When Picasso debuted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1916, it provoked outrage; critics called it hideous, pornographic, and “a loss to French art.” It’s now considered a pathbreaking work of Twentieth Century modernism. But it’s also somewhat overshadowed by time and familiarity. Like me, you’ve probably seen it reprinted in countless art history texts, coffee-table books, and cheap reproductions. It’s become comfy, bland.
Earlier this year, the artificial intelligence program Dall-E Mini, and its altogether more intricate cousin Midjourney, began shilling computer-drawn art online. I scoffed at both, not only because I disbelieved an AI program could make innovative artistic choices, but also because the programs kept getting clogged by users. Like disco or Bill Gates, anything that becomes too popular too quickly usually becomes toxic just as quickly.
However, I’m also curious, and when by happy coincidence I landed on an opportunity to use Dall-E, I grabbed it. As a fan of the British TV series Doctor Who, I decided to test-drive Dall-E by inputting an easy keyword: TARDIS. Then, just to see what would happen, I connected a second keyword: Picasso. Just to see what might’ve happened if the notorious Pablo Picasso had painted Britain’s most famous time and space capsule.
The experiment didn’t disappoint.
In Les Demoiselles, Picasso reduced the female form to its most rudimentary, stripping the niceties which art inherited from Renaissance realism. Though artists like Leonardo had rendered human forms in unprecedented detail, his successors had cheapened realism; art had descended from Renaissance verisimilitude, through Rococo frippery, and into cheapjack schlock by the early Twentieth Century. Picasso purged that habit of fake realism from his work.
But more important, in stripping artifice from painting, Picasso stripped artifice from his subjects. His Demoiselles were prostitutes, resident at The Avignon, a Barcelona brothel. Though these women tried to look enticing for men, Picasso captured the feeling beneath their erotic finery; they gaze through their audience with angle-eyed contempt that contrasts with their poses, exposing their scorn for the clientele upon whom the depend for their living.
Except, as I said, that meaning has become murky through familiarity. Picasso spent months perfecting this one painting; by his later career, he cranked out large-scale paintings at a breakneck pace of one canvas per day, hoping to recapture the magic he demonstrated in classics like Les Demoiselles or The Blue Guitar. He became an artistic assembly line, producing the artistic equivalent of wallpaper for a lucrative audience.
When Doctor Who returned to television in 2005, it enjoyed vastly improved technology over how it last appeared, in 1989. Producers could merge shots, allowing the TARDIS to materialize into tracking shots, or permitting the camera to follow Rose from an ordinary London street into the otherworldly TARDIS interior. I remember watching those first episodes, wide-eyed with childlike wonder. The show was as perfect as it possibly could’ve been.
But like Picasso, the BBC had to repeat the wonder of that first impression forever. It needed to constantly create more elaborate monsters, more apocalyptic catastrophes for the Doctor to avert, and more life-altering consequences for the Doctor’s companions to endure. Early story arcs, like Bad Wolf or Harold Saxon, turned into ridiculous multi-season extravaganzas like the Cracks in Time or Missy’s Redemption. Wide-eyed wonder turned to eye-rolling cynicism.
Dall-E’s renderings of the TARDIS in Picasso’s style are crude, especially compared to the detailed realism which Midjourney is capable of producing. Yet in their crudeness, in their simplicity, they reveal Doctor Who in terms I remember from watching low-tech Tom Baker episodes on PBS in 1982. Sweeps of pattern and color, of hard lines against soft contours, remind me why I first loved this series.
Art that once moved us eventually becomes familiar and banal. Mondrian’s Composition series, once a shocking demonstration of color and line, has become so commonplace that it’s used as a literal wallpaper pattern. The same happens with popular art—and I’d consider television “art” in those terms. Doctor Who, like Law & Order or Gunsmoke, used to feel trailblazing and dangerous. But the need to keep producing reduces them to gimcracks.
I sincerely doubt Dall-E or Midjourney can create innovative art. Both programs work from existing algorithms, and replicate choices which previous human artists have made; they don’t make new choices of their own. But, in combining disparate influences, they can nevertheless have a real emotional impact on the audience. Most important, they can remind us why the familiar art with which we’ve grown tragically comfy, once mattered so much.
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