It was exactly the same as with AI art. The same histrionics about the end of art and the dangers to society. It’s really embarrassing how unoriginal all this is.
As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce.
What it was the end of was talentless painters who were just copying what they saw. Painting stopped being for service and started being for art.
This attitude is not new, either. He addressed it thus:
I know very well that some people will retort, “The disease which you have just been diagnosing is a disease of imbeciles. What man worthy of the name of artist, and what true connoisseur, has ever confused art with industry?” I know it; and yet I will ask them in my turn if they believe in the contagion of good and evil, in the action of the mass on individuals, and in the involuntary, forced obedience of the individual to the mass.
It was exactly the same as with AI art. The same histrionics about the end of art and the dangers to society. It’s really embarrassing how unoriginal all this is.
Charles Baudelaire, father of modern art criticism, in 1859:
This attitude is not new, either. He addressed it thus: