Sorel Syndrome
by Sai Pradhan
Twice this past year, I experienced a racing heart, confusion, and a general loss for words at art shows. If only it had been an abundance of awe-inspiring beauty and meaning that was responsible for it!
Alas, it was not Stendhal syndrome. It was whatever the opposite of it is, whatever we might call a reaction to something that feels so odious that the mind finds itself searching for vocabulary to articulate it. I felt a nauseous revulsion, accompanied by a dawning feeling that what I was beholding was plainly deceit, masquerading as satire.
I am not fool enough to blindly believe that art shows are repositories of sincerity, or even art at times, but transparent deceit still has the capacity to shock me, especially if it becomes obvious that it is being propagated by everyone involved. Indeed, the audience for that deceit may sometimes be in on it too.
On the first occasion that almost necessitated a fainting couch, an artist had conceptualized a video game depicting an art fair, with zombies in it. Learning about the show, I had instinctively been interested in the notion of depicting and perceiving fairs as zombielands, because I had just finished exhibiting at an art fair myself. I was drained by the experience of people using its existence to showcase their involvement with “culture,” by snapping photos for their Instagram feed as quickly as possible before moving to the next gallery booth, the very cold temperature in the space, and the horrible white lighting which depressed my soul and made everyone and everything look and feel like perishables displayed inside a fridge, the life slowly leaving their bodies despite best efforts.
I thought to myself, aha, here was someone making a comment on something I had wanted to critique myself. And so, I went along.
Before arriving at the game component, I found myself in an outer room that the gallery had set up, in which hung a few large-scale blurry paintings. I looked at them, and they didn’t seem to be about anything in particular. I wondered if they were simply part of the critique, of zombie-dom, of nothingness; a commentary on lack of meaning by displaying lack of meaning would interest me.
Here’s the rub.
The paintings were made by cheap art labour across the border in mainland China (I live in Hong Kong; the mainland is easily accessible). I pieced the dots together. The artist who was credited in the show was – seemingly – trying to make what they thought was a terribly clever remark on authenticity and artificial intelligence, by entering a few words into an image generator tool, and then commissioning paintings from other artists to look like the mishmash of imagery that had been spat out, though perhaps they did not consider the other makers artists.
Now, if the idea was to remark sharply on the age-old question of “what is art” or critically look at how AI plagiarizes existing art, this might exist in the realm of the ethically acceptable and intellectually engaging. I hate AI’s implications for art theft, and how it dilutes and dampens human experience to package it into something truly vacuous, so I wouldn’t have liked the use of AI to steal images even for that remark, but I might have pegged it as useful commentary on an increasing plague.
The crucial issue is that the art labour involved in the actual work of making the paintings was not credited anywhere in the whole show. No names, no signs, no answers to my questions when I asked, just a casual “oh it was commissioned off Taobao.” Taobao is a consumer-to-consumer retail platform from which it is possible to commission the making of almost anything, including paintings.
Let’s unspool this a bit further to examine it more thoroughly.
Let’s say that the outside area of the gallery in which those paintings were displayed did not credit the makers, but then one walked inside, to be told something along the lines of “Hey, we fooled you, the conceptualizing artist who is credited didn’t make this work at all! In fact, it’s simply images that AI stole, that we had a team of artists (named) paint! Ask more questions, dumbass! Don’t you be a zombie yourself!” I would think of that as a timely reminder of maintaining our criticality as we partake of art in a world in which flushing ethical concerns down the toilet is normalized. However, not only did it fail to do anything like that, it never informed visitors that the artwork (derived directly from stolen images as it was) wasn’t made by the credited artist at all.
On the second occasion that birthed the deep discomfort that is leading to this examination, I observed that a detailed oil-painted portrait I was looking at in a gallery booth seemed like quite a departure for a graffiti artist whose name I saw under it; an artist whose work I have seen over a period of time. The portrait was of a historic figure, posed by a desk upon which stood some asynchronously contemporary items.
I remarked to the gallerist that it seemed like quite an interesting breadth of technique, to not only create graffiti, but also make old-school “fine art” that this was made to appear like.
With preternatural, professional calm, they told me that the artist had commissioned artists in the “artist village” (Dafen oil painting village located in a suburb of Shenzhen, China) to make it. I heard my voice float into the air over the noise of my blood rushing, asking where their names were on the plaque or where this information was shared for public consumption, without the question having to be asked. It wasn’t. They did not intend for it to be.
The gallerist responded with equanimity that the concept belonged to the graffiti artist, and therefore, it was completely fine that the actual artists were not credited.
One cannot call this thievery of the kind that AI tools undertake when they sweep the internet for images and data, because in these cases, the art labour was paid for. But, passing work off as your own, or not bothering to stipulate that it isn’t your own and was paid for, sits quite deep in the bin of unethical bullshit.
Let’s say the artist was attempting another clever remark on reality and authenticity (ha, ha, the clearly dead person depicted in this portrait has contemporary objects on his desk! Ha, ha, did you really think a graffiti artist would suddenly produce an old-timey looking oil-painted portrait! It’s a joke, of course!). Even so, what could possibly excuse the lack of transparency on the provenance? This was not an item of clothing in a high-street shop or a car exhibited for purchase in a showroom. Those mass-market items are designed by one or more people, then manufactured in factories by others, and then sold under a brand name that has little to do with those others (as uncomfortable as that example should also make us); this was set up and promoted as a one-of-a-kind artwork, credited to a single artist, in an art gallery setting. It was marketed and passed off as art.
There is no excuse.
It is bad enough that AI generated pastiches of stolen imagery of art are being passed off as art these days. It is obscene that fruit bought from underprivileged migrant fruitsellers is duct-taped to a wall and auctioned for 6.2 million dollars, and bought by the crypto-rich who then eat the fruit in a publicized event. It is incredibly sad that theft is easier and easier because of that unregulated use of technology. It feels somehow worse still, that contemporary artists (with the backing of the commercial institutions that support them) themselves deny credit to other makers, or obfuscate on who actually made what we are looking at. In both the examples I describe above, the concepts seem to mainly be the means and ability to commission a general idea or prompt.
If I commission the making of new curtains for my bedroom, I do not take credit for making those curtains. If I designed the curtains, I may be the designer, but I am not the maker.
If I commission a tailor to make a blazer, I might take credit for the design if I had anything to do with it, or the concept if I had anything to do with it, but I do not take credit for tailoring the blazer. I am not the tailor.
If I conceive of an idea for an oil-painting, but I do not make the oil-painting myself, I am not the artist.
When I speak of this matter to folks around me, including people who themselves create and make, and certainly those who engage with art in myriad ways, I have come up against a very strange mix of neutral responses. What is art anyway, one began hesitantly. Well, if they came up with the concept, then… trailed off another. AI is here to stay, proclaimed a third, apropos of almost nothing but accustomed to saying that because, well, that is what people say these days. It’s tricky, this stuff, pontificated a fourth.
It is tricky in that we are being tricked.
Not everything needs a mealy-mouthed centrist attitude, or a devastatingly vacuous both-sides response in aid of appearing open-minded. I say “appearing” by design. It is the appearance that my interlocutors are concerned with.
We see this attitude with everything from the genocide to abortion, to the rights of people who cross borders, to climate change. All it does is exactly what AI itself does to art: word vomit a mess of something that has not been processed or percolated through a critical mind, not been sieved through memory and experience, does not reflect any kind of developed taste, and worst of all, is devoid of care for other humans. It is a fuck-you to humanity.
Marie-Henri Beyle liked to play with the reader on all things reality. Writing under a pen name (Stendhal, he of the syndrome), but writing of “reality” as he saw it, I find myself thinking of his inscription “La vérité, l’âpre vérité”in the epigraph to Rouge et Noir. It is an inscription he falsely attributed to Danton, by design. I think he meant it as an exhortation to be true, even as he wrote complex satire.
Perhaps the opposite of Stendhal syndrome is Sorel syndrome, after the Beylesian protagonist in Rouge et Noir. Sorel is a made up person who knows he has to perform, to try to ascend the social rungs of his time, in order to succeed in the confines of the poisonous society he lives within.
Perhaps that is what these artists were up to as well.
Sai Pradhan is a writer and artist. Her fiction, essays, and travel-focused articles are published in journals and magazines like The Iowa Review, The Prairie Schooner, Ghost Parachute, The Dodge, YOLO Journal, and several others. Her art can be seen at www.saipradhanart.com; it currently takes the form of large-scale figurative work layered upon raw, paint-stained fabric, and concerns the making of myths using recurring motifs of personal significance. Her debut book (fiction) is represented by the literary agent Natalie Kimber. She has a BA in International Affairs (GWU) and an LLM in International Law (Edinburgh).