Weekly Musings + Round Up... And A Few More Things

I often wonder what artists, critics, and art historians like me would have said if told twenty years ago that AI (artificial intelligence) would prove one of the most threatening technologies to both the art world and academia. Maybe you noticed somewhere around late November and through December all of the crazy AI-generated self-portraits on Instagram? Or perhaps you have caught wind of the cheating scandals and other academic integrity violations citing the use of sophisticated chatbot generators that helps students create text and even entire essays based on short prompts. Over the winter break, I had several conversations with artists (emerging and established), studio art instructors, and fellow academics about their own frustrations, worries, and fears about AI image generators like Jasper and Lensa and the growing popularity of ChatGPT. Overwhelmingly the concerns revolve around how to identify “real” versus “AI-generated” content coupled with how to prevent and discourage using these technologies. In this week’s selection of art world news links, you will see these conversations bubbling up in many different directions, and I too will be taking some time to muse about the ramifications of AI moving ahead into 2023.

Enjoy exploring the links and thinking about how AI will likely shake your world in 2023 and beyond.

Incidentally, as we celebrate the lunar new year and the Year of the Rabbit, I thought it fitting to begin my year’s musings by selecting a Joseph Beuys work Chinese Hare Sugar (1979) as my feature image for the weekly roundup. A performance artist, teacher, and art theorist, Beuys sought to broaden the definition of art through several “actions” including How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) and its affiliated art projects (including the one I selected here) that explore references to rabbits (hares) and sugar (honey) as a means to understanding the unique aspects of living and activated knowing. This, perhaps an antidote to the “evils” or “soullessness” of AI. As Beuys explained back in 1971:

For me the Hare is a symbol of incarnation, which the hare really enacts- something a human can only do in imagination. It burrows, building itself a home in the earth. Thus it incarnates itself in the earth: that alone is important. So it seems to me. Honey on my head of course has to do with thought. While humans do not have the ability to produce honey, they do have the ability to think, to produce ideas. Therefore the stale and morbid nature of thought is once again made living. Honey is an undoubtedly living substance- human thoughts can also become alive. On the other hand intellectualizing can be deadly to thought: one can talk one's mind to death in politics or in academia.

• "Getty is suing a popular AI image generator for copyright infringement"

• "Artists file class-action lawsuit against AI image generator companies"

• "What’s in Store for NFTs in 2023?"

• "Can Instagram‘s Algorithm Curate an Exhibition Better Than a Human?" 

• "Making Art for the Age of Screens"

• "Viral TikTok Joke About the Mona Lisa Being Stolen Generates Mass Confusion"

• "Can Art History Be Taught Without Someone Becoming Angry?"

• "Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach"

• "What Rights Do Artists Have When Their Work Is Destroyed?"

• "Is this by Rothko or a robot? We ask the experts to tell the difference between human and AI art"

Top 10 Modern and Contemporary Art Exhibitions Worth Visiting In 2023

Happy New Year and welcome to a 2023 that appears (fingers crossed) promising for art lovers and travelers. I am also coming out of something of a blogging hibernation to breathe life back into my weekly round-up after a 2022 that had my time and attention focused on other priorities and without the same energy and optimism for the often-depressing state of the art world. But in recent months, with the successful planning and recruitment of excited students signing up to join the Paris Field School I will be co-running in June, along with finding something to a closer to a “new normal” in the balance of post-pandemic teaching and research, I am finding myself itching and excited to reconnect with those who find these kinds of posts of interest.  

The art world and art tourism, as an industry having the spent the better part of three years under a cloud of uncertainty, also appears to be awakening. With pandemic restrictions preventing large-scale exhibitions since 2020, it is heartening to see the calendars of “future exhibitions” sections of major museum and galleries advertising some fantastic shows for the year ahead. What I present here below is part of a tradition that I started back in 2011 on my website when I responded to students and blog visitors who would ask me what I would recommend as art cities and art shows to visit in the year ahead. In subsequent years, I developed the top ten selection of modern and contemporary art exhibitions in part based upon where I planned to travel, but also based upon where I would want to go if I had the time and resources. For 2023, I have already booked travel to New York and Paris and hope to make it to London in the fall (the selections for these cities below are big highlights for me), but I always have a list like this in mind when talking to artists and fellow art travellers. And yes, always a selection closer to home (I’m looking at you Vancouver). Happy exploring and best wishes for the year ahead—I hope this list whets your appetite for a return to travel and a return to experiencing art in person.

P.S. I present the exhibitions in chronological order of opening, not in any other oder of preference— they are all special and important in their own way.

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NEW YORK| Meret Oppenheim, My Exhibition (Jan 1 – Mar 4)

STOCKHOLM| Moderna Museet: Laurie Anderson (Jan 4-Mar 9)

LOS ANGELES| LACMA: Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 (Feb 12-July 2)

PARIS| ORSAY: Manet/Degas (Mar 28-July23)

NEW YORK| WHITNEY: Josh Kline: Project For A New American Century (Apr 19-Aug 31)

PARIS| Foundation Louis Vuitton: BASQUIAT X WARHOL. Painting 4 Hands  (May 4-Aug 28

AMSTERDAM| Modern (May 18-Sept 24)

VANCOUVER| VAG: Fashion Fictions (May 27-Oct 9)

LONDON| Tate Modern: Capturing the Moment: A Journey Through 100 Years of Painting and Photography (June 14-Jan 28, 2024)

LONDON|Royal Academy of Arts: Marina Abramovic (Sept 23-Dec 10)

Birthday Thoughts: Alex Colville's To Prince Edward Island (1965)

I’ve always loved this painting. Coincidentally, Alex Colville is a Canadian modern painter with whom I share a birthday today, and the older I get, the more I appreciate this picture's wisdom and every nuance.

When I was younger, I was drawn to the pleasing symmetry of the painting's formal composition-- the strong line, cool colour palette, and contoured shapes-- and how it existed in a strange and uneasy tension with the picture’s unfolding content.

We are first presented with a woman looking through binoculars, suggesting a commanding female gaze and strong subjectivity, but then made to shift focus entirely and reconcile the ominous male figure hovering behind her. In an instance, the woman is rendered an object, both by him and ironically by us, the viewer.

Over time, I have come to see this painting less however as a statement of the woman's victimhood or the man's privileged vision. When I look at this painting today, I see a strong and determined woman who is completely aware but, importantly, equally indifferent, to the dominant vision that attempts to define who and what she is.

With middle age comes the confidence to dismiss and ignore how others wish to define you and/or who and what you should be. This shifting and unapologetic perspective-- mirrored in this extraordinary work of art-- teaches you to look straight through the judgement, ignoring society’s expectations, channeling the unflinching spirit of the powerful woman holding the binoculars.

Weekly Musings + Round Up... And A Few More Things

Feeling paralyzed and not knowing what to write the past few weeks, my round up this Sunday focuses on links related to the global art community's response to the war in Europe.

Conceptual artist Adrian Piper's work has also been haunting my thoughts lately-- this image below and featured, relates to a performance art work first started in response to 9/11 attacks when she asked volunteers to temporarily tattoo the words "EVERYTHING WILL BE TAKEN AWAY" on their foreheads and document the public's response as they walked, took transit, and went about their lives in the streets of New York in the aftermath of violence.

"Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova: ‘You cannot play nice with Putin. He is insane. He might open fire on his own people’"

theguardian.com

"Why We Need a Post-Colonial Lens to Look at Ukraine and Russia"

artnet.com

"Why We Need a Post-Colonial Lens to Look at Ukraine and Russia"

hyperallergic.com

"Russian Yachts Are Held in Harbors. What About Art in Secretive Free Ports?"

bloomberg.com

"Three Years Ago, I Had Dinner With Vladimir Putin. What He Told Me Makes Me Fearful for Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage"

artnet.com

"Venice Biennale Organizers Commit to Staging the Ukrainian Pavilion as Planned"

artnews.com

"12 essential books on Ukraine, Russia and Putin"

latimes.com

"Ukrainian Artists Are Building Anti-Tank Obstacles"

hyperallergic.com

"Calling For “No-Fly Zone” Over Ukraine, Artists Launch Hundreds of Paper Planes at Guggenheim Museum"

hyperallergic.com

"Here's how you can help the Ukraine aid effort by buying art"

theartnewspaper.com

• Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova: ‘You cannot play nice with Putin. He is insane. He might open fire on his own people’

• I Grew Up Behind the Iron Curtain. Isolating Russia’s Art and Artists Will Not Help Us Achieve Peace

• Why We Need a Post-Colonial Lens to Look at Ukraine and Russia

• Russian Yachts Are Held in Harbors. What About Art in Secretive Free Ports?

• Three Years Ago, I Had Dinner With Vladimir Putin. What He Told Me Makes Me Fearful for Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage

• Venice Biennale Organizers Commit to Staging the Ukrainian Pavilion as Planned

• 12 essential books on Ukraine, Russia and Putin

• Ukrainian Artists Are Building Anti-Tank Obstacles

• Calling For “No-Fly Zone” Over Ukraine, Artists Launch Hundreds of Paper Planes at Guggenheim Museum

• Here's how you can help the Ukraine aid effort by buying art

Weekly Musings + Round Up... And A Few More Things

As we celebrate Family Day here in Canada under loosening Covid-19 restrictions this long weekend, I have been thinking about how central “the home” has been to the experience of the pandemic. Finding ways to comfortably inhabit a space for long periods of isolation forced many of us to pay careful attention to the architecture of family dwellings. What may surprise many, however, is how directly the historical avant-garde has impacted the way we imagine, plan, and arrange the spaces of our homes. In particular, the Bauhaus— a German art and design school that flourished in Germany’s Weimar period from 1919-1933— transformed the architecture and traditions of 19th century living spaces to the modern ones that predominate our contemporary lives. The radical departure embodied in the Bauhaus mantra “form follows function” lead to a reimagining of family dwellings as purpose built spaces that privilege how individuals actually live instead of forcing preconceived ideas of how individuals should live.

Flex-spaces, for example, derive from this ethos, along with open plan family rooms, sliding walls, and outdoor living space that extend the experience of indoor spaces to the natural environment. In Bauhaus Dream-House: Modernity and Globalization, author Katerina Rüedi Ray examines the profound social, cultural and spatial transformations that the Bauhaus had on family home design in the decades following WWII. She writes: “The rejection of academic autonomy, historicism and aestheticism was central to the curriculum. The Bauhaus saw the past as discredited, and the task of the artist, designer and architect as beginning with a 'tabula rasa' - a clean slate -and disregarding old hierarchies between the arts, crafts and architecture (p. 26).” If you look around your own home today, you will see traces of Bauhaus influence at every turn. If you don’t believe me, simply watch the “Bauhaus Explained” video linked here and think about the freedom of spatial design you may be taking for granted in your own dwelling. Wishing you all a happy Family Day— enjoy the links!

"Art Problems: Is My Art Good Enough?"

hyperallergic.com

"When Warhol met Basquiat"

theartnewspaper.com

"Sephora on the Champs-Élysées"

parisreview.org

"Arlene Gottfried, the Street Photographer who Captured the Soul of 1980s New York"

elephant.art

"John Lennon on the Satisfying Difficulty of Excellence and the Vital Role of Invisible Incubation in the Creative Process"

themarginalian.org

"Making fun of mental health? Van Gogh ‘earaser’ and ‘tortured artist’ soap removed from Courtauld gift shop"

theartnewspaper.com

"Fragonard to Frozen: how French art inspired Disney animators"

theguardian.com

"AI-Generated Faces Have Crossed the Uncanny Valley"

fastcompany.com

"Dan Graham, Conceptual Artist Who Bent Time and Space, Dies at 79"

artnews,ca

"The Stories Totem Poles Tell | Smarthistory (VIDEO)"

Smarhistory.org

• Art Problems: Is My Art Good Enough?

• When Warhol met Basquiat

• Sephora on the Champs-Élysées

• Arlene Gottfried, the Street Photographer who Captured the Soul of 1980s New York

• John Lennon on the Satisfying Difficulty of Excellence and the Vital Role of Invisible Incubation in the Creative Process

• Making fun of mental health? Van Gogh ‘earaser’ and ‘tortured artist’ soap removed from Courtauld gift shop

• Fragonard to Frozen: how French art inspired Disney animators

• AI-Generated Faces Have Crossed the Uncanny Valley

• Dan Graham, Conceptual Artist Who Bent Time and Space, Dies at 79

• The Stories Totem Poles Tell | Smarthistory (VIDEO)