That’s all there is

On AI guys, art and ‘the rest’ of the painting

‘We by our art may be called the grandchildren of God.’ – Leonardo da Vinci

I try not to write about stuff like this too much.

You may have seen the much-mocked posts going round recently in which someone has used AI to autogenerate blurry extensions to famous paintings. ‘Have you ever wondered’, asked the original poster, ‘what the rest of the Mona Lisa looks like?’

This is, obviously, a bizarre way to talk about a piece of art. ‘Ever wondered what the rest of Michelangelo’s David looks like?’, asked one riposte, appending a picture of a huge unworked block of marble.And at first, this looks like a case of someone putting the cart so far before the horse that it’s ended up in another country. The guy has software that can do this, so he did it, and he phrased it in this way through either stupidity or (I would guess) the rare, needling intuition that can guess what will pique the interest of social media sites at large.

The more I thought about this question though – what does the ‘rest’ of the painting look like – the more it seemed to me like an exemplary expression of the way we now think about all forms of cultural production. It looks to me like a lot of us are increasingly unable to conceive of cultural artefacts – films, TV series, books, paintings or music – as definite, final entities. Instead, we think of artworks as instantiations of some infinitely iterable raw material, which fans and critics refer to as ‘the world’ of the artwork, and which executives think of in legal terms as intellectual property law.

The film industry has been completely consumed by franchise material within my own lifetime, buoyed up by a fan culture that sees characters as having the same reality—and the same rights to respect, deference and sympathetic explanation—as actual humans. Writers like J. K. Rowling have always encouraged their readers to think of the Harry Potter books as mere snapshots of a constantly existing world, and, over time, have also encouraged the composition of the fan fiction which now forms an unreadably large corpus of Potter paratext, appendix and counterfactual. The world’s most famous popstar, Taylor Swift, is currently involved in a massive project devoted to re-recording her early albums, albums that are rereleased with the surtitle ‘Taylor’s version’ – that is, the truer, more honest and more revealing version of something she herself previously released. Just last week, the finale of the TV show Succession was heralded by a mass of exit interviews with members of the cast, who were all asked over and over about the future of their characters, and all explained, over and over, that their characters no longer existed because the show was finished.

A friend of mine, who believes that people are basically losing the ability to discriminate between reality and fiction, sometimes describes this attitude as one in which the very idea of a narrative or pictorial frame is seen as a form selfishness. A deliberate denial of audience access, and so an instance, in the final analysis, of exclusion. So it makes sense to me that at a moment like this, painting—the most unreachable, resistant and curiously prestigious of the major art forms—should also be subject to the same impulse from various directions.

But since painting is so distant, so difficult, so hard to lay a word on or formulate a response to or even to understand, when you look at it, what sort of response would be a correct sort of response to formulate in the first place; and because painting comes with so much cultural baggage, such gilded trappings of elitism, cultural superiority, inscrutable values systems, snobbishness and, generally speaking, speaks so loudly of an exclusionary taste that is justified with reference only to itself; and because painting is so strangely and unselvingly glorified in the sphere of mass image; and because certain paintings, along with certain sculptures, are used as a cultural shorthand for the ne plus ultra of high status human creation; because of all of this, and everything else we think of when we think standing with obligatory deference, bored and slightly insulted, in front of huge naked ladies in golden frames, it often seems to me that there is a particularly destructive bent to the way this AI guy, and others of his ilk, approach old master paintings.

I have been asking myself: what does this man want from art? He does not want to look at it. He has not looked at it, other than alone, in a room, on a screen, with its colours distorted, its context stripped away and its materiality elided as though it were of no consequence at all. What he wants is the prestige of art. He wants this prestige for himself, and he also wants to supersede and annihilate it by showing that these singular objects too are, at root, fungible: vessels for content that his technology can extend, imitating and even bettering the original. The Mona Lisa and The Garden of Earthly Delights are basically the same to him. The only thing that unites his chosen artists—Van Gogh and Mondrian and Hopper and Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage—is their status. (In concrete terms, their financial value). He wants their specialness, and by taking it, to show that they are nothing special. If I were being rude, which I am, I would say he wants from art roughly what incels want from women, which is to destroy and possess the object of his desire at once.

The more I thought about it the more this relationship to art seemed to me, above anything else, profoundly lonely. On your screen, alone, feeding jpeg files into the maw of an AI generator in the hope of getting a few notifications: this is no way to do it.

For one, going to galleries and churches is a profoundly social thing for those of us who love it. I go to the National Gallery a lot on my own but the truth is I often don’t get into it the same way without someone else there to share the experience with. Look, this will sound tacky. But I remember feeling the way a lot of people do about old master paintings: distant, non-plussed, irritated that I was obliged to like these stubbornly mute artefacts and interchangeable masterpieces.

And it was seeing art with other people that changed that. Loving paintings didn’t come at all naturally to me. That love is something I was given, and it’s something I try to give other people too, to the extent that I can. It amazes me that while so much is made of the irreducibly personal terms on which we encounter art, almost nothing is said about the very social circumstances in which most of us look at it. I’m not talking about museum critique here. Just about social life. Paintings are something people see together. We go to exhibitions with friends. We visit museums, sometimes in other cities, with our partners. We organise trips—or I do, anyway, because I’m nuts about this stuff—with large groups of friends, designed so that we can go together, and look hard and talk and experience this art. Even when we go on our own, we mostly go to public places where the presence of other people impinges on our response to the art, sharpens and charges and changes it. The breathless spell of a great painting is best when it’s shared. Theatre, whose thrill depends on transforming a room full of strangers into an audience, is necessarily social. I can’t quite say the same about paintings, but I do think those really great paintings days—days when you come out and see the world with fresh eyes and think ‘fuck, this is what they’re talking about when they talk about “seeing the world with fresh eyes”; days where you feel like everything flimsy and false about how you live has been temporarily scraped away by the encounter—those have always, in my life, been days where I was looking at these things with other people.

Then of course you go back to your normal life. And think: if I go and see it again, will it be the same? Will I be able to respond to it with anything like the same excitement as I could then? These lightning bolt experiences are intense because possibly final—because, as you’ll know if you love paintings, things aren’t always that good when you return. If you do return. Because if the thing you’re seeing is buried deep in the Italian countryside, or housed in a gallery in a country you’ll probably never visit again, you know things might fall out that you never get another shot with that painting. Blockbuster exhibitions aren’t kidding about being once in a lifetime. In fact, even the simplest temporary exhibition or gallery visit forces you to confront that same sense of finality. It’s all once in a lifetime. These pictures, together, on this day, with this person: it will never happen again.

It goes without saying that this kind of finality is anathema not just to the ravening content mill of modern cultural production but to the transhumanist yearnings of guys like our friend above. Wanted more of the film? Why not autogenerate an extended version! Felt your favourite character wasn’t given the ending you wanted? Here’s an origin story that rewrites everything to your taste! Trapped in your body, destined to die early, and perhaps to lose almost everyone you love before that happens? Don’t worry, our premium personality predictor will synthesise their voice and reproduce the sort of things they said long after their death. People are actually working on things like this. If I were feeling particularly French I might argue that every piece of this is just another front in the endless human war against admitting our own mortality. Maybe there’s something in that.

But what I really want to say to this guy is this: first, sorry for calling you an incel. That was probably unnecessary. But I don’t think you get what’s special about these things, and I think that you’re missing out on one of the big things that there is. So if you ever come to London, drop me a line, and together we will go to the National Gallery and spend an hour looking at paintings. Maybe these ones by Piero Della Francesca. Do you see, when you look around the room, that these look sort of different from everything else in here. Lighter somehow. But heavy. It’s hard to describe. He’s the only person really who does that. This one is of the nativity. Yes, it looks weird. He never finished it, I don’t think. People are worried the restorers might have fucked it up. We’ll see. Or won’t. It’s the only he did that’s like that. And then that one over there. The big one. That used to hang with two other panels. They’re lost now. Apparently the picture is organised according to the golden ratio. He was an amazing mathematician, this painter. Lots of people feel, when they stand in front of these things, like they can sense a sort of message or logic behind them. One they can’t quite articulate. That’s how I feel. And this one over here was part of a sort of series made up of others just like it. You can see from the warp that it’s painted on wood. That kind of changes the proposition somehow. Hard to say why. I think part of it is just: this used to be a tree. There’s something beautiful about the idea of that transformation. Actually, if you want to see the very best and weirdest things this guy ever did you have to go to Italy. He painted them on walls in small towns. Painted them into the walls, using an irreversible chemical process. You might only go once. You’ll probably only go once. But you should see these things. Only about thirty of his works survive. The rest are lost, or never were. We have no way of recovering them. We have no way of knowing what they looked like. They probably looked like nothing else. We'll never know. And of course we have no way of seeing the others for now. It’s just these three today. That’s all there is. That’s really all there is. But I mean, just look at it.