Comment on Artist sneaks AI-generated print into National Museum Cardiff gallery

• tal@lemmy.today ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Sure, but they did.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disumbrationism

  Disumbrationism was a hoax masquerading as an art movement that was launched in 1924 by Paul Jordan-Smith, a novelist, Latin scholar, and authority on Robert Burton from Los Angeles, California.

  Annoyed at the cold reception his wife Sarah Bixby Smith’s realistic still lifes had received from an art exhibition jury, Jordan-Smith sought revenge by styling himself as “Pavel Jerdanowitch” (Cyrillic: Па́вел Жердaнович), a variation on his own name. Never having picked up a paint brush in his life, he then painted Yes, we have no bananas, a blurry, badly painted picture of a Pacific islander woman holding a banana over her head, having just killed a man and putting his skull on a stick. In 1925, Smith entered the banana picture under a new title of Exaltation in New York’s “Exhibition” of the Independents at the Waldorf-Astoria. He made a suitably dark and brooding photograph of himself as Jerdanowitch, and submitted the work to the same group of critics as representative of the new school “Disumbrationism”. He explained Exaltation as a symbol of “breaking the shackles of womanhood”.[1] To his amusement, if not to his surprise, the Disumbrationist daub won praise from the critics who had belittled his wife’s realistic painting.

  More Disumbrationist paintings followed: a composition of zig-zag lines and eyeballs he called Illumination; a garish picture of a black woman doing laundry that he called Aspiration, and which a critic praised as “a delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and Negro minstrelsy, with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality”;[2]: 111  Gination, an ugly, lopsided portrait; and a painting named Adoration, of a woman worshipping an immense phallic idol, which was exhibited in 1927.

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  Jordan-Smith did too, though, and his work doesn’t qualify. I think that one has to both do and maintain a straight face for the rest of your life.

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• Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Those artists at least had a recognizable and identifiable style. It was easy to mimic yes, but they became icons for the identifiable style. If Altman snuck this in to the museum I’d give him some credit for it I suppose, but the style already exists and isn’t novel or identiable to a particular artist. Other people have snuck crap into museums too. There’s no novelty or creativity or unique iconic style here. It’s just sludge.

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  • Triumph@fedia.io ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And here we are talking about it.

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    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      If I take my pants off and walk down the street people will talk about me. Seems like a low bar.

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      • Triumph@fedia.io ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        If.

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      • Postimo@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Yeah, it’s called performance art. You’re not wrong in disliking it as slop, but the barrier for what is art is empirically low.

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• TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Except this is missing the executing part. Prompting isn’t work.

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  • Triumph@fedia.io ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You're missing it. It got sneaked into a museum and hung on the wall.

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    • pennomi@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Indeed, the art is the reverse heist.

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