"This was the year... that artificial intelligence went from a dreamy projection to an ambient menace and perpetual sales pitch."

"Does it feel like the future to you, or has A.I. already taken on the staleness and scamminess of the now-worthless nonfungible token?... I suppose there was something nifty the first time I tried ChatGPT — a slightly more sophisticated grandchild of Eliza, the ’60s therapist chatbot — though I’ve barely used it since then; the hallucinatory falsehoods of ChatGPT make it worthless for journalists, and even its tone seems an insult to my humanity. (I asked: 'Who was the better painter, Manet or Degas?' Response: 'It is not appropriate to compare artists in terms of ‘better’ or ‘worse,’ as art is a highly subjective field.')... I remain profoundly relaxed about machines passing themselves off as humans; they are terrible at it. Humans acting like machines— that is a much likelier peril, and one that culture, as the supposed guardian of (human?) virtues and values, has failed to combat these last few years.... I spent a lot of this year thinking about ​​stylistic exhaustion, and the pervading sense that, in digital times, culture is going nowhere fast.... [I] wonder if... these perpetual mediocrity machines, these supercharged engines of cliché, end up pressing us to revalue the things humans alone can do...."

Writes Jason Farago, in "A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That? A fake Drake/Weeknd mash-up is not a threat to our species’s culture. It’s a warning: We can’t let our imaginations shrink to machine size" (NYT).

"We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture..."

"... since the invention of the printing press.... [S]hockingly few works of art in any medium... have been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten...."

Writes Jason Farago in "Ours Is the Least Artistically Innovative Century in 500 Years/A Times critic argues that 21st-century culture is likely to be forgotten. But it’s not as bad as it sounds" (NYT).

Shockingly few? I would say none at all and that's quite specifically not shocking, because nothing can be shocking. Everything even potentially shocking had been cycled through at least 50 years ago. It's not shocking that nothing — in art — is or can be shocking.

Because it is, at least, something new, I asked ChatGPT:

"To me... he’s the supreme model of how an artist can meet the times head-on, and rewrite the rules of culture as the world outside jerks forward."

Writes Jason Farago, in "The 19th Century’s Most Scandalous Painting Comes to New York/'Olympia,' the brothel scene that birthed modern art, crosses the Atlantic for the first time in the Met exhibition 'Manet/Degas'" (NYT).

"Not long ago, it would have been embarrassing for adults to admit that they found avant-garde painting too difficult and preferred the comforts of story time."

"What Gadsby did was give the audience permission — moral permission — to turn their backs on what challenged them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch."

Jason Farago in "With Hannah Gadsby’s ‘It’s Pablo-matic,’ the Joke’s on the Brooklyn Museum/The Australian comedian turns curator in a show about Picasso’s complicated legacy. But it’s women artists the exhibition really shortchanges" (NYT)

This is a review of a Brooklyn Museum art exhibition called "It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby." Gadsby is a standup comedian who has lambasted Picasso for being a sexist. The show has a smattering of works by Picasso juxtaposed with various works by women that are presented as telling women's "stories," with inscriptions on the wall like "I want my story to be heard” and “entirely new stories”:

"But the people who run our great institutions do not want trouble. They fear controversy. They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience."

"And they realize that to remind museum-goers of white supremacy today is not only to speak to them about the past, or events somewhere else. It is also to raise uncomfortable questions about museums themselves—about their class and racial foundations. For this reason, perhaps, those who run the museums feel the ground giving way beneath their feet. If they feel that in four years, 'all this will blow over,' they are mistaken. The tremors shaking us all will never end until justice and equity are installed. Hiding away images of the KKK will not serve that end."

From "Open Letter: On Philip Guston Now" (Google docs), via "The Philip Guston Show Should Be Reinstated/An open letter, signed by nearly 100 artists, curators and critics, accuses four museums of 'hiding away' from controversy. A long postponement is an admission these institutions are not up to the job" (NYT). We talked about this controversy on the blog a few days ago, here.

The NYT art critic Jason Farago writes:

For as the artists suggest in their open letter, the reason to reinstate “Philip Guston Now” is not, or certainly not only, because he passes some anti-racist litmus test. It is to continue and accelerate the transformation of our museums into institutions that can do justice to the work of all artists and the experiences of all publics. A museum unequipped to exhibit Guston will never be able to show truly “problematic” artists like Paul Gauguin or Francis Picabia — but just as inevitably it will fail [Matthew] Barney’s mythopoetic melding of bodies, [Joan] Jonas’s culturally hybrid meditations on gender and climate, [Adrian] Piper’s exacting probes of self and stereotypes.

Barney, Jonas, and Piper are all signatories of the open letter. The NYT critic says, "Really, a museum unequipped to exhibit Guston is barely a museum at all, or else only a museum in the most derogatory sense: a dusty storehouse of dead things." And then he suddenly, in his last paragraph, talks about... can you guess?