Do you think you can use magic to create works of art, without the caster needing to exercise or possess artistic skill in the relevant area?

There are some potentially relevant parts of canon:

- The harp used to send Fluffy to sleep in PS was charmed to play music on its own, without the caster's presence, suggesting that magic can create music.

- Rita Skeeter's Quick Quotes Quill appears to perform independent creative writing.

- The various methods of cheating on exams such as Auto-Answer Quills and Self-Correcting ink are suggestive of magic which can use and apply knowledge.

- In Secrets of Dumbledore, a house-elf is depicted conducting a band of instruments which were playing themselves.

- Wizarding chess sets play chess on their own, which arguably has aesthetic value. Chess players certainly describe certain moves/games as beautiful.

Please add any further relevant scenes you can think of.

So what do you think?

Personally I think it probably is possible within canon, though likely with some limitations. The above references are generally suggestive of magic being able to exercise creative power and I'm not sure there's a convincing way to write them off.

If you wanted to limit this aspect of magic, one of the more obvious routes would be to link the magic to the caster's underlying skill in that area of artistic endeavour. So the Quick Quotes Quill, for example, doesn't exercise its own creative power, but rather writes what Rita would have written, had she written it herself. And the harp would be playing some song that Quirrell knows how to play on the harp. The magic becomes a shortcut rather than an independent source of creative spirit.

The problem with that approach is the cheating magic, which explicitly goes beyond the caster's knowledge/skill - if they simply wrote what you could and would have written anyway, it wouldn't be cheating.

However, one of the hard limitations is presumably that you can't use magic to write new spellbooks or works on magical theory. If you could, then you could just automate magical progress, or have spells create themselves. But the existence of cheating magic does suggest that some level of "using magic to know about magic" is possible.

This kind of mechanic would also go some way to allowing wizards to have a quantity of literature, music, etc. which is disproportionate to their population size, if such works can be created with magic.

In line with the rest of HP magic, presumably the quality of the work produced by the magic would scale with the ability of the caster. So you would still have famous wizarding authors, musicians, etc. but their skill is with the magic used to produce these things, rather than the underlying art. Similar to how when you transfigure animals, your expertise is in transfiguration theory, not biology.

It also opens the door to magical works of art which are just so astoundingly good that they put anything in the Muggle world to shame. For example, you can imagine there being some wizarding author who is widely considered the absolute master of writing magic, who produced, at the peak of their powers, a work which is considered to be the perfect novel. Like the Philosopher's Stone of fiction.

 

You could argue that a "cheating quill" is either pre-programmed to have answers to specific questions, or function kind of like a pensieve allowing you to draw answers from unconscious memory.

Personally I'd say the biggest advantage magic would give in creativity is technical performance. A sculptor might have amazing creative vision of a sculpture, but simply lack the technical skill or ability to bring it to reality. With magic you can create things that are otherwise impossible, opening whole new worlds of creativity.

Also magic removes a lot of economic limitations from creativity; an architect might not be able to experiment with 1:1 scale options, but with magic it would be possible to study shapes and forms in real space without paying contractors vast amounts of money to do so. That would increase the amount of iteration that's reasonably possible beyond anything available in the real world. Magic would also allow for a real life version of crtl+z when painting, for example.

Then there's the different memory enhancing magics available. I could see hallucinogenic drugs/potions used in creative process much more efficiently as you could revisit your trippiest moments using pensieve or other means.

 

I imagine magic is more of a medium for artistry than a source for it in most of those examples. A person can make art on a computer without needing to know painting, but it does still require skill, just in a different way.
So the harp can only play the music it was specifically charmed to play, as opposed to it being told to play music and figuring out the rest on it's own. And I imagine the cheating stuff is more comparable to word autocorrect and stuff like that, where the information is fed into it and so is the style in which it's supposed to apply it.

 

I like that explanation and would keep it, however, I don't agree with the next part:

There is, in my opinion, a difference between what the Quill does and what the harp does. The quill produces, arguably, a text of actual value, a sensationalist hit piece with its own characteristic style and expressive use of language.

However, as you said, the harp plays "music", which is an interesting formulation and the key difference: The quill is supposed to create a very specific subset of text. The harp, however, just does what it is supposed to do. It might just play random notes. In fact, when Harry uses the flute to play random notes, this also works on Fluffy.

And if it just performs basic "harp duties", I don't think this is different from charming an iron to make something smooth, even if you don't know how to iron: The magic makes the tool perform its basic functionality and nothing beyond; it's not art, it's switching something on.

What I think magic is definitely able to do is making the mechanical process easier: If the caster has a melody in his head, the magic might make him able to put it on a harp, but he still has to come up with it himself.

The cheating magic - auto-answer quills and self-correcting ink - can just be explained by using the concept that not the user, but the creator is the one that needs to know how to answer/spell something. Same with the chess boards, who might be able to combine the skill of their creators _and_ their previous users. I don't consider this an issue.

Just as I don't consider "Secrets of Dumbledore" canon...

I personally do not like the idea that creative or intellectual processes can be cheated with magic. Especially, I lack the imagination how improving something on a skill-scale might work, because there is no objective way of measuring skill and there will never be an objectively perfect piece of literature with magic, just as there will never be one without.

 

Perhaps distinguishing between:

1. Knowledge creation

2. Knowledge utilization


A self playing harp could not create music that's never been played before, but could play music it's creator was familiar with.

A chess set could only play as well as it's creator could play.

A House Elf conducting an orchestra is interesting. I don't think the elf knew to play all the instruments. Perhaps general knowledge of music can substitute for instrument specific skill, but only a truly skilled Harpist could create a new piece of music.

 

Much like how a wizard's knowledge of magic affects how well he casts a spell, I think it's reasonable to expect that spells that possess some artistry behind them also pull from the wizard's artistic knowledge/sense. I imagine that a wizard of Dumbledore's caliber could conjure an symphony with the flick of his wand, but should he be tone deaf and unappreciative towards classical music the result would be awful no matter his skill with a wand.

Personally, I think that many spells have a default outcome and that deviating from it requires more specific and advanced knowledge. The result of some music creating spell would depend on the caster's musical knowledge, artistic sense, mood, objective, etc. With the skill at spell itself dictating how close to this ideal song one would reach. The resulting piece would not be under the caster's conscious control and would be very derivative from the music that he's familiar.

I think that way towards transfiguration in general. By default, the caster possess little conscious control over the transfiguration's result beyond how well it reaches it's objective. With customization and "manual" control requiring distinct knowledge, it's own branch of knowledge for things such as clothing, for instance.

 

Perhaps the Auto-Answer Quills are a form of divination

 

I think of magic as pseudo-sentient.

The same way enchanted cars, Wands, books, have displayed a kind of innate sentience,

I see magic as having its own sentience. And so, a wizard can tap into that in order to create artistic works beyond their means.

The same way wizards can transfigure a whole animal without knowing the intricacies of their biology, or repair a building back to its original form without ever seeing what the building looked like.

Hermione can use acio to search through books, for key words and topics. Maybe the cheating ink users a similar magic to search through all the local books for an answer.

Note: In the real world, Humans can create machines that through machine learning or clever software can create pieces of music superior to anything the programmer could ever magic.

Same thing with chess, and many kinds of artistic works.

I see no reason why magic, couldn’t do the same even better.

Wizard’s teach their own paintings, I see no reason why a wizard can’t make a self learning chess set, that gets better Over time.

Or a musical instrument that self plays, and improves.

 

It always seemed to me that art was one of the exceptions to Gamp's law. I'm not too sure how that would apply to music or artistic disciplines that are created through non-transfiguration magic, but it seems that they should just be ways to manifest an individual's already extant artistic ability.

I also wonder about the history of Wizarding and Muggle magical art pre-Statute—how intermingled do you think they were? I've always thought that epics like the Odyssey are so foundational to Western culture because they represent instances of muggles using wit to beat out magicals.

 

The Sorting Hat composes a new song every year. But then again, it's hardly an everyday artifact, so you can explain its abilities with any sort of unusual circumstances.

My headcanon is that such artifacts are specialized versions of magical paintings, containing a limited imprint of a specific person.
So, an auto-correcting quill would have a grammatical skill of a wizard in whose image it has been made. The cheating tools would show the knowledge of a Hermione's counterpart. The Marauder's Map creatively insults the unauthorized user like it's creators would do - but only when is held by the said user. It doesn't plan pranks, nor tries to manipulate children into the no good behavior.

A portrait made by a magical artist appears sentient, but we don't see them inventing the whole new branches of magic, possessing the living, going insane, or doing anything else you might expect from a person who had been incarcerated for centuries. So I think it's plausible to say that such phantoms are static in nature; only able to change when actively influenced by wizards, but not by their own means.

The comparison that comes to my mind is the enchanted mirror. The person studies their appearance, and the mirror gives them a side opinion. The artifact reflects the will of a wizard. Lockhart, writing a new book in a circle of his own portraits, would have a really good team saving him days and months on polishing the text, but he can't tell the copies to write and go to sleep.