Who knew the late art critic Brian Sewell was such a boring, conventional writer? In particular, some of the dead words in the AI version of the London Standard written by Mr. Sewell, who reviewed Van Gogh at the National Gallery, have been in general circulation since Van Gogh died in 2015 at the age of 84. Especially so.
Give him credit, he had a voice. And he had a classy voice. The chatbot used by the Standard would need more novels by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, perhaps Latin novels, and a bite of plums to resemble the public-school-educated, Courtauld-trained Sewell. It’s clear that you need to take it. His career as a protégé of Anthony Blunt, an upper-class art historian and Soviet spy.
I stopped watching The Crown when Sam West, who plays Blunt, the traitorous surveyor in The Queen’s Paintings, talked about “early modern art.” There was no way this witty connoisseur would use that social historian’s terminology.
The Standard’s latest work is even more nonsense. AI’s neutral, classless tone has none of Sewell’s selfishness or class.
Or maybe he said. Clearly, the day when machines imitate the idiosyncrasies of human writers remains as remote and unlikely as the distant utopia where women paint timeless masterpieces.
One of the reasons the standard work is a failed copy of Sewell is that it’s not aggressive enough.
For the very few people who make a living as professional art critics, this activity is extremely encouraging. It turns out that replacing us with AI is not so easy. There are plenty of free trips and private viewings of blockbusters. Loosen the foie gras.
I first met Sewell during a press trip to Paris. The day started with fans giving him a warm welcome at the station. He kindly said he wanted to meet me, and then added that he thought I was a better-looking person. By the end of the trip, he had managed to come to the opinion that Waugh was a crappy novelist, but he didn’t seem to realize that one of us had a writer’s daughter.
Priceless. Sewell was funny, uncensored, a little silly, human, and all too human. And there is no trace of it in the poor imitation of the standard. Sewell himself revealed his hinterland only late in his life, when he wrote about his sexual adventures as a gay man. But it’s not just the prose that is blank and lethargic. He has no sense of seeing things with living eyes.
Art criticism is the recording of direct observations of art as honestly as possible. Sewell always valued that integrity very highly. This pseudo-Sewell, currently only available in print, is just a compilation of abstract opinions culled from undoubtedly a variety of sources, including old Sewell articles, and it’s clear that someone has actually looked at the art. There is no such feeling. I can write this without seeing the Van Gogh exhibition. Of course, that’s what happened.
After all, it is a shockingly hateful way for the Standard to remember one of the London Evening Standard’s most famous writers. The film satirizes Sewell as a thug who ruined works of art, including this great Van Gogh work, without a second thought. He may have done so, but there is definitely a more consistent reason. He wouldn’t have blatantly misunderstood the curators like his AI version did. Far from celebrating Van Gogh’s romanticism, they have actually taken the controversial line of mythologizing Van Gogh’s tragic life.
Only then can (human) sentences be understood. Sewell didn’t just attack everything with this machine’s mindless malice. He became famous in his 1990s because he was the only British critic to consistently and hilariously criticize a generation of young British artists.
Although he infuriated the art world at the time, it is now thought that YBA is best forgotten by the art world itself. So maybe he has a point? It would have been more relevant to have AI Sewell review this year’s Turner Prize. Perhaps he found in Claudette Johnson a truly great draftsman, and would credit her with reviving this figure, “despite being a woman.” Who knows, but people are never just zeros and ones.
