Art Take Me Away

Some days you just need to escape from the real world. Tired of politics, trials and the weather I went today to the Nasher Art Museum to listen to Ruth Cacavale talk about art in two different exhibits.

The first was an exhibit that the Nasher created using AI technology. It was an experiment to see if ChatGPT could be a curator. The assignment was to first suggest some themes for art exhibits. From the suggestions the Nasher chose Utopian and Dystopian Visions. From there ChatGBT was tasked with combing through over 14,000 in the Nasher collection to find works to fit the theme. Then Chat wrote didactics, normally the job of the curator, to describe the works beyond the information contained in the label.

The works chosen were not all perfect for the theme and the descriptions written by the computer were definitely questionable. Real human curators wrote rebuttal didactics.

As with so many things computer related, the work it produces is only as good as the data base it gets its information from. Even with perfect data it still is only regurgitating information it has scrubbed from other sources. The reliability of those sources is often questionable.

It was an interesting exercise. I think we are still going to need humans when it comes to art.

The other exhibit we looked at was Love and Anarchy. It was much better art than the AI exhibit, in my opinion, and was much more interesting to talk about as art, something the Ruth is great at leading groups to do.

The bottom line is that while looking and talking about art I did not think one bit about the unsavory things going on in the world today. For this reason I continue to think that art is important.