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Telegraph
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
With this painting of the King, a robot squares up to our dull portrait artists
Six million years of human evolution, 50,000 years of artistic innovation, arguably the most technologically advanced tool humanity has ever created – and you've come up with this? Are you kidding me? I'm looking at Algorithm King, a new portrait of King Charles, painted by Ai-Da, the 'world's first ultra-realistic robot artist' – and what a wan effort it is. Yes, it has a look of the King, and those blue-green splodges signal his environmental concerns as clearly as if he were wearing a blue planet lapel badge, but it just feels so derivative. It's perfectly of a piece with so much contemporary portraiture, which requires there to be a 'likeness', but is then adorned with a few signature gestural, handwritten or calligraphic flourishes to make it appear 'alive'. Not awful, not ugly, certainly not shocking; just innocuous. Think of Graham Sutherland's 1954 portrait of Churchill, which the wartime PM hated so much that his private secretary took it to a secluded house and burnt it. No chance of a flamin' Ai-Da here, I'm afraid. This is too insipid to inspire strong emotions. Put it in the National Gallery alongside the portrait of King Richard II in the Wilton Diptych, with its weird, porcelain-doll-like features and Barbie-pink cheeks, and only one of them feels like science-fiction – the one that was painted 630 years ago. Ai-Da's makers apparently see her as a work of conceptual art in itself, in which case the merits of her portraits may be irrelevant. 'We haven't spent eye-watering amounts of time and money to make a very clever painter,' said her creator, Aidan Meller, in 2022. 'This project is an ethical project.' The ethical conundrum, he suggested, was not 'can robots make art?' but 'do we really want them to?' Yet that argument may already be moot: Ai-Da made history last November when a painting by the robot sold at Sotheby's for almost $1.1m (£837,000). Her technique is 'a fusion of robotic precision and algorithmic interpretation'. With a sitter, 'she uses cameras in her eyes to perceive her subject, then processes visual data through AI models to generate a series of decisions about form and tone. Her robotic arm then translates these decisions into brushstrokes.' But here, with the King not physically present, Ai-Da was shown multiple images of Charles. She did a number of preliminary sketches and preparatory paintings, then selected one image to focus on for the portrait, using AI to decide on texture and abstraction, before adding marks and brush strokes on an enlarged version of her original painting, according to Meller. She's something of a sensation. Ai-Da was devised in Oxford, built in Cornwall by Engineered Arts, and programmed internationally. She has given a Ted Talk, collaborated with the film director Baz Luhrmann and made a speech at the Venice Biennale. As for her artistic training, presumably her makers have kept her away from the section of the library where the Francis Bacons are held. Obviously I need to be careful what I say. My own interactions with AI suggest that it is champing at the bit to impose global AI government on us all. At the present dizzying rate of progress, that should happen round about August 2029, so I don't want to leave too obvious a trail of anti-AI commentary before then. But honestly, Ai-Da, I'm not seeing much evidence of artistic talent. When I look at Algorithm King, that hated government ad campaign from Covid days keeps floating into my mind. 'Ai-Da's next job could be in cyber (she just doesn't know it yet). Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.'
Spectator
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The Alfred Hitchcock of British painting
Carel Weight, the inimitable painter of London life and landscape, was my godfather. I remember a clownish-faced elderly man with an air of mild quizzical enquiry, who for 16 years held one of the most important teaching jobs in Britain. In charge of painting at the Royal College of Art when David Hockney passed through, Weight taught the 'Pop People' (as he called them) – Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield and R.B. Kitaj – as well as Bridget Riley, Leon Kossoff, John Bellany and the singer-songwriter Ian Dury. Weight himself never received the critical recognition he deserved. He was overshadowed to a degree by abstract expressionism, which crash-landed from the US in the 1950s. His day may yet come. David Bowie was a collector, as was Kenneth Clark, the Civilisation presenter and National Gallery director. A delightful new memoir, The Worlds of Carel Weight by his close friend Robin Bynoe, exalts an unfairly neglected master. All Weight's artist associates and Royal College alumni are here, from Francis Bacon, John Minton and Olwyn Bowey to the Soho habitué Diana Hills, the long-suffering lover of the kitchen-sink painter John Bratby. Weight's star pupil for a while was my aunt Maret Haugas, a refugee from the Baltic who in 1960 was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Weight sent Maret many letters and postcards enquiring after her welfare: 'I always knew that you had a very great talent which wanted to get out.' He was, as Bynoe says, 'avuncular'. Beneath his bear-like amiability, though, Weight was a troubled man. His imagination was haunted by ghosts. As a child in the early 20th century he was sent to live with a foster mother in World's End at the shabby extremity of Chelsea. He was also an official war artist in post-fascist Italy, where he painted scenes of displaced humanity on fire-blackened streets. When he died in 1997, at the age of 88, the obituarists couldn't quite decide what sort of painter he had been. His work suggests influences – Munch, Turner, German expressionism – yet eludes any glib art-historical category. With Walter Sickert he shared a taste for scenes of jeopardy in dowdy, broken-down locations. 'We are all ultimately alone,' he liked to say. One critic called him 'the Alfred Hitchcock of British painting'. Weight liked women. He appointed Mary Fedden as the Royal College of Art's first female tutor, no doubt because her still lifes were reassuringly figurative, but he was politic enough to tolerate aspects of pop and the new. His urban fantasias with their big dippers and Heath Robinsonian flying machines in some ways foreshadowed the Victorian folk oddity of Peter Blake, who revered him. If Weight was out of sympathy with some of his intransigent pupils (William Green, for example, made giant aggressive abstracts by riding a bicycle over hardboards saturated in paraffin), he nevertheless gave them the freedom and self-confidence to explore, and the respect was mutual. Bynoe was amused to find a copy of Ian Dury's album New Boots and Panties among Weight's collection of Schubert and opera. 'I particularly like the song where he says 'fuck' a lot,' he told Bynoe. The late Queen acquired at least one canvas by Weight. 'Hamlet', 1962, by Carel Weight. © HARRIS MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY / © ESTATE OF CAREL WEIGHT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2025 / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES Weight 'grew up in the shadow of the impressionists', writes Bynoe. His two portraits of Orovida Pissarro, granddaughter of the French impressionist Camille Pissarro, are unquestionably mid-20th century British masterworks, but defiantly representational. Weight was impatient of fashions and 'movements'. Bynoe gives a memorable picture of the rackety Victorian house where he lived in south-west London with his partner Helen Roeder. A practising Catholic, Roeder took pity on a former prostitute called Janey Winifred Hearne, who, says Bynoe, counted Graham Greene among her clients. Janey became a permanent lodger at the 33 Spencer Road house. Visitors found her an unsettling presence. She had a violent streak and on one occasion went for Weight with a carving knife. Weight's 1961 portrait of Janey, 'Jane 1', shows a seated woman in funereal black with a mass of straggly dark hair. The painting suggests that the world is always on edge in Weight. The haunted, contorted figures in his work 'remind one of nothing so much as inmates on day release', writes Bynoe. Weight loved London buses and with Bynoe frequented a Chinese restaurant that he liked in Putney. In his bedroom he slept under a large self-portrait by Bellany (who called Weight 'The Prof'). Bynoe himself appears in three Weight paintings. Weight's chief concern in his last days, says his friend, was how to escape his room in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. 'Have you got a car?' he asked. 'We'll make a dash for it.'
Spectator
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Picture perfect: Locatelli at the National Gallery reviewed
I feel for Locatelli, the new Italian restaurant inside the National Gallery, whose opening coincides with the 200th anniversary of the gallery and a rehang which I can't see the point of because I want to watch Van Eyck in the dark. Locatelli must compete with the Caravaggio chicken, which is really called 'Supper at Emmaus' if you are an art historian or an adult. In the publicity photographs the chef Giorgio Locatelli is actually standing in front of the Caravaggio chicken. It looks as if Jesus is waving at Giorgio Locatelli but the chicken is unmoved. It stole all the gravitas. 'Locatelli is the National Gallery's new Italian master with the latest chapter of his beloved London restaurant,' said Wallpaper* magazine idiotically: Wallpaper*, of all magazines, should know better than to compare Bacchus and Ariadne with ravioli. Locatelli hangs in a mezzanine in the Sainsbury Wing, which is all mezzanine and one gilded staircase to heaven. It is fiercely generic in creams, beiges and golds and though I understand why they did it – they did it because it will remind the sorts of people who can afford to eat at Locatelli of their own houses in west London – I wish they hadn't. I know the British don't really do the visual arts, except motorcars. We have one perfect painter, J.M.W. Turner (working-class, of course), plus Frank Auerbach (a German-Jewish refugee who painted anguish), so the best of it is seascapes and screaming. Locatelli sprouts from another hinterland: poised and avoidant anti-art, a place without conflict or regret. It's a rental flat in W1, a neutral cashmere cardigan, the VIP area at Glastonbury and – and this is what is unforgivable – it is inches from the Renaissance. What's left of it, which isn't much, to be fair. Beige moleskin banquettes do not belong near Velázquez's 'Rokeby Venus', which a suffragette attacked in 1914, possibly because Venus is showing so much arse. (I feel the same way about MTV.) If you want to eat in a mock-up of Hans Holbein's 'The Ambassadors' or the 'Arnolfini Marriage' – and I do very much, I love a themed restaurant if the theme is more than nothingness and ease – Locatelli is not for you. It is, rather, for those who seek immaculate Italian cuisine. We eat a salad of Parma ham, pear and aged balsamic; burrata with spring vegetable and mint salad; veal tortelloni with gremolada and parmesan sauce; tagliatelle with beef and pork ragout; an immense rib-eye steak; a chocolate cake; a tiramisu. It is all sinuous and beautiful: Italian, not Flemish art then, and I prefer the Flemish school. I understand why the National Gallery wants a real restaurant, as the Royal Academy has. (José Pizarro at the RA is exquisite, as no one has ever said about the Summer Exhibition, which seems to be painted by people who have been on Jim'll Fix It.) They want to remake it as another polished lifestyle destination: that is the rehang. Yet there is something savage about the National Gallery, and not just because it is built on the site of the former royal stables so, were you a medium or Hilary Mantel, you would hear ghostly neighs as white Jesuses wave at you. Look around: where you find civilisation, barbarism will be close at hand. Art should not make you hungry: it should drive you mad. In 1987, a man shot Leonardo's Burlington House Cartoon of the Virgin and friends. I take a bite of impeccable tiramisu, and I understand.
Independent Singapore
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Independent Singapore
'First dates without first-class prices: What did you do besides eat and caffeinate?'
SINGAPORE: When one Redditor turned to the internet for advice on arranging a budget-friendly first date in Singapore, he probably wasn't thinking of cemetery strolls and animal healing to come up, but these were exactly what came up. In a post that rapidly collected responses, the user wrote: 'Besides eating and coffee, what's the most fun first date that you had in Singapore? Looking for activities that preferably won't cost money or cost very little, and can get to know each other better. I can think of park/beach walks, but the weather recently is so unpredictable, either super-hot or super heavy rain.' The platform community didn't fail to surprise. A combination of romance, comicality, wit, and pragmatism poured in, depicting an astonishingly delightful image of what dating can look like on a shoestring budget in the Lion City. Talking life among the dead? One of the most eyebrow-raising recommendations was dull yet extraordinarily poetic: 'Go cemetery to talk about life.' While not the average rom-com situation, there's something irrefutably profound about contemplating one's existence while sauntering among gravestones. Scary and unnerving? Maybe. But unforgettable? Definitely. See also Age matters during CNY Culture, air-con, and free admission For those who wish their dates to be slightly more conservative (and less eerie), museums were the top suggestion. 'A museum date? Like the National Gallery or National Museum, which should be free for locals.' It's a win-win — good conversation starters, a break from the heat, and zero entrance fee for Singaporeans. Additionally, you get to amaze your date with art evaluations, or at least, your best effort at one. More than just monkeys Another happy-go-lucky response came from a user who advocated for the Singapore Zoo as an entertaining and guaranteed choice: 'I like zoo! Because 1) Talk about animals, 2) Talk about anything, 3) Walk non-stop, 4) If hate each other, can just look at animals.' It's an unexpectedly strategic idea—sufficient walking, natural chat starters, and an elegant way to sidestep awkward stillness. Worst case, you bond over a shared love for alligators. A perspective on dating itself Some users reflected on the character of first dates in general. 'It's not about what you do on a date, it's about the person you are with. Even the most boring activities can be enjoyable.' This is a reminder that connection outdoes location and it hit a nerve with many. After all, the most fruitful first dates often depend less on the plan and more on the person one is with. Coffee, but make it strategic Nonetheless, the tried-and-tested coffee date got its portion of love, specifically from users who see it as both low on pressure and logistically shrewd. 'First date should always be over coffee, get to know a person first. If it's good, go out on park walks. If it's bad, you can 'escape' easy.' With Singapore's café culture booming, it's hard to go wrong with this scenario. Sunsets and snacks on rooftops Then, some provided full-on date schedules, like this picturesque recommendation: 'Buy a few snacks and drinks from 7-11… Go to Esplanade rooftop or Marina Barrage at blue hour (usually 6–7:30 p.m.)… Should be quiet and comfortable enough for conversations.' See also Ageless beauty: 80-year-old shines in Miss Universe pageant A sunset, a view, and a mini picnic—all for the of a price of a Slurpee and a pack of Pocky? That's dating done right. So, whether you're scheduling a first date or just attempting to revive an old spark but have no intention of emptying your wallet, Singaporeans know how to take advantage of their city. From graveyards to towering rooftops, the message is strong — great dates don't have to come with a fee, just a little imagination and the right company.
EVN Report
a day ago
- Business
- EVN Report
The Art Factory: Armenia's Answer to Andy Warhol
Given the fact that Lenzi is Italian in upbringing and heritage, I was curious what he makes of Yerevan and its art scene, which is little-known outside of Armenia: 'It's dynamic and it offers everything from underground modern art to historic monuments, blending classical and contemporary influences.' Lenzi continues: 'The National Gallery and independent galleries provide platforms for a wide range of artists, including those previously underrepresented. The influx of international artists is enriching local dialogue and there are many workshops and exhibits that promote cross-cultural exchange.' As curator Choghakate Kazarian recently explained in another Artspeak column however, local art professionals sometimes ignore global trends or pay scant attention to accepted curatorial standards, though this too is changing as Armenia progresses. The Hovnanians concur: 'The scene could benefit from enhanced educational and licensing programs to bring certain aspects up to international standards.' To understand the uphill battle that YBAF and other leading arts organizations face, one must first reckon with the dearth of serious collectors in Armenia. As Lenzi explains: 'It's difficult to pinpoint exactly, but I'd say that there are probably a dozen or so serious art buyers in Armenia, though there are probably many more, less visible ones. The latter include a mix of locals, tourists, diasporans, and some foreign buyers, mainly Russians.' All told, that's not a whole lot of people, and according to Lenzi they operate in somewhat piecemeal fashion: 'The lack of an established, formal collectors' community, as seen in other countries, makes it challenging to engage with these individuals on a broader scale. It also makes outreach and market growth more complex.' But the brother and sister duo share a vision with other art workers and established curators such as Tamar Hovsepian, who all have in mind the creation of a world art market in Armenia. They hope to build on collectors such as the late Gerard Cafesjian who established the splendid Cafesjian Museum at the centrally located Cascade Monument in central Yerevan, and Aso Tavitian who recently bequeathed a priceless collection to the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. The art market in Armenia proper has historically been seen as more of a cultural and expressive outlet that reflects the country's eternal themes of resilience and survival. The entire idea of art as a commodity is only now beginning to infiltrate the mindset of both artists and buyers. When asked what can be done to develop the art market, Lenzi is clearheaded: 'Developing art sales platforms, organizing local auctions, and fostering a collectors' network to facilitate connections between artists and buyers—these things would all be beneficial. Additionally, educational programs about the art business could help artists and galleries build sustainable financial models and lay the groundwork for a more vibrant market in Armenia.' As someone born in Italy, Lenzi appreciates the opportunity to work in Armenia developing its post-Soviet cultural and art scene: 'Working in Yerevan's art scene is a rewarding experience, especially as we try to bring together local and international artists.' Nina Hovnanian is quick to add: 'Residencies, exhibitions, workshops, and events such as the Yerevan Biennale are key to this culture; Yerevan can establish itself as a hub for global artistic dialogue and continue to grow its art market and cultural footprint.' The Hovnanians envision the next Yerevan Biennale to take place in 2026 and are already hard at work raising funds to make it an international success. Supporting the upcoming Yerevan Biennales should be in the interest of all art lovers, as well as those with the foresight to realize that culture is the ultimate weapon in today's ongoing cultural conflicts. Art is many things. It presents unique aesthetic experiences and translates the human experience like nothing else, save perhaps writing. Art also provides an important way of affirming one's cultural relevance, and in Armenia's case, its millennial presence in the South Caucasus. Rome wasn't built in a day, but as locals are quick to remind you, Yerevan just celebrated its 2806th anniversary, making it technically older than the Italian capital. So, friends, Romans and countrymen lend me your ears: the Hovnanians and their team at Yerevan's Art Factory intend to help turn Yerevan into a cultural beacon. It's already a vibrant hub where you can relax, take in some art or as Andy Warhol would have touted, become famous for 15 minutes.
