MachineMachine /stream

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), a prototypical nerd with few social graces and no head for business turns a watchmaker’s shop into an artist’s studio where, ultimately, he creates a clockwork butterfly in every way indistinguishable from a real butterfly except in its being even more beautiful. Although most of the story is about how misunderstood this nerdy clockmaker is, Hawthorne’s deeper concern is the fundamental mistake of supposing that the idea of artistic creation is not just to create something that is like reality but rather something that amounts to a new reality, a creation to rival God’s own. Indeed, as religion was already fading out of the Western cultural picture by the mid-nineteenth century, the story presents us with a foretaste of our own time in which, to an ever greater extent, we expect the artist to become God.

Or, if not God, at least a sort of godling, who makes his claim on our attention not by the likeness of his