Refik Anadol, The Art World’s Happy Warrior for A.I.
Anadol enjoyed an early triumph in 2018, when he lit up the silver sails of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, with projections developed using terabytes of recordings, program notes, and archival documents from the L.A. Philharmonic. But he wasn’t widely known until 2022, when “Unsupervised” arrived at MOMA. The show followed a series of digital art works which Anadol sold as N.F.T.s., and from which MOMA quietly earned a portion of the proceeds. Buoyed by the promise of digital art, and perhaps by its revenue, the museum displayed Anadol’s work on a twenty-four-foot-tall high-definition L.E.D. screen in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, where it was among the first things visitors saw.
To make “Unsupervised,” Anadol trained an A.I. on more than two hundred years’ worth of art from MOMA’s collection: not just paintings and sculptures but video games, films, and design objects, along with their associated metadata. Then his team had the model identify patterns beyond human-imposed categories like “Abstract Expressionism,” say, or “nineteenth century.” Technically, what appeared onscreen were visions from the “mind” of the model as it moved through its map of the collection, and as it responded to site-specific information like the weather and sounds made by visitors. Visually, the result was a restlessly fluctuating Technicolor whorl. Abstractions that looked like scribbled pastels or Helen Frankenthaler oils or the iTunes visualizer would give way to churning data pigment, sloshing in a square frame. Soothing ambient music played in the background.
“Refik devised different ways of essentially diagramming, visualizing, and then even animating the history of modern art,” Michelle Kuo, one of the curators who organized the exhibition, told me. She compared it to the Surrealists and their “automatic” art, the whimsical painting machines made by the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, and the collaboration between engineers from Bell Labs and Robert Rauschenberg.
“Unsupervised” was wildly popular and eminently Instagrammable. Glenn Lowry, the former head of MOMA, credits the work with helping rebuild attendance after the pandemic, and saw it as a mise en abyme for the museum. “We acquire works of art and then we often sell those works of art in order to acquire new works of art,” Lowry told me. “The collection is in a constant state of metabolism and ‘Unsupervised’ is a metabolic project.” It was eventually metabolized itself: toward the close of the show, MOMA announced that it had accepted “Unsupervised” as a donation; one of the piece’s former owners, a crypto investor and digital-art collector, now sits on the museum’s board.
The critical reaction was more ambivalent. Lloyd Wise, in Artforum, noted how the piece evoked “the broader modernist tendency toward noncomposition,” and Sebastian Smee, in the Washington Post, called it an “early masterpiece of AI-generated art.” Jerry Saltz, in New York, dismissed the work as a “pointless museum mediocrity,” “some cross between relaxation exercise and euphoric TED Talk and NSA levels of data mining.” Ben Davis, in perhaps the most substantial treatment, wrote in Artnet that “Unsupervised” presented MOMA’s collection as “just a bunch of random visual tics to be permuted, rather than an archive of symbol-making practices with social meanings.” He suggested that Anadol’s “purely decorative, cheerleader-ish style of A.I. art”—as opposed to the social and political analyses of A.I. offered by the likes of Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl—is one of the reasons he has received so much support from tech giants.
It takes a certain chutzpah to use the most consequential technology of the age—a technology which makes many deeply uneasy—without somehow bringing those problems into the work. But for Anadol, art critical of A.I. is important yet “predictable,” he told me. “I don’t think there’s anything unusual about being there,” he said. “What is unusual to me is being here.”
Anadol refers to his collectors and patrons, like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, as “pioneers.” “Good or bad for humanity, I don’t know, but they are pioneers of their field,” he told me. “And I think that needs to be matched by another breakthrough. It needs another pioneership.” He drew a comparison to the Renaissance, when an artist might be offered a chance to paint a chapel ceiling. “Jump cut, I feel, like, ‘Hey, Refik, here’s a G.P.U. we are building. We believe this will change the world, and we believe that you can use this for good.’ ”
