so this artist @SHL0MS posted a real Monet painting of Water Lilies and told everyone it was AI generated, and the internet was rage-baited into tearing it apart. then he reveals it was a real Monet, then mints it as an NFT, banks $46k and suddenly everyone looks stupid. now he's getting praised for being some kind of genius, what really what bothers me about this, is why we are so easily manipulated by framing, and why provocateurs keep profiting off the anxiety of artists who are actually doing the work. the real conversation we should be having isn't whether people can tell AI from Monet but rather interrogating the concept of value that antagonizes people about BOTH art and AI, but for completely different reasons. the monetary value of art, especially something like a Monet that's worth millions, is hard and uncomfortable for the average person to comprehend. but then AI is seen as completely fake and therefore valueless, or worse draining value from real creators. and those two reactions are fighting each other in the same conversation, when they are completely seperate debates rooted in objective definitions of "value". what SHLOMS did was clever, but let's be real about what he actually is. his work lives exclusively online pandering exclusively to internet culture and as he says himself, in service of the zeitgeist and chasing attention. this stunt was rage bait designed to go viral and funnel into profit (disrespectful, might I add) but for him to say he has "suffered" for his art when his entire practice is screenshots and social experiments, is a joke. come back and say that after you spend hours locked in a studio inhaling turpentine and microplastics, or injure yourself installing a show, or even pour years of your physical body and mind into work that might never sell. the blood and risk of being a physical artist is not the same as posting a tweet and profiting off people arguing.