Category: [Art]

Ars gratia AI?

I neglected to note the other day the funniest story I’ve heard from the art world in ages: a man, one Graham Granger, a student at University of Alaska Fairbanks, randomly went into an art gallery, and took offence at one of the exhibits, which was a series of Polaroids made by another student in response to suffering “AI psychosis” after using a chatbot as his therapist. Granger took such offence at this AI art thing that he STARTED EATING IT. Apparently this wall of Polaroids contained 16o images and he managed to wipe out 57 of them before finally being dragged. And now there’s an interview with him (“CW” is the interviewer):

CW: So your act wasn’t premeditated?
GG: No, I didn’t know about the exhibit before that day. And then I saw the AI piece and it was just—as an artist myself, it was insulting to see something of such little effort alongside all these beautiful pieces in the gallery. It shouldn’t be acceptable for this “art,” if you will, to be put alongside these real great pieces. It’s art that has zero substance. Not zero substance; I mean it’s a very personal work, right? It’s art that takes away from its own substance by not being made by the artist himself. […]
CW: What are your personal thoughts on AI, specifically in art?
GG: I think artificial intelligence is a very valuable tool. I think that it has no place in the arts. It takes away a lot of the human effort that makes art. If art cannot be improved upon by criticism, it’s hard to call it art. And there is an argument to be made that you can criticize your AI art by changing the prompts and generating more images to pick from, but that work doesn’t compare to the criticisms that a real piece of art would receive if you critique it.
CW: So your main problem with it is that it doesn’t process criticism?
GG: It’s not the only problem. There’s a whole host of things. It depends on your definition of art. I say AI isn’t art. I know a lot of people who would agree with me. I don’t think there’s any perfect argument that can be made for this, because no matter what you say somebody will come up with a counterpoint because at its core art is subjective.
However, the process by which art is made is oftentimes more important than the finished product, and if the process of making your art is just typing a prompt in, it just takes away from the accomplishments of other talented artists. And it really hurts the practice of art by commercializing that finished product.
CW: Do you have any qualms about the fact that AI art is made by scraping other artists?
GG: Yeah, I mean, that’s part of why I spat it out, because AI chews up and spits out art made by other people.
CW: So during your demonstration, you didn’t swallow any of the exhibit?
GG: I swallowed some of it. I had really been spitting it out near the end. I didn’t want to make too much of a mess, but I also didn’t want to have to spit it out in the back of a police car.

This is amazing. Needless to say the “creator” of these pictures is… unconvinced, shall we say, by these arguments—obviously it was a very personal work for him—but when asked why he kept using AI for his art after his clearly negative experience with it he didn’t exactly offer an answer. You could, I suppose, see Granger’s act as a product of “AI psychosis” itself, but it’s one I’m rather more sympathetic to than the artist’s work… In any case, I feel that somewhere the ghost of Marcel Duchamp is looking at this situation and regretfully wishing he’d tried eating the actual Mona Lisa rather than just defacing a postcard of her…

Lyndwulf

John Coulthart features an interesting edition of Beowulf at his blog today, this being a 1939 edition illustrated by Lynd Ward…

I admittedly haven’t seen much of Ward’s stuff, and what I have seen has only been his b/w woodcuts; I think this is the first time I’ve seen him in colour. I should note I haven’t just nicked this from John’s blog post, cos he rarely if ever posts large versions of stuff; instead I nicked it directly from the Internet Archive scan of the book that he links to, whence I got larger versions of the colour illustrations. John also notes:

It’s also possible to read the poem itself, although I wouldn’t advise it with this translation by William Ellery Leonard, not when it begins so risibly with the words “What ho!” Beowulf famously opens with a declaration in Old English—”Hwæt!”—that bards would have shouted to gain the attention of their audience. The word doesn’t translate easily to contemporary English but it’s usually given as “Hear!” or “Listen!” Leonard’s “What ho!” is a phrase that belongs with Bertie Wooster.

Woof. The only W.E. Leonard work I’m otherwise familiar with is his translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, which I did not particularly like and I don’t think that was entirely Lucretius’ fault (even though I do find the whole concept of didactic verse of that sort frankly bizarre), I recall Leonard’s translation doing some contortions to the English language that were just… off-putting. Don’t think I’m into what I read of his Beowulf while getting these illustrations, either; keeping the appearance of the Anglo-Saxon verse with the caesura in the middle, but not the alliteration structure or the four-beat pattern (turning it into hexameters which I’ve never liked in English verse), and then making the line ends rhyme which English alliterative verse generally just didn’t do, all strikes me as a bit of a bastardisation. Still, the illustrations are pretty cracking, and I give you some of my favourites (click to enlarge, obviously):

Holy Mary, holy crap

This… intriguing statue of Mrs God was doing the rounds on Bluesky today, for reasons that I think are obvious. It was Greg’s repost of it, though, that got me thinking… and what it made me think was “Face? But isn’t that oval bit at the top meant to be the face?”… And ONLY THEN did it hit me, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like a man in my life, if you know what I mean…

“Here’s a nice rich seam of blood…”

Something else I sighted on FB tonight:

An illustration by Harold Piffard (one of England’s first aviators as well) for a book called The Signors of the Night; The Story of Frá Giovanni, the Soldier-Monk of Venice; And of Others in the “Silent City” (whew) from 1899 by Max Pemberton, noted novelist of the day. This image struck me as, frankly, slightly alarming. Couldn’t quite work out why at first, but then I got the odd feeling the guy on the table wasn’t 100% dead… Anyway, in search of more information, I found a copy of the book on Internet Archive…

…Oooh, look, that picture! It’s actually the frontispiece for the book, what an interesting choice… what does the caption say… OH. OH FUCK. OH NO. CORPSE IS INDEED NOT CORPSE AFTER ALL. Goddamn, I was actually right about the feeling I got from the picture without the caption… cos the fellow doesn’t look particularly not dead to me, I just got that vibe for some reason. Did Fra Giovanni burst in to save this poor bastard from those cone-hatted murderers? And why do I also feel there’s something oddly anti-Semitic about them?

Beginning with bones

Sighted on Facebook. This is an illustration by Carl Lagerquist and it comes from a 1922 edition of Frankenstein by Cornhill Publishing… and it struck me because the book is famously silent on exactly how Frankenstein creates his monster, only that he did so and was aghast at what he’d done; all the pyrotechnics and shit you see in film versions simply aren’t there in the original text. And for some reason the idea that Frankenstein might have really have started from scratch had never occurred to me until now. Cos look at it, that’s basically what he’s doing here, beginning by evidently making the skeleton himself, which would require adding the flesh, organs, etc separately. Something about that seems more appalling than just, you know, taking a pair of “readymade” fully finished legs and attaching them to a similarly fully finished torso…

And this, apparently, is the end result. From the same edition, Lagerquist’s rendering of the final product; I sighted this on Reddit and can do no better than quote the OP there:

I really like this take on the Creature (my only nitpick is the short hair). His eyes seem to be popping from their sockets (quite different from the Universal version’s droopy and sunken eyes). His inner workings are visible in uneven measure. His limbs have the correct structure, but not quite the right proportions. There’s even a big hernia below his abs!
He looks accurately messed up.

I’ll take OP’s word for that, cos I’m not an anatomical expert and wouldn’t know how “accurate” the mess is, but… yeah, damned if it’s not a mess. And what they say about having the structure but not the proportions is spot on; we’re not looking at dubious technique, Lagerquist evidently meant him to look misproportionate, it’s not really like the infamous Rob Liefeld…

Divisive debate dropped?

Khaled Sabsabi reinstated as Venice Biennale representative after independent review into dumping

Creative Australia has reinstated the artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino as Australia’s artistic team for the 2026 Venice Biennale after an independent external review of the decision.
The pair had been dumped from the prestigious art exhibition earlier this year after Creative Australia’s board took the unprecedented decision to revoke their appointment.
“Today, we were officially informed by Creative Australia that we have been recommissioned as the Artistic Team for the Australia Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale,” the team said in a statement on Wednesday.
“We accept this invitation and welcome the opportunity to represent our country on this prestigious international stage.” […]
The review, conducted by board advisory firm Blackhall & Pearl, found there was no single or predominant failure of process, governance or decision-making that resulted in the decision to rescind the selection.
“There were, however, a series of missteps, assumptions and missed opportunities that meant neither the leadership of Creative Australia, nor the Board, were well placed to respond to, and manage in a considered way, any criticism or controversy that might emerge in relation to the selection decision.”
The inquiry concluded that there was no one at Creative Australia who was adequately prepared for a “potentially divisive controversy” around the appointment, but that failure was not the fault of any one person or group of individuals.

I don’t know, this nonsense feels like it had to have been someone‘s fault, cos obviously someone at CA decided the Biennale had to be protected from Sabsabi and the board of the organisation agreed with them… I accused them at the time of pre-emptively cowering before Dutton, who I frankly expected (as I presume CA also did) to win the election in May; I still feel now that it was mostly if not wholly down to Sabsabi’s support for Palestine, and that he still wouldn’t be going anywhere near Venice had Dutton in fact won the election; whoever he installed as arts minister in place of Tony Burke would have ensured this backdown never happened. Burke, incidentally, seems to be covering his own arse now:

In February Burke publicly expressed shock over two of Sabsabi’s past artworks mere hours before an emergency board meeting was held and the pair were unceremoniously dumped.
One was a 2006 work Thank You Very Much, which used archival footage of the 9/11 attacks alongside a clip of George W Bush, and which Sabsabi said was a “critique of the brutalisation and the savageness of war”. The other, You (2007), is held in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection and included footage of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declaring “divine victory” in an address after the 34-day Lebanon-Israel war. The artwork was made as the Lebanese-Australian artist grappled with the scale of destruction caused to his birth country.
Speaking on Wednesday after their reinstatement, Burke said “the works are quite explicable but at first glance both of them looked deeply offensive”.
He said there had been a failure of “due diligence” and he as minister should have been briefed about Sabsabi’s back catalogue so he could have defended him.

Well, as the minister, why didn’t Tony himself demand this information so he could be fully informed, instead of just going along with whatever CA decided? I don’t know what the answer to this bullshit was, but I’m fairly sure that wasn’t it. Anyway, it seems Sabsabi is off to Venice again (and so is the bloke who resigned as our ambassador to the Biennale over this whole thing), and the “divisive debate” CA singularly failed to avoid can die back down… at least until Murdoch media decides we need to get angry about him again…

Still not going to Biennale, though, I suppose…

Something’s finally worked for Khaled Sabsabi:

An exhibition featuring works by Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi that was called off by Monash University in March will open to the public next week, with the university announcing it had reversed its decision.
Monash University “postponed” Stolon Press: Flat Earth at Monash University Museum of Art (Muma) in Melbourne in the wake of Sabsabi being dumped as Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale. It was the first time a show had been pulled in Muma’s 50-year history.
The exhibition, originally scheduled to open on 8 May, includes large “spiritual” calligraphic paintings by Sabsabi that he has made with Lebanese coffee and draw on his “personal memories of his childhood in Lebanon during the civil war”.
At the time of the postponement, a spokesperson for Monash claimed “consultation with our communities” had revealed that Muma needed “to deepen its collaboration and engagement on this exhibition. Postponing the event will allow this important work to be undertaken.”
Sources told Guardian Australia they feared the timing indicated the decision had been influenced by federal arts body Creative Australia’s cancellation of Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino’s contract to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale. That decision followed days of pressure from The Australian newspaper and Liberal politicians over Sabsabi’s use of footage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in old works.
Sabsabi’s participation in a mass boycott of the 2022 Sydney festival over the sponsorship of an event by the Israeli embassy was also singled out by The Australian, amid a wider increased scrutiny of public figures who criticised Israel’s conduct in Gaza or spoke in support of Palestine after the start of the Israel-Gaza war.

Monash’s PR people are, per the article, claiming the bullshit with Creative Australia had nothing to do with their bullshit, but I’m going to boldly suggest that’s bullshit too; I can’t imagine the timing was purely coincidental. Anyway, the Oz will be livid now that the forces of wokeness have defied them on this one, so I suppose we’ll be seeing lots of whinging from them on the subject…

More Samson Pollen

Unfortunately this example of Samson Pollen’s work, which I just sighted on Bluesky, wasn’t posted at larger size, but it’ll still do and you can click to enlarge it. This comes from Male magazine for July 1974, illustrating a story called “The Gun Them Down Bunch”, and this blog post summarises it. This is evidently the scene where the bunch have come to bust an injured member of the gang out of hospital, which apparently ends badly. Curiously, the gang apparently prides itself on not killing people; I presume that cop we see about to hit the ground was an exception.

As with the prevous example of Pollen I posted here a few months ago, I’m struck by the incidental details, but I’m even more struck by the thoroughly odd angle from which we see the action… it’s so strange that it actually took me a moment to properly read it and work out what was happening in it. Look at how the ambulance doesn’t sit completely on the ground as if it’s tipping a bit, to say nothing of the odd posture of the gang member apparently emerging therefrom… which I presume is actually accurate to how someone in motion would actually look from whatever the hell that angle is, but damn it looks peculiar. And I daresay this picture is far better than the story it was made to depict…

Penis

Historians dispute Bayeux tapestry penis tally after lengthy debate

In a historical spat that could be subtitled “1066 with knobs on”, two medieval experts are engaged in a battle over how many male genitalia are embroidered into the Bayeux tapestry.
The Oxford professor George Garnett drew worldwide interest six years ago when he announced he had totted up 93 penises stitched into the embroidered account of the Norman conquest of England.
According to Garnett, 88 of the male appendages are attached to horses and the remainder to human figures.
Now, the historian and Bayeux tapestry scholar Dr Christopher Monk – known as the Medieval Monk – believes he has found a 94th.
A running man, depicted in the tapestry border, has something dangling beneath his tunic. Garnett says it is the scabbard of a sword or dagger. Monk insists it is a male member.
“I am in no doubt that the appendage is a depiction of male genitalia – the missed penis, shall we say. The detail is surprisingly anatomically fulsome,” Monk said.

The real question this article unfortunately fails to answer is why exactly anyone felt the need to count how many penises were in the Bayeux Tapestry in the first place, never mind why five (or six) of them were human ones…

…and frankly I don’t know that I’m convinced either way. But if that IS his John Thomas, well, that fellow was certainly… endowed.

Here come the crotch-stepper

Last year I posted some old paintings of Jesus after his resurrection. A bit late for this Easter, I think I’ve found a new favourite via Bluesky:

“This initial from the 15th-century Chichele Breviary shows Christ rising from his tomb with the guards asleep around him. He appears triumphant, yet he still bears the wounds from his crucifixion. [MS 69 f. 118v]”

Also sprach the Lambeth Public Library Bluesky account. Christ not only appears triumphant, he also looks like he’s about to stand on the crotch of the dozy bastard on the ground. THAT would’ve been a rude awakening…