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?
This question is the focus of my upcoming
salon, which will take place online at 6pm EDT on September 20. I’ll lead the conversation about artistic anxiety in the age of AI, but this isn’t a lecture — everyone who participates gets to share their point of view. You can register for the event here:My visual essay on this topic for
will drop on September 12, and then I’ll cross-post it here for Fashionably Late Takes subscribers on the 16th, ahead of the salon. In it, I’ll give an overview of who the “New Romantics” are and what they believe, some context about Romantic art, and my perspective on what Romanticism should mean for us today in our irredeemably technological age.Hope to see you at the salon!