If Art imi­tates life, can Big Data imi­tate Art?

If we accept Pablo Picasso’s provoca­tive but remark­able state­ment that “good artists copy, but great artists steal…” then Big Data pro­vides us with more oppor­tu­ni­ties “to steal”. The prob­lem is then a mat­ter of choice and deci­sion. How does this align with Harold Bloom’s the­o­ry of inter­tex­tu­al­i­ty and the “anx­i­ety of influence”?

In the lat­est of her Duet series of inter­views, Dr Cal­daro­la, author of Big Data and Law, and Chris­t­ian Mon­jou M. Phil (Oxon.), con­nois­seur of art and bridge builder between art and man­age­ment, con­sid­er what impact the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion will have on art and innovation.

I assume, being an expert in the field of art, you know what Pablo Picas­so has “stolen” and from whom? And if so, could an algo­rithm search­ing through Big Data also iden­ti­fy the stolen parts and con­nect them to the respec­tive creators?

Chris­t­ian Mon­jou: I think we need to be care­ful about using the word “steal­ing” as it has its own mean­ing, in terms of pay­ing homage to the paint­ings Picas­so used. The best-known exam­ple for inspi­ra­tion, copy­ing or serv­ing as a mode is “Las Meni­nas” by Velázquez, the rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of which one can find in the Pablo Picas­so Muse­um in Barcelona. As far as Picas­so was con­cerned, this paint­ing was the great­est paint­ing in his­to­ry. In 1957, between mid-August and the end of Decem­ber, Picas­so pro­duced 58 vari­a­tions of Las Meni­nas. I think Picas­so was inspired by the pres­ence of a woman or women and he had the ten­den­cy to com­bine the pres­ence of a woman whose influ­ence was declin­ing with that of anoth­er woman whose star was rising.

Of course, the Span­ish civ­il war and the mas­sacre at Guer­ni­ca were an enor­mous source of inspi­ra­tion for Picas­so, inspi­ra­tion in the sense of W.H. Auden’s quote “Mad Ire­land hurt you into poet­ry” so that Guer­ni­ca “wound­ed” Picas­so into painting.

Going back to women, with old age, we could say that women as a sub­ject mat­ter did not tend to main­tain a steady pres­ence in the painter’s life and they them­selves hes­i­tat­ed to be paint­ed so Picas­so had to resort to paint­ing works he admired and vari­a­tions there­of, like the “Women from Algiers” by Delacroix and Manet’s “The Lun­cheon on the Grass”.

Picas­so was prob­a­bly obsessed with work­ing. One must exam­ine his works as series involv­ing his admi­ra­tion of one work and he would have exhaust­ed all per­mu­ta­tions of that work until his inspi­ra­tion dried up. It would be inter­est­ing to have some­one who is not too knowl­edge­able about art be shown one of Picasso’s “copies” and see to what extent that per­son would recog­nise the orig­i­nal ele­ments or would they con­sid­er it to be a com­plete­ly gen­uine work because Picas­so was able to move far away from the mod­el and turn it into his own creation?

You asked whether a machine would be able to recog­nise the under­ly­ing sources of inspi­ra­tion? I don’t know if that would be pos­si­ble. I sup­pose you could “feed” a cer­tain num­ber of ref­er­en­tial paint­ings into the machine, say, 250 mas­ter­pieces. I would be tempt­ed to say that had the machine not been fed these works, then it would have some dif­fi­cul­ty recog­nis­ing these sources. That is where mem­o­ry is so impor­tant. It would be inter­est­ing to expand on this point to explore how humans might recog­nise sources dif­fer­ent­ly from machines, i.e., going by atmos­phere pro­duced or feel­ings pro­voked by the work, i.e., on an emo­tion­al lev­el which is some­thing machines can­not repli­cate, or at least not yet.

When Picas­so died, he was liv­ing in a small cas­tle not far from Aix-en-Provence. I read that the num­ber of arts, his­to­ry books, cat­a­logues, post­cards, repro­duc­tions of works of art etc. in his pos­ses­sion was absolute­ly stag­ger­ing. At some lev­el, I think too many ref­er­ences to oth­er sources “kill” the new orig­i­nal work and some of these ref­er­ences may not have been direct­ly seen or may not have direct­ly influ­enced the artist in ques­tion. Yet with­out those works- it doesn’t mat­ter whether they had been expe­ri­enced only fleetingly‑, the artist would not have pro­duced his or her own works. But the work in ques­tion still cap­tures the imag­i­na­tion and trans­forms it into some­thing which doesn’t resem­ble the orig­i­nal source of inspi­ra­tion. So, I have my doubts that an algo­rithm trained and “fed” all forms of art would be able to find the sources of inspiration. 

West­ern coun­tries have – due to the Bern Con­ven­tion – a com­mon legal agree­ment on what an inven­tion or a work is: It always needs to be new. This implies that copy­ing as well as steal­ing from anoth­er inven­tor or author is regard­ed as an infringe­ment that results in dam­age claims. Nev­er­the­less, this under­stand­ing is not true for every coun­try. If we look to Chi­na, for exam­ple, rejec­tion of copies is not as rig­or­ous as in West­ern coun­tries, since an artist or an inven­tor is tra­di­tion­al­ly val­ued more, the bet­ter and more pre­cise­ly s/he copies the work of his or her teacher, cham­pi­on or idol. What expla­na­tion exists for such dif­fer­ences in perception?

It’s inter­est­ing in a way that there should be a con­ven­tion about a work. After all, at some lev­el, all art is a copy of the art that went before it, how­ev­er dis­tant, like the Ford Mod­el T is a pre­de­ces­sor of the cur­rent auto­mo­biles. If peo­ple had been pre­vent­ed from copy­ing the Mod­el T, then we wouldn’t have any cars today or we would still have only Mod­el Ts.

I sup­pose we have to remem­ber that for a long time in Japan­ese and Chi­nese art, it was impor­tant to work with­in a tra­di­tion and yet bring some­thing dis­crete to the work. In my view, Chi­nese art tends to delve deep­er and deep­er into tra­di­tion instead of spread­ing nat­u­ral­ly and chal­leng­ing oth­er tra­di­tions and assert­ing one’s existence.

If we go back to Picas­so and his con­tem­po­raries at the turn of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, there was a cer­tain fas­ci­na­tion with African art and there was a cer­tain ele­ment of copy­ing and also of being inspired by that art, in a way. For a long time until the end of the 18^th cen­tu­ry and again at the end of the 19^th cen­tu­ry, there was a rule of imi­ta­tion of the ancients, such as French play­wrights writ­ing their plays, such as “Phae­dra” by Racine copy­ing, for exam­ple, a play “Hip­poly­tus” of Euripi­des. If the spec­ta­tor was able to per­ceive the ref­er­ence to the past as well as the nov­el ele­ments incor­po­rat­ed, then this was flattering.

But roman­ti­cism broke away from all that, say­ing that inspi­ra­tion based on imi­ta­tion was absurd and orig­i­nal­i­ty was the touch­stone of cre­ativ­i­ty: The cre­do was: “Make it new”. There was also a new way of look­ing at nature.  Moun­tains, for exam­ple, became an object of fas­ci­na­tion, such as described in Turn­er in the Alps by David Hill.

And then at the end of the 19^th cen­tu­ry there was this idea that pho­tog­ra­phy was going to take over from paint­ing. Paint­ing had to then play the card of being avant-garde, mov­ing in ways that had not yet been explored. This led in some way to an exac­er­ba­tion of colours, such as Die Brücke of Dres­den, because pho­tog­ra­phy could not “do colour” at that time. Paint­ing was try­ing to find a niche, to break away into abstrac­tion. The thought was if pho­tog­ra­phy had a monop­oly on rep­re­sent­ing how things real­ly looked then paint­ing could dis­pense with that.

In Chi­na, of course, and, I sup­pose, to a cer­tain extent in Japan as well, there was this idea of delv­ing deep­er into the same tra­di­tion and mak­ing it nec­es­sary for the ama­teurs to be in a posi­tion to see where tra­di­tion end­ed and orig­i­nal­i­ty began. There was sure­ly an ele­ment of pride in being able to detect what was part of the influ­ence and what was new.  Of course, you could not just repeat, there had to be suf­fi­cient­ly sub­tle and new ele­ments to tease the spec­ta­tor but still be visible.

I assume Pablo Picas­so and T.S. Eliot meant to copy their col­leagues. Would you also regard copy­ing nature as a bor­rowed or stolen copy? Let us take the exam­ple of Antoni Gau­di who observed and analysed the nature of ani­mals, plants and human beings for his archi­tec­ture to improve sta­t­ics, light, etc. Today, there is a trend towards bio­mimicry where prod­uct man­u­fac­tur­ers study nature in order to come up with envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly prod­ucts. Do cre­ative tech­niques depend on inno­va­tion to achieve their goals and trends- such as in the case of bio­mimicry with a view towards being aware of the scarci­ty of resources?

In a way, I sup­pose art has always been a ten­sion between observ­ing and mim­ic­k­ing real­i­ty or nature and abstrac­tion, turn­ing away from real­i­ty, a pen­du­lum between the two. If art moves too far away from real­i­ty, it prob­a­bly dies but if it doesn’t move far enough away, then it also dies in a way, thus, a ten­sion between the two must exist.

Where­as in N.Y. in the 1940s, there was total abstrac­tion in the form of the abstract expres­sion­ism move­ment, such as with Jack­son Pol­lock and oth­ers; of course, the object, the body, face, dis­ap­peared from paint­ing. Some peo­ple even dragged pho­tog­ra­phy into abstract expres­sion­ism. It’s prob­a­bly no sur­prise that some­one like Andy Warhol, and Pop Art in gen­er­al, was a kind of deter­mined, strate­gic reac­tion to that trend. The way Warhol brought back objects and through objects a con­sumerist soci­ety rep­re­sent that sort of trend. Pop Art could then be seen as rivalling photography.

If we go back to drama­ti­sa­tion of the ges­ture, as a way to see­ing if an artist reveals his sources of inspi­ra­tion, then we observe some­thing par­tic­u­lar with Warhol: Just as with Ver­meer, with Warhol you nev­er see the painter’s hand, noth­ing of the painter, there is no trace of the ges­ture, of the work of the painter on the can­vas, to hide art. If we con­sid­er Rembrandt’s final years, such as, “The Jew­ish Bride”, you realise what is going on: a young man and woman get­ting mar­ried, but if you move clos­er to the paint­ing, you become fas­ci­nat­ed by the way the thick­ness of the paint reveals the con­stant move­ment of the brush, the ges­ture has been sus­pend­ed but not erased- where­as you nev­er get that with Ver­meer. There is no trace of the ges­ture, the work of the painter on the can­vas: “ars artem telare”, the pur­pose of art is to hide art unlike “ars artem demon­strare” means you are per­fect­ly enti­tled to make peo­ple see that the paint­ing has a sub­ject and also to see how it has been made.

There is a con­stant bal­anc­ing of the pen­du­lum, keep­ing in mind that paint­ing has to do with the way we look at life and, there­fore, the organ­ic ele­ment has to be present some­where and recog­nised, appre­ci­at­ed and enjoyed, and also, at oth­er moments, that paint­ing is more a ques­tion of abstract archi­tec­ture which under­lies our whole exis­tence. Piero del­la Francesca is a good exam­ple of the lat­ter view in that he was con­vinced that God was more revealed in per­spec­tive because for Piero the world was organ­ised around fig­ures, math­e­mat­i­cal­ly: the math­e­mat­i­cal design­ing of the world by God. Con­verse­ly, before Piero, the gold­en back­ground of paint­ings was always meant to attract your atten­tion and tell you that, how­ev­er real­is­ti­cal­ly the fore­ground of the paint­ing was done, the back­ground led you to realise that what you were shown was no mere anec­dote or sus­pend­ed moment in time but the mean­ing of time and space were revealed in the scene you were look­ing at and the gold­en back­ground was prob­a­bly more a ques­tion of sen­si­tiv­i­ty, an intel­lec­tion seduction.

Visu­al artists, musi­cians and writ­ers can now receive detailed feed­back from Big Data analy­sis on what makes their work more or less appeal­ing to prospec­tive buy­ers.  For exam­ple, musi­cians stream­ing their works on Spo­ti­fy may receive feed­back on what sells best, or input con­cern­ing the length of the intro­duc­tion, instru­ments, vocals, etc.  If new art­work is pro­duced in response to these demands, will Big Data become the new patron of the arts, tak­ing over from the patrons of the past who fos­tered and sup­port­ed the old masters?

There is a quo­ta­tion by the Amer­i­can poet, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, which explains, in a way, the moti­va­tion behind her poet­ry: “This is my mes­sage to the world, even though the world nev­er sent me any messages…”

There is, I think, an enor­mous dan­ger for the artist who is depen­dent on the tastes of his cus­tomers, as it were. Because cus­tomers tend to want to be reas­sured, mean­ing they love the rep­e­ti­tion of what they like. Most peo­ple have for­got­ten that when Claude Mon­et pro­duced the first major work of impres­sion­ism which is called “soleil lev­ant” dat­ed 1872, estab­lished art crit­ics were absolute­ly appalled at what they saw. One of the most famous art crit­ics of the time said that any kind of wall­pa­per was bet­ter paint­ed than Monet’s impres­sion of soleil lev­ant and, of course, 30 years lat­er every­one tried to paint like Claude Mon­et. That is, at the same time, inevitable, per­fect­ly accept­able, and yet, extreme­ly dan­ger­ous because of the dan­ger of pro­duc­ing an end­less rep­e­ti­tion of what is thought to sat­is­fy the respec­tive customers.

Picas­so is again a very remark­able exam­ple because as soon as he had reached the cli­max of a peri­od, like the Blue Peri­od, Cubism, the two forms of Cubism, he turned to mon­u­men­tal­i­ty and sculp­ture and vol­ume, sur­face and lines etc. I mean of course you can say all kinds of bad things about Picas­so, but you have to recog­nise that he took a risk every time he broke down his own achieve­ments, so to speak. As soon as a cer­tain num­ber of peo­ple in the pub­lic had realised what it was Picas­so was aim­ing at, then gen­er­al­ly he broke that down, tak­ing the risk, which indeed hap­pened to him sev­er­al times in his career, of being mis­un­der­stood and for a few months or even years being aban­doned by his public.

The great dan­ger is that nar­cis­sis­tic ele­ment in pub­lic appre­ci­a­tion of art:  We like what we know, what we have been taught to appre­ci­ate, we like things where we can recog­nise our­selves in it. A great artist, I think, is one who is able to make the pub­lic accept being shak­en into a new appre­ci­a­tion for some­thing dif­fer­ent. It is called, I sup­posed, marketing.

If peo­ple are not seduced by some ele­ment of nov­el­ty, they will not buy. But, iron­i­cal­ly enough, if they do not recog­nise a cer­tain tra­di­tion­al ele­ment of exper­tise and com­pe­tence, they will not buy either. Some artists start­ed repeat­ing them­selves at some point in their career. Per­haps that is why peo­ple say those who are loved by the gods, die young. Once they have wrought some­thing entire­ly new, then the next step is either to repeat or break that very new thing which one has pro­duced. Let’s take three very impor­tant painters in West­ern paint­ing: Tit­ian, Rem­brandt, and Picas­so. There is a cer­tain ele­ment of com­mon func­tion­ing between the three which is the abil­i­ty, once they brought a cer­tain por­tion of their career to its cli­max, its per­fec­tion, to turn away from that- at the risk of pro­duc­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent and new and thus los­ing the atten­tion, the benev­o­lence of the pub­lic and, there­fore, of prospec­tive clients. It’s all a ques­tion of clients.

NFTs are cre­at­ing a new mar­ket­place for art. Ear­li­er in 2021, an NFT for a dig­i­tal col­lage by the artist Beeple sold for $69.3m, the third most expen­sive work of art by a liv­ing artist. Will NFT tech­nol­o­gy (asset tokeni­sa­tion on blockchain) help dig­i­tal art become the art of choice for high-tech elites of the 21^st century?

The man who bought that dig­i­tal col­lage, if mem­o­ry serves, is an Indi­an mil­lion­aire based in Sin­ga­pore. When he bought the work by Beeple, he was in some way paving the way for Asian and Indo-Pacif­ic prospec­tive cus­tomers to cre­ate a new mar­ket for them­selves which they would dom­i­nate in a way which had not hap­pened for tra­di­tion­al, Euro­cen­tric works of art.

It’s inter­est­ing because it’s not just a new tech­nique which also seems to her­ald the arrival of a new taste, but rather new cus­tomers com­ing from oth­er parts of the world, dif­fer­ent from the ones that have been tra­di­tion­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the art mar­ket. At the same time, of course, there is some­thing extreme­ly phys­i­cal in art. Per­haps one of the best exam­ples is Jack­son Pol­lock: the way Pol­lock put the can­vas on the floor, then dripped and even dripped vio­lent­ly, wav­ing, agi­tat­ing, danc­ing, mov­ing etc. Con­verse­ly, per­haps Ver­meer inter­ests us because we can­not find any trace of the phys­i­cal pres­ence of the painter, only the “eye” in a way. Ver­meer is an extreme case which fas­ci­nates us because we all know that with­out the phys­i­cal pres­ence and com­mit­ment of the painter to the paint­ing there would be no work of art. And we know of course that the dif­fer­ence in ges­tures is essen­tial for reveal­ing the per­son­al­i­ty of the artist and it’s essen­tial in the con­sti­tu­tion of artis­tic indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and orig­i­nal­i­ty. At the same time, medi­a­tion wrought by the machine is for me a major ques­tion. Art is extreme­ly phys­i­cal but also extreme­ly intel­lec­tu­al. One of the most intel­lec­tu­al painters of all time, Paul Cézanne, was, in gen­er­al, extreme­ly present ‑spend­ing hour after hour in front of his can­vas­es and in nature before he was paint­ing and he went to church every morn­ing as well.

Your ques­tion under­lines the speci­fici­ty of the indi­vid­ual com­mit­ment to the ges­ture in artis­tic creation.

Speak­ing of bor­row­ing and steal­ing, a new nat­ur­al lan­guage AI GPT‑3, now avail­able to sub­scribers of Microsoft cloud, can write bril­liant and almost indis­tin­guish­able sto­ries in the style and voice of any writer sug­gest­ed. The sto­ries have their own mer­it.  As this AI tech­nol­o­gy becomes more refined, will these works cre­at­ed by an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence still be recog­nised as orig­i­nal works of art?  Will we all become writ­ers by learn­ing to use this technology?

I must admit I find that a lit­tle bit prob­lem­at­ic. You know of course that Mar­cel Proust wrote at night. Prob­a­bly writ­ing is itself not the prob­lem, but rather the expe­ri­ence of writ­ing is the prob­lem and feel­ing that what you have expe­ri­enced needs to be expressed. Some peo­ple express it in all sorts of dif­fer­ent ways, paint­ing, writ­ing etc. I love the quo­ta­tion by Fran­cis Bacon, who said: “If you can talk about it, why paint it?” There is an urgency about artis­tic cre­ation. If artis­tic cre­ation is sim­ply repro­duc­ing tech­nique, then it is not artis­tic cre­ation.

Jean Genet, the French writer, was obsessed with Alber­to Giacometti’s cre­ative process and he wrote a book which is called “The stu­dio of Gia­comet­ti” because he used to vis­it Gia­comet­ti in his stu­dio and watch him cre­at­ing. He has this mar­vel­lous state­ment at one point where he says: “Beau­ty has no oth­er ori­gin than a wound, unique, dif­fer­ent for each per­son, hid­den or vis­i­ble, that every­one keeps in him­self, that he pre­serves and to which he with­draws when he wants to leave the world for a tem­po­rary but pro­found soli­tude.” If the work is not recog­nised as com­ing from a wound, but, at the same time, is sim­ply mak­ing an effort to con­vey the wound, then one require­ment has not been met- you can’t have one with­out the oth­er. Each alone is essen­tial­ly unin­ter­est­ing. There is a dou­ble require­ment. What­ev­er focuss­es on the per­fec­tion of the con­vey­ing with­out being inter­est­ed in the wound is a waste of time.

I am remind­ed of a rather nice quo­ta­tion by Charles Ren­nie Mack­in­tosh, the great inte­ri­or dec­o­ra­tor and archi­tect from Glas­gow at the end of the 19^th cen­tu­ry: “There is hope in hon­est error. None in the icy per­fec­tions of the mere styl­ist”. I am afraid that a machine might pro­duce the icy per­fec­tions of the mere styl­ist, if you know what I mean, but noth­ing of the hon­est error.

The Mona Lisa is bril­liant and still holds secrets. Will the dig­i­tal age come up with even bet­ter art?

Of course, there have been count­less works ded­i­cat­ed to the Mona Lisa so we can­not hope to solve her mys­tery in a short answer. How­ev­er, what has saved Mona Lisa is pre­cise­ly her mys­tery, enig­ma, and, if we think art reduces or elim­i­nates the mys­tery instead of cre­at­ing it, then I don’t think that is art. Tech­nique is prob­a­bly sci­ence, but not art. In my view, we have to be very care­ful about this search for solu­tions, answers.

My opin­ion is:

“Art is more con­cerned with ques­tions and enig­mas than with solu­tions, answers, and recipes.
I think there is a great dan­ger in recipes. Art means jump­ing beyond the recipe”

Chris­t­ian Mon­jou M. Phil (Oxon.)

Mr Mon­jou, what a won­der­ful clos­ing state­ment. Thank you for shar­ing your insight­ful reflec­tions on the impact the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion will have on art and innovation.

Thank you, Dr Cal­daro­la, and I look for­ward to read­ing your upcom­ing inter­views with recog­nised experts, delv­ing even deep­er into this fas­ci­nat­ing topic.