“The Conquest of Ubiquity” a Century Later: Valéry in the Age of AI

Art is in the Air. AI art

  

“In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be (...). We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.” —Paul Valéry

Abstract

In 1928, Paul Valéry anticipated in La conquête de l’ubiquité a radical transformation of the material conditions of art, driven by the technical advances of his time. Almost one hundred years later, his intuitions strongly resonate in the age of artificial intelligence, where digital reproduction, global circulation, and algorithmic creation present new challenges and opportunities for art. This article revisits Valéry’s essay in light of contemporary technological developments, exploring the relevance of his diagnoses and their pertinence for understanding today’s aesthetics.

Introduction

In Pièces sur l’art (1928), Paul Valéry published the celebrated essay La conquête de l’ubiquité, where he argued that the arts were undergoing an irreversible mutation under the impact of technology. “Nos belles œuvres sont devenues illimitées et ubiquistes” (“Our fine works have become unlimited and ubiquitous”), he wrote, foreseeing that artworks would lose their rootedness in a here and now and become reproducible objects in circulation everywhere (Valéry, 1928/1960, p. 129).

Nearly a century later, the age of artificial intelligence offers a privileged stage to reread this visionary text. If for Valéry print, photography, and the phonograph had already transformed aesthetic perception, today digitalization and AI reshape creation itself, not merely its dissemination. This article explores that historical and conceptual continuity.

Valéry and Technology

Valéry’s concern belongs to a broader reflection on the relation between art and technology in modernity. In La conquête de l’ubiquité, he warned that the technical multiplication of works radically alters our aesthetic experience: what was once singular and unique becomes reproducible, and with that, our sensibility and our relation to art itself are transformed.

The “conquest of ubiquity” did not simply mean wider access, but a true decentering of art from its material support. The artwork becomes flux, transmission, circulation: a cultural good without a fixed body, “like water or electricity” (Valéry, 1928/1960, p. 131).

The Physical and the Spiritual in Art

In La conquête de l’ubiquité, Valéry clearly distinguishes between the physical and the spiritual aspects of art. The first refers to its material support—pigments, stone, paper, or more recently, disks, waves, and circuits. The second points to its symbolic and intellectual dimension, where the artist’s invention, feeling, or conception resides. For Valéry, both aspects are inseparably linked, yet modern technology had begun to separate them by allowing the spiritual work to circulate without the weight of its material body.

Cinema, phonography, and print had already partially dematerialized art, multiplying its presence across distant spaces. In the digital age this fracture becomes sharper: the artwork becomes almost pure information, subject to endless reproductions and recombinations. Artificial intelligence intensifies this process: it produces symbolic configurations—images, texts, music—without requiring manual gesture or individual invention, altering the balance between the physical and the spiritual. Thus, the tension identified by Valéry is renewed today with unprecedented radicality, to the point of redefining what we mean by materiality and spirit in art.

Ubiquity in the Digital Age

The digital revolution and the rise of artificial intelligence can be seen as the extreme prolongation of Valéry’s diagnosis of the “conquest of ubiquity.” Global platforms allow musical, visual, or literary works to be instantly reproduced anywhere in the world. Streaming, augmented reality, and the virtualization of museums intensify the experience of radical ubiquity.

Even more, AI has introduced a novelty Valéry could hardly have imagined: the automation of creation. Generative algorithms produce images, music, or texts from vast data corpora, blurring the boundaries between author and machine (Floridi & Chiriatti, 2020). If technology for Valéry mainly transformed reception, today it also modifies artistic production.

The Status of Art Today

The horizon opened by AI raises questions about the very status of the artistic. What happens to originality when images are generated from statistical patterns? How should authorship be redefined when machine learning systems actively participate in the creative process?

Some studies suggest that, rather than displacing the artist, these technologies reconfigure their role: the human creator becomes a “curator of possibilities,” selecting, filtering, and resignifying what algorithms produce (Manovich, 2019). The ubiquity of the artwork is no longer limited to its circulation: it now includes the incessant proliferation of possible variants, all available in the same digital instant.

Conclusion

A century later, Valéry’s essay retains its diagnostic power. The “conquest of ubiquity” was not a passing metaphor but a lucid anticipation of the mutation that today reaches a new threshold with artificial intelligence. The artwork, transformed into digital flow and algorithmic production, confirms that the technical horizon not only multiplies dissemination but also redefines creation itself. In this sense, Valéry remains an indispensable interlocutor for thinking about art in the age of AI.

References

• Floridi, L., & Chiriatti, M. (2020). GPT-3: Its nature, scope, limits, and consequences. Minds and Machines, 30(4), 681–694.
• Manovich, L. (2019). AI Aesthetics. Moscow: Strelka Press.
• Valéry, P. (1960). Pièces sur l’art. In Œuvres (Vol. 2, pp. 129–135). Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). (Original published 1928).