"No one cares about this anymore" — T. Chalamet
In a long interview with Matthew McConaughey and Timothée Chalamet for Variety, Chalamet made a quick — and out of context — comment on ballet and opera. "I don't want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it's like, 'Hey! Keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.'" While it may be a quirky uneducated comment, it points to a far more serious topic — and to a deep irony. Ballet and opera are not only alive and well. In a world where AI seems to be consuming every art form, the living arts are — and will be even more in the future — a precious and vibrant witness of our humanity.
The postulate is remarkably out of touch, for many reasons. One should consider any art form as being periodically challenged and taken by doubt. Cinema is far from being exempted — streaming platforms have already changed the rules, and the growing use of AI — a continuation, after all, of what digital editing already began — is now reshaping it from the inside. It is not a distant threat. Actors' likenesses are being licensed posthumously or without consent. Screenwriters have already fought, publicly and painfully, for the right to remain in the room. Entire visual effects studios have closed because what took teams of humans months can now be generated overnight. Ballet and opera have faced their fair share of questioning — and still do — but their vibrant discourses and the passion of their most valiant contributors are proof that they are more than alive.
Of course, I am biased, being deeply involved in ballet, but I believe firmly that its future is vast and perennial, and I have been thinking a great deal about what constitutes its strength in light of AI expansion. One does reassess one's place when AI is learning fast and a catastrophic number of jobs have — or will become — obsolete. The arts are not exempted, on the contrary. Design, drawing, music, film — all have felt this already, some of them dramatically. And yet something grows clearer the longer one sits with it. What AI is consuming, replacing, and accelerating are forms that exist as image, as file, as recording — things that can be stored, copied, and distributed without a human being present. The body is another matter entirely. The body, on a stage, in real time, in front of you — that fleeting moment whose very value lies in its ungraspable, ephemeral essence, remains stubbornly, irreducibly outside what AI can reach.
What happens in a theater — in a human communion of artists, staff and audience — is not transactional. It cannot be. A gathering of human beings in the dark, choosing to be present together for something that will never exist again in exactly this form. To witness a human being on stage — talking, dancing, singing directly to you, unfiltered, unperfected, yet still aiming for an impossible ideal — smiling together, crying together, laughing together — this is the most irreplaceable and rare thing that makes us human, makes us community, makes us mitmenschen*.
* fellow human beings
