The Life & Art of Gustav Klimt: A Short Art History Lesson on the Austrian Symbolist Painter and His Work

in Art, Technology, Video - Arts & Culture | February 17th, 2023

The Aus­tri­an sym­bol­ist painter, Gus­tav Klimt, a dri­ving force of the Vien­na Seces­sion, has joined the ranks of famous, dead artists being served up as pricey, super-sized, Insta­gram-friend­ly immer­sive expe­ri­ences.

Jane Kallir, author of Gus­tav Klimt: 25 Mas­ter­works and co-founder of the Kallir Research Insti­tute, a foun­da­tion ded­i­cat­ed to fur­ther­ing the study of Aus­tri­an and Ger­man Mod­ernists, is not buy­ing into this approach.

Hav­ing vis­it­ed the Gold in Motion immer­sive Klimt exhib­it at New York City’s recent­ly inau­gu­rat­ed Hall des Lumières with Art­net’s Ben Davis, she def­i­nite­ly has some notes:

They take lib­er­ties with the orig­i­nals. If you know the orig­i­nals well, which I do, it’s some­times hard to fig­ure out what they were work­ing from. The col­or is some­times way off. And some of the images are not by Klimt at all. They seem like pas­tich­es of Klimt or pieces of Klimts that they’ve past­ed togeth­er in dif­fer­ent ways…these images are blown up to a height of, what, 20 feet? It real­ly doesn’t work, aes­thet­i­cal­ly. Klimt’s draw­ings are espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult because they’re so del­i­cate, at times almost invis­i­ble.

But mustn’t some young vis­i­tors, after post­ing the pletho­ra of self­ies that moti­vate many a pil­grim­age to this “mul­ti-sen­so­ry cel­e­bra­tion,” be moved to learn more about the artist it’s cash­ing in on?

That’d be a good thing, right?

Of course it would, and Paul Priest­ley pro­vides a great intro­duc­tion to Klimt’s life and work in the above episode of his Art His­to­ry School web series.

We grant that spend­ing 13 min­utes with a mid­dle-aged arts edu­ca­tor in a fes­tive vest is a less sexy-see­ing prospect than “step(ping) into a won­der­land of mov­ing paint­ings” to be “amazed by the gold­en era of mod­ernism.”

But Priest­ley offers some­thing you can’t real­ly focus on while gawk­ing at enor­mous 360º pro­jec­tions of The Kiss dur­ing a $35 timed entry  — his­tor­i­cal con­text and a gen­er­ous por­tion of art world dish on a “life­long bach­e­lor who had count­less liaisons dur­ing his life­time, usu­al­ly with his mod­els, and is rumored to have fathered more than a dozen chil­dren.”

Priest­ley makes clear how the young Klimt’s career took a fate­ful turn with Phi­los­o­phy (below), part of a mas­sive com­mis­sion for the ceil­ing of Vien­na University’s Great Hall, that was ulti­mate­ly destroyed by the Nazis, but has since been res­ur­rect­ed after a fash­ion using AI, black and white pho­tos, and eye­wit­ness descrip­tions.


When Klimt’s first go at it was dis­played, it was sav­aged by crit­ics as “chaot­ic, non­sen­si­cal and out of keep­ing with the intend­ed set­ting.”

Philosophy’s drub­bing put an end to Klimt’s offi­cial com­mis­sions, but pri­vate ones flour­ished due to the bohemi­an painter’s “beau­ti­ful women in ele­gant­ly lan­guid and flat­ter­ing pos­es.”

Imag­ine how those sta­tus con­scious soci­ety matrons would have react­ed to see­ing their like­ness­es tapped as immer­sive art, which Vice’s Alex Flem­ing-Brown pegs as “the lat­est lazy lovechild of Tik­Tok and enter­pris­ing ware­house land­lords.”

Sure­ly they would have rel­ished the atten­tion!

Well, every­one, that is, except Mar­garet Ston­bor­ough-Wittgen­stein, sis­ter of Lud­wig, who chafed at her appear­ance in Klimt’s 1905 bridal por­trait as  “too inno­cent, timid and girl­ish…” and stuck the pic­ture in the attic.

C’mon, they can’t all be The Kiss.

It’s an aston­ish­ing paint­ing, but there’s so much more to dis­cov­er about Klimt and his four decades worth of work.

But first, with apolo­gies to any read­ers who gen­uine­ly enjoy immer­sive art exhibits — many do — here are Jane Kallir’s not entire­ly con­cil­ia­to­ry thoughts on Beethoven Frieze, Klimt’s volup­tuous vision of lust, love and dis­ease, which was delib­er­ate­ly enhanced by accom­pa­ny­ing sculp­ture and live music when it made its pub­lic debut in 1902, and is cur­rent­ly being parceled out and writ large in dig­i­tal form in the build­ing for­mer­ly known as New York’s Emi­grant Indus­tri­al Sav­ings Bank:

I asked myself whether Klimt would have approved of the Beethoven Frieze pro­jec­tions. I believe most artists embrace cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy, what­ev­er it may be in their day and age. The Beethoven Frieze seg­ment is a Gesamtkunst­werk on a scale that Klimt might have dreamed of—might have. This is the one part of the pre­sen­ta­tion that could be faith­ful to his inten­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

136 Paint­ings by Gus­tav Klimt Now Online (Includ­ing 63 Paint­ings in an Immer­sive Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty Gallery)

Vienna’s Alberti­na Muse­um Puts 150,000 Dig­i­tized Art­works Into the Pub­lic Domain: Klimt, Munch, Dür­er, and More

Gus­tav Klimt’s Mas­ter­pieces Destroyed Dur­ing World War II Get Recre­at­ed with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: It’s “Basically High-Tech Plagiarism” and “a Way of Avoiding Learning”

in Education, Technology | February 10th, 2023

Chat­G­PT, the sys­tem that under­stands nat­ur­al lan­guage and responds in kind, has caused a sen­sa­tion since its launch less than three months ago. If you’ve tried it out, you’ll sure­ly have won­dered what it will soon rev­o­lu­tion­ize — or, as the case may be, what it will destroy. Among Chat­G­P­T’s first vic­tims, holds one now-com­mon view, will be a form of writ­ing that gen­er­a­tions have grown up prac­tic­ing through­out their edu­ca­tion. “The essay, in par­tic­u­lar the under­grad­u­ate essay, has been the cen­ter of human­is­tic ped­a­gogy for gen­er­a­tions,” writes Stephen Marche in The Atlantic. “It is the way we teach chil­dren how to research, think, and write. That entire tra­di­tion is about to be dis­rupt­ed from the ground up.”

If Chat­G­PT becomes able instan­ta­neous­ly to whip up a plau­si­ble-sound­ing aca­d­e­m­ic essay on any giv­en top­ic, what future could there be for the aca­d­e­m­ic essay itself? The host of YouTube chan­nel EduK­itchen puts more or less that very ques­tion to Noam Chom­sky — a thinker who can be relied upon for views on edu­ca­tion — in the new inter­view above. “For years there have been pro­grams that have helped pro­fes­sors detect pla­gia­rized essays,” Chom­sky says. “Now it’s going to be more dif­fi­cult, because it’s eas­i­er to pla­gia­rize. But that’s about the only con­tri­bu­tion to edu­ca­tion that I can think of.” He does admit that Chat­G­PT-style sys­tems “may have some val­ue for some­thing,” but “it’s not obvi­ous what.”

As the rel­e­vant tech­nol­o­gy now stands, Chom­sky sees the use of Chat­G­PT as “basi­cal­ly high-tech pla­gia­rism” and “a way of avoid­ing learn­ing.” He likens its rise to that of the smart­phone: many stu­dents “sit there hav­ing a chat with some­body on their iPhone. One way to deal with that is to ban iPhones; anoth­er way to do it is to make the class inter­est­ing.” That stu­dents instinc­tive­ly employ high tech­nol­o­gy to avoid learn­ing is “a sign that the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem is fail­ing.” If it “has no appeal to stu­dents, does­n’t inter­est them, does­n’t chal­lenge them, does­n’t make them want to learn, they’ll find ways out,” just as he him­self did when he bor­rowed a friend’s notes to pass a dull col­lege chem­istry class with­out attend­ing it back in 1945.

After spend­ing most of his career teach­ing at MIT, Chom­sky retired in 2002 to become a full-time pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton’s Robert Zaret­sky, who still teach­es, recent­ly offered his own, grim­mer take on Chat­G­PT and edu­ca­tion. “The col­lege essay died years ago,” he argues. “It’s a mug’s game in which a stu­dent sends me an elec­tron­ic file that, when open, spills out a jum­ble of words that the sender pro­pounds to be a fin­ished paper” — to which, pre­sum­ably, the out­put of a machine-learn­ing sys­tem would actu­al­ly be far prefer­able. Most tech­no­log­i­cal “dis­rup­tions” leave both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive effects in their wake. If the col­lege essay is indeed unsal­vage­able, per­haps Chat­G­PT will final­ly bring about its replace­ment with some­thing more inter­est­ing.

Update: Chom­sky has co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times called “The False Promise of Chat­G­PT”. Find it here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Explains Where Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Went Wrong

Chat­G­PT Writes a Song in the Style of Nick Cave–and Nick Cave Calls it “a Grotesque Mock­ery of What It Is to Be Human”

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Thanks to Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, You Can Now Chat with His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures: Shake­speare, Ein­stein, Austen, Socrates & More

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Vinyl Records Are Made

in Music, Technology | February 10th, 2023

The vinyl record–we’ve shown you how they were made way back in 1937, and also in 1956. But how about nowa­days, dur­ing the renais­sance of vinyl? Above, Wired vis­its Jack White’s Third Man Records vinyl press­ing plant in Detroit, Michi­gan to “find out exact­ly what goes into the cre­ation of a vinyl record; from cut­ting and press­ing to mak­ing sure they sound great.” If you’re in the Detroit area, you can take a tour of Third Man Records’ press­ing plant. Get more info here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

How Old School Records Were Made, From Start to Fin­ish: A 1937 Video Fea­tur­ing Duke Elling­ton

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Why We All Need Subtitles Now

in Film, Technology, Television | January 31st, 2023

We live in an age of sub­ti­tles. On some lev­el this is a vin­di­ca­tion of the cinephiles who spent so much of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry com­plain­ing about shod­dy dub­bing of for­eign films and pub­lic unwill­ing­ness to “read movies.” Today we think noth­ing of read­ing not just movies but tele­vi­sion shows as well, even those per­formed in our native lan­guage. For an increas­ing pro­por­tion of at-home view­ers — includ­ing on-com­put­er, on-tablet, and on-phone view­ers — sub­ti­tles have come to feel like a neces­si­ty, even in the absence of any hear­ing dif­fi­cul­ties. Vox’s Edward Vega inves­ti­gates why this has hap­pened in the video above.

The chief irony of the sto­ry is that the intel­li­gi­bil­i­ty of film and tele­vi­sion dia­logue seems to have degrad­ed as a result of sound record­ing and edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy hav­ing improved. Back in the ear­ly days of sound film, actors had prac­ti­cal­ly to shout into bulky micro­phones con­cealed on-set or placed just off it. Today, a pro­duc­tion can keep a cou­ple of boom mics sus­pend­ed over­head at all times, but also rig each actor up with a few hid­den lava­liers. The upshot is that dia­logue almost always gets record­ed accept­ably, but it removes the pres­sure on per­form­ers to deliv­er their lines with the clar­i­ty they would, say, on stage.

For bet­ter or for worse, this has encour­aged a ten­den­cy toward unprece­dent­ed­ly nat­u­ral­is­tic dia­logue, man­i­fest though it often does as slur­ring and mum­bling. At the same time, says dia­logue edi­tor Austin Olivia Kendrick, film­mak­ers have come to believe that “if you want your movie to feel ‘cin­e­mat­ic,’ you have to have wall-to-wall bom­bas­tic, loud sound.” Yet a sound­track can be cranked up only so high, an explo­sion of the same loud­ness as a human voice won’t sound like an explo­sion at all: “you need that con­trast in vol­ume in order to give your ear a sense of scale.”

This need to pre­serve the sound mix’s “dynam­ic range” — just the oppo­site of the “loud­ness wars” in pop­u­lar music — thus keeps dia­logue on the qui­et side. You can still hear it clear as day in a the­ater equipped with up-to-date sur­round-sound facil­i­ties, but much less so when it’s com­ing out of the tiny speak­ers crammed into the back of a flat-pan­el tele­vi­sion, let alone the bot­tom of a cell­phone. Turn­ing the sub­ti­tles on and leav­ing them on has emerged as a com­mon solu­tion to this thor­ough­ly mod­ern prob­lem. Anoth­er would be to invest in a prop­er high-end ampli­fi­er and speak­er set­up, which, if wide­ly adopt­ed, would cer­tain­ly come as a vin­di­ca­tion for all the frus­trat­ed audio­philes out there.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Do Peo­ple Talk Fun­ny in Old Movies?, or The Ori­gin of the Mid-Atlantic Accent

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

David Lynch on iPhone

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Bell Telephone Launched a Mobile Phone During the 1940s: Watch Bell’s Film Showing How It Worked

in Film, History, Technology | January 24th, 2023

“Here comes a trail­er truck out on the open high­way, miles from the near­est town,” says the nar­ra­tor of the short film above. Sud­den­ly, it becomes “impor­tant for some­one to get in touch with the dri­vers of this out­fit. How can it be done?” Any mod­ern-day view­er would respond to this ques­tion in the same way: you just call the guys. But Mobile Tele­phones dates from the nine­teen-for­ties, well before the epony­mous devices were in wide use — about four decades, in fact, before even the mas­sive Motoro­la DynaT­AC 8000X came on the mar­ket. The idea of call­ing some­one not at home or the office, let alone a truck­er on the road, would have seemed the stuff of sci­ence fic­tion.

Yet the engi­neers at Bell had made it pos­si­ble, using a sys­tem that trans­mits con­ver­sa­tions “part­way by radio, part­way by tele­phone lines.” This neces­si­tat­ed “a num­ber of trans­mit­ting and receiv­ing sta­tions con­nect­ed to tele­phone lines,” installed “at inter­vals along the high­way so that one will always be in range of the mov­ing vehi­cle.”

As dra­ma­tized in Mobile Tele­phones, the process of actu­al­ly ring­ing up the dri­ver of a vehi­cle involves call­ing a clas­sic for­ties switch­board oper­a­tor and ask­ing her to make the con­nec­tion. But oth­er­wise, the process won’t feel entire­ly unfa­mil­iar to the mobile phone users today — that is, to the major­i­ty of the peo­ple in the world.

Cell­phones have become such an inte­gral part of life in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry that few of us real­ly feel the need to under­stand just how they work. But three quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry ago, the idea of tak­ing or mak­ing calls on the go was unfa­mil­iar enough that view­ers of a film like this would have want­ed the mechan­ics laid out in some detail. Sure­ly that held espe­cial­ly true for the indus­tri­al clients of Bel­l’s ear­ly mobile-tele­phone sys­tem, for whom its reli­able func­tion­al­i­ty would trans­late into greater prof­its. Tak­ing the longer view, this tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment marks, as the nar­ra­tor reminds us over swelling music, “one more step toward tele­phone ser­vice for any­one, any time, any­where”: a once-futur­is­tic vision that now sounds prac­ti­cal­ly mun­dane.

Relat­ed con­tent:

“When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones”: A 1920s Com­ic Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts Our Cell­phone-Dom­i­nat­ed Lives

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vin­tage Film

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

In 1953, a Tele­phone-Com­pa­ny Exec­u­tive Pre­dicts the Rise of Mod­ern Smart­phones and Video Calls

The First Cell­phone: Dis­cov­er Motorola’s DynaT­AC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Robots Are Carving Replicas of the Parthenon Marbles: Could They Help the Real Ancient Sculptures Return to Greece?

in Computer Science, Design, History, Museums, Technology | January 24th, 2023

Art forgery is a stur­dy trope of film and fic­tion. We’re all famil­iar with the spec­ta­cle of a rar­i­fied expert exam­in­ing a work, while a wealthy col­lec­tor anx­ious­ly wrings their hands near­by.

As Mag­gie Cao observes in the Guardian:

Forg­eries expose some of the art world’s most psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly com­plex fig­ures: the col­lec­tor and the coun­ter­feit­er. What com­pels the pro­to­typ­i­cal col­lec­tor to accu­mu­late objects of beau­ty is usu­al­ly a pecu­liar devo­tion to the pow­er of sin­gu­lar­i­ty. The col­lec­tor wor­ships art’s pow­er to move us, a pow­er we imag­ine emanates from unique objects. Mean­while, what moti­vates the coun­ter­feit­er is an undue con­fi­dence in the pos­si­bil­i­ties of repli­ca­tion. To deceive a view­er with a copy is to affirm that copy’s inter­change­abil­i­ty with the orig­i­nal.

But what if art forgery can be used for good?

That’s the hope of Roger Michel, founder of the Insti­tute for Dig­i­tal Archae­ol­o­gy, who employs tech­no­log­i­cal advances to pre­serve cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant objects and offer acces­si­ble tac­tile expe­ri­ences to those with vision impair­ment.

Short­ly after ISIS destroyed the Mon­u­men­tal Arch of Palymyra, he har­nessed 3D tech­nol­o­gy to recre­ate the 1800-year old land­mark in two-thirds scale Egypt­ian mar­ble.

The pub­lic was able to get up close and per­son­al with the mod­el in var­i­ous loca­tions around the world, includ­ing New York’s City Hall Park, Florence’s Piaz­za del­la Sig­no­ria, and London’s Trafal­gar Square, where Michel enjoyed watch­ing passers­by touch­ing and pho­tograph­ing the repli­ca Arch:

There are guys in Carn­a­by Street suits mixed with young peo­ple in hip-hop clothes and Syr­i­ans in tra­di­tion­al dress. It’s the cross­roads of human­i­ty, and that was what Palym­ra was.

Michel is also striv­ing to con­vince the British Muse­um that all will not be lost, should it choose to repa­tri­ate the 2,500-year-old Parthenon Mar­bles to Greece, much as the Smith­son­ian returned 29 Benin bronzes tak­en dur­ing an 1897 British raid to the Nation­al Com­mis­sion for Muse­ums and Mon­u­ments in Nige­ria.

Michel made his case with a robot­i­cal­ly carved fac­sim­i­le of the head of the Horse of Selene, above, which is all the more remark­able when one learns that he was work­ing from pho­tos tak­en on an iPhone and iPad while vis­it­ing the gallery in which it is dis­played, after the muse­um refused his request for an offi­cial scan.

The item descrip­tion on the museum’s collection’s por­tal notes that the Horse of Selene was pur­chased from Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, who took pos­ses­sion of it while serv­ing as Britain’s ambas­sador to Ottoman Turkey from 1799–1803.

(The descrip­tion neglects to men­tion that rather than allow him to adorn his home with this and oth­er ill-got­ten antiq­ui­ties, a par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tee ordered Lord Elgin to sell his vast col­lec­tion to the British gov­ern­ment for £35,000, which is how they wound up in the muse­um.)

Orig­i­nal­ly a part of the Parthenon’s east ped­i­ment, the Horse of Selene is such a fan favorite that the muse­um shop sells an “exquis­ite” hand-cast resin repli­ca for £1,650, promis­ing that it will make “a show-stop­ping point of focus in any home.”

Perhaps…though we’re will­ing to bet it can’t match the verisimil­i­tude of the tiny chips and chis­el marks painstak­ing­ly cap­tured by the robot carv­er, which took about about 8 days to cre­ate a rough mod­el once it received the scans, fol­lowed by some 3 weeks of refin­ing. The robot got an assist at the very end from human arti­sans, whose hand­i­work Michel calls “the cru­cial 3 to 5 per­cent.”

Gia­co­mo Mas­sari, founder of Robot­or, who part­nered with Michel on this recre­ation, vaunts the pre­ci­sion tech­nol­o­gy makes pos­si­ble:

You can rec­og­nize every scratch. You can see the flaws of the stone and you can see the chal­lenges our col­leagues from 2,000 years ago were fac­ing. It’s like going back in time — you can feel the strug­gles of the artist.

The muse­um brass appears unmoved by the prospect of swap­ping repli­cas, no mat­ter how excel­lent, for the frieze pan­els, sculp­tures, archi­tec­tur­al frag­ments and oth­er trea­sures of antiq­ui­ty Elgin shipped home from the Acrop­o­lis in the ear­ly 1800s, though the New York Times report­ed last week that secret talks with Greece’s prime min­is­ter may indi­cate the two par­ties are edg­ing clos­er to res­o­lu­tion.

This col­lec­tion has been a cul­tur­al hot pota­to since Lord Byron, tour­ing the Parthenon short­ly after Elgin made off with so many its trea­sures, denounced his avarice in a poem titled The Curse of Min­er­va:

Lo! here, despite of war and wast­ing fire,

I saw suc­ces­sive Tyran­nies expire;

‘Scaped from the rav­age of the Turk and Goth,

Thy coun­try sends a spoil­er worse than both.

Sur­vey this vacant, vio­lat­ed fane;

Recount the relics torn that yet remain:

‘These’ Cecrops placed, ‘this’ Per­i­cles adorned,

‘That’ Adri­an reared when droop­ing Sci­ence mourned.

What more I owe let Grat­i­tude attest—

Know, Alar­ic and Elgin did the rest.

That all may learn from whence the plun­der­er came,

The insult­ed wall sus­tains his hat­ed name:

For Elgin’s fame thus grate­ful Pal­las pleads,

Below, his name—above, behold his deeds!

The New York Times quot­ed a mid­dle-aged Lon­don bus dri­ver who voiced the opin­ion, as did the vast major­i­ty of respon­dents to a British sur­vey, that the Parthenon sculp­tures should be returned to their land of ori­gin, remark­ing, “It’s like the Crown Jew­els. If some­one took those, you’d want them back, wouldn’t you?”

His argu­ment is a hard one to refute in an age when the inno­v­a­tive tech­ni­cal solu­tions pro­mot­ed by Michel and the Insti­tute for Dig­i­tal Archae­ol­o­gy cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties that Lord Elgin and muse­um vis­i­tors of yore could nev­er have envi­sioned.

The pub­lic invi­ta­tion to the Novem­ber 2022 unveil­ing of the Selene Horse repli­ca stat­ed that “Britain’s stew­ard­ship of the Elgin mar­bles embod­ies a psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly com­plex sto­ry of obses­sion, pos­ses­sion, and assim­i­la­tion — so far with­out res­o­lu­tion”, ask­ing:

Might per­fect copies, ren­dered in sacred Pen­tel­ic mar­ble, sug­gest a pos­si­ble path for­ward?

Read­ers, what say you?

Relat­ed Con­tent

John Oliver’s Show on World-Class Art Muse­ums & Their Loot­ed Art: Watch It Free Online

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,737 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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ChatGPT Writes a Song in the Style of Nick Cave–and Nick Cave Calls it “a Grotesque Mockery of What It Is to Be Human”

in Music, Technology | January 18th, 2023

Pho­to by Bled­dyn Butch­er via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Last year, not long before Christ­mas, every­one on the inter­net received a shiny new toy in the form of Chat­G­PT, which by the pow­er of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can near-instan­ta­neous­ly gen­er­ate most any text one asks it to. And after a bit of exper­i­men­ta­tion, one is inclined, nat­u­ral­ly, to turn such an impres­sive tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ment to the most ridicu­lous pos­si­ble uses. Over the past few months, pas­tiche has proven an espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar use of Chat­G­PT: my own inter­est was first piqued, as I recall, by its gen­er­a­tion of instruc­tions for “how to remove a peanut-but­ter sand­wich from a VCR” in the style of the King James Bible.

It’s unknow­able what the author or authors of the Bible (depend­ing on how you hap­pen to con­ceive of its author­ship) would think of the results. But we do know just what Nick Cave thinks of Chat­G­P­T’s attempt to write a song in his style. You can read its lyrics at The Red Hand Files, the site of Cave’s ques­tion-and-answer newslet­ter (in which he has opined on these mat­ters before). Con­sist­ing of two vers­es, a cho­rus, and an out­ro filled with lines about “a siren’s song,” “the blood of angels,” and “the fire of hell,” the song was sent in by a fan named Mark in New Zealand, to whom Cave writes a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly thought­ful reply — or at least he does after deliv­er­ing his ver­dict: “This song sucks.”

“What Chat­G­PT is, in this instance, is repli­ca­tion as trav­es­ty,” Cave writes. “It could per­haps in time cre­ate a song that is, on the sur­face, indis­tin­guish­able from an orig­i­nal, but it will always be a repli­ca­tion, a kind of bur­lesque.” Gen­uine songs, he explains, “arise out of suf­fer­ing, by which I mean they are pred­i­cat­ed upon the com­plex, inter­nal human strug­gle of cre­ation.” But “Chat­G­PT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured noth­ing, it has not had the audac­i­ty to reach beyond its lim­i­ta­tions, and hence it doesn’t have the capac­i­ty for a shared tran­scen­dent expe­ri­ence, as it has no lim­i­ta­tions from which to tran­scend.”

“What makes a great song great is not its close resem­blance to a rec­og­niz­able work,” he con­tin­ues. “Writ­ing a good song is not mim­ic­ry, or repli­ca­tion, or pas­tiche, it is the oppo­site. It is an act of self-mur­der that destroys all one has strived to pro­duce in the past.” This is the act that Cave him­self has com­mit­ted to over and over again through­out his half-cen­tu­ry-long musi­cal career. But even if that act will lie for­ev­er beyond the grasp of an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tem, no mat­ter how robust, it also lies beyond the grasp of the many human musi­cians con­tent to crank out the same old songs for decades on end. Per­haps it is they, not the Nick Caves of the world, who should wor­ry about the likes of Chat­G­PT putting them out of work.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Lis­ten to Nick Cave’s Lec­ture on the Art of Writ­ing Sub­lime Love Songs (1999)

Demys­ti­fy­ing Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand,” and How It Was Inspired by Milton’s Par­adise Lost

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Nick Cave’s Beau­ti­ful Let­ter About Grief

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

Hayao Miyaza­ki Tells Video Game Mak­ers What He Thinks of Their Char­ac­ters Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: “I’m Utter­ly Dis­gust­ed. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Futurists Envisioned the Future in the 1920s: Moving Walkways, Personal Helicopters, Glass-Domed Cities, Dream Recorders & More

in History, Sci Fi, Technology | January 16th, 2023

Many of us now in adult­hood first came to know the nine­teen-twen­ties as the decade our grand­par­ents were born. It may thus give us pause to con­sid­er that it began over a cen­tu­ry ago — and even more pause to con­sid­er the ques­tion of why its visions of the future seem more excit­ing than our own. You can behold a vari­ety of such visions in the videos above and below, which come from The 1920s Chan­nel on Youtube. Using a col­lec­tion of print-media clip­pings, it offers an expe­ri­ence of the “futur­ism” of the nine­teen-twen­ties, which has now inspired a dis­tinct type of “retro-futur­ism,” between the “steam­punk” of the Vic­to­ri­an era and the “atom­punk” of Amer­i­ca after the Sec­ond World War.

“Being in the mod­ern age, futur­ism of the nine­teen-twen­ties leans more towards atom­punk,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor. But it also has a some­what dieselpunk fla­vor,” the lat­ter being a kind of futur­ism from the nine­teen-for­ties. “In Amer­i­ca, the nine­teen-twen­ties were sim­i­lar to the nine­teen-fifties, in that they took place in the imme­di­ate after­math of a mas­sive, destruc­tive war, and both car­ried an opti­mism for the future. The only dif­fer­ence was that sci­ence fic­tion was not as main­stream in the twen­ties as it was in the fifties, so it did­n’t quite ful­ly devel­op a unique look that per­me­at­ed soci­ety.” This gave twen­ties futur­ism a look and feel all its own — as well as a pre­pon­der­ance of diri­gi­bles.

Apart from those heli­um-filled air­ships, which “only rose to promi­nence after the Vic­to­ri­an era, and their pop­u­lar­i­ty end­ed in the nine­teen-thir­ties,” its oth­er ele­ments of sci­ence fic­tion and (even­tu­al) fact include mov­ing walk­ways, per­son­al heli­copters, cities enclosed by glass domes and webbed by sky bridges, high­ways stacked ten lev­els deep, zero-grav­i­ty cham­bers, dream recorders, theremins, “light-beam pianos,” a tun­nel under the Eng­lish Chan­nel, “aer­i­al mail tor­pe­does,” and a curi­ous tech­nol­o­gy called tele­vi­sion. Long­time Open Cul­ture read­ers may also spot the Iso­la­tor, a dis­trac­tion-elim­i­nat­ing hel­met invent­ed by sci-fi pub­lish­er Hugo Gerns­back — whose own mag­a­zine Sci­ence and Inven­tion, the nar­ra­tor notes, orig­i­nal­ly ran many of these images. Per­haps what our own decade lacks isn’t excit­ing visions of the future, but a Gerns­back to com­mis­sion them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Iso­la­tor: A 1925 Hel­met Designed to Elim­i­nate Dis­trac­tions & Increase Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty (Cre­at­ed by Sci­Fi Pio­neer Hugo Gerns­back)

The Word “Robot” Orig­i­nat­ed in a Czech Play in 1921: Dis­cov­er Karel Čapek’s Sci-Fi Play R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum’s Uni­ver­sal Robots)

Futur­ist Makes Weird­ly Accu­rate Pre­dic­tions in 1922 About What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wire­less Tele­phones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

In 1922, a Nov­el­ist Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wire­less Tele­phones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

Sci-Fi Pio­neer Hugo Gerns­back Pre­dicts Telemed­i­cine in 1925

In 1926, Niko­la Tes­la Pre­dicts the World of 2026

“When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones”: A 1920s Com­ic Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts Our Cell­phone-Dom­i­nat­ed Lives

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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