What do Chinese influencers, luxury brands, Hayao Miyazaki and Open AI have in common?
1
What is a style? When the power of the form overlapped the strength of the meaning, then the "how" became more important than the "what", and it was then-like for example in Renaissance Italy-that the notion of "manniera" appeared. "La manniera" was the consequence of the development of personal artistic style in Renaissance. A style was transformed into an imprint and a seal of identity and originality, overcoming at some point the relevance of the content.
Style, is then, a signature, a proof of identity, very much entering the definition of a brand. Brands, usually, and maybe unlike styles, are jealously codified in their use, defined minutely in their elements and variations and protected in their use and context.
Beyond art, and like a style and a manniera, a brand is product of intangible creative decision making made visible trough many avatars; objects, places, colors and more. As such, it is versatile and yet consistent and recognisable. Also it is reproducible. Artist had workshops and pupils, brands have stylebooks, agencies and factories.
And, because to study and recreate is a work of respect and appreciation, if a style is reproduced beyond these spaces, the influence appear, but also the plagiarism. The counterfeit appears.
2
It is easier to understand a Picasso, a Duchamp or a Mondrian in 2025 than it was in 1925.
Labeling is the bane of artists, their boxing into categories (How do you call your style?) is no other thing that the inertia permeating the creative motion behind their practice.
Labeling is the starting point of AI. Every piece of data is assigned a valued, which helps to relate each bit to the other pieces in the task of sense-making through algorithms and complex operations.
In the world of Art History, when a tumultuous movement of creativity is gone, it leaves the archives, the taxonomies, the classifications and categories that allow us, albeit arbitrarily, to divide, package and digest it.
When the development of archeology and other disciplines across the 19th century brought a vision of the history as a succession of empires and of the history of art as a succession of styles. Assyrian Style Egyptian style Gothic, Romanic, Renaissance, Louis XIV, Louis XVI, Regency, Chippendale, Victorian etc, like a manual of styles applicable to any decoration. Manuals of this and that became guides for revival buildings, a development that tired everyone and pave the way to the avant-garde. A curious thing was that the nearer the time, we had more difficulty dividing these periods, like the perspective lines in a grid, the further the spaces from the point of view, the more extended our division were. Egyptian style embarks 3000 years, the difference between the Louis styles where to the most, decades, and the more we approach our own time, we start self-historicising ourselves. A consequence of the art history of the first half of the twentieth century was a story of styles. Every vanguard declared itself to the world with a "ism". Every movement. Instead of BrainrotCore or MinimalismCore of today, we had cubism, fauvism, modernism.
On a wider scope, there is a point where an art becomes mature and start a cycle anew, and it comes to a turning point. Like the manuals of architecture, Ibn Muqla is attributed to develop the art of the six hands or the oldest guide to classic style sin Arabic calligraphy which marked the future development of the craft for centuries. This is the next stage, style is commoditized, extracted and exploited, losing its essence until it becomes ripe for reuse, reinvention, remix, disassembling and reassembling while keeping a tenuous vestige of their previous identity.
3
Style, then, becomes an identity, a mark, a brand, a belonging and a property. Opposed to the idea of property is the idea of the commons; resources that belong, ethically, to all of us, air, water, sunlight. The Earth. Culture, and cultural artifacts are also placed into this space, specially symbols and meanings. Meanings and their symbols traverse and mixed among themselves, almost involuntarily, chemically, dynamically as they are, in essence, intangible, like a meme, a chunk of information available, perceptually, mentally, to everyone.
As a consequence of the interplay of these two notions we got the idea of commodities, value extraction, fair use, surplus and other concepts that are displayed in the complex study of economy.
First, the AI models the ones treating cultural production as a commodity instead of a luxury brand. Thousands of pieces of data are feed, as databases, to the models that, trough algorithmic obscurity extract the knowledge of relations between them in order to retrieve each one of them in a specific order when requested by a prompt, suitable to the parameters needed: a poem, a daguerrotype-styled image of Niccolo Machiavelli or a business-plan for your latest start up idea. Sound like a value added.
The latest trend in TikTok is lead by Chinese influencers showing step by step the costs of production of luxury items. They enlist the price of each part, adding all together to get a number that is a far cry from the final price that the consumer find in the shiny and lavish stores of the luxury brands worldwide. This is explained because in this context, the style -as we saw above- marshaled by the brand, is a property, an intellectual one. This goes from taste-based ones like fashion brands to technological-based ones like Apple. Now if we apply this to each image in the Ghibli style produced via ChatGPT, for free, we see that a different logic, if we can call it that, is applied. Each image produced would be a counterfeit image. So do we, as a society, approve counterfeiting or not?
4
A curious case regarding intellectual property can be found specifically in the 16th century when the printing press was invented, between Albretch Durer and Marcantonio Raimondi in Venice. Another one would be Samsung vs Apple, based in differences (and similarities) among patent design. A style and a gestalt subsumed into the legalities of trade and property.
Now lets circle back to what is into words like "thousands of pieces": poems and novels, remembered, repeated, read in loud voice,written, on hand-made paper or parchment, or printed trough metal typesets and wooden presses first and metallic machines later, or typed letter by letter, transposed, translated, edited, corrected, paintings, of powdered color and linseen medium, on linen, on silk, with gouache, oil or ink, and movies, performances recorded for your delight, sets built for your illusion, encyclopedias painstakingly collected for your instruction, updated every five or ten years, all of it by authors that are most of them by now dead.
So they belong to the commons, apparently, although this does not apply if the author are alive, and therefore, to more recent, current, state-of-the-art knowledge, at least in principle. The middle layer has been developed by researchers and technology firms through years of painstaking labour, surpassing the barriers of the so called AI winter.
When someone use this code, who is the owner of the product? are you a creator? if your input has an amount of relevance in the final output, what is would be, in a percentage number? because this wouldn't be possible without the technology of the algorithm, and the algorithm wouldn't be able to produce anything if hadn't been trained on a specific material. As it seems, the notions of creativity and property are at a crossroads that look more like a version of the trolley dilemma.
5
There are entire business models based on the idea of intellectual property that are placed under the magnifying glass by all these changes and the idea of knowledge and its ownership are questioned.
But these ideas and concepts, what shape do they take? in the tangible form of digital files, hosted in servers functioning with electric energy. There are many roads that the research in AI is taking, from health to factory production. Yet the most popular -and accessible- are image creation and writing. This access to the power of the image and communication, but above all, image, is at the hands of basically anyone, helping us to familiarize with AI.
This however create another set of problems, such is the increasing verisimilitude of the results in video, image and voice. This is basically copping the perceptual realm.
Now how does these phenomena, somehow symbolically connected will affect the economy is still to be seen. (on the other hand, the research that led to the development of the models has been financed by a myriad of actors, different mediums and purposes, some private, some state-based, some academic, with a consensus developed in the realm of open source. Open AI was open source up to a point.)
Both facts are related to labour and property. Now, who does that when using a trained model? Intellectual property for who? Who decides what goes into the model? Is a model a property? Of whom? Where is the value in a chain of production? In the intellectual creator in the production side, in the execution, in the selling point?
Susan Sontag said it . Style is more than style.
__________________________________________________________________
Notes
1) On the trends and their terminology
https://fashionista.com/2022/08/core-style-aesthetics-fashion-style-glossary-gen-z
https://www.parents.com/brain-rot-2024-oxford-word-of-the-year-8754608
https://www.cyberlink.com/blog/trending-topics/3702/italian-brainrot
https://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/92738/excerpt/9780521792738_excerpt.pdf
2)On manniera
https://www.britannica.com/art/maniera
https://mymodernmet.com/what-is-mannerism/
https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/mannerism.html
Sontag Susan, Against Interpretation, On Style.
3) On Chinese trend
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/18/nx-s1-5366058/chinese-manufacturers-luxury-goods
4) On Miyazaki documentary
https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/never-ending-man-hayao-miyazaki-review-1202027781/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never-Ending_Man:_Hayao_Miyazaki
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfxlgHBaxEU
As my colleague Liz Ramos Prado pointed out, in the now famous scene of the documentary where Hayao Miyazaki dispatches the young guys with a heavy handed response with hints of disdained dismissal, there were two points of disagreement and philosophies both in the media and in the way of seeing the world. Certainly a zombie is that,a faithless vision of the human experience. Whether it has a space in the world of fiction or symbolic creation is open to debate. Hayao response considered this and exposed clearly and unambiguously his position, something the young artist failed to get (" its just a experiment") focusing only in the technological aspect. Because in the same documentary there is another scene where Hayao urges his animators to go out and see the world to bring that knowledge into their creations, and stay at safe distance from a sterile stylization.
5) On Durer vs Raimondi
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/the-first-copyright
https://williampatry.blogspot.com/2005/09/albrecht-drer-and-copyright.html
Comments
Post a Comment