Good Morning,
An AI model trained to value paintings has declared a random street artist’s work more valuable than a Picasso (ARTnews). Whatever that means. Meanwhile, a Facebook group called Baddies in AI — women using AI to either augment or wholly invent their social-media presence — has crossed 300,000 members (The New Yorker). Machines are making aesthetic and identity judgments at scale, and the answers don’t have to be coherent — they just have to circulate. That’s because the “traffic” has become more valuable that the “content” itself, a transfer of value that has had enormous repercussions in the arts world.
Trump’s renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being handed to his personal pool guy, who originally pitched the president on turquoise so it would look like the Bahamas (Artnet). A former LiveNation executive is suing the company, claiming he was fired for flagging financial misconduct (LA Times). The Vegas Sphere — universally predicted to flop three years ago — is now the highest-grossing arena on the planet, $379 million on 1.7 million tickets last year (WSJ). And Carolina Miranda reads the new LACMA as architectural drama at the expense of the art it’s supposed to hold (Bloomberg).
In quieter news, the Rocky statue has finally moved inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art — which once tried to evict it (CBS). And Murakami has published a novel narrated by a woman, his first ever (LitHub).
All of our stories below.
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