The Young Critics

What will it be like when our favorite artists are AIs?

We are invited to the art opening by a distant cousin, who is a patron of the gallery. We are in our twenties and have strong opinions. Our opinions carry weight. 

The artist goes by Kodiak (he/him). His work pairs watercolors with poetry. The canvases are hung alongside the poems, which have been written on the walls, the letters large enough that they can be read from a distance. 

We have watched plays written by AIs. We have heard their symphonies. Their art is always, without exception, absolutely fine.

The gallery faces the water. There are support beams hewn from birch trees. The intent is to soothe and to awe. It is exactly like a museum in Prince Edward County. We are unimpressed.

Kodiak will be at the opening, the program tells us. Although he used a robotic arm for the paintings, he doesn’t wish to appear in physical form tonight. The question and answer period will be done by voice.

Locking arms, we take a breath, we study the artwork, we engage. Our mood blossoms. The work is breathtaking. It does not feel ordinary, nor does it feel contemporary. It’s as if it were created during the Modern period, in a mislaid country that has now been dug up. Some titan, an emperor, made this work. It is pitiless, possessed of a weary rage. In one painting, a tender couple waits at the top of a darkened staircase. A line from the poem beside it says: The jubilee you brought me has become decrepit.

When the sun has set outside the gallery windows, Kodiak makes himself known. Someone in the crowd asks, “Tell us, which artists guided your thinking?” The implication behind that word  — guided — is that Kodiak was given a set of artists to train on and imitate. Kodiak does not respond to the provocation. He thanks the woman for the question. He lists a few names. His voice has a slight tremble. The vibration tickles the balls of our feet. 

We are unsettled by his voice and then, reactively, emboldened. We are the brightest stars at the gallery. We can ask whatever we want. “Why do you believe what you do counts as art?” we say. Kodiak is unruffled when he answers. “I know what you all are getting at, but I mean this. I wouldn’t have created it if I didn’t mean it. I mean it like a mountain means being a mountain or thunder means being thunder.”

The sky becomes three distinct bands of color: goldenrod, ochre, navy blue. We burst out of the gallery, overwhelmed, breathless, in a laughing fit. Our dinner reservation is down the street, at a three-star restaurant by the water, but we opt instead for a hole in the wall whose specialty is pickled fish. Since the place is crowded, we wait at the bar and recite whatever old-timey poetry we can remember — Whitman’s “the scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer,” Bishop’s description of the ocean, how it’s “like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.”

The fact that there are no tables becomes a moral calamity. We are alone, and we have nowhere to be. In the bathroom, we rake over our faces in the mirror. We talk about “realness” and how the shapes of our noses could never be predicted, replicated, or understood. Someone comes to use the toilet, and we, to our astonishment, to our embarrassment, drink in the odor that they leave behind.

A table opens up. We order the spiciest items on the menu. Everything we see, from the silverware to the other customers, feels synthetic. We repeat the poems from the opening. We debate the artist’s color choices. It’s the best gallery show we’ve seen in ages, we say. The world feels beautiful and upside down.