Szántó András Szántó. The Future of the Art World. 38 Dialogues

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-7757-6143-7
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 424 Seiten

Reihe: Hatje Cantz Text

The third in a series of books investigating the future of the museum, following on The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues (2020) and Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues With Architects (2022). Rounding out the previous volumes, which examined the “software” and the “hardware” of the museum, the 38 dialogues in the third installment of the trilogy survey the social, cultural, economic, institutional, and technological conditions of the wider ecology in which museums operate. The conversations include leading figures from around the world, engaging voices not heard in the prior volumes: artists, curators, collectors, members of the art trade, sociologists, entrepreneurs, and others. Together, they offer a portrait of an art world seeking to adapt to a rapidly changing society.

András Szántó (*1964, Budapest) advises museums, cultural institutions, and leading brands on cultural strategy. An author and editor who oversaw the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, his writings have appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, and many other publications. Szántó, who lives in Brooklyn, has been conducting conversations with art-world leaders since the early 1990s, as a frequent moderator of the Art Basel Conversations series and as the moderator of the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museums of Tomorrow Roundtable at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Szántó, András

Weitere Mitwirkende

Szántó, András

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunsttheorie, Kunstphilosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Sozialprognosen
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturpolitik, Kulturmanagement
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunstförderung, Mäzenatentum, Auktionen
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften Journalismus & Presse
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Museumskunde, Materielle Kultur, Erinnerungskultur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Introduction An Inventory of Conceivable Futures
Art World in the Age of AI
Art World Networks
Immersive Opportunities
Globalization
International Dialogues
Beyond the Legacy Art World
Making Space for Digital
Art and Its Markets in Asia
Art & Spectacle
New Alliances
Art & Well-being
Objects with Roots
Art & Indigeneity
Brands as Partners
Future of Creativity
Future of Art Fairs
Freedom: No Fear
Art & Political Power
Museums in the Middle East
Fantasizing the Future
Updating the Art Gallery
Latin American Typologies
Borderless Institution
Change from the Inside
China: The Next Chapter
Art & Climate Emergency
New Platforms in Asia
New African Models
Rethinking Business Models
Crisis & Opportunity
Future of the Gallery
What’s Next for Media and the Arts?
Cultural Diplomacy
Reinventing Art Institutions
What’s Next for Private Museums?
In Search of the Sublime
Redefining Globalism
Art & Science
Acknowledgments
Imprint

Leseproben

Art World in the Age of ai Refik Anadol Artist, Los Angeles, United States

The year was 2019, and Refik Anadol and I were looking for data for a new artwork. We wandered around the factory of an automobile company for which Anadol—a pioneering media artist and a leader in using artificial intelligence—was preparing a commission. We found what he needed in a glass chamber where robotic arms, moving with poetic precision and grace, had been laying down paint in a kaleidoscopic array of colors. A few months later, the trove of information thus generated was embodied in a data painting. No data, no art. That’s the logic behind the Turkish-born Anadol’s brand of generative art. His polyglot studio of data engineers has been retained by companies at the forefront of the ai revolution. In 2022, his work was recognized with an exhibition at Moma, Unsupervised, a human-machine collaboration that mobilized the museum’s collections into an ever-shifting digital work. His latest endeavor is a museum of ai art in Los Angeles called dataland. Each day, Anadol and his colleagues confront new questions about the methods, markets, and morals of data-driven creativity.

andrás szántó Let’s start with something easy. What are you working on this week?

refik anadol An exciting artwork for the United Nations. We got a call from the general secretary for the Summit of the Future. They found our work to be among the most ethical and responsible ai art to highlight. We are crafting a new artwork that is aligned with the United Nations’ statement on how ai should operate and for whom.

You’re working on this with the Refik Anadol Studio—because you can’t do this all by yourself. Can you describe the studio?

Our studio has twenty people who speak fifteen languages. I don’t like working alone—I prefer to imagine together. While doing my mfa in visual communication design at Istanbul Bilgi University, I was certain I’d open a studio one day. During my second mfa, at ucla, I studied with pioneers like Casey Reas, Christian Moeller, Rebecca Allen, and Jennifer Steink they all encouraged me to establish a studio eventually. Today, our network includes specialists across architecture, ai, data science, neuroscience, and literature. We collaborate to generate new ideas and push creative boundaries.

This is a far cry from Turkey, where you grew up. Looking at your art, I’m often reminded of the mosaics of Istanbul.

Culture starts with nature. The Bosporus, which I saw every day of my life growing up, is a connecting tissue. The city of Istanbul is a bridge between Europe and Asia. It’s an insanely complex city where you can see all the connections between culture, nature, and spirituality. It is, to me, truly the ultimate inspiration. What I like most about being from Turkey is all the layers of architecture, history, and knowledge. I still get inspired by wandering around all those incredible surfaces.

I can see how being from Istanbul, you’d feel right at home in la: the in-betweenness, the water and the sun, the sense of being at the edge. Meanwhile, you’ve become an artist. What kind of artist are you?

I’m a media artist. I learned that from one of my mentors, Peter Weibel. It was in his class that I coined the term “data painting,” in 2008. Peter said that any artist using any media is a media artist. You can use music, sound, intangible data. He allowed me to shape the notion of what I could be. Then, luckily, I found the Design Media Arts department at ucla, which had been the locus for these issues for four decades. That was a natural fit.

dataland, your future museum of ai art, is an apotheosis of your work. Why did you decide to establish it?

I am inspired by the concept of a playground—a space to explore without constraints. My work is never rooted in straightforward technologies. Each piece presents its own set of formidable challenges in engineering, technology, programming, and data. These complexities often push even advanced institutions to their limits. I envisioned a museum where I could push the boundaries of imagination and technology, creating a space to experiment at the very edge of what is possible with ai. We decided to call it dataland to convey a sense of excitement and discovery.

We’re speaking in the fall of 2024. Just yesterday, Openai released a chatbot that reasons the way a human might, in a series of steps. What exactly is ai for you?

I would say a co-creator. I was still saying a “tool” couple of years ago, but at this moment I can no longer say that. This is a tool that can turn into a thinking brush. We would underestimate it by calling it a tool. Now I speak about “human-machine collaboration.” Working with ai, I find myself enhanced in my capacity for imagination.

I believe in collecting our own data and training our own ai models. When people think about ai, they often see big systems involving multi-billions of dollars and a trillion tokens. That’s a different league, a product-and-service business with its own agenda. In the art context, I always think about something different: open-source archives, open-source ai, open-source data. These are, at the moment, two separate worlds.

ai is an evolving technology, not like electricity or any physical tool. It’s a living entity. Once it blends in with society and humanity, it may be harder to question it and to understand it. That’s why I think that over the next decade or so, it will be so important to ask questions, to be sure that we really understand it. We have to demystify ai as much as we can.

You were a media artist before you were an ai artist. How did ai change your way of making art?

We artists tend to ask the bold question: “What lies beyond reality?” In February 2016, I became the first artist in residence at Google’s Artists + Machine Intelligence (ami) program. At that time, I was posing questions such as, “If a machine can learn, can it dream?” As I delved into ai, I recognized that the archive represents everything. Archives are humanity’s collective memories. I connected these dots during my Google residency. We currently work with over 5 billion images and more than a century of audio data.

I find it fascinating to break the mold of the ai. Many algorithms are boringly trying to mimic reality, as if they were trying to say, “Here is exactly what you are asking for; I have no hallucinations.” That is functional, but not inspiring. Whenever we break these molds and hack the algorithms, that’s where the inspirational part of ai appears. We call them “machine hallucinations.” I’ve worked on this concept for the past eight years. I never get bored, because each dataset, each archive, is unique.

However, this is not simply imagery that ai has made on its own. I always apply an artistic computation on top of the ai. I use ai as a collaborator to realize my artistic vision. We never show a raw ai output. It’s not art, and it does not reflect our studio’s vision of media art: There needs to be a human intervention. Imagination is the starting point, not computation.

The whole world is trying to eliminate machine hallucinations, and you are turning them into fuel for creativity.

I cannot explain how incredibly inspiring this is. I have great team members whom I love to work with, but I also have ai to work with. Every moment of the day, I brainstorm in the neural networks. I am constantly finding new ways of thinking with ai. There is often a significant time gap between what I am doing and what I am showing, because it requires time to digest, to give context to the work before it goes to a public scale.

What sort of infrastructure, skills, or partners do you need to make this happen?

Number one, the now-familiar ai tools that people use every day. But those, to me, are not art-making tools. They are reasoning tools available to everyone.

We get the most out of ai when we train our own data and create our own models. This requires significant wisdom, experience, and computation. I met Jensen Huang, the ceo of Nvidia, seven years ago, and since then he has never stopped supporting our studio’s journey. We receive significant graphics processing unit support from them—because you need gpus to train the ai and have a dialogue with it.

I learned how to use cloud computing at Google. We need it to scale up and work with multiple billions of parameters. We have learned how to work with pioneers in ai research and to blend our respective creative teams together. At Moma, we collaborated with Nvidia researchers to dive into the collection data. At the Walt Disney Concert Hall, for the 2019 Frank Gehry projection wdch Dreams, the Los Angeles Philharmonic donated hundreds of terabytes of data. Dealing with that amount of information on a local computer is impossible. We must use cloud computing to make art from it.

When someone buys an ai-based artwork, what exactly do they...