The mith of romantic authorship in the age of artificial intelligence

Distributed and digital economies — from which no form of communication, art included, can today be separated — compel us to reconsider many paradigms that until recently seemed beyond question. The first to suffer a significant reversal is the concept of the author understood as “sole creator”, which in the mature phase of the cultural industry survives in the collective imagination more as a romantic myth — useful for the promotion of a personal name brand — than as a factual reality.
New digital reproduction technologies, aided by artificial intelligence, which promise even to replicate the material texture of paint on canvas, are threatening to draw the visual arts toward the fate of large-scale reproducibility — a fate which painting had appeared to resist, unlike cinema and music, which are by definition reproducible arts.
What may be at stake is a market economy founded on scarcity. The painting as a unique work born from an artist’s hand — engaged with pictorial technique and personal inspiration — remains the sole justification for selling a work for millions of euros. The entire art market and its associated supply chain, from critic to gallerist, are intimately bound to the uniqueness of the fetish object. The artist’s name functions as a guarantee of financial value, and copyright still constitutes its legal legitimation. One might argue that, across all production preceding the digital era, the figure of the artist in the collective imagination coincides with Pollock hurling paint at the canvas, or Van Gogh painting in the grip of his demons: a mythology whose foundations lie in a psychological mechanism first, and an economic one second. To purchase a painting was to purchase a fragment of that artist’s soul — or brand. What the digital era tends to diminish, however, is not so much the quality of the artistic product itself as the perceived value of the fetish.

This is not to call into question the principle of protecting intellectual labour as such. Rather, it must be acknowledged that traditional copyright law — rigid and centred on exclusive ownership — struggles to accommodate the forms of diffuse cultural production in which creation is a continuous, collective process rather than a static and individual object. The most plausible trajectory points toward models of protection capable of promoting access and circulation rather than exclusivity and control.

Three scenarios are worth considering:

Remix and reuse culture: Digital creativity frequently rests on the manipulation, sampling, and reinterpretation of existing works — as in memes, electronic music, or fan fiction.

Collective and decentralised works: The logic of open-source software is increasingly applied to cultural products.

Artificial Intelligence: The advent of generative tools further blurs the boundary of who constitutes the effective “author” of a work.

Currently accepted models oriented in this direction include:

a) The Creative Commons (CC) model: The author determines in advance which rights to retain (for instance, permitting non-commercial distribution). It promotes maximum circulation of the work without forfeiting intellectual authorship.

b) The Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) model: Direct sales via decentralised platforms, subscriptions (Patreon, Substack), or crowdfunding. The author retains the near-totality of the revenue, eliminating the need for industrial intermediaries.

c) Models based on artificial scarcity / Web3: Decentralised technologies are employed to track ownership and guarantee automatic micro-royalties at each transaction, thereby seeking to reintroduce artificial scarcity within a natively digital context.

In conclusion, disintermediation is driving the evolution of copyright away from an instrument for protecting industrial rents and toward a guarantee of fair remuneration for the creative act — in a context where value no longer resides in the scarcity of the physical copy, but in the direct relationship between the author and their community.

The “state of the art”, today as yesterday

The modern visual artist, in many cases, already operates much like a film director or creative director: providing the idea, the vision, and the signature, while execution is collective. Damien Hirst has openly declared that many of his celebrated Spot Paintings were produced by his assistants, and that “the best ones were painted by Rachel” because she is more precise than he is. Major figures of contemporary art — Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Maurizio Cattelan — do not physically realise their own works. They run studios resembling factories or design agencies, where dozens of craftspeople, programmers, sculptors, and assistants cast metal, apply paint, or write software.
What is called into question is an entire narrative about the role of art. To assert categorically that a painting should be regarded as a publishing or industrial product — no different from a Pixar film or a pop record — may be an uncomfortable dose of reality that the art world does not particularly welcome. Yet it would help to contain the excesses of a business that frequently exploits the perceived “sacredness” of artistic production without scruple.
If this strikes some as blasphemous, it should be noted that in certain respects there is nothing new under the sun: in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Raphael, Rubens, and Rembrandt all ran intensely populated workshops. The master painted the face and the complex passages; the apprentices handled the backgrounds, the drapery, the animals. Authorship has always been a commercial and collaborative enterprise, subsequently “flattened” by art historiography in the service of the myth of solitary genius.

Beyond the mith of genius

The myth of the genius who scorns money has historically served to establish the institution of copyright: the legal instrument through which that genius is monetised. The artist then cedes this proprietary right to the industry — publishers, record labels, galleries — which employs it as a legal shield for speculation. It is no coincidence that the earliest copyright laws (such as the Statute of Anne of 1710 in England) were not born to protect artists, but to safeguard the major publishers and printers who sought a monopoly over the reproduction of texts (M. Woodmansee, The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the “Author”, 1984). A pointed critique of this system is also found in Michel Foucault’s celebrated essay “What Is an Author?” (1969), which, in addressing the discursive function of the author, raises questions about the relationship between value and scarcity as a mechanism designed to limit and exclude. This argument has been further developed by scholars such as Bernard Edelman and Pierre Bourdieu.
In other terms, financial speculation in art does not purchase the canvas or the paint — and often not even the aesthetic: it purchases the signature, protected by the legal apparatus of copyright and certificates of authenticity.

Behind the noble cause of art, copyright law effectively guarantees steady and predictable revenue streams (through streaming, advertising, cinema) protected by law for decades — up to seventy years after the author’s death.
 

Authorship and digital art

On the eve of the inevitable encroachment of artificial intelligence upon the work of producers of every form of content, art included — and without wishing to diminish the insights and legitimate critiques of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse above all) — it seems preferable to align with Roland Barthes, who argued that the author is not the ultimate source of the meaning of a text. The text is a tissue of quotations, formulas, and already-written codes (stored, one might now add, on the servers of AI data centres). Authorship understood as “creative genius” expires, and the true centre of the work becomes the reader, who reassembles and generates meaning from this pre-existing flow. Bourdieu would add that the author’s success is determined by their capacity to manipulate “symbolic capital” in the modes most congenial to them.

Conclusion

The new digital ecosystems compel us to acknowledge that authorship itself is changing in nature. It is no longer a fixed identity, but a fluid, distributed, shared process — a hybrid field in which human and artificial intelligence mutually interpenetrate.
In this intermediate space, not only law but also the philosophy of art, ethics, and our very conception of creativity play a fundamental role. For today more than ever, art demonstrates its eminently conceptual nature, leaving behind the romantic connotations of a lost craftsmanship.
The debate over art generated by artificial intelligence is, at its core, the symptom of an epochal transition: we must learn to conceive of artistic creation no longer as the solitary and inspired expression of a lone creator, but as the outcome of a complex network of relationships, algorithms, data, intuitions, and choices. A new form of diffuse authorship — one that remains entirely to be explored.