Could AI Appreciate Art?
By: Steve Kemple
Tags: AI, NLP, Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Art

Could an AI understand or appreciate art? Is it possible for a computer to form a critical opinion? Or have an aesthetic response? What does it “see” when it looks at a work of art? To explore these and other questions, we enlisted an AI (or, more precisely, several AI models) to co-produce this curatorial project.

Front page of the PDF version of A(artistic)x I(nteresting)x P(owerful).

Which is… what, exactly? A book? An exhibition? It doesn’t fit neatly into either category or any of the common intermediaries (artist book, exhibition catalog, etc.). Complicating matters, there are no images anywhere, either in the gallery or the PDF. It’s certainly a text, an embodiment of an experiment, and a proof of concept (more on that later); a version of this PDF’s contents were installed on the walls of the Pearlman Gallery at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in late 2020, so it’s also an exhibition. And if you have the means to print out this 340 page document and enough wall space to put it on, there’s no reason some variation of this exhibition couldn’t be mounted anywhere in the world.

The 29 works “appearing” in this project were submitted by students, faculty, and alumni of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. All were created sometime in 2020, and most were born out of the COVID-19 quarantine. This isn’t a show about COVID or lockdowns, but it is a relevant context. Consider technology’s role in mediating not only interactions between humans but also its role mediating human encounters with works of art. Live streaming performance and gallery walkthrough videos; thesis exhibitions on Instagram (supply your own brie and boxed wine) — while these all existed before in some form, they usually served more as an auxiliary form of access and documentation while the real event took place in the real world.

installation view of A(artistic)x I(nteresting)x P(owerful) in the Art Academy of Cincinnati’s Pearlman Gallery. Photos by Lindsey Whittle

But reality is slippery. An important role of documentation pre-COVID was to validate the reality of the event and the reality of the artists’ and curators’ efforts. If photos from the opening aren’t posted to Instagram, some would say it didn’t happen. And if an exhibition isn’t reviewed in a glossy art publication, then, on some level, it may as well not have occurred. Now, with in person gatherings curtailed, these less real modes are as close to real real as we can get (at least without creating dangerous superspreading events). In other words, at least for the moment, real reality is only accessible via the streaming lens. So what?

Consider: When you look at a work of art on your phone, what are you seeing? Put another way, how are you seeing?

Between the plate of glowing touch capacitative glass in your hand and the art object elsewhere are a host of applications that rely on various forms of artificial intelligence. When we talk about “AI” we don’t mean sci-fi fantasies like self-aware computers or super-intelligent robots yearning to be more like their carbon-based comrades. AI is already a ubiquitous part of our lives and has become an indispensable — and frequently invisible — layer in our media ecology.

Next time you point your smartphone’s camera at a plate of food, you might catch it making subtle adjustments. Maybe the greens in your salad grow deeper and greener, popping out from the softened middle distance, and the reds of that plank of salmon…well, you get the idea. Swing your phone around to take a selfie, and those parameters change, because the layers of software operating your camera knows the difference between a plate of arugula and your smiling face. (What’s really interesting to me is when we start to see our faces and plates of food that way even when the camera isn’t looking! But that would be a digression).

This “content-awareness” is AI at its most banal. Its ubiquity renders the technology invisible — or, to use Silicon Valley’s favorite euphemism: frictionless. This should give you pause. Because when we take the smartphone’s view of reality for objective, we cede much of our agency to the algorithms that exert influence on how we see and, consequently, how we desire.¹