Tales and tensions of sharing the privilege of creation
In a music history seminar years ago, discussing post-war contemporary composition, the professor laid out a problem that still sits with me: after conceptual art broke everything open, after Duchamp’s urinal and Cage’s 4’33“, the old rules stopped working. You couldn’t point to formal training, mastery of technique or adherence to established forms and say “this is music, that is not.”
Two things happened in response.
First: the rules of the game got established per work, not per movement. You couldn’t subscribe to a style that would carry you for decades. Each piece had to argue for its own coherence on its own terms.
Second: art became whatever the artist declared it to be. But that immediately raised the harder question: who gets to be an artist?
To achieve relevance for academia and critics, at least two requirements were added to the established canon. Beyond the joy of creation and the pursuit of beauty, artists had to think critically about why they were doing what they were doing. Playing 400-year-old operas in the 21st century might be complex, beautiful, culturally valuable work, but if you’re not pushing against something, if there’s no critical friction, you’re performing, not creating.
Ligeti was active throughout the late 1950s, teaching, studying and composing, but his work gained little international recognition. Atmosphères (1961) emerged after nearly 15 years of foundation-building: rigorous training at Budapest Academy, time at Cologne’s electronic studio with Stockhausen, deep engagement with contrapuntal traditions from Renaissance polyphony to Bartók. When it premiered at Donaueschingen, the audience demanded an immediate repeat performance. That breakthrough wasn’t accidental. It was the culmination of years of work that finally made his peers listen.
Subtly addressing the second requirement was the infrastructure of legitimacy: education, study and peer recognition. But conceptual art’s democratization didn’t eliminate barriers; it redistributed them. Museums, critics, curators and academic institutions became more central, not less. Conceptual art shifted legitimacy away from craft and toward discourse, positioning and institutional framing. This opened space for radical experimentation, but also for snobism, self-proclamation and opaque gatekeeping. Claims of artistic status were no longer grounded primarily in technique, but in proximity to cultural power and the ability to operate within elite interpretive frameworks. At the same time, mass culture absorbed and neutralized many of these gestures, turning provocation into style and critique into commodity.
Here’s the thought experiment that came up and stuck with me from that class: imagine divine intervention overnight grants you the knowledge and creativity to produce the most disruptive, intelligent, compelling musical works anyone has ever heard. If you don’t have the background, the study, the critical framework to contextualize it, if you haven’t built the peer relationships that make your work legible to the community, it doesn’t matter. The work dies on arrival. Not because it’s bad, but because legitimacy is relational, not intrinsic. It’s network validation, not an individual act.
The same rhetorical exercise applies to other disciplines now.
Fast forward to 2026. Anyone with internet access can generate working code in seconds. Blog posts, movie cuts, entire kernels, version control systems, compilers. The output is often correct, sometimes elegant, occasionally brilliant. Gossip.Goblin crafts sci-fi stories scripted from the human brain, curated through vision and rendered by the machine. Built on the imaginary foundation of Zack London’s prior illustration work. The tools are democratized in a way that would have seemed like science fiction five years ago.
So a considerable language model enters a bar, handing you a post-quantum kernel hardened against cryptographic collapse and a version control system that reconciles commits from futures that haven’t branched yet, merging timelines across parallel execution universes. Without decades of systems programming, without the community that recognized judgment on architectural decisions, without the credibility earned through years of public technical arguments, it’s just code. It might compile. It might even run. But no one’s going to use it, fork it, build on it or trust it in production. This isn’t hypothetical posturing; it’s an observation about how technical communities actually work.
The same question again: who gets to call themselves a programmer, a writer or an artist now?
Akin to conceptual art, the old markers still exist: formal education, years of production experience, deep knowledge of internals. Yet they are no longer sufficient, and in some contexts no longer necessary. Novice engineers can ship features that a decade ago would have taken experts days to build. The code works. The tests pass. It runs in production.
The first filter from the art world maps cleanly: there is conscious thinking about what is being built. Not just “does it work,” but “should this exist, what does it enable, what does it foreclose?” The language model can generate the implementation, but it can’t tell you whether the thing you’re building is worth building. That requires context, judgment, an understanding of second-order effects.
This capacity for critical consciousness may be our last privilege. The model produces artifacts with inhuman speed and often impressive quality. But the question of value, of purpose, of consequence still lives with us. For now. Consciousness about means and ends, about why we build what we build and who it serves, remains the domain where human judgment can’t be delegated. Not because the tools are incapable in principle, but because the question itself demands a stance, a set of values, a position in the world that only beings with skin in the game can occupy. The privilege of creation is no longer ours alone. The privilege of consciousness, of reasoning about what should exist, may be our last bastion.
What’s the equivalent of peer recognition for code in the LLM era? GitHub stars? Production uptime? Economic survival with a fraction of the effort? The ability to debug the generated artifact when it inevitably breaks in ways the model didn’t anticipate? Or is it something we haven’t named yet, some new form of infrastructure legitimacy that’s still being negotiated?
The uncomfortable part is realizing that legitimacy in this new regime isn’t about the artifacts you produce. It’s about the frameworks you bring to evaluating those artifacts, the critical distance you maintain from the tools and the peer community that recognizes your judgment as sound.
The LLM writes you a beautiful piece of code, asynchronous workers in an exponential backoff and dead letter handling choreography. Does it work? Sure. But do you know why it chose this backpressure strategy over rate limiting? Can you explain the tradeoffs to your team? Can you debug it when managed queue services starts throttling your calls and the logs don’t tell you why?
You can’t skip the foundation building. Even if the LLM hands you the most elegant solution to a problem, if you don’t have the context to know why it’s elegant, why it’s better than the alternatives, what it costs in maintainability or observability or security, the gap between artifact and understanding remains unbridged.
If this is a call for silence, I should stop writing now. It’s an observation about how legitimacy gets constructed in fields where the barrier to entry drops suddenly and dramatically. The output becomes table stakes. What matters is everything around the output: the thinking, the context, the ability to explain not just what you built but why it matters and what it changes.
There’s a pragmatic difference here worth acknowledging. Art operates with different constraints than design. The latter responds to pragmatic industry requirements: legibility, communication, function. Visual art doesn’t have to. A broken painting might still be beautiful; broken code doesn’t pay for lunch. This affects how we think about craft, utility and the relationship between maker and artifact.
Ligeti’s years of preparation weren’t wasted. They were the price of having something to say when he finally spoke. I don’t think we’re in for years of preparation before the field sorts itself out, but I do think we’re in for a period of figuring out what counts, who counts and why. The tools changed overnight. The legitimacy structures didn’t.
Joseph Beuys declared that every human being is an artist, a freedom being called to participate in transforming society through creative acts. It’s a beautiful, radically democratic idea and it’s more urgent than ever.
A friend once told me: “Que el carpintero traiga mesas.” Let the carpenter bring tables. Sooner or later, someone will ask not only what you built, but why it matters, what it costs and who has to sit on the chairs.