The computer (as a graphic tool) is relatively new in the current rush of technology. In America, widespread use of the computer dates approximately from 1955, when a line of commercial units first became available.

In 1963 computers began to develop possibilities for making graphics. An electric microfilm recorder was introduced; it can plot points and draw lines a million times faster than a human draftsman. This machine and the electronic computer which controls it thus make feasible various kinds of graphic movies which heretofore would have been prohibitively intricate, time-consuming and expensive.

The microfilm recorder consists essentially of a display tube and a camera. It understands only simple instructions such as those for advancing the film, displaying a spot or alphabetic character at specified coordinates or drawing a straight line from one point to another. Though this repertoire is simple, the machine can compose complicated pictures—or series of pictures—from a large number of basic elements: it can draw ten thousand to one hundred thousand points, lines or characters per second.

This film-exposing device is therefore fast enough to tum out, in a matte r of seconds , a television-quality image consisting of a fine mosaic of closely spaced spots, or to produce simple line drawings at rates of several frames per second.

As a technically oriented film-artist , I realized the possibilities of the computer as a new graphic tool for film-making in 1964 and began my exploration of this medium. I have since made nine computer-generated films. To produce these films the following procedure was used: an IBM 7094 computer was loaded with a set of sub-routines (instructions) which perform the operations for computizing the movie system called “Beflix” devised by Ken Knowlton of Bell Telephone Laboratories. The movie computer program is then written, in this special language, and put on punched cards; the punched cards are then fed into the computer; the computer tabulates and accepts the instructions on the cards calculating the explicit details of each implied picture of the movie and putting the results of this calculation on tape. To visualize this: imagine a mosaic-like screen with 252 x 184 points of light each point of light can be turned on or off from instructions on the program. Pictures can be thought of as an array of spots of different shades of gray. The computer keeps a complete “map” of the picture as the spots are turned on and off. The programmer instructs the system to “draw” lines, arcs, lettering. He can also invoke operations on entire areas with instructions for copying, shifting, transliterating, zooming, and dissolving and filling areas. The coded tape is then put into another machine that reads the tape and instructs a graphic display device (a Stromberg-Carlson 4020), which is a sophisticated cathode-tube system similar to a TV picture tube. Each point of light turns on/off according to the computerized instructions on the tape. A camera over the tube, also instructed when to take a picture by information from the computer, then records on film that particular movie frame. After much trial and error—during which time the computer informs you that you have not written your instructions properly—you have a black-and-white movie. This is edited in traditional movie techniques, and color is added by a special color-printing process developed by artists Bob Brown and Frank Olvey.

Movie-making was for long the most revolutionary art form of our time. Now television touches the nerve-ends of all the world; the visual revolution sits in just about every living room across America. The image revolution that movies represented has now been overhauled by the television evolution, and is approaching the next visual stage-to computer graphics to computer controls of environment to a new cybernetic “movie art.”

For the artist the new media of movies, TV, computers, cybernetics, are tools that have curved the perspectives of vision, curving both outward and inward. The revolution of ideas and the ecology of the senses began in 1900 (movies were “invented” about the same time as psychoanalysis). Trace the path of ideas of painting over the past sixty years: the breakup of nineteenth-century ideals, step by step; the obj et d’art to nonobjective art; cubism-simultaneous perception; futurism—motion and man machine metaphysics; dadaism-anti-art, pro-life; surrealism—the dream as the center of the mental universe; action painting—synthetic time-motion; happenings—two-dimensional painting comes off the wall; op art-illusion as retinal “reality”; pop art” reality” as reminder of reality; minimal art-illusion of reduction; conceptual art-the elements of illusion.

In other words, we have been moving closer to a “mental” state of art/life. Now we move into the area of computers, an extension of the mind with a tool technically as responsive as ourselves. In the developing mental art/life, to “think” about the work is the process of doing the work.

An abstract notation system for making movies and image storage and retrieval systems opens a door for a kind of mental attitude of movie-making: the artist is no longer restricted to the exact execution of the form; so long as he is clear in his mind as to what he wants, eventually he can realize his movie or work on some computer, somewhere.

What shall this black box, this memory system of the world, this meta-physical printing press do for us? Compare the computer to driving a fast sports car; it is difficult to control; although the irony is that at higher speeds less effort is needed to alter and change directions. However, more skill—a complex man/machine understanding—is required.

The future of computers in art will be fantastic, as amplifiers of human imagination and responses, of kinetic environments programmed to each of our interests; in short, computers will shape the overall ecology of America.

It’s not very far from the Gutenberg press of movable bits of type to the logic “bits” of the computer. No doubt computers will be as common as telephones in our lives; art schools in the near future will teach programming as one of the new psycho-skills of the new technician-artist-citizen.

Whereas fame and fortune in the art world come from restricting access to an elite few, making it as a digital creator is about giving away as much of yourself as possible. For free, all the time.

“My attitude’s always been, as soon as I post something on the internet, that’s out there,” Winkelmann said. “The internet is an organism. It just eats things and poops them out in new ways, and trying to police that is futile. People take my stuff and upload it and profit from it. They get all the engagements and clicks and whatnot. But whatever.”

Winkelmann leveraged his two million followers and became the face of NFTs. In the process, he became a blue-chip art star, with an eponymous art museum in South Carolina and pieces reportedly selling for close to $10 million to major museums elsewhere. That’s without an MFA, a gallery, or prior exhibitions.

“You can have [a contemporary] artist who is extremely well-selling and making a shitload of money, and the vast majority of people have never heard of this person,” he said. “Their artwork has no effect on the broader visual language of the time. And yet, because they’ve convinced the right few people, they can be successful. I think in the future, more people will come up like I did—by convincing a million normal people.”

In 2021 he might have been right, but more recently that path to art world fame is being threatened by a potent force: artificial intelligence. Last year, Midjourney and Stability AI turned the world of digital creators on its head when they released AI image generators to the public. Both now boast more than 10 million users. For digital artists, the technology represents lost jobs and stolen labor. The major image generators were trained by scraping billions of images from the internet, including countless works by digital artists who never gave their consent.

In the eyes of those artists, tech companies have unleashed a machine that scrambles human—and legal—definitions of forgery to such an extent that copyright may never be the same. And that has big implications for artists of all kinds.

In December, Canadian illustrator and content creator Sam Yang received a snide email from a stranger asking him to judge a sort of AI battle royale in which he could decide which custom artificial intelligence image generator best mimicked his own style. In the months since Stability AI released the Stable Diffusion generator, AI enthusiasts had rejiggered the tool to produce images in the style of specific artists; all they needed was a sample of a hundred or so images. Yang, who has more than three million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, was an obvious target.

Netizens took hundreds of his drawings posted online to train the AI to pump out images in his style: girls with Disney-wide eyes, strawberry mouths, and sharp anime-esque chins. “I couldn’t believe it,” Yang said. “I kept thinking, This is really happening … and it’s happening to me.”

Yang trawled Reddit forums in an effort to understand how anyone could think it was OK to do this, and kept finding the same assertion: there was no need to contact artists for permission. AI companies had already scraped the digital archives of thousands of artists to train the image generators, the Redditors reasoned. Why couldn’t they?

Like many digital artists, Yang has been wrestling with this question for months. He doesn’t earn a living selling works in rarefied galleries, auction houses, and fairs, but instead by attracting followers and subscribers to his drawing tutorials. He doesn’t sell to collectors, unless you count the netizens who buy his T-shirts, posters, and other merchandise. It’s a precarious environment that has gotten increasingly treacherous.

“AI art seemed like something far down the line,” he said, “and then it wasn’t.”

Yang never went to a lawyer, as the prospect of fighting an anonymous band of Redditors in court was overwhelming. But other digital artists aren’t standing down so easily. In January, several filed a class action lawsuit targeted at Stability AI, Midjourney, and the image-sharing platform DeviantArt.

Brooklyn-based illustrator Deb JJ Lee is one of those artists. By January, Lee was sick and tired of being overworked and undervalued. A month earlier, Lee had gone viral after posting a lowball offer from Epic Games to do illustration work for the company’s smash hit Fortnite, arguably the most popular video game in the world. Epic, which generated over $6 billion last year, offered $3,000 for an illustration and ownership of the copyright. For Lee, it was an all-too-familiar example of the indignities of working as a digital artist. Insult was added to injury when an AI enthusiast—who likely found out about Lee from the viral post—released a custom model based on Lee’s work.

“I’ve worked on developing my skills my whole life and they just took it and made it to zeros and ones,” Lee said. “Illustration rates haven’t kept up with inflation since the literal 1930s.”

Illustration rates have stagnated and, in some cases, shrunk since the ’80s, according to Tim O’Brien, a former president of the Society of Illustrators. The real money comes from selling usage rights, he said, especially to big clients in advertising. Lee continued, “I know freelancers who are at the top of their game that are broke, I’m talking [illustrators who do] New Yorker covers. And now this?”

Lee reached out to their community of artists and, together, they learned that the image generators, custom or not, were trained on the LAION dataset, a collection of 5.6 billion images scraped, without permission, from the internet. Almost every digital artist has images in LAION, given that DeviantArt and ArtStation were lifted wholesale, along with Getty Images and Pinterest.

The artists who filed suit claim that the use of these images is a brazen violation of intellectual property rights; Matthew Butterick, who specializes in AI and copyright, leads their legal team. (Getty Images is pursuing a similar lawsuit, having found 12 million of their images in LAION.) The outcome of the case could answer a legal question at the center of the internet: in a digital world built on sharing, are tech companies entitled to everything we post online?

The class action lawsuit is tricky. While it might seem obvious to claim copyright infringement, given that billions of copyrighted images were used to create the technology underlying image generators, the artists’ lawyers are attempting to apply existing legal standards made to protect and restrict human creators, not a borderline-science-fiction computing tool. To that end, the complaint describes a number of abuses: First, the AI training process, called diffusion, is suspect because it requires images to be copied and re-created as the model is tested. This alone, the lawyers argue, constitutes an unlicensed use of protected works.

From this understanding, the lawyers argue that image generators essentially call back to the dataset and mash together millions of bits of millions of images to create whatever image is requested, sometimes with the explicit instruction to recall the style of a particular artist. Butterick and his colleagues argue that the resulting product then is a derivative work, that is, a work not “significantly transformed” from its source material, a key standard in “fair use,” the legal doctrine underpinning much copyright law.

As of mid-April, when Art in America went to press, the courts had made no judgment in the case. But Butterick’s argument irks technologists who take issue with the suit’s description of image generators as complicated copy-paste tools.

“There seems to be this fundamental misunderstanding of what machine learning is,” Ryan Murdock, a developer who has been working on the technology since 2017, including for Adobe, said. “It’s true that you want to be able to recover information from the images and the dataset, but the whole point of machine learning is not to memorize or compress images but to learn higher-level general information about what an image is.”

Diffusion, the technology undergirding image generators, works by adding random noise, or static, to an image in the dataset, Murdock explained. The model then attempts to fill in the missing parts of the image using hints from a text caption that describes the work, and those captions sometimes refer to an artist’s name. The model’s efforts are then scored based on how accurately the model was able to fill in the blanks, leading it to contain some information associating style and artist. AI enthusiasts working under the name Parrot Zone have completed more than 4,000 studies testing how many artist names the model recognizes. The count is close to 3,000, from art historical figures like Wassily Kandinsky to popular digital artists like Greg Rutkowski.

The class action suit aims to protect human artists by asserting that, because an artist’s name is invoked in the text prompt, an AI work can be considered “derivative” even if the work produced is the result of pulling content from billions of images. In effect, the artists and their lawyers are trying to establish copyright over style, something that has never before been legally protected.

The most analogous recent copyright case involves fine artists debating just that question. Last fall, well-known collage artist Deborah Roberts sued artist Lynthia Edwards and her gallerist, Richard Beavers, accusing Edwards of imitating her work and thus confusing potential collectors and harming her market. Attorney Luke Nikas, who represents Edwards, recently filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that Roberts’s claim veered into style as opposed to the forgery of specific elements of her work.

“You have to give the court a metric to judge against,” Nikas said. “That means identifying specific creative choices, which are protected, and measuring that against the supposedly derivative work.”

Ironically, Nikas’s argument is likely to be the one used by Stability AI and Midjourney against the digital artists. Additionally, the very nature of the artists’ work as content creators makes assessing damages a tough job. As Nikas described, a big part of arguing copyright cases entails convincing a judge that the derivative artwork has meaningfully impacted the plaintiff’s market, such as the targeting of a specific collecting class.

In the end, it could be the history of human-made art that empowers an advanced computing tool: copyright does not protect artistic style so that new generations of artists can learn from those who came before, or remix works to make something new. In 2012 a federal judge famously ruled that Richard Prince did not violate copyright in incorporating a French photographer’s images into his “Canal Zone” paintings, to say nothing of the long history of appropriation art practiced by Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, and others. If humans can’t get in trouble for that, why should AI?

In mid-March, the United States Copyright Office released a statement of policy on AI-generated works, ruling that components of a work made using AI were not eligible for copyright. This came as a relief to artists who feared that their most valuable asset—their usage rights—might be undermined by AI. But the decision also hinders the court’s ability to determine how artists are being hurt financially by AI image generators. Quantifying damages online is tricky.

Late last year, illustrator and graphic novelist Tomer Hanuka discovered that someone had created a custom model based on his work, and was selling an NFT collection titled “Punks by Hanuka” on the NFT marketplace OpenSea. But Hanuka had no idea whom to contact; such scenarios usually involve anonymous users who disappear as soon as trouble strikes.

“I can’t speak to what they did exactly because I don’t know how to reach them and I don’t know who they are,” Hanuka said. “They don’t have any contact or any leads on their page.” The hurt, he said, goes deeper than run-of-the-mill online theft. “You develop this language that can work with many different projects because you bring something from yourself into the equation, a piece of your soul that somehow finds an angle, an atmosphere. And then this [AI-generated art] comes along. It’s passable, it sells. It doesn’t just replace you but it also muddies what you’re trying to do, which is to make art, find beauty. It’s really the opposite of that.”

For those who benefited from that brief magical window when a creator could move more easily from internet to art world fame, new tools offer a certain convenience. With his new jet-setting life, visiting art fairs and museums around the world, Winkelmann has found a way to continue posting an online illustration a day, keeping his early fans happy by letting AI make the menial time-consuming imagery in the background.

This is exactly what big tech promised AI would do: ease the creative burden that, relatively speaking, a creator might see as not all that creative. Besides, he points out, thieving companies are nothing new. “The idea of, like, Oh my god, a tech company has found a way to scrape data from us and profit from it––what are we talking about? That’s literally been the last 20 years,” he said. His advice to up-and-coming digital artists is to do what he did: use the system as much as possible, and lean in.

That’s all well and good for Winkelmann: He no longer lives in the precarious world
of working digital artists. Beeple belongs to the art market now.  

As with most of his works, a voiceover accompanies the dance. It has a narrative that doubles as prompts for the dancers, but also bleeds into the realm of description. This comes naturally for Núñez, who is visually impaired, though he also includes a separate, live audio description track conceived specifically for blind audiences. For The Square, Núñez, who was born and raised in Costa Rica and is currently a fellow at Princeton University, instructs his dancers to feel the elements, the vibrations of their ancestors, and their third eye. He sounds more like a yoga instructor than a ballet master, encouraging dancers to listen to their bodies rather than dominate them. He wants them to get into a trance.

Núñez says he is unlearning his training in the school of German expressionism as typified by Pina Bausch; in that context, he was taught that to dance is to suffer, an attitude he regards as both Western and ableist. When his dancers generate momentum, they’re instructed to let the energy carry them where it may—a method he describes as decidedly decolonial. Rotations and undulations mark his choreography, dancers revolving around one another as they move, their spines billowing like inchworms. Núñez said his “vortex” method evolved from his trouble judging distances: when everyone rotates around one point, it helps him predict their positions to avoid collisions.

The Square has a score by Alfonso “Poncho” Castro, who uses indigenous Central American instruments like the carraca, basically, a donkey jaw modified by ants; the insects slowly remove the flesh and loosen the teeth. Played with a stick, the carraca produces a sound that Poncho mixes electronically to intone at 432 hertz, “the frequency of the universe,” as Núñez describes it. He presents the frequency as a gift to both the dancers and the audience, saying it “automatically invites people to rest.”

Despite all this, Núñez insists his practice is not one of healing. “I want to nurture and energize my body,” he said, “but I also love this state of feeling the wounds.” He added that, “in marginalized communities, when you are communicating to the world that you are healing, you risk removing the responsibility from all the oppressive structures.” His nuanced approach to the dynamic is a sort of extension of his “vortex” method, with a focus on neither nurturing nor wounds but, rather, both, swirling together. 

In a time when so many artists dabble in video, Nguyen-Chi stands apart for her mastery of cinematic storytelling. Like a true filmmaker, she collaborates with skilled cinematographers and musicians in beautifully shot works built around compelling narrative structures. In Violet Belly, her mother is onscreen telling her story, so it’s understood that she survived, but we’re never told how—just left suspended in blue.

Before studying at Germany’s famed art school Städelschule, Nguyen-Chi, now based in Berlin, worked for a Swiss NGO helping people exposed to Agent Orange. Violet Belly completes a trilogy that deals with Cold War history from her Vietnamese and German perspective. All three personal, poetic videos ensconce viewers in a blue expanse, and she plays with modes of display. When she showed Violet Belly last year in a former refugee center in Amsterdam, now an art space called de Appel, Nguyen-Chi shoved a large, jagged mirror through a slanted projection screen. One evening, a musician performed a live version of the soundtrack on a cello as the projection danced across her instrument. 

This summer, Nguyen-Chi will cover the floor of Norway’s Kunsthall Trondheim with hundreds of ping-pong balls, where she will show two works from the trilogy together for the first time. A mirrored game table will bounce the light from video projectors instead of balls, in reference to Cold War “ping-pong diplomacy.”

Meanwhile, Nguyen-Chi is at work on a new trilogy about three Vietnamese women: her mother (once again) plus an activist and a filmmaker. She said that each of them “embodies some form of resistance, and defines their own freedom despite limitations.” She has borrowed footage left behind by the filmmaker, who documented the Vietnam War, some of it literally drenched in blood. Nguyen-Chi is an artist who handles haunting stories without reducing or sensationalizing them, so it’s hard to imagine such delicate material in better hands. 

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Disabled Choreographer Christopher Unpezverde Núñez Is Skeptical of "Healing"

Tsai was in town this past February for the opening of her first solo exhibition in the United States, “A Mirror for the Romantic,” at Tara Downs gallery, where the London-based artist was surrounded by her own painted abstractions. Her work in pencil and oils invites us to wander between marks that boomerang freely across the canvas, with hard-edged lines and brisk smudges wending through eddies of flamboyant color. Her compositions are dense and seemingly limitless in dimension. They sweep you up in their relentless fervor.

Tsai describes herself as a narrator of motions, with a special concern for “the tension of searching back and forth.” This dynamic registers in her gestures’ trajectories, which morph wildly and resolve into harmony. Although her paintings offer no clear stories, they are as eventful as any drama. Word without End I Saw (2022) is a riotous encounter of pastel daubs that flit around a wispy spiral of purple, with exacting curves and ciphers subtly punctuating the chaos. Looking at the verdant First Day of Four Day Interlude (2023) feels like a fit of spring fever.

Tsai, 24, draws influences from lyrical texts of traditional Chinese literature, in particular the classic epic novel Dream of the Red Chamber, written in the 1750s by Cao Xueqin. Growing up in a large family in Taiwan, she was attracted to the book’s story about the rise and decline of a royal family and its evocation of imagery and metaphors to delineate complex interpersonal relationships. Her ongoing fascination with the 120-chapter tale’s “ever-changing process of beauty and ugliness, temperance and obscenity, refinement and vulgarity,” as she put it, materializes in her approach to mark-making. She often begins by piling up paint on the edges of her canvas and then spreading it across the surface, drawing over certain layers, and obfuscating others with gesso. When she describes this process, she uses words like “distort,” “destroy,” and “re-create.”

This method of working laterally stems from Tsai’s training in gongbi, a realist style of traditional Chinese ink painting that she studied in high school. She adapted her skill in executing fine yet fluid brushstrokes in oil paint at the Taipei National University of the Arts, but turned to abstraction at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she received her MFA in 2022.

She was, and remains, interested in pushing spatial relationships and seeking layered emotional states: just as the diction and rhythm of a pithy Chinese idiom can impart a figurative meaning, so can the precise choreography of gestures on canvas unfold a nexus of events. “They’re all constructing and bringing to the viewer a broad worldview and inner spiritual space,” she said.  

As told to A.i.A. I started this in the fall of 2019. Before that, I was primarily making these cutout paintings that are larger-than-life figures, like 7 feet tall. I still paint those a lot. I hadn’t really painted before on a rectangular canvas, other than in college. So this was like my reentry into a more traditional format for painting. 

Clothing is a point of inspiration for me. I started painting people wearing different clothes and masks and headwear that are a bit fantastical and are at varying levels of obstructing the faces. This was pre-Covid: that hadn’t really entered my world yet, so I don’t know exactly what prompted me to start depicting masks. But, obviously, they soon became much more relevant. There’s also a sort of superhero-fantasy vibe to the painting, which comes from me learning to draw by tracing comic books and this X-Men encyclopedia I had as a kid. 

The figure in the center changed over time. As you’re painting, especially if you’re spending months or years on something, characters start to develop a personality. When I began this, I went through a breakup. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but that character sort of took on the persona of the person I’d dated. That figure was the hardest to finish. It was a bit of a battle. I hesitate to articulate some concrete meaning or interpretation of what he’s supposed to convey. But I will say he was emotional to flesh out. There’s a calm kind of fear to him, and I think that’s connected to what I was going through while I was working.

The head pieces obstruct the figures’ faces in ways that hinder or maybe enhance them in some decorative way. Wearing a mask affects the way you communicate with someone, especially when their face is obscured too. I was thinking about fashion and adornment and decorating yourself to attract or repel interaction. Sometimes you want to attract, but other times you might want to repel, maybe by creating a force field around yourself for protection.

Backgrounds and settings are not the fun part for me. I’m not sure where these people are exactly, but I get the sensation of weather, a feeling of the air and wind and movement. It feels like a bit sexual to me, like a party, but also kind of ominous. I want it to be a little unclear.

Everyone’s dressed in this kind of real-but-unreal way. It feels related to other stuff I’ve done, with gay guys and weird outfits. It’s like a version of a gay bar, some exaggerated version of a real place. But it is quite different from my other work. I feel like this is maybe a world that I’ll go back to.  

The issue kicks off with an expanded Datebook section of exhibitions and events we’re sure you’ll want to know about in the coming months, with some books and films and other things thrown in. We’re introducing fun and thought-provoking new sections, like Battle Royale, which pits one art world fixture against another (in this case, Chelsea and Tribeca, New York’s most-trafficked gallery districts), and Object Lesson, in which we explore a single artwork by an esteemed artist (first up is Jaune Quick-to See Smith, who has a retrospective on view now at the Whitney Museum). You’ll also see that we’ve given additional space to our columnists Chen & Lampert, who have added an interactive quiz to their popular Hard Truths advice column.

As for New Talent, we’ve increased the number of artists this time to 20—more in line with the huge number of exceptional creators who arise on the worldwide art scene every year. This year’s group skews to the Global South, where some of the most intriguing new talents are being cultivated these days. We’ve also included a special focus on New Talent in New York—where square-footage is expensive and competition among artists is intense—with a feature taking you into five artists’ studios. We offer even more new talent scattered throughout a feature on artists who are using fiber and textiles in ways that elevate the medium to the status of painting.

And we aren’t just celebrating new talent. Emily Watlington conducted a revealing interview with Kerry James Marshall, an artist who is at the top of his game—but refuses to be pegged to any one style.

Finally, with this issue we inaugurate a feature that you saw before you even opened the pages here: a cover artist. The idea is that, for each issue of Art in America, we will choose an emerging (or re-emerging) artist whose work we’ll showcase on the cover, and you’ll find an interview with that artist on the final page of the magazine, along with a full view of the artwork from which we chose a detail. In this case it’s a painting by Drake Carr, who summoned a spirited milieu rooted in part in his work as a bartender at a self-described “queer tiki disco dive bar” in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Learn more about it on page 136—and enjoy the read.

New Talent
20 exciting artists to watch, as chosen by the editors of Art in America.

New Talent New York
A.i.A. visits the studios of five New York–based artists on the rise.

Fiber Is the New Painting
On gallery walls, tapestries are replacing canvases as young artists disregard distinctions between fine art and folk art.
by Wendy Vogel

Bow Down
As scholars revisit early matriarchal cultures, artists are rediscovering the Goddess movement.
by Eleanor Heartney

Grand Theft AI
A new lawsuit asks, can you steal a style?
by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Softer Power, with a French Touch
The Centre Pompidou’s landmark agreement with Saudi Arabia is more complicated than it seems. So are the politics of art there.
by Devorah Lauter

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Issues & Commentary
The best and worst artists of our time are sending work into space.
by Emily Watlington 

Battle Royale 
Tribeca vs. Chelsea—gallery districts face off. 
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on video art.
by Emily Watlington 

Inquiry
A Q&A with Kerry James Marshall about his new exquisite corpse works.
by Emily Watlington 

Sightlines
Counterpublic curator Allison Glenn tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Hard Truths
A teacher and an artist ask for advice. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Appreciation
A tribute to Peter Schjeldahl, writer of vivid, unforgettable prose.
by Jackson Arn

Book Review
A reading of Amanda Wasielewski’s Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning.
by Sonja Drimmer

Object Lesson
An annotation of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Memory Map.
by Francesca Aton

Spotlight
Revisiting Leon Polk Smith’s abstractions in the context of identity.
by Barry Schwabsky

Cover Artist
Drake Carr talks about his painting featured on the front of the magazine. 
by the Editors of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Hong Kong
Hong Kong Diary
by Andrew Russeth

New York
“Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth”
by Elise Chagas

“Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter”
by Maria H. Loh

Cape Town
“When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting”
by Nkgopoleng Moloi

Sharjah
The 15th Sharjah Biennial
by Emily Watlington

Berlin
“Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief”
by Martin Herbert

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Photography in Fragments

Two Books about Art History Examine a Discipline in Crisis

Dillon begins with semantic negotiations. “How to describe, as a writer, the relation it seemed the artists had with their chosen and not chosen—what is the word? Talismans? Tastes? Sympathies? Familiars? Superstitions? Affinities,” he writes. He describes affinity as “something like but unlike critical interest, which has its own excitements but remains too often at the level of knowledge, analysis, conclusions, at worst the total boredom of having opinions.” Dillon’s brand of affinity goes deeper than the internet’s algorithmic recommendations, and is more authentic than the manufactured kinships trumpeted in marketing collateral. Affinity, he writes, is like fascination, but not. It’s a less sentimental sibling to appreciation: a term with the same bloodline but a different character. It’s beyond aesthetics. It’s impermanent. Ultimately, it’s not even thinkable—a “mode of dumb fascination.” Elsewhere in the book, he describes the attempt to anatomize affinity as “stupid” and “idiotic.” His thematic playground here is the gap between how art transfixes us and our inability to articulate that transfixion. (T.J. Clark’s 2006 book on Poussin, The Sight of Death, shares such language; he wonders if only “the physical, literal, dumb” act of looking can satisfy the mind.)   

It’s risky to structure a book as a kind of Wunderkammer—what if it dissipates into its own eclecticism?—and riskier still to feature artists who have been embalmed by decades of analysis. But Dillon’s accretive method is itself a textual demonstration of affinity that helps his various subjects cohere. Artists who have their own chapter reappear in chapters about others: William Klein is invoked alongside Arbus and the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada; Claude Cahun is mentioned in connection to Dora Maar and Francesca Woodman. Chapters succeed each other in subtle embellishment, echoing or annotating earlier themes. In the first essay, for example, Dillon considers Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, the first book in English to present observations made with a microscope. “Among the better-known illustrations in the first edition of 1665 are those showing a fly’s many-faceted eye, the starry shapes of ice crystals and a prodigious bristling fold-out flea,” Dillon writes. This is followed by a chapter on Louis Daguerre’s Vue du boulevard du Temple (ca. 1838), a photograph of a Paris street that’s believed to be the first to depict living people: the smudged apparitions of a man and his boot polisher. Nothing links these two works except an analogy that Dillon leaves implicit: Just as a microscope reveals the invisible world around us, so can a photograph illuminate what we typically ignore.  

This understated approach is typical of Dillon. He writes atmospherically and impressionistically rather than critically. Here is how he describes a photo of dancer Loie Fuller: “She looks like a primitive aircraft coming apart, a soft disintegrated Blériot.” About the elderly subject of a 1970s Eggleston photo, whose particolored dress clashes with the floral cushion she sits on, he writes: “She holds onto her cigarette as if she might disappear amid all this patterned excess.” In Arbus’s ensemble of outcasts and misfits he discerns an “aristocratic distance”—an apt phrase whose accuracy doesn’t evoke any one image but the whole dispassionate vantage of Arbus’s work. 

As befits a book conceived during the pandemic, Affinities is introspective and fitfully elegiac, even as it seeks communion. In his chapter on Vue du boulevard du Temple, Dillion recalls walking around London during the spring of 2020. He notes “a category of city person who seemed suddenly more visible than before”—fellow housebound Londoners out for a stroll who, like Daguerre’s phantasmal figures from nearly two centuries earlier, are rendered newly vivid by their circumstances. A chapter about the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, a monument in London whose plaques record stories of ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others, begins as another pandemic scene before taking a more philosophical turn. “The things a nation may conceal from itself inside an idea of heroism,” Dillon muses, noting that many would-be plaques on the monument remain blank. Elisions, often conceptual, recur throughout the book, most pointedly in the final chapter, which lists “images that are not mentioned and do not appear in this book, but will not leave the mind.” (Among the missing: French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue’s depiction of his cat catching a ball; filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Polaroid of his wife and their dog standing by a fence in Russia.) 

These missing images parallel one of the book’s subtexts: artists’ oblique and unacknowledged relationship to modernism, which Dillon defines broadly as the aesthetic tendency toward ambiguity and formal experimentation. He suggests that the 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron might be considered a modernist, her blurred portraits and tableaux vivant representing “a deliberate effort to capture something evanescent but particular.” The French photographer and filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who made lyrical documentaries about aquatic life, is another modernist, one who attends “to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street.” (Note how gracefully Dillon posits additional affinities.) If part of Dillon’s project is to reclaim or excavate lineages of modernism, then another definition of affinity emerges. To be modern is to connect one thing to another. Affinity is connection; affinity is modern.   

But affinity is also, finally, a mood, as Dillon concedes. And the mood is intimate in two back-to-back chapters—the most moving in the book—that look outside the canon toward more workaday, even vernacular, imagery. In the first, Dillon considers a press photograph of a charismatic Christian congregation, shot in Dublin in the 1980s or ’90s. “Their faces compose a selection of mundane ecstasies, such as I know well from certain churches of my childhood,” he writes. His mother, plagued by depression and, later, a fatal autoimmune disorder, belonged to just such a congregation, a “rapt sorority of the unwell and the unhappy.” Dillon recognizes his mother’s ghost in the faces of these middle-aged pilgrims, one of whom offers her hands in a gesture that’s either beseeching or quizzical. In the following chapter, he writes about his aunt, whose paranoid grievances against her neighbors culminated in a series of reconnaissance snapshots taken around her property: of hedges, doors, windows. “You can pursue vigilance and attention into a kind of fugue state, almost hallucinatory,” Dillon writes. He’s referring to his aunt, but the line has a cautionary tone, self-conscious and chastened.  

That tone recurs a few pages later, when Dillon confesses a suspicion that “nothing I write pursues an argument or is built to convince. Instead, I simply get into a mood about the thing I am meant to be writing about, and pursue that mood until it is exhausted or has filled the space it was meant to fill.” He’s right, of course, but he’s in good company: Wayne Koestenbaum, Maggie Nelson, Walter Benjamin, and, most emphatically, Roland Barthes all share Dillon’s dilatory, memoiristic method. Like those writers, Dillon revitalizes images by respecting their inherent ambiguities and enigmas rather than seeking to resolve them. (One more quote: Dillon calls the work of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi “a domestic photography, dedicated to an infinity of small things, impossibly tender and exposed.”) Dillon is acutely sensitive to the subfrequency of his chosen images, and he regards them with curiosity and sympathetic scrutiny.  

In one of the book’s late chapters, he writes about the final TV interview that British dramatist Dennis Potter did, in 1994, shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Potter remarks that impending death has made the world almost hyperreal—more radiant, more fully itself. Dillon achieves a similar miracle in these pages, the “mundane miracle of looking,” as he calls it. The images he contemplates become sharper and stranger, aligned in myriad inscrutable ways to each other and to the world. It’s an irreducible process that’s finally beyond our understanding but impossible to resist—something, perhaps, like love.