The crime scene of creativity

Artwork: Detail from The Death of Beautiful Things (2026) by Elizabeth Khoury

I have a suspicion that the future of art may be covered in paint. Not metaphorically. Literally. Thick, sticky, badly behaved paint. Paint that refuses to stay inside the lines. Paint that runs down the canvas. Paint that has been attacked with a palette knife, pushed around with a finger, scraped off, put back on, and generally subjected to the sort of treatment that would make a conservator reach for the telephone.

Why?

Because the internet has become suspiciously clean. Everywhere you look, there are astonishing images. Perfect people. Perfect houses. Perfect sunsets. Perfect dogs. Perfect bodies. Perfect worlds that never existed.

Now, thanks to artificial intelligence, we can manufacture an almost unlimited supply of them. Ask for a woman standing on Mars at sunset while playing a violin inside a Victorian railway station and, a few seconds later, there she is. Nobody asks where the railway station came from. Nobody even asks why the woman brought a violin. The machine doesn't care. It simply makes the picture. And it makes another one.

We are entering an age of visual abundance so enormous that the extraordinary is becoming ordinary. Which makes me wonder whether something rather unexpected is going to happen to painting. We might start falling in love with the messy stuff again. I want to see the fingerprints.

Imagine two pictures appearing on your phone. The first is spectacular, it has incredible lighting, perfect colors, astonishing detail and the sort of atmosphere that makes you immediately think: "Wow." You swipe.

The second is a photograph of a painting, you can see the canvas, you can see the paint. There is a thick ridge where the artist dragged a brush through the surface, a little patch where one color hasn't completely covered another, a scratch, even a fingerprint, something strange happens; you stop scrolling, because the fingerprint tells you something. Someone was there.

A human being stood in front of that canvas and made a decision. Then another decision. Then probably several bad decisions before correcting them. The painting contains evidence of the journey, perhaps that is becoming increasingly interesting.

The forensics of creativity
I sometimes think we should stop looking at paintings as finished pictures and start looking at them as crime scenes. Forget Instagram photographs of the completed work. I want forensic evidence; Where did the artist hesitate? Where did they scrape something away? Where did they change their mind? Why is there a completely different color underneath? Why is that brushstroke suddenly going in another direction? What happened here?

The surface of a painting can contain the history of its own creation. A digital image doesn't necessarily have that history. It can appear instantly. A painting has to become and becoming leaves traces.

For centuries we tried to hide the evidence. There is something wonderfully ironic about this. For hundreds of years, painters became incredibly good at making paint disappear. The ultimate compliment was: "It looks real." The painter's trick was to make us forget the brush.

Now AI has become extraordinarily good at doing something similar. It can create images without ever touching a canvas, and suddenly we may find ourselves looking in the opposite direction. Perhaps we don't want to forget the brush anymore. Perhaps the imperfection becomes evidence.

Welcome back, human
This doesn't mean that everything made by a human is automatically wonderful, of course. Human beings have been producing terrible art for a very long time, and I see no reason for that tradition to disappear. But something else is happening.

The more images machines can produce, the less scarce images become.  When images become almost free, perhaps the physical object becomes more precious.
A painting takes up space, has weight, casts a shadow, you can see the texture changing as the light moves across it. You can stand three centimeters away and discover something that disappeared completely when you looked at it on your phone.

The gallery strikes back
For galleries, this could be rather interesting. We spent years trying to get people to look at art through photographs on Instagram. Now perhaps the photograph itself is becoming the problem. A photograph can show you what a painting looks like, it cannot show you completely what a painting is.

So perhaps the future gallery advertisement shouldn't say: "Look at this beautiful painting." Perhaps it should say: "You haven't actually seen it yet."

Come closer, look at the surface, look at the tiny mistake, look at the place where the artist changed their mind. Look at the evidence, if you are lucky, perhaps you will find a fingerprint.

In praise of the imperfect
Maybe this is one of the unintended consequences of AI. It won't kill human art. It may actually make us appreciate the human traces inside it. After being surrounded by perfectly generated faces, we may begin to like wrinkles again. After perfect digital landscapes, we may appreciate a crooked horizon. And after a million images generated in ten seconds, we might find something strangely beautiful about an artist spending three months getting one stubborn piece of canvas right.

Perhaps the future of art isn't about competing with the machine at making perfect pictures. Perhaps it is about reminding ourselves why we liked imperfect ones in the first place. So bring back the fingerprints. Bring back the drips. Bring back the scratches, the smudges, the paint under the fingernails and the mysterious blob that the artist insists on  it is intentional. Because in a world where a machine can produce almost anything you can imagine...
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The most valuable thing an artist can leave behind is evidence that they were actually there.

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