Thankfully, summer is ending, and the undeserved holiday season that galleries take is coming to a close. I review two current exhibitions below, but they come with a preamble. Prefacing that, I should say that I have little doubt that the tendencies discussed below would have emerged without AI; so, the suggestion is not that they share deep cultural continuity, but that they share incidental formal traits. I am on the fence about the likely implications of AI for art (it seems much clearer for other fields), but it annoys enough people that it is at least potentially interesting. Despite the “newness” that people associate with it, AI’s artistic potential seems to be entirely in step with the ambitions of significant aspects of the avant-garde from a hundred years ago. However, the dreams of an automatic, depersonalized art made by machines that would eliminate elitism — and which were central to many Modernist ambitions — seem entirely out of step with the reac...
A critical revue of contemporary art in the city.