The coming of mankind’s new frenemy, AI, is necessarily impacting the arts

  Mary Reid, Temperence, 36 x 24, oil on canvas, 2024

   By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST May, 2024

  Debbie Dickinson has her own gallery space on West 67th Streert but she also curates at large, making her a good fit in New York’s fluidly evolving artworld. Shows she has put together include Ocean, which was of work by artists dealing with an endangered planet, and Chroma, which was of work indicating the range of effects that light conditions can have on color. Ocean was hung in a gallery in SoHo, Chroma in a designer furniture showroom and her current show, Cerebral. is hung in the Smile Gallery, a foundation set up by Dr Lee Gause, DDS, to raise funds from art sales to provide dentistry for the needy. There are ten artists in Cerebral, which is so-named because Dickinson feels that the work of each is distinctively thinky.

  A timely subject, this. The coming of mankind’s new frenemy, AI, is necessarily impacting the arts, and some effects have been dismayingly negative. Young writers used to earn a few hundred dollars by writing short pieces for catalogs or whatever. Chatbot does ‘em for free. But deeper effects are likely with the coming of AGI, which is to say AI that has developed a level of consciousness, and they may be momentous. James Cameron, director most recently of Avatar, foresees AGI being able to write scripts and direct movies. 

   Will AGI also be able to generate art? I asked some of the Cerebral artists how they came up with their own work. “It usually has to do with human beings around me,” said Cosmo Mullican. “In terms of making the art, that comes from taking photographs. And then working with them, trying to understand about human beings. That’s how it starts. And from there there’s more mystery involved, I guess”. 

  How does Tina Salvesen approach her material?

  “I’m very interested in the space of In Between,” she said. “That moment between waking and sleeping, between life and death – that kind of limbo state where we’re not awake but we’re not sleeping. I’m a meditator and when you meditate you go into a place which can be of this world but which is not of this world.” 

  It looks like a time-consuming process, I noted.

  “Months. Months,” she agreed. “But that’s part of the beauty. It’s the slow meditative process.”

   David Richardson comes from a different place. “I’d rather make a composition which is somewhat awkward, somewhat initially displeasing to the eye. That’s kind of where the Awkward Flowers come in,” he says, meaning his work in the show. “The flowers are very representational and I enjoyed doing them because I could see so many element of abstraction in them as I purposefully made them asymmetrical. You’re trying to finish. And then eventually you enjoy looking at it. Because it stimulates your brain”.

David Richardson, Milk Jar w Spring Flowers, 30 x 20, oil on canvas, framed

  “My art comes from inside, it comes from the soul, it comes from my experience of life. It comes from the colors that I like, the emotions that I have gone through” says Marc Bouwer, a painter and leading New York fashion designer. “I call this group of portraits Facial Recognition. When you look at one a story immediately comes to mind. That’s what is intriguing to me. One is called Side-Eyed Suspicion. Another one is called Look What She Did. There’s a strange beauty behind each of these faces.  And I ask the person who is looking at the art to come up with ideas of what they see when they’re looking at the art? What they feel?”

  Bill Buchman started artmaking early. “When I was about thirteen I started drawing snd making little sculptures in a natural unconscious way” he says.

  “But every now and again something would pop out which was better than I was expecting. I’d look at it and go wow! I wish I had thought of that. And that was one of the reasons I became an artist, because I loved that experience”.

  “All the women I paint are people who I met. They are not models you hire,” Mary Reid told me. One was a nude model she painted for a week in Florence. “She would come in every day and pose and she was like a punk rock chick. She had a shaved head and pierced nose.”  Reid though sensed a high degree of control. “We can be rebellious and virtuous at the same time and I saw that in her,” she says. “It was really edgy. When I asked her to pose as my Temperance she laughed.“ But she’s in the show.

  “It’s really just an emotion driven piece,” says Evan Lagache about Apex, a piece in the show. “I made it after the passing of a friend. I just let go. I had no objective, I just kept painting until I kind of ran out of breath. There’s also the piece  Beyond, which is more meditative. I was dealing with grief. I would add a little bit every day.”

   There’s also a cartoonist in Cerebral. Well, Okay, it’s me and here’s my take on AI. Could AI replicate the way I draw? Somewhat for sure. The handwriting on my captions? Absolutely. Could AI come up with cartoon ideas? A No to that surely. I have spoken with an artist who is working on a program to bring humor to AI. Indeed if an AI generator was fed with laugh-packed texts and required to cough up tens of thousands of scrambled lines, some would likely be hilarious. It will, though, take a human being, to decide just which.

  The relationship of AI to art is similar. Artists are using AI as a tool with interesting results, just as David Hockney made tremendous work from earlier devices. But can AI or some blossoming form of AGI be able to generate its own art? Consider the thought processes, the accidents, the incidents that went into the art-making in Cerebral. AI/AGI will certainly be turning out artsy stuff that will look great any wall but – and I could be wrong about this, I’m only human – they will merely be Shallow Fakes. WM