Crushed by technology.
Is a world where no one needs art supplies heaven—or hell?
Apple’s new ad for the iPad depicts a giant hydraulic press crushing the tools and creative objects synonymous with artwork and culture. Everything gets the same relentless treatment: visual art supplies like paint; gorgeous instruments including a piano; a metronome; video games; a television set; a record player — a golden trumpet becomes scrap metal, expensive glass camera lenses shatter, cans of paints explode in a rainbow of goop, a guitar splinters, and perhaps most disturbing and on the nose, human sculptures are reduced to disfigured bits of wood and clay.
After the ritual destruction of these artifacts, the press raises to reveal a new iPad pro. It looks tiny on the great big pedestal, and that’s the point: Apple wants us, watching this ad, to feel awed and amazed at how much fits inside this super thin, portable, shiny, new device.
Turns out, many viewers were amazed, but not in a good way. The ad made me sick to my stomach and brought actual tears to my eyes, and judging from the comments all over the web, I’m not the only one.
It’s not just the pointless, wasteful misuse of thousands of dollars worth of creative tools and supplies that upsets me, though that is deeply disgusting.
It’s the stark, unmissable message behind the ad and what it says about the people who created and approved it.
Rarely has a big tech company declared the quiet part so loudly: that their objective, their grand vision, is a world where individual artists do not exist. Where the beloved tools of individual creative expression - the very things that give our lives meaning and joy - are literally pulverized out of existence by a heartless corporate machine. Where every creative endeavor is mediated through their screens, their apps, their algorithms. Where the satisfaction, the texture, the private pleasure of real things is absent. Where the experience of creating is ever-public, ever-tracked, ever-monetized, endlessly datamined and digital. Where the analog output of individual creatives is absent, replaced by an intermediary controlled by a faceless corporate entity over which individuals have no control.
We are living through the greatest attempted art heist in the history of the modern world, a time when lavishly funded companies and legacy tech giants are mounting the argument that they have the right to vacuum up the sum of all human creative production - photographs, paintings, videos, books, articles, everything - and feed it in to proprietary models that they own, without the knowledge or consent of the creators, without proper licensing or compensation.
This ad dramatizes this perspective and then dares to act like it’s a good thing. “See how great it will be when we no longer have to deal with you gross messy human artists and your gross art stuff?” “Look at all this icky analog junk we can get rid of now!” The result is a spotlight on how little leading tech companies seem to care or understand about the value and perspective of the artists they claim to serve.
Any artist knows that the tools of creative work are precious. Our brushes, our paints and pens, our cameras and lenses and instruments - I don’t know a single artist who is in a hurry to get rid of these. Indeed, we respect our tools, treating them carefully and lovingly. They are the conduits through which we express our souls and dreams. They are the prizes we earn with our practice. They are how we make our living and also how we find our peace.
It is in the C-suite and on Wall Street where you will find people salivating at the idea of cutting the messiness, the unpredictability, and of course, the annoying human artists themselves, out of the process of obtaining creative outputs. Goldman Sachs predicted that the global rise of AI will lead to workplace shifts resulting in as many as 300 million full time jobs lost. Every single artist I know is concerned about what this shift means for them.
No ad or piece of creative work exists in a vacuum. There is always a context and we are always in conversation with it. Marketers should be more conscious of this than most. No matter what your personal views on AI, artistic production, or the future of technology and work, given the social and economic context in which we find ourselves and the assumed core target audience of this ad, it is the most inappropriate and tone deaf thing I can imagine.
Anyway, I give this campaign a hard fucking pass.
Creative juice
I continue to enjoy deepening my own art practice and lately aim for painting or drawing at least once per day.
Creative practice is hard and I have always been pretty bad at making the time to do it in any sustained and disciplined way. This year, I vowed that I would prioritize my own creative joy, and it has already paid off in increased self esteem, internal peace, and improved skills. I am grateful every day to my past self when I review what I have made and the time I spent has never been a waste.
I love you, you’re doing great. Now, go touch grass and make something!
IM