The Tortured Artist Is So Yesterday
41 years ago, Samuel Lipman wrote that an artist’s life is a “constant—and constantly losing—battle” against one’s own limits. That image has lasted because print culture taught us to imagine the artist as a solitary figure whose worth is measured by the perfection of a single, final work. Print fixed texts in place, elevated the individual author, and made loneliness part of the creative job description.
That world is slipping away.
And with it, the tortured artist.
Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine) is a 1922 watercolor with gouache, pen-and-ink, and oil transfer on paper by Swiss-German painter Paul Klee
LLMs have made competent expression abundant. The blank page no longer terrifies; anyone can produce something fluent and polished. When craft becomes cheap, suffering loses its meaning as a marker of artistic seriousness. What becomes scarce instead is the willingness to take a risk—not in private, but in public, where a stance can fail, provoke, or be reshaped by others.
Venkatesh Rao recently argued that authorship is no longer about labor but about courage: the courage to commit to a line of thought and accept the consequences of being wrong. In an era of infinite variations, the decisive act is not creation but commitment. The value lies in staking something of yourself on an idea that may not survive.
This shift is reshaping where culture is made. In what I’ve called the “Cloister Web,” people draft and explore ideas in semi-private creative rooms before carrying only a few into the open. LLMs make experimentation cheap; they also make commitment expensive. The hard part now is choosing which idea you are willing to be accountable for.
As the burden of execution drops, something else rises: genuine collaboration. Not just collaboration with models, but with other humans. Andrew Gelman, reflecting on Lipman in a recent StatModeling post, noted that scientists, too, feel versions of this pressure of the solitary creator. In science, the burden rarely falls on one person. The struggle is distributed across collaborative projects that outlive any single contributor.
Groups can explore bolder directions than any one creator working alone. Risk spreads, ideas compound, and the scale of what can be attempted expands. The solitary genius was an artifact of print; the collaborative creative lab is the natural form of the world we are entering.
This leads to a claim many will resist but few will be able to ignore: the single author is beginning to collapse as a cultural technology. What will matter in the coming decades is not the finished artifact but the evolving line of thought carried forward by teams willing to take risks together.
The tortured artist belonged to an age defined by scarcity, perfection, and solitude. Today’s creator faces a different task: to choose a risk worth taking and the collaborators worth taking it with. The work endures not because it is flawless, but because a group has committed to pushing it forward.
Pain is optional now.
Risk isn’t.
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