WORK
On the New
Groys's 1992 treatise — translated into English in 2014 — that rejected every Romantic assumption about creativity and reframed innovation as revaluation: the movement of an object across the boundary between the profane and the archive.
On the New is Boris Groys's foundational theoretical work, published in German in 1992 and translated into English only in 2014. The book dismantles the Romantic conception of creativity as inner genius producing original form from nothing. In its place, Groys substitutes a relational theory: novelty is not a property of objects or creators but a property of the relationship between a product and the existing archive against which the product is measured. The new is whatever the archive lacks. This framework dissolves the central question of the AI-creativity debate — can machines be creative? — by showing that creativity was never a property creators possessed. It was always a property the culture conferred through institutional valuation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The significance of On the New for the AI moment is that it arrived with its conclusions already drawn. Groys was not writing about machines. He was writing about Marcel Duchamp