AESTHETIC NEGATIVITY VS. ECONOMIC NATURALISM: A CLOSE READING OF AN INDIAN AI-ART PRACTICE

This paper offers a close reading of an Indian AI-art practice to ask a narrow but consequential question: when AI systems become both the tool of image-production and the theme that legitimizes the work in public circulation, what conditions allow the artwork to remain critical rather than merely novel. Rather than treating “AI art” as a coherent genre, I treat one practice as a testing ground for a tension that repeats across contemporary digital culture: critique versus the smoothing force of platform visibility, institutional framing, and market-facing narratives of innovation. The argument is developed through Adorno’s account of negativity as formal refusal, Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of smoothness, Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, and Gawronski’s account of productive negativity. A methodological spine runs through the analysis: the mediation problem, where installation-based demands for duration, scale, and embodied negotiation are repeatedly compressed into online documentation, captions, and shareable fragments that can neutralize friction. Across three case studies, the paper tracks how interactive and generative systems can interrupt recognition and force interpretive labour, while also risking conversion into a consumable spectacle of disturbance. The paper concludes that the central struggle is not whether AI art can “be critical,” but what kinds of circulation it can survive. In a culture that rewards speed, legibility, and frictionless affect, negativity persists only when it is built into form and viewing conditions, not declared in the concept note: when the work withholds resolution, demands duration, and makes its own mediation visible as part of what the viewer must contend with.