Art and the Artist in the Age of AI

‍⚠️ This post contains spoilers for "The Christophers" (2025). If you haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend doing so before reading. ⚠️

I recently watched the movie “The Christophers”, which tells the story of the unique relationship between Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) and Lori Butler (Michaela Coel). Julian is an aging and famously brusque artist who painted some beloved works of art in his day, but now at the end of his career he has drifted away from his passion and is mostly sending Cameo video messages to fans, wishing happy birthdays and congratulations to pay the bills. He is contrasted with Lori, a young artist who gets a job as his assistant and is known amongst her peers for her ability to perfectly emulate the work and style of other artists.

On Art and the Artist

This movie really got me thinking about art and its relationship to the artist and its audience, in the way that an artist’s private life and public persona contribute to the process of creating their art and how their notoriety can contribute to the perception of their art.

The Setup

When the movie begins, we are introduced to Lori, a struggling artist being asked by her old classmates to complete a set of their father Julian’s unfinished paintings known collectively as “The Christophers” - all so they can get some quick cash by selling these “new” Julian Sklar paintings when he dies. She agrees to do it under the pretense of being hired as his assistant, but when she meets Julian, one of the first things he asks her to do is to destroy the paintings, which he has kept for many years stashed away in his attic. Not only does she not destroy “The Christophers”, but even Julian ends up having second thoughts, and throughout the movie we learn more about Julian’s relationship with his unfinished paintings and with their subject, a man named Christopher. Julian and Christopher were once in a romantic relationship that eventually ended in heartbreak, which is why he had been reluctant to revisit the paintings, while simultaneously being reluctant to destroy them.

Public and Private

The movie makes a point of connecting the two artists through their ideas of public and private personas. In one scene, Julian is shown looking at Lori’s online portfolio and blog. The next day he confronts her about a blog post where she claims that Julian has “sold out” and is only making money because of his public persona and not because his artistic skill. He is clearly very hurt by this assessment, and in response insults a piece of work that she had displayed on her portfolio. In another scene later on, Julian visits Lori’s apartment after she has quit working for him. There she finds him looking at the same painting of hers that he had insulted from her portfolio; he tells her that he now remembers also being highly critical of it on a TV show he hosted years ago, on which a younger Lori had been a guest. Julian clearly understands in this moment the role he played in ending Lori’s pursuit of her own art as a public endeavor in favor of copying others’. He admits that her piece evokes much more of a reaction in him now that he actually knows her. This brings up an interesting parallel between the two artists. Julian criticized her art when she was young on a public stage, and in response she shifted her career in art to copying other painters while continuing to pursue her own art - in private. She in turn criticizes the public persona he has adopted and which has come to define him, which causes him reflect on himself and his art.

Does It Matter Who Made It?

“The Christophers” ends with Lori completing Julian’s pieces after his death (and making sure that Christopher himself receives the proceeds rather than Julian’s offspring). But she uses a distinctly glitter-heavy flair that he didn’t have in any of his previous work, a flair inspired by Julian’s own brief, drunken idea to complete (and maybe simultaneously destroy) the pieces. She never takes any credit for completing them, and when asked by Julian’s children if it was she who did it, she responds with a simple “Does it matter?” While I wouldn’t necessarily agree that it “doesn’t matter” who made the art, the movie raises the question of how much of art is the artist’s intention versus the audiences perception.

Art in the Age of AI

There is something interesting about a movie making a point to state that it “doesn’t matter” who made a work of art at a time when “AI art” is becoming more and more prevalent. Relevantly, the movie’s director, Steven Soderbergh, has even openly admitted to using AI in his recent film about John Lennon. In a world where anyone can supposedly create “art” by typing in a prompt, we are forced to consider art in its creation and perception in a way we perhaps haven’t in the past. Do we perceive art differently when the artist uses AI to assist in their output? In my experience, the answer is unanimously yes, and Steven Soderbergh reinforces this in a statement he made about people’s reaction to his use of AI: ”I understand why people have an emotional response to this subject. As I’ve said before, I feel like I owe people the best version of whatever art I’m trying to make and total transparency about how I’m doing it”. I find this particularly interesting to consider because while art can be something that is meant to evoke an emotional response, that response ultimately feels empty when there is no human artist to consider.

Read the full interview with Steven Soderbergh here

The Artist Behind the Art

I know I would feel somewhat betrayed if I saw a piece in a museum that evoked an emotional reaction from me only to later learn that it was fully generated by AI. While there is so much that we as an audience don’t know about an artist beyond what they create, there is still a feeling of connection we feel with an artist when we view their work, and when that “artist” is simply a person with a prompt, it feels like half of the relationship is missing.

Conversely, the more we learn about artists as people, the more we relate them to their art, and at times conflate their output with their personality and process. In “The Christophers”, there is an expectation placed on Julian because of what he had painted in the past and the type of persona he created, but we learn throughout the movie that the public’s expectation of him may be part of the reason he never completed “The Christophers”. He worried how people would perceive these paintings knowing everything they do about him, so he hides behind the persona he created and caters to the public’s expectations. In contrast, AI has no private or public persona to consider, so even if the art evokes an emotional reaction from the viewer, the feelings are fleeting and give no opportunity for further reflection, which can leave a viewer feeling empty.

In the context of the film, Lori also has basically no public persona whatsoever, which makes her feel more authentic than Julian even though she is most known for forging others’ work. But in the final scene of the movie, we see Lori’s first public piece of work under her own name in years, displayed alongside the completed “Christophers”: an art installation of the Cameo recordings Julian had done over the years, on many screens arranged on a wall and all playing at once. In my opinion, this further solidifies the point of public perception. At the time he was making those videos, Julian certainly didn’t perceive himself as creating art; he was just capitalizing on his public persona to make ends meet and avoiding engaging with his true passion. But with Lori’s intentional reframing and a new way to view them, perhaps now these videos can be considered art, and even a way to merge Julian’s private and public personas in an effort to present him in a way he hadn’t been in the past.

As Lori watches her installation of Julian’s videos, his masseuse hands her an unfinished self-portrait of Julian with a message reading “For Lori” in Julian’s handwriting, seeming to imply Julian’s acknowledgement that she is perhaps the only person who saw him for who he truly was. She saw through his public persona and allowed him the freedom to paint, if only briefly, without regard to the expectation of the style that made him famous.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Art has always been subjective and often dictated by personal preference. We live in a world where we are often being asked to separate the art from the artist, and the prevalence of “AI art” might make that easier, but at the cost of the human connection. While AI may be capable of evoking an emotional reaction from its audience, what follows can feel hollow, offering little room for reflection. “The Christophers” reminds us how much effort and emotion goes into a work of art, to the point that the artist is almost giving us a piece of themselves. Whenever we view an artwork, our own reflections and emotional reactions are important, but we must also remember to consider the artist: both their public persona and their private humanity.