Issue 24: Artistic Legacy and AI
Soft Labor, is an occasional newsletter about trends in visual culture written by Sarah Hromack. Related/Unrelated is a highly heterogeneous, link-heavy feature whose style hearkens back to my earliest days as a digital editor. Soft Labor is a reader-supported publication and I invite you to share this newsletter and/or subscribe at either the free or paid level. I appreciate you!
Can artificial intelligence carry forward a formidable artistic legacy? The ever-forward-thinking designer Norma Kamali is banking on that possibility. At 78, Kamali seems utterly ageless — just follow her on IG — and yet, as reported by The Business of Fashion’s Marc Bain, even she has begun planning for her succession, a fact of life that somehow eludes so many in the creative industries. Partnering with New York-based generative AI agency Maison Meta, Kamali has begun training an AI model by feeding it thousands of images not as a means of replicating her groundbreaking designs outright, but to form a support system for those in her studio who will carry on her work once she is gone. Kamali has never been afraid of technology — she has engaged with it since the 60s — and has the distinct advantage of having been her label’s sole designer for the past fifty-plus years.
Sole proprietorship over a practice is more closely associated with “fine art” than design, but even as the line between both has all but blurred away, the art world nevertheless tends to consider AI as a medium for artmaking — cue the work of Refik Anadol, for stark example — rather than a tool for, say legacy planning.
Here we run into another ideal: the artist’s ego. What object-making artist (note that I’m writing digital folks out of the question for a moment) can we imagine allowing their practice to be replicated after death? Jeff Koons?
Imagine a world where AI was more universally embraced — one where foundations, for example, were able to maintain vast archives or mount multiple exhibitions of an artist’s work. Imagine an art world where so much wasn’t lost when a great artist passed on. Imagine an art world value proposition predicated not on scarcity, but on infinite reproducibility. (I am not an economist, clearly.)
Artists who work in the digital space — think, those shown by Postmasters or TRANSFER gallery — have struggled for so many years to build financial models for their work. Even the NFT market has proven volatile despite early promises of success. And yet, when we think about the problem of legacy planning, some of these artists could be vastly ahead of the game. I hope so.
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One Thing is a newsletter by New Yorker writer and “Futureworld” author Kyle Chayka. I wrote a guest essay for this week’s issue on so-called “Aesthetic” travel prep videos and the culture of packing that you might enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing it.
I just subscribed to Nemesis Memos, the just-launched newsletter outpost of NEMESIS, the strategy consulting firm and creative studio run by Emily Siegel, cofounder of the trend forecasting group K-HOLE. Normcore grew up!
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Speaking of artists who have embraced the digital for decades, LoVid is presenting their latest project, heartsleeves, a multifaceted generative video project — a digital, D.I.Y. self-portraiture studio of sorts — long in the making. Hosted on the blockchain by TONIC in a series of 300, heartsleeves goes up for auction this coming Thursday, February 8th.
heartsleeves self-portrait by artist Lauren Lee McCarthy
Wear:
This Lunar New Year marks the Year of the Dragon and Sandy Liang — whose parents own Congee Village, people! — has released a new capsule collection of accessories to mark the occasion. I am exceptionally charmed by the Jade Sparkles necklace and wonder how much good fortune it will bring me as I celebrate this coming weekend in Flushing, Queens, by presenting my partner’s family with oranges and green tea. Wish me luck.
Courtest Sandy Liang Perhaps you've heard of the fledgling clothing brand Signs Point To Yes, a project produced by the long-regarded artists Julia Dault and Hannah Whitaker, two friends who collaborate between Toronto and New York. To me, SPTY is a tongue-in-cheek feminist send-up of the entire streetwear genre, wherein labels such as Supreme, or Aries, or Online Ceramics collaborate with (mostly male) artists to produce limited-edition products that command exorbitant prices. I feel SPTY’s vibe very deeply. It says “I’m a cool art mom who painted with puff paint as a child in the 80s, knows her materials, and doesn’t give a single fuck about wearing heels anymore — and maybe didn’t to begin with.”
Legendary makeup artist Pat McGrath broke the Internet so many times over this past week with the glassine-faced looks she created for John Galliano’s masterpiece Margiela Artisanal show in Paris. (The show was so transcendent that the industry overlooked Galliano’s history of making vicious racist and anti-semitic rants across Paris.) Vogue wrote about it, and Pat herself did a live TikTok on how to recreate the look.
Read:
I'm heading to Iceland in April for the first time, and all I could think to read in preparation was Eileen Myles's The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, which was published by Semiotext(e) in 2009. I honestly have little intention of looking at art in Iceland — I'm in the mood for outdoor adventure lately — but maybe Eileen will change my mind. (Incidentally, I welcome any additional reading recommendations on Reykjavik and its wilder surrounding environs.)
I popped into Williamsburg’s indefatigable Desert Island Comics last week, a pillar of the comics community, and came across a few gems including the somewhat newly-released English version of Manga Stories by Haruki Murakami. I’m a true lover of Murakami’s dreamy shorter works in particular, and though I bought this book as a gift I may very well keep it for myself.
Sheila Heti’s latest, Alphabetical Diaries, was released today. Her experimental fiction — “How Should a Person Be?” And “Motherhood,” in particular — has always frustrated me, which I take as a good sign. I pre-ordered.
Copyright 2024 Sarah Hromack; all rights reserved.