Curated by AI: now even the art has to impress the machines

Artificial intelligence continues to make inroads into our daily lives, be it on a personal or professional level. And now, AI is also making its way into cultural venues.

For the first time, the Chateau de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art has entrusted the curatorship of an entire exhibition to an AI – an original initiative that’s not entirely unprecedented.

For its new exhibition, the museum in France’s Loire Valley has opted for an unusual curator: ChatGPT.

OpenAI’s chatbot was tasked with designing a show called Art & Language: Interview With An Obedient Humorist, running through July 1. From concept development to text writing and thematic structuring, artificial intelligence is responsible for the entire project – a first on this scale in the museum world.

The exhibition tackles a particularly complex field: that of humour, irony and institutional criticism.

It features major works from the Philippe Méaille Collection, a committed collector and patron whose close ties with the Art & Language collective enabled a particularly representative selection.

In choosing to highlight this Anglo-American collective, active since the late 1960s, the museum has adopted a radical, reflective approach.

From the outset, this emblematic group has questioned the very mechanisms of contemporary art through textual works, publications and performances that challenge the boundaries between creation and discourse.

The exhibition is divided into four sections. The first explores an intellectual, academic humour that turns critical language against itself. The next section questions the notion of authorship and the multiple voices that traverse an artwork.

A further section targets the museum as an object of criticism, and the final section explores the instability of meaning and the freedom of language. The exhibition invites visitors to become actors in their own reading of the artworks, in the face of deliberately ambiguous creations.

Towards a more hybrid approach?

This curatorial experiment raises a central question: can we really entrust a machine with the interpretation of culture?

By giving AI the task of staging an art show based on the critique of codes and institutions, the Chateau de Montsoreau is overturning conventions. Indeed, the exhibition proposes a new, hybrid curatorial model, in which artificial intelligence becomes a partner in the thought process.

But the French museum’s initiative doesn’t come out of nowhere.

In fall 2023, the Nasher Museum of Art in the United States had already experimented with an exhibition conceived with ChatGPT.

Entitled Act As If You Are a Curator, this initiative was the result of a joke between curators faced with staff shortages. The game soon turned into a serious project. ChatGPT proposed a theme, selected the works, defined their spatial arrangement and wrote several texts.

The result? An exhibition judged “eclectic” by Marshall Price, chief curator at the Nasher Museum of Art, who told the New York Times that the show was relatively disjointed on a visual level, even if it was “thematically cohesive.”

This first experiment highlighted the potential of AI in the artistic field, but also its limits.

Other recent initiatives confirm that the use of artificial intelligence in artistic curation is gaining momentum on an international scale.

In 2022, the Bucharest Biennial in Romania was organised by Jarvis, a programme developed by the Viennese studio Spinnwerk.

It selected a dozen artists by assigning them “score values” based on their popularity and their relevance to the central theme of popular culture. The works were exhibited physically in Bucharest, but were also accessible in virtual reality.

A year earlier, New York’s Whitney Museum and the Liverpool Biennial launched a satirical project entitled The Next Biennial Should Be Curated By A Machine, using a tool developed by OpenAI to generate fake artist biographies and absurd curatorial texts as a way of mocking the often impenetrable discourses of the art world.

Between provocation, experimentation and innovation, these projects reveal the growing interest in the narrative and critical capacities of AI. They also raise a crucial question: can art remain an exclusively human domain? – AFP