The Brooklyn Rail

Attempting to foretell the next art world trend is a thankless task. I was recently reminded of this as I watched a 1986 appearance by Suzi Gablik on Richard Love’s American Art Forum TV show where she predicted that “militarism, consumerism, and class divisions” characteristic of then-regnant postmodernism would soon be countered by the emerging Aquarian vision of a “more holistic paradigm.” Gablik’s prediction was inspired by Marylin Ferguson’s bestseller The Aquarian Conspiracy, which promoted a hippiesque, interdisciplinary alliance to bring about profound and lasting social change. But New Age art dominated neither the nineties nor the noughties, and militarism, consumerism, and class division are still with us. Evidently, even one as astute and knowledgeable as Suzi Gablik could fall prey to wishful thinking because, as we Central Europeans like to say, “hope dies last.”

A similar enthusiasm currently surrounds the field of AI, promising dramatic changes across many fields: medicine, energy, sport, finance, the military and, of course, the arts. These changes will be made possible through optimization, artificial neural networks, deep learning, and generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs). In a recent conference talk titled “Is art making still meaningful or even necessary when AI can do it as well as or better than humans?*,” [original punctuation and typography] artist and theorist Lev Manovich questioned the assumption that in the automated future, human beings unburdened from labor will dedicate their newly discovered free time to creative pursuits. What if, asks Manovich, “this type of human behavior has fulfilled its function in our cognitive and social evolution,” resulting in artmaking losing its meaning and becoming unnecessary? In such a scenario, artmaking “may gradually fade from our lives, replaced by new activities we can’t yet imagine.” The approaching juggernaut of this dystopian future is powered by the rapid development of AI, which supports Manovich’s claim that we “may have difficulty imagining this new world today” because the technology has already outpaced our epistemology. Therefore, AI could supplant human artmaking entirely, but humans will not even mind, since our entire frame of reference will have shifted.

While AI-generated or AI-assisted art is not taking over just yet, there are some notable harbingers of the impending AI doom: both the low and the high rungs of the art world ladder have been infiltrated by digital art. I will start from the bottom. In March 2022 Beeple’s non-fungible token magnum opus Everydays: The First 5000 Days was sold at Christie’s for $69,346,250. That digital art could command such a price was stunning. If nothing else, this sale exposed that the art world’s metaphorical feet are indeed made of clay. Then in August 2022 a lab-printed giclée of an AI-generated image rendered by a certain “Jason M. Allen via Midjourney” was awarded the top prize in the digital arts/digitally-manipulated photography division of the Colorado State Fair. After making a triumphant announcement that “A.I. won. Humans lost,” Allen refused to fade into the oblivion, as he appealed the US Copyright Office copyright denial issued on the grounds of insufficient human authorship. Not a surprising charge, really, given Allen’s amateur status, and the single-cell resolution of his artwork.

This would not be the case at the top end, where projects are complex, and involve platoons of artist assistants. In July 2021 Damien Hirst announced an ambitious new project called “The Currency”—a participatory artwork that was meant to unfold over the next two years. In its initial phase, ten thousand unique NFTs were made available for sale via application, with an option of exchanging them for the corresponding enamel-on-paper paintings. Unclaimed paintings were first exhibited, then ritually burned at Hirst’s London gallery in the fall of 2022. The paintings, although analogue in terms of their physical rendering, are AI-assisted in their concept. Their titles were AI-generated from Hirst’s favorite song lyrics, and the AI algorithm ranked the works within the series based on their texture, brushstroke density, overlaps, and weight. “The Currency” received a great deal of attention across the art press which, together with over $100 million in total sales, ensured the project’s place in the annals of contemporary art.

Also filed in the “blue chip” section is another well-publicized instance of algorithm-assisted art—Refik Anadol’s twenty-four-foot-tall, screen-based, generative AI work Unsupervised that was exhibited and then acquired by MoMA in 2023. Unsupervised particularly irritated Jerry Saltz, who skewered the piece as a “glorified lava lamp” and a “narcotic pudding” in New York magazine, before taking his opinions to X, where he reiterated his firm belief that Anadol’s cumulative masterpiece (the work subsumed two hundred years-worth of paintings from the MoMA collection) is absolute shite. Anadol responded in kind, informing Saltz that ChatGPT writes better than he does. Their spat recalls a 2008 episode of 60 Minutes in which Julian Schnabel, on being reminded of Robert Hughes’s famous remark that his work is to painting what Sylvester Stallone’s is to acting, reacted by calling the eminent critic “a bum.”

Among the insults Saltz hurled at Unsupervised was that it is a techno equivalent of “Zombie Formalism”—painting which may look like abstraction but is actually no more than vacuous wall décor. This term, now over a decade old, was first used by Martin Mugar and Walter Robinson to describe recent non-objective works that had all the hallmarks of older abstract painting without its meaningful content. Jacob Kassay, Oscar Murillo, and Lucien Smith are the most often cited examples. History repeated itself here. The charge that Zombie Formalism is a simulacrum of serious art, an ersatz version of the real thing, evokes Clement Greenberg’s definition of “kitsch” as a “vicarious experience and faked sensations” and an “academicized simulacra” from his seminal 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Without naming Greenberg, John Yau resurrected the kitsch vs. genuine art dichotomy in a 2013 article “What Happens When We Run Out of Styles?,” where he wrote about an “academically approved replacement model … which smugly dismisses anything that seeks to delve beyond the surface.” Yau’s contention was that, when artists (he cited Wade Guyton) become “high-end art director[s] in the guise of a forward-thinking conceptual artist,” the work’s appearance becomes “the art world’s highest goal.”

Rob Colvin’s pithy 2017 takedown of what he calls “Like Art”—art which conjures up great modernist art in appearance only—the ubiquitous “look for less,” “monotone and pretentiously boring,” “the line of recycled abstraction out of your budget,” was a twist on the Zombie Formalism: it accounted for the amplificatory role of social media platforms. Like Yau before him, Colvin saw the reliance of ersatz abstraction on pre-established taste as a risk-averse way of gaining acceptance, because earlier art had already prepared the viewer to recognize something familiar and pleasant in the fresh examples of Like Art. The allusion to the familiar is what makes social media and Like Art the perfect bed fellows, because the participatory nature of clicks, likes, and swipes encourages continuous engagement and unfiltered emotional responses. This symbiotic mode is then turbo-charged by AI algorithms that streamline the feed. Having learned the individual viewer’s preferences, the algorithm configures their feed accordingly, thus reinforcing existing biases. The most obvious problem here is that anything potentially transformative, which could initially manifest as challenging or even offensive, is purged by the algorithm, whose goal is to serve up the familiar before it reaches its potential viewer.

Today’s Like Art, the neo old masters, and generative art all function as academicized simulacra of modernism and postmodernism folded into one. They have the look of modernist art, and the spirit of postmodernism, with its reliance on appropriation and lampooning of primary sources. Each of these “schools” is highly responsive to what Jonathan Haidt labeled “the hive switch”—a modality where a Homo sapiens morphs into the Durkheimian “Homo duplex,” wired to empathize with others who conform to a particular moral matrix. The burst in popularity of Black Figuration is one prominent example of how moral and aesthetic preferences can mutually reinforce, especially in our panopticon culture where one’s digital “likes” are visible to all. But whereas modernism and the avant-garde fetishized the new and the futuristic, and postmodernism thrived on appropriation and ironic distance, today’s cultural producers and consumers prioritize moral prestige and emotional safety. In the 1990s Dave Hickey and David Levi Strauss identified this new system of value judgement in their writings on the therapeutic institutions and allopathic art (anodyne, agreeable, images intended for therapeutic effect). Today many museums and foundations see their allopathic function as a mandate.

This, of course, is nothing new. Half a century ago, Christopher Lasch connected the prevailing “culture of narcissism” to what he called “the therapeutic sensibility” that drives individuals to great lengths “for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.” In the culture of narcissism one “feels that he lives in a world that defies practical understanding and control, a world of giant bureaucracies, ‘information overload,’ and complex interlocking technological systems vulnerable to sudden breakdown.” Hence the search for comfort, social approval, and the need to conform to a group “identity.” So while art critics lament the deterioration of aesthetic standards, the consumers of ersatz art who find themselves under pressure from information overload and complex interlocking technological systems justifiably look out for their own psychic balance as they “like” and swipe right on the very work that makes artworld professionals despair.

The seepage of art into the online sphere was a huge gamechanger. True, there was centuries-long tradition of seeing paintings in their engraved iterations, and then, for about a hundred-and-fifty years, in photo-gravure reproductions, which led Walter Benjamin to write about the importance of the “aura.” In the decades since, it has been assumed that looking at art meant doing so in person, not on a screen, just like reading books meant reading printed full-length texts, not their digital digests on Blinkist. Now we are in a brave new world of Immersive Van Gogh and Instagrammable installations, whose main purpose seems to be documenting one’s attendance on social media. Visitors are invited to “escape reality” in one of many locations in the Paradox Museum, where perceptual abstraction is used to build an adult playground. Artsy, an entirely digital platform that bills itself “as the leading marketplace for art,” and boasts a subscription of over four thousand galleries, is but an intimacy coach between the art in its virtual viewing rooms and the small-time collectors. Consistent with the digital world’s lofty ambitions and Icarus outcomes, Artsy runs a bespoke algorithm called “The Art Genome Project,” which classifies the works on the site using over a thousand characteristics. Yet its “Buy It Now” curated auction platform is awash with counterfeits. Artsy refuses to provide any guarantee of authenticity for their curated auctions, which is at odds with the rules of established auction houses, but in line with the “app” spirit of Artsy.

Unsurprisingly, the digital universe has its own frame of reference. Artists’ growth happens not through critical recognition, but by clicks and likes. Devon Rodriguez, whose Instagram following now stands at 9.2 million people (his bio calls him the “most followed visual artist in the world”) aptly demonstrated the pitfalls of assuming analogue rules still apply online. A year ago Ben Davis reviewed Rodriguez’s solo show, offering what seemed to me an evenhanded evaluation of his work. Normally, no public feedback from the artist is expected. But in the spirit of social media clapback, Rodriguez posted an Instagram story accusing the critic of snobbish gatekeeping, while encouraging his multitude of followers to chime in—even tagging the culprit to facilitate the harassment. Followers obliged, swarming Davis with bullying, ad hominem attacks, and even threats. Davis’s thoughtful response was to look for the bigger picture, and to identify the trends that had caused the swarm. He concluded that the attention economy and parasocial relationships between celebrities and their audience lead to what he called “parasocial aesthetics,” where the value of the art is driven entirely by its producer’s fame. In the world of parasocial aesthetics Rodriguez did not need an opinion of a professional critic, emojis and “likes” from his followers were sufficient feedback.

Instagram also has a number of “buffet” feeds like @artists.pages.daily and @art_dailydose that create content based on a gimmicky version of art that makes Bob Ross seem highbrow. While these accounts are easy to dismiss, a number of serious artists (often gallery or even museum artists) also use Instagram, forcing serious critics to contend with the digital format. In a 2020 article “What Truths Can You Divine from Instagram Paintings?” Barry Schwabsky named several painters he followed on the platform, as the pandemic closures forced him to rely on Instagram. After all, looking at paintings online was better than not looking at paintings all. But in a different article two years on, with galleries reopening, Schwabsky acknowledged the limitations of seeing art on Instagram where one could easily be led astray, mistaking an eye-catching painting for a good one, and where the good ones tend to make the viewer yearn for a real-life aesthetic encounter anyway. Benjaminian “aura” must be addictive.

As an art historian, I was trained to make sense of the past. As a critic, I try to make sense of the present. What I am now observing is that the art scene is very much siloed. In addition to the familiar ecosystem of traditional contemporary art museums, commercial galleries, career artists, and professional art critics, there is a parallel universe of social media and self-identifying artists, creators, and influencers, a universe that is expanding in proportion with the growing importance of AI algorithms. In some cases (MoMA’s purchase of Anadol’s Unsupervised) the gatekeepers open the gates voluntarily to welcome the barbarians. In other cases the two worlds clash, as happened with Rodriguez and Davis, because the world of social media art plays by different rules than the analogue art world. Even within analogue art, however, I see a split between those who believe that art should be primarily aesthetics-driven, and those who value it mainly for its social engagement. It seems that in the artworld, as in politics, Balkanization prevails.

Going forward, I see an ever-increasing role of the audience, empowered by its ability to record, publish, and share content. The attention economy and parasocial aesthetics are part of that trend. I worry about the expansion of conformism and groupthink, both characteristic of the cultural narcissism Lasch described. As we have learned in the past seven years, the “hive switch” is easy to flip. The biggest potential game-changer, in my opinion, is AI, and its ability to penetrate the upper echelons of the artworld. The likes of Jason Allen are easy to ignore, but the technology is still nascent, and Hirst’s success with “The Currency” suggests that AI has a future outside the space populated by crypto evangelists and other amateurs. As far as the analogue silo goes, I am not holding my breath for a new movement or style. My sense is that the pendulum will continue to swing indefinitely between figuration and abstraction, at least until it hits the brick wall of AI. Art history will continue to wane in importance, so we will see more and more reinvented wheels in both brick-and-mortar galleries and online. Eventually, we will all wear Crocs. But that will not matter, because algorithms that curate our feeds will ensure that we only see what we “like,” keeping everyone content, or at least comfortably numb.