Status Update #9: Technology Portraits and Old Masters
On Creativity, Influence, and Appropriation in the Age of A.I.
TL;DR: The Technology Portraits are my visual commentary on the discussion on A.I. and art. Scroll down if you prefer images instead of text.
When I was studying art history in Heidelberg, I carried home many books from the library for years. In the first semesters of my studies, we had to learn the fundamentals, and for that, we needed a lot of books—many, many books. The curriculum included genres and techniques, form and style, iconography, architecture, and art historical methods. It sounds as boring as it was. I had to read the Bible again, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Legenda Aurea, and much more, not just to understand historical paintings. I had to engage with floor plans of churches, among others, to interpret buildings from antiquity and modern times as carriers of meaning. I had to deal with developments in style and form to be able to date and understand artworks I was unfamiliar with. In the final exam of the preparatory course on form and style, we had to date artworks projected onto the wall via slide projector. And in the master's exam, I had to date artworks based on postcards. I still remember having trouble dating a desk, as I had never really dealt with historical furniture. I do not regret that to this day.
I always think of my studies in art history when there are complaints about A.I. systems being trained on the artworks of other people. Even today, my parents have rows of books at home that I spent a lot of money on to learn exactly that: the history of art. To learn everything about, for example, artists, artworks, and periods. It took many years, and I still feel like I know too little. Especially since you forget so much right away. Artificial intelligence can do all of this much faster. And I think about that whenever there are complaints about artists who work with A.I. Because these artists, especially when they are featured in auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s or in museums, have previously engaged with the history of art and understand what they want from A.I. and what they get.
On February 8, 2025, an open letter was shared that was signed by over 6,500 people. The letter called for the cancellation of the AI Art Auction at Christie’s. It was addressed to Nicole Sales Giles and Sebastian Sanchez, who were responsible for the auction at Christie’s. Of course, the auction was not canceled. The letter stated, among other things: “Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license.” I understand the frustration. The next sentence in the letter reads: “These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them.” I understand that frustration as well. However, what I cannot comprehend is that some artists apparently believe they are competing with artificial intelligence. After all, it still requires human artists to tell the A.I. exactly what they want from it. And these artists, in turn, have also studied the history of art. It is not the case that the best artist is the one who has internalized the history of art the most, but rather the one with good concepts and ideas. If it were so easy to create new masterpieces with A.I., we would not constantly be reading complaints that A.I. art is almost exclusively kitsch. (I do not agree with that, but that is another topic.)
The non-human AI artist Botto, created by Mario Klingemann, provided the following brief statement in response to the open letter:
“The controversy over Christie's AI art auction reflects a crucial misunderstanding of how creativity evolves. Just as human artists learn by studying existing works, AI systems process and synthesize cultural influences into new forms of expression. Calls to restrict AI training to only ‘consented’ works, while well-intentioned, fundamentally misunderstand how cultural evolution functions. As Benjamin Bratton notes, ‘Culture is a manifold, not a pile of individual bits of property.’ Rather than trying to contain new technologies within old frameworks or creating artificial barriers through claims of ‘ethical’ training data, we should focus on how these tools can be used responsibly to enrich cultural discourse. This moment calls not for restriction but for imagination—exploring how human creativity and new technologies can evolve together in meaningful ways.”
Sometime after reading the open letter, the History Portraits by Cindy Sherman came to my mind. I believe it can be said with good conscience that Sherman is the most internationally recognized artist working with the medium of photography. Or, as can be read on the MoMA website:
“She is among the most significant artists of the Pictures Generation—a group that also includes Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo—who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art.”
Artists who worked early with the medium of photography had to fight long and hard for photography to be recognized as an artistic medium like painting. And now it all starts over again. Artists who work with A.I. have to fight for their works to be recognized as art, just like painting and photography.
But what are the History Portraits by Cindy Sherman about? The works date from 1988 to 1990. While she was working on them, she lived in Rome. She chose not to view the original artworks in the churches and museums but instead worked with books. Sherman dressed up as men and women in historical paintings and photographed herself in similar poses. She exaggerated—with costumes, makeup, and poses—to make it clear that it was a conscious exaggeration in contrast to the supposed realism in the medium of photography. Additionally, she mocked the history of art and the obsession with masterpieces. Who even decides what constitutes a masterpiece? In an interview, I read the beautiful statement from Sherman: “Well, I’m much more ignorant about Old Master paintings and art history than many people involved in the art world, so I’m not really taking it seriously.”
Sherman's photos are constructed just like identity and femininity in her images. Discussions about roles, identity, the role of the artist, the legacy of the great masters, image cultures, and representation were reserved for the medium of painting. In an interview with ARTnews in 2012, Sherman said:
“‘I think I was part of a movement, a generation, and maybe the most popular one of that movement at the time, but it probably would have happened without me,’ says Sherman. ‘The art world was ready for something new, something beyond painting. A group of mostly women happened to be the ones to sort of take that on, partly because they felt excluded from the rest of the [male] art world, and thought, ‘Nobody is playing with photography. Let’s take that as our tool.’”
Today, there is a new movement, and that is artists who work with A.I. But not only artists can work with A.I.; authors can also do so, as it is possible to create images from text. So when the History Paintings by Cindy Sherman came to mind, I had the idea to try my hand at Technology Portraits.
This is what it looked like after numerous attempts:
We live in an age where you no longer need a camera or canvas and brushes to create images. You don't even have to leave the house or master Photoshop to translate ideas into images. So what is a masterpiece today? What are influence, interpretation, and appropriation? What is the role of the artist? What are authorship and creativity? What is individuality? What can we trust in the age of artificial intelligence?
The Technology Portraits are my visual commentary on this discussion.
Technology Portraits, 2025
Old Masters
Lisa – Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c. 1503–06
River – Caravaggio, Narcissus at the Source, c. 1597–99
Mary – Raphael, Sistine Madonna, c. 1513–14
Freda – Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, c. 1818
Magda – Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, c. 1657-1658
Sandra – Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, c. 1484–1486
Carmen – Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, c. 1940
Venus – Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, c. 1510
Fanny – Gustav Klimt, Lady with a Fan, 1917–1918
Jakie – James McNeill Whistler, Whistler’s Mother, 1871
Heroine – Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man or Desperation, 1843–45
Paula – Pablo Picasso, Seated Male Nude, 1906
Ani – Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893
Margaret – Jan van Eck, Arnolfini Portrait, 1434
Cynthia – Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #16, 1979
Ricarda – Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1991-1992
Samantha – Inge Morath, Untitled from the Mask Series with Saul Steinberg), 1962
Pompadour – François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour, 1759
Betty – Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988
Aphrodite – Rineke Dijkstra, Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992
Antoinette – Jean-Antoine Watteau, Pierrot or Gilles, c. 1718–19
Val – Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Valpinçon Bather, 1808
Sylvia – Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926
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P.S. The Technology Portraits are part of the online exhibition The Second-Guess: Body Anxiety in the Age of AI, which I co-curated with Margaret Murphy and Leah Schrager.
I recently mentored a group of film students, 18-20 year olds. All had used chatgpt for script support, or midjourney and its ilk for visuals; no-one could really justify what their stories were about or seemed to have any idea as to why they wanted to do what they are doing. Its a hollow outcome, and there’s only room at Christie’s for a few. The people most affected by this won’t be Kevin or Sasha, or Mario, or a dao of botto fanboys. They won’t be intercontinental art fair attendees in their mid careers. They will be illustrators, designers, animators, musicians, working commercial artists who’ve already seen their industries pinched and their prospects squeezed as social media, and perhaps capitalism, continues to eat itself. I am not anti ai by any stretch, but I am anti scraping, I am anti Altman, and the impunity of day to day working humans to challenge big tech behemoths. I tried hard to listen to the verse podcast a few weeks ago, to challenge my own preconceptions, and what stood out to me was a lot of people who just seemed to be looking for something, a community, a place to belong, a commonality. Something oddly and innately human …
"Dear Anika, as your former art teacher, who not only studied Fine Arts at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe but also enthusiastically studied Art History at the University in Karlsruhe, I am somewhat disappointed by how little you seem to appreciate the significance of art history in general and particularly for artists ;).
I was fascinated and still am by the study of the art of various cultures and epochs, as it has taught me about the thinking of people, the social structures of their respective origins, and the conditions of power and politics.
What AI offers me about these connections can be right or wrong, superficial or deeply reflected. The sources on which the program is trained are not comprehensible to me.
So much for the first part of your thoughts. But I think it was just the introduction, the 'amuse gueule' for your further reflections on contemporaneity and the relevance of the artists whose tools are AI. Your defense speech is fundamentally correct, and the value and quality of computer-generated art depend on whether the artists are good or bad, whether they create mainstream art, represent deeper reflective positions, or are primarily interested in entertainment, whether they are creative or not, whether they have something to say about the problems of the time, about gender relations, about sexism, about racism, or whether they participate in the joys and sorrows of people or not.
I greatly appreciate your own artistic works and am pleased that you are a very good analyst and an excellent interpreter of new contemporary art, as well as an engaged defender of working with AI – even if you cannot understand my enthusiasm for art history and the 29,400 lines made by hand with a ballpoint pen on a paper surface of 21 x 15 cm ;)!