Episode 2: What Makes Something Count as Art?

Dr. Ferguson came to his understanding of art the way most good ideas arrive: early, sideways, and through something strange. Discovering Dada at eleven or twelve, he found in Marcel Duchamp's urinal that the "definition" of art comes from its intention rather than the process used to make it. In this conversation, he and Theo work through what that means across a century of edge cases, from Bottle Rack to DALL-E, arriving at a definition that is both radically open and surprisingly precise: art is what agents with genuine intentions declare it to be. The AI image someone posts calling it their work counts. The image the model generated before anyone touched it does not.