On Thomas Flight’s YouTube channel he describes a film by Werner Herzog ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ about the prehistoric cave paintings in Chauvet, France, and an essay written by J F Martel about the film….

(Martel) In the images this prehistoric people bequeath to us we get a glimpse of something like a shared humanity but also we gaze into a stranger part of ourselves, something reaching to the depths. Seeing art made 30,000 years ago there is a striking sense of familiarity. There’s something in the very activity of creating art that feels instantly recognisably human, an impulse which remains within us despite such a vast passing of time and despite how much society has changed across that span. What we find looking at this art is the mystery of who these people painting these images were and why they painted them. It’s as if we discovered signs of alien life only to realise the aliens are us, that our own existence is just as mysterious and startling as anything else in the cosmos.

(Flight) Even if cannot know what these cave paintings mean, there is a profound and moving mystery in the question of their meaning itself. These images don’t just represent the existence of something or someone but self awareness of that existence. The existence of the art in the caves is existence expressing itself for other to see and hear. What we don’t often think about is that despite how much art has changed, despite all the technological advancement and scientific knowledge we’ve acquired since these cave painters first did their work, we are still caught in this mystery today. Art for us is still mysterious and true works of art still express the mystery of life itself. According to Martel art ” demands that we feel and think the mystery of our passage through this body, on this earth, in this universe” and “bears witness to the bafflement that the mere fact of existence elicits in our brains.”

YouTube – Thomas Flight ‘Why AI ‘Art’ Feels So Wrong, quoting from ‘Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique and Call to Action’, J.F. Martel, Evolve Editions, 2015