State of the Art Criticism

Back in May, I hosted an

Interintellect

salon with

Ross Barkan

, in which I interviewed him about “State of the Art Criticism.” You can watch the full 2hr video above, in which we discuss the purpose of art criticism, the challenges it faces, and how it is impacted by artificial intelligence.

Ross is the founder of

The Metropolitan Review

, where I was excited to publish my review of The Brutalist, and he also writes at magazines like

New York Magazine

and for his Substack

Political Currents by Ross Barkan

. His latest novel, Glass Century, just hit the shelves and I look forward to reading it — the plot seems like it might have parallels to Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities: both are New York novels expressing interest in the city’s architecture, with plots driven by adultery.

Architecting a Myth

If you have yet to learn about Interintellect, then you should check out their website to get a sense of the variety of salons:

Interintellect is a leading cultural institution dedicated to the enjoyment of the life of the mind without polarizing politics. A high culture creator platform with a cozy community tier, our online city of minds welcomes the greatest thinkers of our times joining ambitious seekers from around the world to explore timeless ideas. Now also present offline in global hubs.

Currently, I’m signed up to attend nine upcoming salons, to give you a sense of how worthwhile they are to me and how I want to spend my time (of which there is never enough). Besides hosting this interview with Ross, I also just attended a lovely Interintellect book club about Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America that has been one of the highlights of my past 6 months. And I’m excited to invite you to the next salon that I’ll be hosting about “The Purpose of 21st Century Painting.” You can register for the online event here, which is currently slated for mid-September. That date is subject to change — I’m working on a visual essay about the topic we’ll be discussing, so I’ll firm up the date once that’s published — but we wanted to share the salon now to give people more time to explore the reading list (which you will find at that event registration page).

More about the event:

A steady hum of artists and writers have been calling for a New Romanticism, largely in reaction to artificial intelligence. Romanticism is often — though neither inevitably nor entirely — a negative reaction to new technologies. And no wonder: Last year, for example, blogger Scott Alexander challenged 11,000 people to conduct an AI Art Turing Test that asked them to identify which of the 50 pictures were generated by AI versus which were culled from the art historical canon. He concluded that “most people had a hard time identifying AI art" and barely performed better than a coin toss at figuring out whether a human made a given image. Perhaps remarkably, he also found that “most people slightly preferred AI art to human art" and that “even many people who thought they hated AI art preferred it." What, then, is the purpose of 21st century painting?

At this salon, artist and writer Megan Gafford will lead a discussion about artistic anxiety in the age of artificial intelligence, and the role that Romanticism should play in how artists grapple with new technology. As we get closer to the date, this reading list will grow. But for now, pick up a copy of Isaiah Berlin's slim volume The Roots of Romanticism for a comprehensive yet succinct history on the topic. To familiarize yourself with those now yearning for a New Romanticism, please read Ted Gioia's essay "We Really Are Entering a New Age of Romanticism," Ross Barkan's "The Rise of the New Romanticism," and Udith Dematogoda's "Mal du Siècle: The New Romanticism and the Sickness of the Age."

I hope you’ll come talk about this with me in the Fall!