Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and it’ll confidently produce a museum-worthy clone. Ask a human, and he falters. This exhibition tracks five decades of artists’ jealous frustration with the machine.
Jack Whitten’s rice paper Xerox, Albert Oehlen’s silkscreen plotters, and Christopher Wool’s CAD engravings perverted ‘new’ technologies in ‘old-school’ craft workshops. Rosemarie Trockel’s knitting and Mattias Groebel’s PAL television acrylics gave into remediation. Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ AI art history paintings, Seth Price’s bust-shelter poster print, and Jacqueline Humphries nominalism, finally, brute-force their hand on the algorithm.
These are modest responses to one of humanity’s oldest problems: man made the machine and knows not how to unmake it. Art brings some taxonomical reassurance. But what help is it when Ai-Da robot’s “painting” has already outbid it at auction?
