I saw Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain for the first time when I was thirteen, standing in the Tate Modern on a school trip, staring at a urinal that had somehow become art. It was a replica, sure, yet its impact still nagged at me. It was less my reaction to it that I found interesting, but that of my peers. I remember their hatred for it–how aggressively simple it was, how defiantly ordinary. Maybe it's irrational to ask a group of thirteen-year-olds to solve the question of what the role of the artist is, but it opened me to a whole new way of thinking. My friends around me reached for the cliché: I could have made that, but immediately, almost embarrassingly, the truth followed: they didn’t. Duchamp had made a choice they hadn’t known was even available. This art–by his own admission–was “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice,” (Martin, 42). And, I must say, nothing has since made as much sense to me as that quote. For the first time, I could conceptualize the sheer force of intention that was behind art. I understood that creation is not always a matter of crafting something new, but of taking responsibility for its meaning. Had any of my peers stumbled upon a readymade urinal a week before this trip, I doubt they would have seen anything in it, let alone art.
When looking at works like Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, Borges’ Library of Babel, and Lem’s The First Sally (A), or Trurl’s Electronic Bard, we are forced to imagine systems that produce meaning mechanically, infinitely, or algorithmically. The work of André Breton attempts to remove authorship altogether. Even Duchamp’s Fountain tried to erase the artist’s craft in favor of a more conceptual gesture. However, the trend we begin to recognise is that the more they try to remove the human creator, the more they expose just how vital human presence actually is. Not all “authorlessness” is created equal. Some, like Breton’s automatism, deepen the human presence by drawing from the subconscious, whilst others highlight how quickly meaning dissolves when the human is removed entirely. Thus, I must argue that there is still a human, spiritual, and subjective core required in the creation of meaningful art.
The experiments with “authorless” creation emerged from a frustration with traditional ideas of authorship. In the early twentieth century, artists and writers began to challenge the belief that creativity depended on conscious intention, personal expression, or technical mastery. Surrealism is a key example of this. André Breton’s call for “psychic automatism in its pure state” (Breton, 26) sought to bypass rational control and tap directly into the unconscious–working straight from the hand without the mind's interference. Allowing language to flow without this censorship should hypothetically eliminate the human creator. But, to me, it presented a new form of creativity, one rooted in dreams, desires, and the unpredictability of transcendental life. So, whilst this automatism separates itself from the artist in the traditional sense, there is still something too innately human in its creation to argue against the necessity of the artist. Enjoying art from the Surrealists, the Dada movement, or anything similar should not lead to the belief that the artists are unnecessary. Likewise, disliking this art shouldn’t lead to, or stem from, the belief that you could have made it. Instead, it should invite meaning to surface from interior places we don’t fully understand, yet shouldn’t fear. When done correctly, ‘authorless’ creation pushes the boundaries of what can and should be considered art, and in that sense, it enriches rather than erases the human presence behind the work.
To demonstrate these differences, comparisons can be made between the works of Kafka, Lem, and Borges and those of Breton, Duchamp, and their respective movements. The apparatus in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony is a threatening torture device used by a colonial regime to punish those who go against it. Emotionless and unrelenting, it writes the condemned man’s sentence directly into his flesh, lasting twelve excruciating hours (Kafka, 83). Through the Officer insisting, in relation to the prisoner’s offence, that “it would be pointless to tell him. He will feel it in his own flesh,” (Kafka, 79) Kafka highlights how this machine does not create. It does not think. It is simply a vessel for violence disguised as communication. The officer lives with a mentality that “guilt is always beyond question” (Kafka, 80), which is horrifying to reckon with when the only way to know what you have done wrong is through suffering. In this world, meaning comes not from a human mind but from a system that operates without reflection, compassion, or spiritual depth. Kafka argues that taking the human out entirely leaves creation to become mechanical inscription instead of expression, brutality instead of knowledge, a process that produces output but no genuine understanding. Putting it into a contemporary context–a world seemingly ever filling with LLMs–In the Penal Colony reflects the anxieties of how self-learning equipment might impact society on both a social and political scale. How can we trust something to create if it has no empathy, no care, and no love?
Similarly, Lem plays with these themes in The First Sally (A), or Trurl’s Electronic Bard, in which Trurl, an inventor, builds a machine that can write poetry. However, during this creation, Trurl realizes that the average poet is naturally filled with so much knowledge and experience simply due to living amongst civilization. So, for this machine to be even partly viable, “one would first have to repeat the entire Universe from the beginning–or at least a good piece of it” (Lem, 1). Art cannot be separated from the lived, generational, and collective experience that exists within every artist. So, if machines have to have this replicated for them to make valuable art, is it really necessary to create them anyway? I struggle to find a few, if any, instances in which machine-created art is able to create something that a human artist could not do significantly better. Is it quicker to allow the machine to create for you? Yes, of course. But should there not be a serious amount of respect and value placed upon the dedication to building a skill and craft? As the story continues, the machine’s abilities become so great that ‘its poems became… so intricate and charged with meaning that they were totally incomprehensible.’ (Lem, 8) This leads to the understanding that Lem is warning that machines will inevitably try to go beyond imitation or human ability. However, instead of being beautiful creations, they collapse when recognized as meaningless, impersonating as wisdom. Without a human creator, there is a lack of inherent taste that allows us to differentiate between noise and meaning.
Where Kafka and Lem imagine creation stripped of the creator with nothing human remaining, the works of Breton and Duchamp reveal the opposite. Loosening authorship while still being tied to the human psyche can actually enrich the art. Breton’s work, Manifesto of Surrealism, is one of the defining works of the surrealist era, especially in establishing what surrealism was. It defines automatism as thought liberated from rational control, but it still comes from the human psyche. Breton’s automatism may bypass conscious control, but it does not bypass the self; it exposes the hidden, more dreamlike parts of our brains that we are unable to access otherwise. This is something that no machine could imitate because they come from lived experience, memory, and desire. Similarly, Duchamp’s Fountain does not erase the artist so much as redefine what the artist does. There is a force behind intention, rather than the labor of the craft, that can become the site of creation. In both cases, “authorlessness” is not the absence of the human but a new way of interacting with the desire to create. Unlike Kafka’s apparatus or Lem’s bard, Breton and Duchamp retain the spiritual core of creation; they take responsibility for what they make. Their works highlight that what matters is not how much of the artist’s hand is visible, but whether the artist’s presence is still relevant.
What all these comparisons make clear is that the value of human creation does not lie in technical skill alone, nor even in originality, but in qualities that are unique to humans. Human beings create out of the condition of being alive, out of our capacity to feel, to suffer, to remember, to hope, and to long for connection. Humans bring culture, the ability to discern what should be created, when, and how it should be made. It might seem obvious to say, but every time an artist willingly lays claim to an object or idea and stands behind it, they do so as a unique individual who has lived a life in such a way that, consequently, they view some things better than others. Take Duchamp’s Fountain, for instance; the act of choosing that urinal is inseparable from who Duchamp is as a person. There is a reason no one on my school trip, including me, would have seen a urinal and thought it was a good art piece. We have not experienced what Duchamp has; we do not have the same connection to art and the world around us. Machines cannot answer for what they produce. There is a depth to the act of creation, in whatever form, that brings you close to the things you make. So, if you leave that creation up to a machine, it is hard to believe it–or you–will truly be able to answer for your art the way artists do. Meaning is an ethical act as much as it is an aesthetic one. It grows from the depths of the individual psyche, which is itself shaped by the human condition. This can be defined as the combination of experiences, emotions, vulnerabilities, and questions that shape human life. Machines have no experience to draw from, they know nothing of pain or desire, and therefore nothing of meaning. When creation is severed from these human qualities, as it is in Kafka’s machine or Borges’ infinite library, meaning cannot be communicated, as it becomes merely procedural. It is not creation but occurrence, and in this sense, all these works reveal that creativity is not simply a process but a profoundly human mode of being. One that is inseparable from the condition of living in a body, in time, in society, and in relation to others. And it is here, at the limit point where machines can only imitate, and humans can genuinely create, that I find myself returning to the urinal in the Tate Modern that I saw when I was thirteen.
At the time, there was something about that urinal that I couldn’t articulate, but it attracted me. Now I can recognise that the Fountain is meaningful because a human chose it. No machine could have done that because no machine experiences the world. Meaningful art requires the human condition. The feeling of waking up in the middle of the night feels like you’re going to vomit. The strangers that you see every day on your walk to work. The random dog that drops its ball in front of you, expecting your throw. We have yet to communicate with the aliens out there, so for now, we are the only intelligent life that can create, and instead, we are giving that privilege to machines. I fear the world that gives artistic creation to robots to free up people’s time for corporate jobs and taxes. Even Brian Eno’s claim of urinating in the Fountain (Starkley), no matter if you think it was foolish or brilliant, reminds us that only human beings interact with art emotionally, revelingly, and bodily. A machine cannot complete or deface a work, because it cannot care about it in the first place. And perhaps that is the simplest truth my thirteen-year-old self sensed without yet understanding–that creation matters not because someone could have made it, but because a human being chose to. Meaning begins and ends with us. Without the human condition, there is no art at all.