value. The distinction may appear obvious, but it becomes theoretically significant when applied to digital art. At a moment when an image can be produced, modified, and distributed at extremely low marginal cost, the traditional relationship between material scarcity and economic value comes under radical pressure.

The history of art nevertheless shows that scarcity has never been a universal condition of the artwork. Engraving, photography, the illustrated book, the poster, the art print, and later digital graphics have all introduced different forms of multiplication and reproducibility. Digital Deformalism therefore asserts a more democratic vocation for the circulation of images: the value of an artwork should not depend upon its location within a consecrated space. In this sense, Digital Deformalism does not propose a utopian democratization of art through commerce. Rather, it proposes a de-institutionalization of the aesthetic experience.

Virtual exhibitions, augmented- and virtual-reality headsets (AR/VR), and online viewing platforms (OVRs), which expanded rapidly during the pandemic, have now become structural components of the contemporary art environment. This reduces the importance of geographical location and of traditional art centers such as London, New York, and Milan, in favor of a global and continuous marketplace. At the same time, however, the risk of information overload and attention saturation has become extremely high.

The Artist in the Age of Algorithmic Abundance

If an algorithm can produce an image within seconds that previously would have required hours or days of manual work, the issue cannot be resolved simply by opposing the “real artist” to the “machine.” The real problem is to redefine which operations constitute authorship. Digital Deformalism suggests a precise answer:  the contemporary artist is increasingly the one who selects. The problem is no longer merely to produce a form, but to navigate and direct an enormous field of possibilities. Prompting, selection, variation, montage, cropping, deformation, post-production, exclusion, and printing become stages within a unified creative process.This does not eliminate skill. On the contrary, it transforms it.

The Myth of the Aura and the Artistic Genius

The Western artistic tradition has often associated value with the difficulty of execution. Virtuosic painting, technically complex sculpture, and representational ability have for centuries constituted important elements of artistic training and recognition.Artificial intelligence introduces a different condition: the almost instantaneous availability of a potentially enormous number of visual solutions. The principle can be interpreted as a shift from poiesis to selection: from directly fabricating every element to determining which elements should enter the final form. Digital Deformalism focuses on what it considers the true essence of art: its fundamentally conceptual character rather than its purely artisanal one. Even photography has evolved beyond its original mimetic horizon as a tool for reproducing reality, toward the abstraction of a concept or an idea and toward the interpretation of the represented world.
Choosing, rejecting, deforming, and recombining. These are the domains within which the artist operates in the algorithmic age. They constitute infinite spaces that remain largely unexplored. Authorship does not disappear. It becomes less visible on the surface of the work and more evident in the structure of the decisions that produced it.

The Critique of Digital Perfection

One of the most distinctive aspects of the manifesto is its critique of digital perfection. Visual communication, today as in the past, approaches kitsch precisely in its attempt to imitate reality faithfully, corrupting it from within. If beauty, perfection, and uniformity once survived as legacies of Renaissance art, today they increasingly function as signs of a new conformity and banalization. Contemporary technology is capable of producing images that are polished, symmetrical, highly detailed, and formally coherent. Yet precisely this capacity can generate uniformity. If millions of images share the same criteria of beauty, perfection risks becoming a new form of conformity. Digital Deformalism responds to this risk by valuing anomaly.

Deformation therefore becomes not a defect to be corrected but an aesthetic strategy. A distorted proportion, an impossible material, or a surface that belongs to no recognizable physical substance can interrupt the viewer’s immediate consumption of the image. In phenomenological terms, error introduces a form of perceptual resistance. The viewer is compelled to stop. An image can be simultaneously seductive and disturbing, harmonious and unsettling, elegant and vulgar, childish and sophisticated. This position enters into dialogue with a long tradition of the European avant-garde, in which the artwork ceased to be conceived simply as the production of harmony. Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Expressionism, and numerous other twentieth-century artistic experiences transformed error, absurdity, chance, and dissonance into creative instruments. Digital Deformalism inherits this freedom while placing it within a new technological environment.

The machine is not used to achieve greater fidelity to reality. It is used to move away from it. From this perspective, the term **“Deformalism”** should not be understood simply as a negation of form. Form remains central. What is rejected is rather **form as an obligatory norm**.

Art as a Space for the Production of Meaning

Another fundamental axis of the manifesto concerns the relationship between artwork and interpretation. If algorithms are trained in logical, linguistic, and mathematical reasoning, the artist’s task is to move beyond meanings encoded within established repertoires and explore what resists critical interpretation. Breaking through the barrier of meaning in order to embrace the horizons of sense, semantic ambiguity, and intelligibility will entail new creative modes, mediated by tools designed to return predictable and fully coherent formulations. An image may produce pleasure, irritation, curiosity, estrangement, or simply attention. These reactions already constitute forms of aesthetic experience.

Where Benjamin observed the decline of the aura, Digital Deformalism sees a possibility: **multiplying an image does not diminish its value; it increases its presence in the world.** Within the traditional context of art, multiplication may appear as a loss: a copy is worth less than the original. In the digital system, however, reproducibility is a structural property of the image. Digital art introduces a particularly interesting condition because an image can simultaneously exist as a file, a procedure, a matrix, a print, and a series of instances. The same image can therefore exist as digital data on a computer, as a print on paper, as a large-format work on canvas, as an image on a screen, or as an animation. The artwork no longer necessarily coincides with a single physical support.

Digital Deformalism takes this possibility to its aesthetic consequences: it does not regard multiplicity as a diminution of the artwork but as one of its defining characteristics. This leads to a conception of authenticity based less on material uniqueness and more on the **responsibility of the creative act**. The signature, from this perspective, should not certify the economic rarity of the object. It should identify the person who assumes responsibility for that particular visual decision.

Technology as a Condition of Possibility

Marshall McLuhan’s famous formula, “the medium is the message", does not simply mean that content is irrelevant. Rather, it indicates that every technology modifies the scale, rhythm, and conditions through which human activities are carried out. Technology, therefore, does not constitute an aesthetic in itself. It is a condition of possibility. Aesthetic experience emerges from what the artist is capable of doing with that condition. This position has clear affinities with Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of *postproduction*, according to which many contemporary artistic practices work with existing materials, images, and repertoires, selecting, modifying, and recombining them. The contemporary artist does not necessarily operate before a virgin material. The artist often works within an archive. AI radicalizes this condition because it transforms the archive into an operational environment in which the production of variations becomes virtually unlimited. The artist therefore does not necessarily begin from nothing. The artist begins from an existing visual culture and seeks to introduce a deviation into it. In this sense, Deformalism can be understood as a practice of deviation: taking a recognizable form and pushing it to the point at which it ceases to be merely recognizable.

A New Ethics of Choice

The Manifesto of Digital Deformalism does not simply propose a new artistic technique. Its more ambitious aim is to propose a different hierarchy of values. It places multiplicity in the place of uniqueness; imperfection in the place of perfection; choice in the place of manual skill as the measure of value; and technology as a means rather than an end. The central question is therefore not whether a machine can “make art.” The more relevant question is what conception of the artist emerges when a machine makes an unprecedented quantity of visual production available. Digital Deformalism proposes an artist who is less like the traditional artisan and more like an author operating through selection, montage, transformation, and judgment. This does not mean celebrating AI. The machine is a tool, not an idol. Technology is interesting only insofar as it makes it possible to produce forms that were previously unavailable. The new is not the technological. The new is what technology makes possible to think. From this perspective, Digital Deformalism can be understood as a proposal for an **aesthetics of choice**, in which the fundamental problem is no longer how to produce an image, but how to distinguish, among a potentially infinite number of images, the one that deserves to survive.

The fundamental artistic gesture thus becomes surprisingly simple: to choose. And, after choosing, to assume responsibility for that choice.

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McLuhan, M. (1964), *Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man*, McGraw-Hill, New York.

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