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Als gretig en kritisch cultuurconsument geeft Joyce Roodnat haar visie op het aanbod.

In Florida veegt gouverneur Ron DeSantis alle kunstsubsidies van tafel. Met, zoals dat dan heet, 'één pennestreek'? Nou, meer met een achteloze geeuw. Het culturele veld in Florida geeuwt terug. Het spreekt zijn „teleurstelling" uit en wijst op de „toeristen-dollars" die de kunsten aantrekken.

Zo wordt het nooit wat. Alleen al dat toerisme-argument. Kunst steunen vanwege geld in 't laadje, dat is de buurman van kunst en cultuur die 'hun eigen broek moeten ophouden'. Nee. Kunst is ons aller broek en die moeten we met zijn allen ophouden. Kunst is voor iedereen. De een wil dit, de ander dat, niemand kan zonder. Ook die politieke praalhanzen niet, al denken ze van wel. Maar wie is verantwoordelijk voor hun sjieke pakken? Modeontwerpers. En wat zijn modeontwerpers? Kunstenaars, inderdaad.

Het kan ook anders. In Bologna wachten we op het Piazza Maggiore met zijn vijftienhonderden in het donker. Dat doen we elke avond, zolang het provinciale, wereldwijd geliefde, Festival Del Cinema Ritrovato op een enorm scherm de gratis hoofdfilm vertoont. Altijd is het afgeladen, vanavond wachten filmnerds en 'gewone' Bolognesi op The Wind, een onbekende film uit 1925. En nu verschijnen naast het filmscherm op de gevel van de middeleeuwse basiliek San Petronio felle letters in laserprojectie: ' Meloni non ci rappresenti', oftewel ' Meloni jij vertegenwoordigt ons niet '.

'Meloni non ci rappresenti'. Piazza Maggiore in Bologna

Foto Joyce Roodnat

Zo doe je dat. Giorgia Meloni en haar ultrarechtse Fratelli d'Italia zijn bezig de kunsten te laten buigen tot ze barsten, door de leiding van gerenommeerde instituties over te dragen aan bekenden, nooit met kennis van zaken, altijd goed rechtsradicaal. Dat moet Bologna niet hebben voor dit festival, vandaar deze actie. Lik niet de hand in de hoop op een aaitje, laat alvast je tanden zien: Giorgia, rot op.

Ook hier is het tijd voor de hooivork, nu de PVV-fractie van de zopas geïnstalleerde regering dreigt met het schrappen van alle kunstsubsidies. De rest van het kabinet verklaart zedig wél de kunst in de regio te willen bevorderen - alsof bewoners van de regio alleen maar koekjes van eigen deeg blieven. Die willen ze ook, en het publiek van buiten wil ze net zo goed. Maar niet alleen. Zie het Terschellinger Oerol-festival, zie Film by the Sea in Vlissingen: reuze regio, reuze gevarieerd. Ze staan in de rij om Georgina Verbaan 24 uur lang 100 keer dezelfde scène te zien spelen, ze zijn trots op hun Jopie Huisman in Workum. Cultuurafwijzers doen alsof het gaat om altijd dezelfde mensen, de 'elite'. Vergissing. Kunstsubsidies belanden aantoonbaar bij brede lagen van de bevolking, desondanks vinden regerende politici ze onzin. En ik vind het dan weer een domme rechtse hobby om de massa kunstminnende landgenoten te behandelen of ze tegen zichzelf beschermd moeten worden. Hoeven ze niet. Wegwezen.

Joyce Roodnat houdt een zomerstop. 11 september is ze terug.

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Joyce Roodnat: Het is tijd voor actie, nu de PVV-fractie van de zopas geïnstalleerde regering dreigt met het schrappen van alle kunstsubsidies. In het Italiaanse Bologna ziet Joyce Roodnat hoe je dat doet: Giorgia Meloni, rot op.

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Is er nog toekomst voor de Romantiek? Afgelopen week stond ik dan eindelijk voor hem, of beter, achter hem, na vele jaren: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer van Caspar David Friedrich. Hij had een eigen wandje gekregen op de grote tentoonstelling die de Hamburger Kunsthalle ter ere van Friedrichs 250ste geboortedag had ingericht. En terecht: wie de Wanderer ziet, begrijpt meteen waarom dit schilderij, deze man, de afgelopen tweehonderd jaar uitgroeide tot hét symbool van de Romantiek. Kijk hem daar staan, op de rug gezien, hoog op zijn berg, linkervoet op de rots, fier uittorenend boven de wolken - een heerser tussen wereld en hemel, los van elke ondermaanse last.

Die superioriteit is ook de reden waarom de Romantiek de westerse kunst bijna tweehonderd jaar wist te domineren: de romanticus houdt ons voor dat je als mens wordt beloond als je een individu durft te zijn. Dat je, zowel als mens als als kunstenaar, in jezelf moet geloven, nieuwe, persoonlijke, authentieke, wegen moet bewandelen, om vervolgens je toeschouwers mee te voeren naar nieuwe verten, nieuwe visies, nieuwe inzichten. De Romantiek viert de mens als goddelijk heerser in een zelfgeschapen universum. En in de Hamburger Kunsthalle werd duidelijk dat die wereldvisie nog steeds véél weerklank vindt. Het was er idioot druk, Vermeer-druk, zo druk dat je je slechts met moeite van het ene schilderij naar het andere kon verplaatsen.

En toch voelde het vreemd. Verloren. Eigenlijk was ik vooral naar Hamburg gegaan om te kijken of ik nog in de Romantiek kon geloven. Heel lang heb ik gedacht dat ik een romanticus in-het-diepst-van-mijn-gedachten was: ik heb altijd enorm gehouden van kunstenaars die op volstrekt eigen en eigenzinnige wijze nieuwe horizonnen, nieuwe vergezichten voor hun toeschouwers openen. Maar de laatste tijd twijfel ik daar vaker aan. Steeds meer heel goede nieuwe kunst wil niks te maken hebben met het individualisme, en zoekt nadrukkelijk verbinding met de maatschappij - nieuwe beelden, nieuwe indrukken, die vaak voorbij mijn eigen horizon liggen, maar daarom niet minder verwarrend of verrijkend zijn. En wat het post-individualisme nog begrijpelijker maakt: waarom zou je het individu willen vieren in een wereld vol van onrust, twijfel, geweld en onrecht, die maakt dat steeds meer mensen verlangen naar geborgenheid, vertrouwen, verbondenheid? Zelfs de grote hedendaagse emancipatiebewegingen waar behoudende mensen zo onrustig van worden, gaan uiteindelijk allemaal over het verlangen opgenomen te worden in het grote geheel.

Groots en goddelijk

De omslag kwam op de grote Kiefer-tentoonstelling, onlangs in Voorlinden. Anselm Kiefer is natuurlijk de ultieme hedendaagse nazaat van de Romantiek, de perfecte achterkleinzoon van Caspar David Friedrichs Wanderer - zie de film Kiefer die Wim Wenders onlangs over hem maakte. Daarin zien we Kiefer als der romantische Radfahrer door zijn gigantische studio fietsen, hoogstpersoonlijk babel-achtige torens optrekken in het landschap, achteloos met enorme kunstwerken schuiven en zijn doeken als een hedendaagse Prometheus met een brander bewerken (zijn vele assistenten worden zorgvuldig buiten beeld gehouden).

Dichter bij wereldse goddelijkheid dan Kiefer kom je niet: hij schiep in de afgelopen vijftig jaar een groots en goddelijk universum, vol machtige kunstwerken van lood en stro en honderden kilo's verf - doeken van zes, acht, tien meter groot, de ene nog overweldigender dan de ander. In die werken converseert hij ook nog eens als vanzelfsprekend met de geschiedenis en met de goden: met de Tweede Wereldoorlog, met de alchemie, met de hemel en de sterren, met Adolf Hitler, Paul Célan en Richard Wagner... Alleen, realiseerde ik me in Voorlinden, niet met mij.

Serie Wereldkunst

In de serie 'Wereldkunst' schrijft kunstcriticus Hans den Hartog Jager maandelijks een beschouwing of polemiek over kunst die hem opvalt. Lees meer afleveringen van Wereldkunst.

Het omslagpunt kwam in de laatste zaal, waar in een vitrine een stapel oude, verroeste fietsen lag, 'geplet' door een zware steen. Misschien kwam het doordat de fietsenstapel me deed denken aan die bergen roestlijken die halfjaarlijks uit de Amsterdamse grachten worden gedregd. Of door een Koot en Bie-achtige ('Do ist der Bahnhof') 'ik wil mijn fiets terug'-associatie (ook godentemmer Kiefer beheerst niet elke ventweg van de geschiedenis). Of door de ronduit pathetische poging oud roest op te blazen tot goddelijke proporties. Maar het probleem zat dieper. Kiefer begon zijn carrière ooit door in gevecht te gaan met de Duitse geschiedenis - in zijn vroegste werk, eind jaren zestig, daagt hij het naoorlogse zwijgen uit door de Hitlergroet te brengen. En op zijn sublieme Innenräumer van tien jaar later toont hij de vernietiging die de oorlog had aangericht, zowel letterlijk, in Duitse huizen en gebouwen, als in de Duitse ziel. Kiefer probeert, in de geest van de Romantiek, grip te krijgen op vernietiging - namens ons, machtelozen, vecht hij met de materie om het onzegbare te materialiseren.

In Voorlinden was dat gevecht weg. Zeker, er hingen nog steeds een aantal indrukwekkende schilderijen die aan de oude, strijdende Kiefer deden denken. Maar wat ik vooral zag was een achteloze, ongeïnteresseerde god, die lukraak scheppingen uitbraakte. Een vitrine vol gestapelde oude rolstoelen. Ronduit amateuristische aquarellen van vrouwen die louter laten zien hoe weinig Kiefer in vrouwen is geïnteresseerd. En fietsen, overal die verdomde fietsen, onder een steen, op doeken gehangen, als dragers van stapels stenen, stro of lood - onmachtige vehikels van een lamgeslagen god. En ineens besefte ik dat je Friedrichs Wanderer evengoed kunt zien als de verbeelding van een mislukking: een man die met veel moeite de berg op is geklommen, op zijn mooie schoenen, met zijn sjieke stok, om daar aangekomen te moeten constateren dat alles in de mist ligt. Niks uitzicht, niks blik op de wereld, niks nieuwe visie - daarom kijkt hij ons natuurlijk ook niet aan. Friedrichs Wanderer is teruggeworpen op de mist van zijn eigen gedachten en een vaag gevoel van kijk-ik-sta-boven-de-mensheid-superioriteit. Opgesloten in zijn eigen wereld. Niet voor niets deed de mystiek van veel van Kiefers Voorlinden-werk me denken aan fantasy-films als The Lord of the Rings of Dune. Escapisme voor eenzame mannen met almachtsfantasieën. Nu, bij Cas-par David Friedrich in Hamburg, voelde ik iets soortgelijks. Anders wel, minder megalomaan, maar nog steeds eenzaam - alsof de cirkel rond was.

Visionair

Daar zat-ie dan, de romanticus in mij. Vermoedelijk ben ik niet de enige die met dit dilemma worstelt. Want nu de Romantiek langzaam aan belang inboet, en we meer afstand krijgen tot de kunst uit het verleden, wordt langzaam óók duidelijk hoe diep dat romantische verlangen in de hedendaagse westerse kunst zit ingebakken. Ik weet nog hoe verbaasd ik was om te zien hoe het op mijn Facebook-tijdlijn (en trouwens ook in de meeste recensies) aanhankelijkheidsbetuigingen regende voor Kiefer. Waarom waren al deze mensen zo enthousiast over een zelfingenomen man die over de hoofden van zijn publiek heen godgelijke waarheden toeterde? Tegelijkertijd begreep ik het ook wel: het waren niet zozeer aanhankelijkheidsbetuigingen aan de kunstenaar Kiefer, maar aan het systeem dat hij vertegenwoordigt. Kiefer staat voor de kunstenaar als visionair, als ijkpunt, als mythisch figuur, die net zo over zijn wereld heerst als Zeus en Judd en Prometheus en Hirst dat altijd hebben gedaan. En laten dat nu ook precies de werelden zijn die tegen de grenzen van hun mogelijkheden aanlopen: werelden waar op het hoofdpodium nooit plaats is voor vrouwen, of voor mensen afkomstig uit een niet-westerse cultuur of voor mensen die er geen Zeus-achtige seksuele moraal op na houden.

En wat misschien nog wel erger is: waar de romantische kunst bij Friedrich en Turner en hun opvolgers juist bestond bij de gratie van de nieuwe verten, de nieuwe perspectieven die ze creëerden, staat het werk van een kunstenaar als Kiefer juist voor behoud. Bij hen is de Romantiek zijn eigen paradox geworden: het aloude idee van de Romantiek houdt de vernieuwing tegen die diezelfde Romantiek altijd nastreefde. Sterker nog: op dit moment vindt de echte vernieuwing juist plaats bij de kunstenaars die van de Romantiek af willen. Kunstenaars die het ego proberen los te laten, die verbinding zoeken met anderen, die onderzoeken hoe je kunst kunt maken, niet door je boven de massa te verheffen, maar door in contact te treden met de wereld. Zoals de Wanderer óók laat zien (een goed kunstwerk laat zich door-interpreteren tot in het oneindige) kun je in de romantische visie twee dingen benadrukken: de man of het landschap. Traditioneel wordt dat meestal de man, omdat we met hem kunnen meekijken, hij ons leidt en optilt en meevoert. Maar waarom zou je niet daadwerkelijk naast de man gaan staan, en samen over nieuwe visies, nieuwe vergezichten fantaseren?

Caspar David Friedrich, Zwei Männer in Betrachtung des Mondes, 1819/20

Foto Elke Estel, SKD/ Albertinum, Galerie Neue Meister

Nieuwe vergezichten, daar gaat het natuurlijk om. Niet om degene die ze vervaardigt. En zowaar, zo is er nog een derde interpretatie van de Wanderer mogelijk. Want wat doet hij eigenlijk nadat hij daar van zijn eeuwige uitzicht heeft staan te genieten? Hij kan daar niet eeuwig blijven staan - nou ja, dat kan wel, maar dan word je dus Anselm Kiefer. Je zou ook kunnen denken dat het veelzeggend is dat Friedrich hem welbewust op een hoogtepunt, het hoogste punt heeft afgebeeld - ooit zal hij zich moeten omdraaien en teruglopen. Die symboliek is óók mooi: wanneer onze Wanderer dat doet, is hij niet langer de onbenaderbare, onbereikbare figuur die ons stug zijn rug toont, maar kijken we hem eindelijk in het gezicht, maken we contact, en kunnen we samen nieuwe wegen gaan ontdekken. Het bezoek aan de top hoeven we daarbij zeker niet te vergeten: dat is voor altijd een sublieme herinnering, die we gewoon met ons mee blijven dragen, die kunstenaars en toeschouwers zelfs kan sterken in hun gezamenlijke ambities. Maar er is ook een nieuwe Wanderer mogelijk. Die confronteert je met het idee dat het soms heel goed is om stil te staan, op de top, en in de verte te staren. En daarna weer verder te gaan - samen. Bergtoppen genoeg.

Caspar David Friedrich: Kunst für eine neue Zeit is nog t/m 1 april te zien in de Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg.

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Het hyperindividualisme van de Romantiek is passé

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Wereldkunst: Waarom hechten we zo aan het individualisme in de kunst? De romantische traditie van Caspar David Friedrich tot Anselm Kiefer heeft zijn langste tijd gehad, vindt Hans den Hartog Jager. In een wereld vol van onrust en twijfel verlangen steeds meer mensen naar geborgenheid, vertrouwen en verbondenheid.

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Paintings by Suzanne Jackson at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnews

If the Whitney Biennial really must reflect the United States as it stands right now, this year it had a particularly tall order.

The show had to deal with growing discontent surrounding war abroad, particularly in Gaza, and it also had to portray mounting anger at home, where conservative-led legislatures and the pandemic have threatened the lives of many Americans. And that's not to mention that the country is at a crucial inflection point, with a presidential election coming in November.

But rather than taking up any of that, curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli have veered in a different direction. Their exhibition, which opens to the public on March 20, is light on loud, explicit political statements and heavy on conceptual art about bodies in flux. It's the most challenging Whitney Biennial in several editions, and also the best since 2017.

Iles and Onli's show, titled "Even Better Than the Real Thing," marks a turn away from the opulence of the past couple Whitney Biennials, which privileged lush art, sometimes to a fault. A number of works here even revisit Minimalism, a movement that rejected visual pleasure in favor of flinty industrial forms arranged neatly into rows and grids.

Charisse Pearlina Weston is showing a sculpture formed from semi-translucent smoked glass sheets that tilt downward and hang above viewers' heads. The sculpture, with a lengthy title that is just about as inscrutable as the object itself, contains a secret: its elements were borrowed from Weston's 2022 show at the Queens Museum, where a bigger version of these glass plates obstructed the entryway to a gallery. Here, this new work-called un- (anterior ellipse[s] as mangled container; or where edges meet to wedge and [ un]moor), and styled in that way, with irregular italicization and spacing-blocks a wall, much the same way Minimalists cut off parts of white cubes with their spare objects.

Charisse Pearlina Weston, un- (anterior ellipse[s] as mangled container; or where edges meet to wedge and [un]moor), 2024.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnews

The work finds an analog in Carolyn Lazard's Toilette (2024), a group of ready-made medicine cabinets that encase Vaseline instead of drugs. Arranged on the floor back-to-back, these cabinets are evocative of Donald Judd's steely stacks. Yet Lazard's work, sleek as it may be, is anything but clinical-it suggests a human touch via the inclusion of lubricant. In these works, Weston and Lazard have literally given Minimalism a second life.

Many works in this biennial are clean, largely colorless, and slick. There are Jes Fan's elegant sculptures, for which his spine, leg muscles, and innards were CAT scanned and 3D-printed, with the latter being embedded in the wall and barely visible; these abstracted parts are supplemented with oozy-looking glass elements draped across them. There are Harmony Hammond's cryptic paintings, which are formed from reused fabrics that suggest bandages concealing mostly healed wounds. Peek around these white strips, and you may even spot a glimpse of blazing red paint.

Works by Harmony Hammond at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnews

Running through a central stairwell many visitors will use, there is Holland Andrews's Air I Breathe: Radio (2024), a sound piece composed of echoing caws and booming hums. These sounds are sometimes transcendent and other times strange-Andrews made them by manipulating their voice using an effects processor. The sounds come from a series of speakers that hang in the middle of the staircase (a related work also plays in the museum's publicly accessible freight elevator). Seen from above, those speakers look a bit like a spine's vertebrae.

This Whitney Biennial seems to presage a new kind of body art, albeit one that is quite different from the strain seen in the 1960s and '70s, when artists-particularly women artists-created their work using their arms, legs, and genitals. The goal back then was to show that an artist's body cannot be divorced from their work. That now appears to be the objective once more.

But now, those arms, legs, and genitals have dissolved entirely, fading away into architectural forms, fabrics, and everyday objects that merely resemble body parts. Perhaps this is all a response to the gradual paring back of bodily autonomy in this country-the unraveling of Roe v. Wade, a flotilla of anti-trans bills. Then again, these artworks are deliberately evasive, and their makers do not seem much interested in timeliness. Theirs is a kind of bodiless body art that channels alternate corporeal states without ever directly representing them.

Works by B. Ingrid Olson at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnews

It's not that these artists have sought to vanquish the body from art-making-quite the opposite. Take one gorgeous sculpture from 2021 by Karyn Olivier composed of found buoys suspended above a tangle of multicolored ropes. The work's title is How Many Ways Can You Disappear, the suggestion being that, while many bodies have fallen prey to the watery depths of the ocean, traces of their presences always linger behind.

Bodies without bodies, frames without artworks, architecture without purpose: these all recur in a show of ironies and contradictions. The paradoxes are meant to be deliberately frustrating, nowhere more so than in Nikita Gale's TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME), 2023-24, an installation that contains an unvarnished piano that plays on its own accord. Gale has rigged this instrument so that it cannot make any noise, however-the only audible music is the repeated clickety-clack of the keys moving against one another. Meanwhile, the lighting turns up and down dramatically, expectantly awaiting a musician who will never arrive.

Works like TEMPO RUBATO decline to perform to the viewer's liking. In doing so, they refuse their viewers' gaze, mirroring an unwillingness by many artists here to participate in structures that seek to oppress them. It does not seem like a coincidence that Iles and Onli have loaded this Whitney Biennial with Black and trans artists.

Paintings by Mavis Pusey at the 2024 Whitney Biennial.Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnews

If there is a key to unlocking this mysterious, tough exhibition, it may be the paintings of Mavis Pusey, a Jamaican-born artist who spent a significant chunk of her career in Chelsea, not far from the Whitney. During the '70s, Pusey, the only dead artist in the Whitney Biennial's main section, painted shutters, boards, and window frames that smash against one another. While apertures are frequently represented, it is impossible to see through them-Pusey typically depicts what's held within as a block of muted color. These works tempt viewers with the possibility that desolation may be revealed, only to deny viewers access to the world that Pusey envisions.

There is, of course, an entire universe beyond the US that typically goes unrepresented in most Whitney Biennials. That is once again the case in this show, which contains no explicit references to Israel's war in Gaza, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the crisis in the Congo, and the conflict in Sudan. With the exception of Demian DinéYazhi's sculpture that includes the word "genocide" and a memorable Diane Severin Nguyen video about reenactments of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, there's not much about global strife at all.

But it seems unfair to ding the show for that lacuna, since it feels like a conscious choice on the part of many of the show's participants who were born abroad. Unlike some of the homegrown talents more inclined toward minimalism, these artists tend to represent traumas both past and present through decadence rather than disturbance.

Maja Ruznic, a New Mexico-based painter, recalls her time spent in an Austrian refugee camp after her family's flight from war-torn Bosnia in Deep Calls to Deep (2023), a transcendent image of a solitary figure lost in a sea of green. Chilean artist Seba Calfuqueo channels her Mapuche heritage with TRAY TRAY KO (2022), a video in which she traipses around a verdant forest while dragging a long blue sheet of fabric; the iridescent garment seems to bend alongside a river and caress the dirt beneath, which Chilean loggers have sought to abuse for their own purposes. Santo Domingo-born choreographer Ligia Lewis's revisits a 1521 revolt by enslaved people in the Dominican Republic in A Plot, A Scandal (2023), a video that culminates in the artist ecstatically dancing, crossing herself, sticking out her tongue, and flailing around in a moment of pure liberation.

In a handful of cases, the art here is itself freed from having to remain fixed and permanent. One of the few showstopping moments in a largely sedate exhibition comes courtesy of Suzanne Jackson, an octogenarian painter at the top of her game. She's presenting a group of abstractions that are mounted to the ceiling and walls by hooks. Done using acrylic set within gel, these paintings are speckled with refuse-trashed mesh, pistachio shells, shredded mail, and more. Done using a technique that she has called "acrylic on acrylic," these paintings are like flayed skins that have been slathered in color; they will sag over the course of the show's run, essentially aging in real time.

Certain works are intentionally unfinished. A wall has been set aside for a work by JJJJJerome Ellis, who will write a musical score that will be scrawled here as the show progresses. At press time, the wall was entirely blank. Meanwhile, an entire gallery has been awarded to works by Lotus L. Kang, who has unfurled large sheets of unfixed photographic film that will continue to develop as times goes on. Today, their surfaces are apricot-like shades of orange; next week, they may turn a very different hue; in a hundred years, perhaps they will be completely white.

Work by Lotus L. Kang at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnews

And, abutting a sun-splashed window, there is Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio's Paloma Blanca Deja Volar / White Dove Let Us Fly (2024), an imposing hunk of amber that contains within it documents related to the activities of white activists in New York and Los Angeles, the artist's hometown. As light continues to hit this work, the documents contained within will move about-heat will place pressure upon the texts explaining the white activists' views, and so will critical eyes seeking to read these words. Meanwhile, the amber will transform, changing shape across the next few months. When I walked by, shards of the stuff had already hit the floor, where they were crunched beneath the feet of passersby.

Now for the big question: What's any of this got to say about America? First, that American history is hardly set in stone-its contents are likely to shift as they are disturbed, as is the case with Aparicio's sculpture. Second, that the core tenets of the nation's culture-those recognizably American things such as the Founding Fathers and the Statue of Liberty-do not hold much relevancy for a generation that is mostly disinterested in them.

This unpatriotic note is noisily sounded by Kiyan Williams's sculpture Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master's House (2024), an earthen depiction of the north section of the White House that appears to sink into an outdoor balcony. (An aluminum sculpture of the Black trans activist Marsha P. Johnson, also by Williams, gleefully looks on.) The Williams piece stands out in this sober show for its lack of subtlety and for its engagement with a distinctly American subject. Right now, it is one of the show's rare misses, but as the work is exposed to the elements, it will likely transform into something much less obvious.

I much preferred the tattered, knotted American flag that appears in a Ser Serpas installation on the ground floor that is filled with garbage. The flag rests here on a disused piece of a sectional relegated to the corner-which is perhaps where the Stars and Stripes belongs during these depressing times. Nearby, there are barbells, a fire hydrant tipped on its side, half a broken mirror, and an exercise ball trapped in a tent armature.

The Serpas installation, with all its tossed-off matter, looks a bit like the aftermath of a night of debauchery. In the context of this biennial, it also functions like an elegy for a celebratory moment post-lockdown when a state of normalcy had somewhat returned. It has finally come to an end. The party's over, but it sure was fun while it lasted.

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A Blazing, Brilliant Whitney Biennial Heralds a New Kind of Body Art

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The 2024 Whitney Biennial is blazing and brilliant, heralding a new kind of body art through lots of conceptual work.

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Dit ook. Dit is levend en steeds completer wordend wat mij betreft.  Heel vrij. 

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Dit ook. Dit is levend en steeds completer wordend wat mij betreft.  Heel vrij. 

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If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA's collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

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'I use very mundane materials to really push at that quesion of how you imbue value in inanimate objects' 

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'I use very mundane materials to really push at that quesion of how you imbue value in inanimate objects' 

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re Jessica Stockmaker

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Sarah Sze: Emotional Time | Art21 "Extended Play"

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Sarah Sze: Improvisation | Art21 "Extended Play"

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Ik probeer te begrijpen waarom ik denk dat dit is wat het moet zijn. 

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Ik probeer te begrijpen waarom ik denk dat dit is wat het moet zijn. 

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Not all creative pursuits have benevolent outcomes. Here are the psychological factors that fuel ... [+]
getty

"Dark creativity" involves the generation of ideas or creative expression that is considered morally questionable, ethically ambiguous or harmful. Researchers of a 2022 study describe it as "using original thought to meet a selfish, negative or evil goal, with or without the deliberate intent to harm others."

Researchers highlighted the potential causes and consequences of the intentional use of dark creativity. For instance, the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is at the center of ethical debates and security discussions and the deployment of AI for fraudulent activities is alarming, with scammers and cybercriminals leveraging sophisticated algorithms to deceive unsuspecting individuals and organizations, prompting a deeper examination into the psychological underpinnings of this phenomenon.

Here are three psychological factors motivating dark creative pursuits, according to the study.

1. Psychological Desires

Dark creativity is driven by various psychological needs, including:

The need for power. The need for power can spark dark creativity in individuals who prioritize achievement and dominance at the expense of ethical considerations and social relationships. This can manifest in creative strategies aimed at subverting or manipulating one's competition to achieve self-serving goals or destabilize existing power hierarchies. "An example might be the treasurer of a local organization who longs to be president. Perhaps they concoct a negative rumor about the current leadership to get the president to resign so they can take over. Under conditions of unstable power, persons in low power positions tend to be more creative than those with higher power," explain the researchers.

The need for resources. The pursuit of wealth or tangible resources can drive individuals to enact novel solutions to accumulate these rewards. When resources are scarce and competition is fierce, the urgency to alleviate economic pressures or sustain a particular lifestyle and social status may also drive the use of dark creativity to maintain appearances. Individuals often rationalize unethical behavior as self-preservation, where the ends justify the means. Citing an infamous example of embezzlement, the researchers write, "Edith Chase siphoned off funds from her employer and remained undetected for eight years, tricking the company into paying for her loans taken against her pension account through creative bookkeeping."

Hedonism. Hedonism-the pursuit of pleasure and self-indulgence-can inspire individuals to explore unconventional and morally questionable avenues for personal enjoyment, where they prioritize immediate gratification over ethical considerations. For example, individuals may create and promote substances solely for hedonistic pleasure, such as designer drugs and potent recreational substances without regard for health or safety. Additionally, the pursuit of sadistic pleasure, derived from the suffering of others, can also motivate individuals to use dark creativity to provoke, harass or harm individuals in virtual spaces.

2. Personality Traits

The "dark triad" of personality includes the traits of psychopathy, narcissism and machiavellianism. Research shows that individuals with psychopathic and machiavellian traits exhibit negative or harm-based creativity. These traits, marked by a lack of empathy, manipulative tendencies and a willingness to exploit others, concoct creative ideas that involve deception, gaslighting and coercion to achieve personal goals.

Researchers suggest that socio-emotional skills such as the ability to identify and manage emotions, navigate social situations and intuit social norms can also be employed to manipulate others for personal gain. Highlighting the troubling case of Ted Bundy, the authors write, "this organized and calculating serial killer often lured women by pretending to have his arm in a sling and requesting help in carrying something into his vehicle."

Unsurprisingly, malevolent forms of creativity are also associated with physical aggression, impulsive behavior and episodes of anger.

3. Cognitive Processes

The cognitive processes powering dark creativity involve a unique interplay of divergent thinking-the ability to connect seemingly unrelated concepts-and a willingness to explore unconventional ideas for deceptive or exploitative endeavors.

The researchers write, "a certain level of intellect is required to conceive of and successfully implement dark and original ideas. Action-relevant knowledge for dark creativity may include knowing how to hack into a database or manipulate someone's emotions," highlighting how without relevant knowledge and skill sets, creativity is stifled.

Additionally, an individual's belief systems, such as strongly prejudiced beliefs towards certain social groups, can guide creative misbehavior. Individuals may justify this harm by morally detaching from the consequences of their actions.

Researchers suggest that psychological factors combined with environmental assets, such as access to material and social resources, enable dark creativity.

"For instance, the invention and sustained use of nail bombs and other IEDs only require easy-to-access household components and basic technical know-how. Just as creators can use material goods to attain their goals, they can also leverage social circles, from mentors to audiences to peers, one's family, neighborhood, country or more," the researchers explain.

Dark creativity is an aspect of human expression that warrants careful examination. By understanding the psychological complexities, societal implications and ethical considerations surrounding this phenomenon, we can foster a more conscientious approach to creativity by striking a balance between the exploration of unconventional ideas and the responsibility that comes with creative liberty.
Do you have the proclivity to derive pleasure from others' pain? Take this personality assessment to know more: Sadism Scale

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A Psychologist Breaks Down The Phenomenon Of 'Dark Creativity'

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Not all creative pursuits have benevolent outcomes. Here are the psychological factors that fuel dark creativity.

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Our family dress-up box lived at the bottom of the wardrobe in the room my sister and I shared until we were eight and 10. For two little girls who grew up reading Enid Blyton, that box contained multitudes of worlds to visit and characters to become.

A red skirt with ruffles was good for both matador and flamenco dancer. An old layered petticoat made the perfect Little Bo Peep. Eighties prom dresses became ballgowns, long black capes transformed us into pirates and witches. The box had tiaras, bonnets, berets and fedoras; long beaded necklaces, plaited leather belts, suspenders, glasses, waistcoats and wings. Occasionally our younger brothers could be persuaded into sequined tutus.

Sadly, Halloween spending spikes around the world reflect the availability of cheap, one-off costumes and suggest the days of the flexible dress up box are behind us.

Buying a new costume for every dress-up occasion wastes a lot of money in a cost-of-living crisis and creates a lot of plastic waste in an environmental one. But growing up, half the fun of playing dress ups was emptying the entire box on to the floor and conjuring a character from the pile - and it's possible to replicate the same joy as adults. Here, three stylists provide advice on how to go about building an old-school dress-up box for grownups.

'Dishwashing gloves make everything scary'

Protective gloves: scary in most contexts. Photograph: theLIME/Alamy

Maria Pattison, a film industry costume designer, says dressing up is all about context. "Sometimes the ordinary delivered in a weird way can be the most effective," she says. "Like matching blue dresses in The Shining, or a robe from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or a tennis outfit splashed with fake blood."

Start by filling your dress-up box with character pieces: statement shirts, outlandish dresses and bright dressing gowns and jackets. Then build it up with other useful items such as tight black clothing that can be worn as a base layer, makeup supplies or non-toxic face paint, and stuffing or foam that can be used to morph shapes.

"Things like helmets and umbrellas make for effective bases to head pieces. While dishwashing gloves and gumboots have the potential to make everything scary."

For Pattison, when you're dressing up, more is more. Glasses and other disguising elements can do a lot of the legwork, she says. Accessories like sunglasses, goggles, caps, hats, bags and belts can help to sell a character.

"Imagination and creativity are like muscles," she says. "They foster our ability to adapt, they help us to overcome some of the most challenging things we experience. We all need to find time for play and imagination, especially right now."

'Just staple them together'

When the stylist Stuart Walford makes a costume, he collects a few images of the character first so he can return to them as reference points as he goes. Then he gathers "the building blocks". These are usually things of substance like a hat, a large piece of fabric, or a shoe that can be transformed with a bit of craft (and a hot glue gun).

"I think a lot of people assume that you have to have pattern making or fashion knowledge to be able to make a garment," he says. "But actually, by draping fabric on your body and using other accessories to help it stay, you can make totally new silhouettes."

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He describes bed sheets as really helpful. "I just staple them together to make sort of pleats and folds. You can belt a sheet over your waist and then pull it up so it becomes a skirt," he says. In these moments he always keeps safety pins, bulldog clips and a micro stitch gun on hand.

He suggests viewing items such as hats as a base to build on. For example, you can use things from around the house, like cardboard stapled into a cone, to turn it into a witch or wizard's hat.

A pointy shoe with a sling back can be another good building block. "Then you can start cutting up cereal boxes or old wrapping paper tubes to create structures that can sit over the shoe and fabricate the shape you want," he says.

'A colander makes a fabulous helmet'

"Having a costume box full of fabulous clothes and accessories encourages kids and adults to use their creativity more," says Polly Filla, a drag performer and costume creator. "A fur wrap can become a lion's mane or a king's cape. An old formal dress can become a princess gown."

Polly Filla: 'We used a fancy dressing gown cord with tassel ends a lot!'

They suggest starting at your local op shop or thrift store and looking for anything made from sparkly fabrics like sequins and lamé. "Pieces of black or glitzy fabrics can become scarves, pirate's bandanas or belts," they say. "We used a fancy dressing gown cord with tassel ends a lot!"

A good thrift store should have a collection of old glasses, hats, wigs, handbags and gloves that can be used to give detail to a character. And when all else fails, a bit of imagination can make all the difference. Case in point: "A colander makes a fabulous helmet and five-year-old me was always partial to doing fencing [while] holding a sieve over my face."

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Stuffing, staples and sequins: how to assemble a grownups' costume box

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In childhood a dress-up box can be the starting point for endless adventures. As an adult, it can save money, stop waste and offer a chance to play

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'De zomer is nu zowat voorbij en 't was niet eens erg warm. Toch ben ik uitgeput, erger dan ooit in de tropen, doe niets liever dan hangen en neervallen op stoel of bed', schreef Jan Jacob Slauerhoff in 1934 vanuit Tanger aan een vriend, de schrijver F.C. Terborgh. 'Het derde en voornaamste is 't gemis van een levensgezellin. Dan zou 't nog wel uit zijn te houden.'

J. Slauerhoff: Logboek Slauerhoff. Dagboeken en reisverhalen. Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 289 blz. € 29,99

Het was de eerste en enige keer dat dichter-schrijver-scheepsarts Slauerhoff (1898-1936) een poging deed zich te vestigen. Na tien jaar over de wereld te hebben gereisd, opende hij een praktijk als huisarts in Tanger. Met uitzicht op de Straat van Gibraltar voltooide hij er Het leven op aarde, zijn tweede China-roman na Het verboden rijk (1932). Maar zijn praktijk kwakkelde, de zeemist irriteerde zijn zwakke longen en zijn vrouw weigerde er te komen wonen; hun huwelijk liep na vijf jaar sowieso op zijn laatste benen. Al na een paar maanden vertrok hij er, 'tijdelijk', zei hij, maar hij keerde er nooit terug.

Wat dreef hem ertoe om altijd weer onder het mom van noodzaak of onvermijdelijkheid de slechtste oplossing te kiezen, vroeg Terborgh zich later af over Slauerhoffs besluit zich uitgerekend in Tanger 'een burgerbestaan te scheppen'? Zelfkastijding? Freudiaanse Fehlleistung: 'de geheime wens zich van meet af aan de mogelijkheid open te houden er op terug te komen en een nieuwe reden te hebben voor een nieuw, even onbevredigend besluit'?

Misschien moest hij in Lissabon of Valencia gaan wonen, opperde Slauerhoff nog. Of consul worden in Latijns-Amerika. Maar hij maakte nergens echt werk van. Hij koos opnieuw voor het bestaan als scheepsarts. Dat verzekerde hem van een goed inkomen, maar de wisselende contracten bij Nederlandse rederijen lijken ook bedoeld om juist geen vaste grond onder te voet te hebben. Als scheepsarts leidde hij een bestaan als zoveel van zijn personages. Versterveling zijn ze wel genoemd: een vrijwillig uitgestotene die liefde, rust en wijsheid tegelijkertijd zoekt en ontloopt.

Na Tanger zou hij nog twee reizen als arts maken: een naar het Caraïbisch gebied en Midden-Amerika, en een naar Afrika. Op die laatste reis zou hij malaria oplopen die zijn door astma en tbc beschadigde gezondheid verder ondermijnde. Zijn laatste dichtbundel was net uit en heette Een eerlijk zeemansgraf. Hij stierf op 38-jarige leeftijd in een verzorgingstehuis in Hilversum.

Behalve poëzie ('Alleen in mijn gedichten kan ik wonen'), proza, een toneelstuk en brieven - in 2016 verzameld onder de titel Een varend eiland - schreef Slauerhoff ook dagboeken en reisverslagen. Van die laatste twee zijn al veel fragmenten bekend, onder meer uit Wim Hazeu's Slauerhoff-biografie (1995, uitgebreid in 2018). Nu verschijnen ze voor het eerst in hun geheel samen als Logboek Slauerhoff, samengesteld door Hein Aalders en Menno Voskuil, die ook nieuwe edities bezorgden van Slauerhoffs Verzamelde gedichten (2018) en diens Verzameld proza (2020).

Vlerkprauw, pagaaien

Alsof je het deksel van zijn zeemanskist opent, zo voert dit boek je Slauerhoffs varende leven binnen. Met reportages en 'reisbrieven', dagboekaantekeningen, soms uitgebreid en precies, soms alleen in trefwoorden met de kracht van een haiku: '3 november. Vlerkprauw, pagaaien. No 1 dronken, K. dronken' ('nummer één' is de eerste stuurman). Met Slauerhoffs eigen foto's van stoomschepen en jonken, eilanden en kusten, van bevriende schrijvers, vriendinnen en geliefdes, Chinezen met vlecht, Indiërs in lendendoek en Europeanen die dekgolf spelen. Portretten in donker uniform en wit tropentenue, gedichten in klad, een conduitestaat met stempels, kaarten met zeeroutes, en treffende passages uit de brieven.

Ansichtkaart van het Astor Hotel in Shanghai uit Slauerhoffs collectie. Hij bezocht die stad voor het eerst in 1926.

Foto Literatuurmuseum Den Haag

Het is de vervlogen scheepvaart tussen Nederlands-Indië, Macao, Hongkong, havens en nu onder hoogbouw bedolven steden in Japan en noord-China. De 'koelieboten' die contractarbeiders vervoerden en de 'lijkenhalers' die overzee gestorven Chinezen in het ruim opeengestapeld terugbrachten voor een begrafenis thuis, het nog steeds onrustige China van net na de burgeroorlog. Opiumkitten, bordelen en de charleston dansen in balzaaltjes in Singapore of Shanghai, de stegen, kroegen en kerkhoven waar hij zijn personages tegenkwam.

En het voert je naar de lijndiensten voor passagiers tussen Europa en 'de Oost' en 'de West', uit de tijd van voor het vliegtuig - van arme maar energieke emigranten tot de mannen en vrouwen uit de eerste klasse, die zich steeds meer vervelen naarmate de reis vordert en die in Slauerhoffs ogen veelal verwende 'parvenuen' zijn, met wie hij geen medelijden heeft als ze zeeziek worden.

Strotafsnijding

Over zijn werk als scheepsarts kom je niet alles te weten, maar een paar doorkijkjes in zijn werk als arts liegen er niet om. 'Welke specialistische vrouwenarts verrichtte wel eens een [verlossing] met losgelaten placenta, uitgezakte navelstreng, opgeslagen arm in een nauwe scheepskooi op een slingerend schip?' schrijft hij. En daarna: 'Een kleine kist aan een slingerend touw, one two three, in the name of the Lord.' Of: 'Twee passagiers werden krankzinnig, een pleegde zelfmoord door strotafsnijding + slokdarm, ontzettend bloedbad. Ik heb hem toch nog in leven gehouden.'

Op zo'n schip van de lang-verdwenen Vereenigde Nederlandsche Scheepvaartmaatschappij of de Hollandsche Lloyd heeft de arts een bijzondere status. Hij hoort bij de officieren en valt rechtstreeks onder de kapitein, maar heeft geen idee hoe je het schip van A naar B zou moeten navigeren. En hij heeft gestudeerd, hoort tot een andere sociale klasse. Hij is er voor het welzijn van de passagiers, wordt geacht mee te eten in de eersteklas, mee te doen aan spelletjes, dansen.

De andere officieren vinden Slauerhoff vreemd, met zijn neiging om steeds zo lang mogelijk aan wal te zijn en zich terug te trekken in zijn hut. Hij spreekt Spaans en Portugees, een beetje Arabisch, leest poëzie. De lagere rangen mogen hem; hij begrijpt de 'kwade gevolgen van een avond aan de wal' als geen ander. Maar eigenlijk hoort hij bij niemand; hij is zelf dat 'varende eiland'.

Aantrekkingskracht

Zijn - in Terborghs woorden - 'onmiddellijk veroverende houterige wellevendheid' heeft grote aantrekkingskracht op vrouwen. Hij kan niet zonder en zij zijn er altijd, overal. In dit boek raak je de tel kwijt, en hijzelf soms ook, krijg je de indruk. Een ' senhora Pereira', ' mademoiselle Fraga' en een 'Suzanne' zoeken op dezelfde reis zijn belangstelling, al doet het dagboek niet aan wederhoor. Terwijl 'Madame Rampon zich aanbiedt onder voorwendsel van auscultatie [onderzoek met stethoscoop]'. Zelf begint hij iets met de wispelturige Natasja, maar is opgelucht als ze van boord gaat.

Slauerhoffs waarnemingen zijn soms bordkartonnige land- en volkenkunde ('Zoals de Marker visser de nationale figuur van Holland heet, is de gaucho het van Argentinië'), wat niet zo verwonderlijk is omdat hij veel verslagen schreef voor krantenlezers in de provincie die nooit in een buitenland kwamen. Maar in de dagboeken schrijft hij scherp over de koloniale erfenis van Spanjaarden en Britten (aan wie hij een pesthekel heeft). Ook over Nederlanders is hij meedogenloos: 'Alle bezitters in Indië en Oost-Azië zijn van een stompzinnige arrogantie die doet wenschen dat de Russische sikkel eenmaal door deze rotte aren varen zal.' Overigens was hij geen communist.

De opkomst van het nazisme ontgaat hem niet: in Tanger ziet hij steeds meer gevluchte Joden. Op een bootreis in 1933 voert hij een Duitser op die grammofoonplaten met Hitlers toespraken draait, om er aan vast te knopen dat men 'tot in Afrika kan constateren wat altijd weer het Duitse volk als een kudde doet afdwalen: [...] een surplus aan dweepzucht en een even groot tekort aan kritisch onderscheidingsvermogen'.

Dit boek laat je meevaren met Slauerhoff in een voorgoed verdwenen wereld. Het is ook een goudmijn aan scènes en personages die als het ware generale repetitie houden voor gedichten of verhalen. Met de samenstellers, die Slauerhoffs werk als geen ander kennen, als - niet opdringerige - gids. Een voorbeeld. Bij het Braziliaanse gevangeniseiland Fernando de Noronha, met een kale rots die de 'de vinger Gods' heet, speculeert hij in zijn dagboek dat er 'een banneling kwam overzwemmen', wat later tot een wonderschoon gedicht leidt over ballingschap en verlatenheid, en niet alleen van die arme gevangenen.

Correctie (15 december 2023): In het fotobijschrift bij de ansichtkaart van het Astor-hotel in Shanghai (uit 1916) is toegevoegd dat Slauerhoff die stad in 1926 voor het eerst bezocht. In de papieren editie stond onder de groepsfoto de naam van Slauerhoffs rederij verkeerd vermeld. Die moet zijn: Java-China-Japan Lijn.

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Meevaren met Slauerhoff in een voorgoed verdwenen wereld

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Reisverslagen: De dagboeken van J. Slauerhoff zijn een goudmijn aan scènes, decors of personages die als het ware generale repetitie houden voor zijn gedichten of verhalen.

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Filmfestival IDFA bracht er drie persverklaringen over uit in drie dagen. De Museumvereniging zette een steunbetuiging op haar site waarin ze oproept tot een staakt-het-vuren, maar weinig musea doen hetzelfde. Theaters twijfelen of ze ruimte willen geven aan het nieuwe initiatief 'Theater voor Gaza'.

Dat culturele instellingen het moeilijk vinden om zich te verhouden tot de oorlog tussen Israël en Hamas, is een understatement, blijkt uit gesprekken die NRC met directeuren en programmamakers voerde. Ze klinken behoedzaam, gevoelig, zoekend. Overal waar kunst en maatschappelijk debat samenkomen - theater, musea, film - vragen medewerkers en makers hen om betrokkenheid te tonen. Maar in dit complexe, bloedige conflict kan elk standpunt tot polarisatie leiden, en kan zelfs zwijgen worden opgevat als een politieke keuze. De Gaza-oorlog stelt culturele instellingen voor een basale vraag: waarom ze eigenlijk bestaan.

Afgelopen vrijdagochtend, na een doorwaakte nacht en een uurtje slaap, had de Haagse theaterdirecteur Cees Debets het gevoel dat hij een antwoord had gevonden. „Ik vind dat theater de plek moet zijn waar je bijeenkomt. Waar je enorm van mening mag verschillen, en waar je weet dat dat mag."

Debets, directeur bij Het Nationale Theater, had die nacht het Theater aan het Spui opengesteld voor de 'Slaapstaking' waarmee theatermaker Laura van Dolron aandacht wilde vragen voor de oorlog in Gaza. Debets had extra bewaking geregeld, maar die was niet nodig. „De nacht is mild", zegt hij. „Zo'n evenement heeft een hoog hippie-gehalte, dat realiseer ik me."

Aan het begin van de avond had Debets kaarsen aangestoken, die waren opgebrand toen de ochtend kwam. Nadat Van Dolron voor de 45 bezoekers haar monoloog had voorgelezen over de pro-Palestijnse activist Rachel Corrie, die in 2003 in de Gazastrook werd overreden door een bulldozer, was het eerst lang stil geweest. „Niemand durfde te klappen, want iedereen voelde: we hebben toch de hele nacht." Daarna was er gesproken, onder meer door de Palestijnse theatermaker Ibrahim Mousa, door een Nederlandse dominee, door barpersoneel dat spontaan het woord nam.

Ik vind dat theater de plek moet zijn waar je enorm van mening mag verschillen

Hoewel de nadruk lag op Gaza, was er ook aandacht voor Israëlische slachtoffers, zegt Debets. „Het was geen competitie in leed." Er zijn „heel heftige verhalen" verteld, en hij voelde dat die nacht verbinding had gebracht. „Een kunstenaar moet op het podium ongemakkelijke en soms onveilige onderwerpen aansnijden. De theaterdirecteur moet een zo veilig mogelijke omgeving creëren om met het publiek dat onveilige gesprek aan te gaan."

Politieke standpunten

Ruimte bieden voor emoties en debat, zonder een politiek standpunt in te nemen. Dat is wat de meeste culturele instellingen en organisaties lijken na te streven rond de Gaza-oorlog. Maar dat botst als makers juist uitgesproken politieke standpunten aanhangen en die, vanuit hun maatschappelijke motivatie als kunstenaar, ook uitdragen.

Het documentaire-filmfestival IDFA, dat van 8 tot 19 november werd gehouden in Amsterdam, wist dat conflict niet te vermijden. Directeur Orwa Nyrabia bood op de openingsavond ruimte aan demonstranten van de actiegroep Workers for Palestine, die een spandoek meevoerden met de als antisemitisch beschouwde leus 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free'. Nyrabia had geapplaudiseerd.

Dat viel slecht. Nyrabia schreef in een persverklaring dat hij de leus niet had gezien, en excuseerde zich. Vervolgens werden Nyrabia's excuses opnieuw als een politiek standpunt uitgelegd, maar nu door filmmakers die zich solidair voelden met de Palestijnen. Circa vijftien makers trokken zich terug van het festival.

Uiteindelijk lukte het IDFA om de zaak te sussen met een verklaring dat het festival wil dat „iedereen zich welkom en veilig voelt" en waarin het censuur afwijst. Vrijdag kondigde het bovendien aan een symposium te gaan organiseren over „de rol en verantwoordelijkheid van filmfestivals en culturele instellingen in tijden van wereldwijde crisis".

Ongelofelijk ingewikkeld

De lijn tussen solidariteit en partijdigheid is dun, ondervinden IDFA en andere culturele instellingen. Ook Pepijn Kuyper, directeur van de drie Amsterdamse culturele centra De Rode Hoed, Felix Meritis en De Nieuwe Liefde, voelt dat zijn organisatie (samen de Amerpodia) zich niet afzijdig kan houden - maar noemt dat „ongelofelijk ingewikkeld".

„We zijn programma's aan het ontwikkelen, maar we willen geen partij kiezen." Wat dat des te lastiger maakt, zegt hij, is dat hij medewerkers heeft met diverse achtergronden. „Dat is superinteressant en ik ben er heel trots op. Er zijn ook mensen met een moslimachtergrond bij. Daar leeft het heel erg, en er is ook verdriet." Zelf voelt hij sterk de behoefte om iets met de kwestie te doen, om op te staan, zegt hij. „Dat klinkt abstract. Want wat dan?"

Felix Meritis organiseert aanstaande vrijdag een eerste evenement: 'Solidarity Through Art: Palestinian Stories'. Een verklaring verwijst naar „de verwoesting en het onmetelijk menselijke lijden dat uit de hevige bombardementen tegen onschuldige mensen in Gaza voortvloeit", en roept op tot een staakt-het-vuren en het vrijlaten van alle gijzelaars.

Het evenement, waar de film The Story of an Olive Tree in a Whirlpool (Mohammad Abou Chair, 2022) vertoond zal worden, wil „verschillende verhalen uitlichten over de Palestijnse gemeenschap en hun vrijheidsstrijd". Als illustratie is een vrouw met hoofddoek getekend die oprijst uit een gebouw dat in puin ligt. Er zullen donaties voor de Palestijnse zaak worden opgehaald.

Gevraagd of dat alles wel bijdraagt aan neutraliteit en verbinding, is Kuyper even stil. „Ja, dat vind ik wel, maar dat is het moeilijke. Je wilt goed doen waar het maar kan. Tegelijkertijd kunnen we dan al gauw de suggestie wekken dat we aan een bepaalde kant staan."

Dit evenement is pas het eerste in een reeks, zegt hij. De drie podia gaan in allerlei programma's, van film tot debat en muziek, ruimte bieden aan verbinding, verdriet en dialoog; de Rode Hoed komt met een inhoudelijk programma over de context en impact van de Gaza-oorlog. „We willen echt breed kijken en bevragen."

Ook kunstenaars en sommige medewerkers roepen het museum op om stelling te nemen

Geen verantwoordelijkheid

Bij een ander deel van de culturele instellingen leidt die twijfel tot de keuze om zich helemaal niet uit te spreken over Gaza en Israël. Het Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam kiest daar bewust voor, vertelt directeur Rein Wolfs. „Het is een complex conflict dat enorm historisch belast is, en waarbij alles wat naar buiten gebracht wordt heel sterk gepolariseerd wordt. Daar willen wij geen verantwoordelijkheid voor nemen."

Het Stedelijk Museum was een van de drie musea aan het Museumplein die op 4 november in de Museumnacht beklad werden met rode verf, een actie die werd opgeëist door Workers for Palestine, dezelfde actiegroep die ook bij IDFA demonstreerde. Ook kunstenaars en sommige eigen medewerkers roepen het museum op om stelling te nemen, zegt Wolfs.

Hij noemt Jonas Staal, de Nederlandse winnaar van de Prix de Rome die momenteel met andere genomineerden in het Stedelijk Museum exposeert. Toen Staal op 31 oktober de prijs in ontvangst nam, riep hij het Stedelijk op om solidair te zijn met kunstenaars wereldwijd die volgens hem monddood worden gemaakt als ze zich voor de Palestijnse zaak uitspreken.

Het Stedelijk gaf daar geen gehoor aan. „Dat we geen steunbetuiging naar buiten brengen, betekent niet dat we niet betrokken zijn", zegt Wolfs. Hij voelt echter dat er geen manier is om dit goed te doen, ook omdat hij niet weet hoe het museum zou kunnen bijdragen. „Op dit moment is er in ons museum geen expositie die direct aansluit op de thematiek die dit conflict behelst. We zouden zo'n steunbetuiging ook een beetje een leeg statement vinden."

Er zijn maar weinig musea die zich wel uitspreken over het conflict, en die doen dat behoedzaam. Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), het Amsterdam Museum en de vier musea van het Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen plaatsten steunbetuigingen online die in verschillende bewoordingen het geweld aan beide zijden veroordelen en oproepen tot een staakt-het-vuren.

Ook de Museumvereniging, die 467 Nederlandse musea vertegenwoordigt, publiceerde op 9 november, de dag van haar jaarlijkse congres, een korte steunbetuiging met die inhoud. Gevraagd naar de beweegreden van de vereniging is directeur Vera Carasso een paar seconden stil. „Ik vind het moeilijk hierop commentaar te geven. Je kan zoiets nooit helemaal goed doen. Niet alle musea waren ervan overtuigd dat dit nodig was, andere vinden het prettig dat we er woorden voor vinden. Onze rol als musea is om een dialoog tot stand te brengen, om de verbinding te zoeken. En niets doen zou voor een sector die zo maatschappelijk betrokken is, ook een statement zijn."

Solidariteit

In de theaterwereld is het Haagse nachtprogramma van Laura van Dolron de afgelopen week uitgegroeid tot een landelijk initiatief 'Theater voor Gaza' dat de komende weken in theaters in Nederland en België programma's organiseert.

De zes initiatiefnemers uit de theatersector willen de aandacht vestigen op het „geweld in Gaza, de Westelijke Jordaanoever en Israël" en „een plek bieden voor de gemeenschap om in solidariteit samen te komen". Er zijn inmiddels veertien evenementen gepland, maar er zijn ook veel theaters die twijfelen.

Theater Rotterdam doet niet mee, vertelt hoofd programmering Dave Schwab. „Intern zijn de meningen hierover heel verdeeld. Het initiatief gaat over álle slachtoffers, maar toch. De schijn is dat je partij kiest."

Zijn theater voelt betrokkenheid, zegt Schwab - het verspreidde in oktober een eigen steunbetuiging op Instagram. „Iedereen is het er over eens dat dit een verschrikkelijke oorlog is, maar we willen als theater een eigen manier zoeken om om te gaan met de vele brandhaarden in de wereld, zoals in Oekraïne, in de Democratische Republiek Congo. Daar waren we al mee bezig, om een vorm te zoeken waarin je de verbinding en dialoog aan kunt gaan."

Dave Schwab van Theater Rotterdam en Cees Debets van Het Nationale Theater zeggen allebei dat deze oorlog doet hen meer doet nadenken over de functie van theater. „Ik snap de terughoudendheid van mijn collega's", zegt Debets. „Maar ik vind het belangrijk om deze plek als theater in te nemen, juist in deze tijd waar steeds minder ruimte is om van mening te verschillen."

„Ik ben het absoluut eens met de initiatiefnemers: je kunt niet stil blijven", zegt Dave Schwab. „Je kunt ook het theater openstellen zodat mensen daar troost kunnen vinden. We moeten iets doen wat zin heeft. We worden als theater geconfronteerd met onze eigen betekenis."

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'Niets zeggen is ook een statement': cultuursector zoekt naar antwoord op Gaza-oorlog

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Cultureel engagement: Musea, podia en festivals wordt gevraagd zich uit te spreken over de oorlog tussen Hamas en Israël. Steeds meer instellingen doen dat, maar tussen betrokkenheid en activisme blijkt het lastig balanceren.

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4 SEASONS?

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David Hockney draws better than anyone else alive today. There may be other fine painters around, but on paper, with charcoal, ink pen or even crayons in hand, he is incomparable. So of course his retrospective of portraits on paper opening this week at the National Portrait Gallery is called Drawing from Life.

Hockney has always had a deceptively simple and absolutely captivating ability to look at his own face in the mirror, or at his "muse" Celia Birtwell, or at flowers in a vase, and set down what he sees, in clear, confident lines that vibrate with vitality.

Hockney's eyeballful of a show, which had a brief three-week run in early 2020 before it was closed by the pandemic, reopens at a time when drawing from life is becoming ever more popular. And not just any drawing from life, but particularly life drawing, that of the human figure.

The events site Eventbrite lists nearly 500 life drawing classes coming up in the next few weeks alone around Britain, from Brixton to Exmouth.

Nudes have long featured in Hockney's oeuvre, especially in the 1960s, when he sketched friends and lovers lying on sofas in relaxed Californian languor. He has also oil-crayoned Celia lushly nude. Now demand for life drawing classes is outstripping all other subjects such as landscapes or still lifes.

The UK has seen an explosion of interest in life drawing classes, a craze that may owe much to Tracey Emin. Photograph: Andrew H Williams/Care UK/PA

In London alone, the classes currently on offer include Full Bodied, where you sample sommelier-selected wines as you sketch a nude - a few glasses and you'll think you are Picasso - and Neon Naked Life Drawing classes, where the models are "adorned with UV paints and accessories".

Options range from queer life classes, life classes for young people, and high-end classes at the Royal Drawing School. Life drawing is also becoming more popular with hen and stag parties across the UK.

The craze has undoubtedly been stimulated by Tracey Emin, who leads regular life classes at her art school in Margate and has spoken of how her art was changed by experiencing one a few years ago in New York.

Emin is also an influence on the way life drawing is now being enjoyed as a therapeutic, "mindful" way to slow down and sense your being. "Once you get going," she told me earlier this year, "you can really enjoy it: you enjoy looking, you enjoy seeing, and you enjoy slowing down because you're seeing in a different way. And then after that drawing class, you see everything differently."

But is artistic drawing as Hockney does it the same thing as drawing in a mindful life class? Are we perhaps missing how hard it actually is to draw well? Artists who have drawn from life over the centuries may or may not have been spiritually enriched by the time they spent staring at faces, bodies or the natural world. They were, however, doing something whose purpose was not therapeutic. They were trying to see and record visual truth.

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Celia Carennac August 1971, by David Hockney. Photograph: Richard Schmidt/© David Hockney

Hockney is heir to that searching tradition. He calls it "eyeballing" - and it's hard work. It is not necessarily uplifting, either, for the truth isn't always pleasant. Some of Hockney's most powerful drawings are his self-portraits - not ennobled, expressionist visions, but clinically accurate renderings of his image in the mirror. Often he shows his drawing hand too. He has drawn himself as a bespectacled teenager in Bradford, much later with a hand cupped over his ear to show his increasing deafness, and as a man whose elderly face might be someone else's as he delineates it faithfully, unswervingly.

For drawing as it is practised by Hockney is more science than spirituality. The greatest draughtsperson of all was Leonardo da Vinci, whose drawings don't stop at the skin, but cut under it to reveal organs, arteries and bones in anatomical drawings based on his own dissections of corpses. Were such "death classes" conducive to wellness? No. Leonardo wrote of the horror and disgust he felt carrying out his anatomies late at night with blood spattered everywhere. But the knowledge was well worth the sacrifice; his drawings record details of human anatomy that no one had seen before him.

Hockney is a great exemplar of Leonardo's belief that drawing is about steadily seeing nature's truth. His youthful studies from the 1950s demonstrate an absolutely absorbed, fascinated eye learning to see. But the kind of art education he and Leonardo da Vinci shared - in which the student must draw, draw and draw again from other artist's works and from life - has given way to much more varied art-school curricula. This is proving a problem now that artistic fashion has shifted from postmodern media back to painting.

So the rise of the life class is a fascinating moment. In some ways, it seems a mindful indulgence, inviting us to splurge out our "artistic" impulses without any pressure to draw particularly well. Then again, with so many people signing up to sketch the human figure, perhaps a new Hockney will emerge: someone who doesn't just enjoy the wine-fuelled vibe, but relentlessly eyeballs the model, hand moving with deadly accuracy on a sheet of paper, seeing us as we are.

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No one can draw from life like David Hockney - but more than ever are trying

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Growing numbers of hobbyists are attempting to emulate the artist and capture the truths of the human body at life drawing classes

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Disturbing the Meaning of Objects | Artist Jessica Stockholder | Louisiana Channel

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Artists Ygor Marotta and Ceci Soloaga of VJ Suave ( previously) were recently invited to participate in the Walk&Talk art residency on São Miguel Island, Azores, Portugal. The duo transformed their projected street art animations to happily dance across the trees, cliffs, and shores of the the island including the Lagoa das Empadadas, Porto da Ribeirinha, Cachoeira do Cabrito and Lagoa das Sete Cidades. Using long exposure, VJ Suave captured their interventions with nature, creating the videos and GIFs seen here.

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Nature-Based Animations Projected on São Miguel Island by VJ Suave - Colossal

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Artists Ygor Marotta and Ceci Soloaga of VJ Suave (previously) were recently invited to participate in the Walk&Talk art residency on São Miguel Island, Azores, Portugal. The duo transformed their projected street art animations to happily dance across the trees, cliffs, and shores of the the island including the Lagoa das Empadadas, Porto da Ribeirinha, Cachoeira do Cabrito and Lagoa das Sete Cidades.

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The proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s, new research shows.

Analysis of Office for National Statistics data found that 16.4% of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, but that had fallen to just 7.9% for those born four decades later.

This reflected a similar decline in the number of people with working-class origins, according to the paper in the journal Sociology by researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield. People whose parents had a working-class job accounted for about 37% of the workforce in 1981, but by 2011 that had fallen to about 21%.

The finding raises questions about why years of attempts to make the arts more open and diverse have not had more impact - people who grew up in professional families were four times more likely than those with working-class parents to be in creative work, the study found.

And with fewer film directors, authors or songwriters to describe the experience of growing up in a working-class household, some creatives fear their stories are being squeezed out of culture or confined to "poverty porn".

"These class imbalances have been with us for a long time," said Dave O'Brien, a professor of cultural and creative industries at the University of Sheffield and one of the paper's authors.

"It suggests that we need to do something more than just create access courses. It suggests that this is a big social problem, not just something that the BBC or the Arts Council or these kinds of organisations should be addressing."

Actors such as Michael Sheen, Christopher Eccleston, Julie Hesmondhalgh and Julie Walters have said repeatedly in the last few years that finding a career in the creative industries has become much harder for people from traditionally working-class backgrounds.

Gary Oldman in Slow Horses. Photograph: Jack English/Apple TV+

The reality, says O'Brien is more complex. "The backdrop is this massive change in British society where there are fewer coal miners or manual labourers to have these kinds of working-class sons and daughters, so there are fewer working-class people coming through. And so the odds of people making it stay the same, even if the experience of the industry is really different."

But the decline in numbers has other effects people should be concerned about, O'Brien said. "We know there's clearly a relationship between who makes decisions, particularly in commissioning, and the kinds of stories that get made," he said. TV commissioners and publishers come from a "reasonably kind of cohesive, quite narrow, elite social background" and may have a narrower view about what is interesting. He cited the BBC's lack of appeal among people who are younger and from less privileged backgrounds.

That creates access problems even for success stories such as Gary Oldman, a sailor's son from south London, Oscar winner and star of current Apple TV hit Slow Horses.

He has directed one film, Nil by Mouth, which won several awards including two Baftas in 1997.

"People say to me 'Why haven't you directed again?' and it hasn't been for want of trying," he said at the BFI in October. "They don't want another one of these [ Nil by Mouth]. That's the problem. They want Four Weddings and a Funeral."

Natasha Carthew, the author of nine books including All Rivers Run Free, founded The Working Class Writers festival last year to address the issue.

"A lot of [working-class] writers think that people are going to be prejudiced right off the bat but that's not the case," she said. "People do want authentic voices. What makes it harder for them is later on, when you haven't got the mates who are going to publicise your book."

But publishers need to remember that books dealing with working-class life are not "poverty porn", she added. "There are very different stories, about resilience and beauty and humour and hard graft."

The lack of ability to take risks is another barrier, Carthew said, such as working two jobs or not having money to go out for drinks to build a network or pay for a hotel in London while doing an internship.

"Publishers are trying more to get a broad church of people," Carthew said.

"But they've been slow, like everywhere's been slow.

"There are lots of schemes, and then the money runs out - they've ticked that box and then they move on and put their cash somewhere else. I've seen that with my festival. That's why the momentum keeps changing. They want novelty."

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Huge decline of working class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society

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Study shows the proportion of musicians, writers and artists with working-class origins has shrunk by half since the 1970s

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Over Rosanne Hertzberger

Iedere week schrijft wetenschapper Rosanne Hertzberger over de raakvlakken tussen wetenschap en het dagelijks leven.

Over Rosanne Hertzberger

Iedere week schrijft wetenschapper Rosanne Hertzberger over de raakvlakken tussen wetenschap en het dagelijks leven.

Ze is initiatiefnemer en bestuursvoorzitter van Stichting Crispatus, waar een vrouwenonderzoekscollectief een vaginaal probioticum ontwikkelt. Sinds 2017 doet ze onderzoek naar het metabolisme van vaginale melkzuurbacteriën in het Systems Biology Lab aan de VU Amsterdam.

Eerder was ze als postdoctoraal onderzoeker werkzaam bij de afdeling moleculaire microbiologie van Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri, USA) en deed ze in samenwerking met Nestle Research Center promotie-onderzoek bij SILS, UvA & NIZO Food Research. Ze publiceerde twee boeken: 'Het Grote Niets - waarom we te veel vertrouwen hebben in de wetenschap' (2019) en 'Ode aan de E-nummers -Waarom e-nummers, kant-en-klaar-maaltijden en conserveermiddelen ons leven beter maken' (2017).

Meer over Rosanne Hertzberger is te lezen op haar site.

Ik had ernaar uit gekeken. In het nieuwste NPO-programma The Biohack Project krijgen BN'ers voedings- en leefstijladviezen om symptoom nummer 1 van onze samenleving - stress - te bestrijden. Biohacking gaat uit van het idee dat mensen zelf door metingen te verrichten iets kunnen leren over hun fysiologie en op basis hiervan zinvolle aanpassingen kunnen doen. Het staat in een lange burgerwetenschappelijke traditie, die stamt uit een tijd waarin kennis nog niet uitsluitend het terrein was van de wetenschap, waarin de belangrijkste ontdekkingen werden gedaan door gewone burgers die zelf observeerden, experimenteerden en nadachten.

Maar de eerste aflevering van het programma was ook voor mij een grote teleurstelling. Govert Viergever, de opperbiohacker die de deelnemers begeleidt, weet steeds precies wat iedereen nodig heeft op basis van hartslagmetingen, labuitslagen en genetische informatie. De één een ijsbad, de ander een broodloos dieet, de volgende een magnesiumsupplement. Er zat heel veel stelligheid in en weinig nieuwsgierigheid. En dat laatste is toch wel een essentieel ingrediënt voor ieder die iets wil leren.

Er was één ding waar ik me meer aan ergerde dan aan het programma zelf. Dat waren de commentaren van de publieke inquisiteurs, die optraden namens de geneeskunde en de wetenschap. Mensen als Adriaan ter Braack, 'sjamadriaan', die als dappere ridder van de wetenschappelijke waarheid steeds weer ten strijde trekt tegen kruidenvrouwtjes en influencers die bijvoorbeeld zonnebrandcrème als gevaarlijk bestempelen. Ik herken het omdat het ook ooit mijn hobby was om als overenthousiaste kersverse wetenschapper anderen de maat te nemen. Tot ik erachter kwam dat 'groene meisjes' weinig macht hebben en eventuele adviezen die zij verkondigen verwaarloosbare problemen opleverden ten opzichte van dingen als roken, alcohol en overgewicht.

In zijn kritiek hanteert Sjamadriaan regels en grenzen die hij zelf verzint. Hij heeft niet alleen problemen met de onzinadviezen die in het programma werden gegeven. Maar merkt ook op dat Viergever niet 'opgeleid of bevoegd is om conclusies te trekken uit hartslaggegevens'. Zie daar de uit de hand lopende orthodoxie van de poortwachters van de wetenschap. Adriaan moet hier zelf even worden gefactcheckt. De wetenschappelijke kerk is machtig, maar gelukkig mogen mensen gewoon zelf nog steeds iets meten en jawel zelf daar helemaal op eigen houtje conclusies aan verbinden. Je mag je bloedsuiker bepalen, je hartslag en bloeddruk meten, cholesterol meten, je kan testen of je corona hebt, je mag zelfs een zwangerschapstest uitvoeren. Thuis, onbevoegd. En dan helemaal, zonder diploma of opleiding, daar een conclusie aan verbinden. Er zijn zelfs patiëntenverenigingen, burgerwetenschappelijke collectieven, etnische minderheden, of mensen met zeldzame aandoeningen die niets anders hebben dan die metingen bij gebrek aan interesse voor hun groep of aandoening vanuit de wetenschap.

Het is iets dat Bernard Leenstra, huisarts, in zijn kritiek ook steeds negeert. Hij gaat in deze krant in reactie op het programma nog een stapje verder en bestempelt gewoon alle biohacking tot 'flauwekul', maar heeft niet de moed om ook kritisch te kijken naar de eigen beroepsgroep. Wat heeft de huisarts zelf te bieden bij spanningsklachten? Zullen we even in de richtlijnen kijken? Running therapy, mindfulness en het dringende advies om minder of anders te piekeren. Niets dat echt bewezen is dus, of echt werkt, naar de maatstaven van Leenstra. Zullen we even bij andere veelvoorkomende aandoeningen kijken? Vermoeidheid? Long covid? Een tennisarm? Of bij een tiental andere symptomen? Er zijn legers aan mensen die dagelijks op het spreekuur van Leenstra langskomen die hij alleen kan behandelen met slechte of niet-bewezen therapie, kortwerkende therapie of die hij gewoon niets te bieden heeft. Omdat we het mechanisme van de ziekte domweg nooit hebben begrepen, of omdat er geen farmacologisch verdienmodel is. Omdat de etnische minderheid nooit in de onderzoeksgroep werd meegenomen, of de demografische groep niet groot genoeg is om iets rendabels voor te ontwikkelen (kinderen). Dat is vaak de context van het biohacken. Beter dan niets. Mensen die uit wanhoop niet wachten, maar zelf op onderzoek uitgaan. Dat is volstrekt begrijpelijk. Waar Sjamadriaan en Leenstra zich voor zouden moeten inzetten, is om burgers te leren hoe je wél zelf degelijk onderzoek kan doen. Door symptomen nauwlettend te volgen, door hypothesen te formuleren, experimenten en relevante metingen uit te voeren. Mensen verheffen en helpen, niet neersabelen.

Rosanne Hertzberger is microbioloog.

Een versie van dit artikel verscheen ook in de krant van 16 september 2023.

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Column | Biohacken 'flauwekul'? Wat heeft de huisarts zelf dan te bieden bij spanningsklachten?

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Column: Rosanne Hertzberger Ik had ernaar uit gekeken. In het nieuwste NPO-programma The Biohack Project krijgen BN'ers voedings- en leefstijladviezen om...

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In McLuhan's terms, a cliché is a "normal" action, phrase, etc. which becomes so often used that we are "anesthetized" to its effects. McLuhan's archetype "is a quoted extension, medium, technology or environment." "Environment" would also include the kinds of "awareness" and cognitive shifts brought upon people by it, not totally unlike the psychological context Carl Jung described. [...]
McLuhan relates the cliché-to-archetype process to the Theater of the Absurd:

Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliché.[3]

The "languages of the heart," or what McLuhan would otherwise define as oral culture, were thus made archetype by means of the printing press, and turned into cliché.

The satellite medium, McLuhan states, encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which "ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed."[4] All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artifacts are retrieved under these conditions ("past times are pastimes"). McLuhan thereby meshes this into the term global theater.

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Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we'll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately becomes much more difficult and tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia Plath? Does self-harm count? Okay, well, it's back to the men I guess: Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector.

They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can't watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker's monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or ... we don't. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don't know what to do about them.

We've all been thinking about monsters in the Trump era. For me, it began a few years ago. I was researching Roman Polanski for a book I was writing and found myself awed by his monstrousness. It was monumental, like the Grand Canyon. And yet. When I watched his movies, their beauty was another kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his iniquities. I had exhaustively read about his rape of thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey; I feel sure no detail on record remained unfamiliar to me. Despite this knowledge, I was still able to consume his work. Eager to. The more I researched Polanski, the more I became drawn to his films, and I watched them again and again-especially the major ones: Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown. Like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does.

I wasn't supposed to love this work, or this man. He's the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage. In the public's mind, man and work seem to be the same thing. But are they? Ought we try to separate the art from the artist, the maker from the made? Do we undergo a willful forgetting when we want to listen to, say, Wagner's Ring cycle? (Forgetting is easier for some than others; Wagner's work has rarely been performed in Israel.) Or do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass?

And how does our answer change from situation to situation? Certain pieces of art seem to have been rendered inconsumable by their maker's transgressions-how can one watch The Cosby Show after the rape allegations against Bill Cosby? I mean, obviously it's technically doable, but are we even watching the show? Or are we taking in the spectacle of our own lost innocence?

And is it simply a matter of pragmatics? Do we withhold our support if the person is alive and therefore might benefit financially from our consumption of their work? Do we vote with our wallets? If so, is it okay to stream, say, a Roman Polanski movie for free? Can we, um, watch it at a friend's house?

*

But hold up for a minute: Who is this "we" that's always turning up in critical writing anyway? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It's the voice of the middle-brow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say we, I mean I. I mean you.

*

I know Polanski is worse, whatever that means, and Cosby is more current. But for me the ur-monster is Woody Allen.

The men want to know why Woody Allen makes us so mad. Woody Allen slept with Soon-Yi Previn, the child of his life partner Mia Farrow. Soon-Yi was a very young adult the first time they slept together, and he the most famous film director in the world.

I took the fucking of Soon-Yi as a terrible betrayal of me personally. When I was young, I felt like Woody Allen. I intuited or believed he represented me on-screen. He was me. This is one of the peculiar aspects of his genius-this ability to stand in for the audience. The identification was exacerbated by the seeming powerlessness of his usual on-screen persona: skinny as a kid, short as a kid, confused by an uncaring, incomprehensible world. (Like Chaplin before him.) I felt closer to him than seems reasonable for a little girl to feel about a grown-up male filmmaker. In some mad way, I felt he belonged to me. I had always seen him as one of us, the powerless. Post-Soon-Yi, I saw him as a predator.

My response wasn't logical; it was emotional.

*

One rainy afternoon, in the spring of 2017, I flopped down on the living-room couch and committed an act of transgression. No, not that one. What I did was, I on-demanded Annie Hall. It was easy. I just clicked the OK button on my massive universal remote and then rummaged around in a bag of cookies while the opening credits rolled. As acts of transgression go, it was pretty undramatic.

I had watched the movie at least a dozen times before, but even so, it charmed me all over again. Annie Hall is a jeu d'esprit, an Astaire soft shoe, a helium balloon straining at its ribbon. It's a love story for people who don't believe in love: Annie and Alvy come together, pull apart, come together, and then break up for good. Their relationship was pointless all along, and entirely worthwhile. Annie's refrain of "la di da" is the governing spirit of the enterprise, the collection of nonsense syllables that give joyous expression to Allen's dime-store existentialism. "La di da" means, Nothing matters. It means, Let's have fun while we crash and burn. It means, Our hearts are going to break, isn't it a lark?

Annie Hall is the greatest comic film of the twentieth century-better than Bringing Up Baby, better even than Caddyshack-because it acknowledges the irrepressible nihilism that lurks at the center of all comedy. Also, it's really funny. To watch Annie Hall is to feel, for just a moment, that one belongs to humanity. Watching, you feel almost mugged by that sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself. And that's what we call great art. In case you were wondering.

Look, I don't get to go around feeling connected to humanity all the time. It's a rare pleasure. And I'm supposed to give it up just because Woody Allen misbehaved? It hardly seems fair.

*

When I mentioned in passing I was writing about Allen, my friend Sara reported that she'd seen a Little Free Library in her neighborhood absolutely crammed to its tiny rafters with books by and about Allen. It made us both laugh-the mental image of some furious, probably female, fan who just couldn't bear the sight of those books any longer and stuffed them all in the cute little house.

Then Sara grew wistful: "I don't know where to put all my feelings about Woody Allen," she said. Well, exactly.

*

I told another smart friend that I was writing about Woody Allen. "I have very many thoughts about Woody Allen!" she said, all excited to share. We were drinking wine on her porch and she settled in, the late afternoon light illuminating her face. "I'm so mad at him! I was already pissed at him over the Soon-Yi thing, and then came the-what's the kid's name-Dylan? Then came the Dylan allegations, and the horrible dismissive statements he made about that. And I hate the way he talks about Soon-Yi, always going on about how he's enriched her life."

This, I think, is what happens to so many of us when we consider the work of the monster geniuses-we tell ourselves we're having ethical thoughts when really what we're having is moral feelings. We put words around these feelings and call them opinions: "What Woody Allen did was very wrong." And feelings come from someplace more elemental than thought. The fact was this: I felt upset by the story of Woody and Soon-Yi. I wasn't thinking; I was feeling. I was affronted, personally somehow.

*

Here's how to have some complicated emotions: watch Manhattan.

Like many-many what? many women? many mothers? many former girls? many moral feelers?-I have been unable to watch Manhattan for years. A few months back, when I started thinking about Woody Allen qua monster, I watched nearly every other movie he's ever made before I faced the fact that I would, at some point, have to watch Manhattan.

And finally the day came. As I settled in on my nice couch in my comfortable living room, the Cosby trial was taking place. It was June of 2017. My husband, who has a Nordic flair for quiet drama, suggested I toggle between watching the Cosby trials and Manhattan so as to construct a kind of meta-narrative of monstrousness. But my husband's austere Northern European sense of showmanship came to naught, for the Cosby trial wasn't in fact televised.

Even so, it was out there happening.

The mood that summer was one of extreme discomfort. Just a general feeling of not-quite-rightness. People, and by people I mean women, were unsettled and unhappy. They met on the streets and looked at one another and shook their heads and walked away wordlessly. The women had had it. The women went on a giant fed-up march. The women were Facebooking and Tweeting, going for long furious walks, giving money to the ACLU, wondering why their partners and children didn't do the dishes more. The women were realizing the invidiousness of the dishwashing paradigm. The women were becoming radicalized, even though the women really didn't have the time to be radicalized. Arlie Russell Hochschild first published The Second Shift in 1989, and in 2017 the women were discovering that shit was truer than ever. In a couple of months would come the Harvey Weinstein accusations, and then the free-fall pig-pile of the #MeToo campaign.

As I wrote in my diary when I was a teen, "I don't feel great about men right now." I still didn't feel great about men in the summer of 2017, and a lot of other women didn't feel great about men either. A lot of men didn't feel great about men. Even the patriarchs were sick of patriarchy.

Despite this bolus of opinion, of feeling, of rage, I was determined to at least try to come to Manhattan with an open mind. After all, lots of people think of it as Allen's masterpiece, and I was ready to be swept away. And I was swept away during the opening credits-black and white, with jump-cuts timed perfectly, almost comically, to the triumphal strains of "Rhapsody in Blue." Moments later, we cut to Isaac (Allen's character), out to dinner with his friends Yale (are you fucking kidding me- Yale?) and Yale's wife, Emily. With them is Allen's date, seventeen-year-old high-school student Tracy, played by Mariel Hemingway.

The really astonishing thing about watching this scene is its nonchalance. NBD, I'm fucking a high schooler. Sure, he knows the relationship can't last, but he seems only casually troubled by its moral implications. Woody Allen's character Isaac is fucking that high schooler with what my mother would call a hey-nonny-nonny. Allen is fascinated with moral shading, except when it comes to this particular issue-the issue of middle-aged men fucking teenage girls. In the face of this particular issue, one of our greatest observers of contemporary ethics-someone whose mid-career work can approach the Flaubertian-suddenly becomes a dummy (I always hear this word in Fred Sanford's voice: " dummeh!")

"In high school, even the ugly girls are beautiful." A (male) high-school teacher once said this to me.

Tracy's face, Mariel's face, is made of open flat planes that recall pioneers and plains of wheat and sunshine (it's an Idaho face, after all). Allen sees Tracy as good and pure in a way that the grown women in the film never can be. Tracy is wise, the way Allen has written her, but unlike the adults in the film she's entirely, miraculously untroubled by neurosis.

Heidegger has this notion of dasein and vorhandensein. Dasein means conscious presence, an entity aware of its own mortality-e.g., almost every character in every Woody Allen movie ever except Tracy. Vorhandensein, on the other hand, is a being that exists in itself; it just is-like an object, or an animal. Or Tracy. She's glorious simply by being: inert, object-like, vorhandensein. Like the great movie stars of old, she's a face, as Isaac so famously states in his litany of reasons to go on living: "Groucho Marx and Willie Mays; those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne; the crabs at Sam Wo's; uh, Tracy's face." (Watching the film for the first time in decades, I was struck by how much Isaac's list sounded like a Facebook gratitude post.)

Allen/Isaac can get closer to that ideal world, a world that has forgotten its knowledge of death, by fucking Tracy. Because he's Woody Allen-a great filmmaker-Tracy is allowed her say; she's not a nitwit. "Your concerns are my concerns," she says. "We have great sex." This works out well for Isaac: he gets to hoover up her beautiful embodied simplicity and he's absolved of guilt. The women in the film don't have that advantage.

The grown women in Manhattan are brittle and all too aware of death; they're aware of every goddamn thing. A thinking woman is stuck-distanced from the body, from beauty, from life itself.

For me, the most telling moment in the film is a throwaway line delivered in a high whine by a chic woman at a cocktail party: "I finally had an orgasm and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind." Isaac's (very funny) response: "You had the wrong kind? I've never had the wrong kind, ever. My worst one was right on the money."

Every woman watching the movie knows that it's the doctor who's an asshole, not the woman. But that's not how Woody/Isaac sees it.

If a woman can think, she can't come; if she can come, she can't think.

*

Just as Manhattan never authentically or fully examines the complexities of an old dude nailing a high schooler, Allen himself-an extremely well-spoken guy-becomes weirdly inarticulate when discussing Soon-Yi. In a 1992 interview with Walter Isaacson of Time, Allen delivered the line that became famous for its fatuous dismissal of his moral shortcomings:

"The heart wants what it wants."

It was one of those phrases that never leaves your head once you've heard it: we all immediately memorized it whether we wanted to our not. Its monstrous disregard for anything but the self. Its proud irrationality. Woody goes on: "There's no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that's that."
I moved on her like a bitch.
Things being what they were that summer, I had a difficult time getting through Manhattan-it took me a couple of sittings. I mentioned this difficulty on social media, this problem of watching Manhattan in the Trump moment. (I fervently hoped it was a moment). " Manhattan is a work of genius! I am done with you, Claire!" responded a writer guy I didn't know personally. This was a guy who had withstood many of my more outrageous social media pronouncements, some of which involved my desire to execute and chop up the male half of the species, Valerie-Solanas-like. But the minute I confessed to having a funny feeling when I watched Manhattan -I believe I said the film was making me "a little urpy"-this man stormed off my page, declaring himself done with me forevermore.

I had failed in what he saw as my task: the ability to overcome my own moralizing and pettifoggery-my own emotions- and do the work of appreciating genius. But who was in fact the more emotional person in this situation? He was the one storming from the virtual room.

I would have a repeat of this conversation with many men, smart and dumb, young and old, over the next months: "You must judge Manhattan on its aesthetics!" they said.

Another male writer and I discussed it over dinner one night. It was like a little play:

Female writer: "Um, it doesn't really hold up."

Male writer, sharply: "What do you mean?"

"Well, it all seems a tad blasé. I mean, Isaac doesn't really seem too worried she's in high school."

"No no no, he feels terrible about it."

"He cracks jokes about it, but he certainly does not feel terrible."

"You're just thinking about Soon-Yi-you're letting that color the movie. I thought you were better than that."

"I think it's creepy on its own merits, even without knowing about Soon-Yi."

"Get over it. You really need to judge it strictly on aesthetics."

"So what makes it objectively aesthetically good?"

Male writer says something smart-sounding about "balance and elegance."

I wish the female writer had delivered a coup de grâce here, but she did not. She doubted herself.

*

Which of us is seeing more clearly? The one who had the ability-some might say the privilege-to remain untroubled by the filmmaker's attitudes toward females and history with girls? Who had the ability to watch the art without committing the biographical fallacy? Or the one who couldn't help but notice the antipathies and urges that seemed to animate the project?

I'm really asking.

And were these proudly objective viewers really being as objective as they thought? Woody Allen's usual genius is one of self-indictment, and here is his one film where that self-indictment falters, and also he fucks a teenager, and that's the film that gets called a masterpiece?

What exactly are these guys defending? Is it the film? Or something else?

I think Manhattan and its pro-girl anti-woman story would be upsetting even if Hurricane Soon-Yi had never made landfall, but we can't know, and there lies the very heart of the matter. Louis C.K.'s I Love You, Daddy -a tale of a father struggling to prevent his teenage daughter from hooking up with an older man-will meet a similar fate. It will be impossible to view outside the knowledge of Louis C.K.'s sexual misconduct-if it even gets seen. For now, distribution has been dropped and the film is not going to be released.

A great work of art brings us a feeling. And yet when I say Manhattan makes me feel urpy, a man says, No, not that feeling. You're having the wrong feeling. He speaks with authority: Manhattan is a work of genius. But who gets to say? Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the (male) maker, against the audience.

Me, I'm not ahistorical or immune to biography. That's for the winners of history (men) (so far).

The thing is, I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. But I'm the audience. And I'm just acknowledging the realities of the situation: the film Manhattan is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it's also kinda gross in its own right; and it's also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great. All these things can be true at once. Simply being told by men that Allen's history shouldn't matter doesn't achieve the objective of making it not matter.

What do I do about the monster? Do I have a responsibility either way? To turn away, or to overcome my biographical distaste and watch, or read, or listen?

And why does the monster make us-make me -so mad in the first place?

*

The audience wants something to watch or read or hear. That's what makes it an audience. At the same time, at this particular historical moment, when we're awash in bitter revelation, the audience is outraged freshly by new monsters, over and over and over. The audience thrills to the drama of denouncing the monster. The audience turns on its heel and refuses to see another Kevin Spacey film ever again.

It could be that what the audience feels in its heart is pure and righteous and true. But there might be something else going on here.

When you're having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language. The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and weirdly exciting.

Reminder: not "you," not "we," but "I." Stop side-stepping ownership. I am the audience. And I can sense there's something entirely unacceptable lurking inside me. Even in the midst of my righteous indignation when I bitch about Woody and Soon-Yi, I know that, on some level, I'm not an entirely upstanding citizen myself. Sure, I'm attuned to my children and thoughtful with my friends; I keep a cozy house, listen to my husband, and am reasonably kind to my parents. In everyday deed and thought, I'm a decent-enough human. But I'm something else as well, something vaguely resembling a, well, monster. The Victorians understood this feeling; it's why they gave us the stark bifurcations of Dorian Gray, of Jekyll and Hyde. I suppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us-in me-chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question.

The psychic theater of the public condemnation of monsters can be seen as a kind of elaborate misdirection: nothing to see here. I'm no monster. Meanwhile, hey, you might want to take a closer look at that guy over there.

*

Am I a monster? I've never killed anyone. Am I a monster? I've never promulgated fascism. Am I monster? I didn't molest a child. Am I a monster? I haven't been accused by dozens of women of drugging and raping them. Am I a monster? I don't beat my children. (YET.) Am I a monster? I'm not noted for my anti-Semitism. Am I a monster? I've never presided over a sex cult where I trapped young women in a gilded Atlanta mansion and forced them to do my bidding. Am I a monster? I didn't anally rape a thirteen-year-old.

Look at all the awful things I haven't done. Maybe I'm not a monster.

But here's a thing I have done: written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.

The critic Walter Benjamin said: "At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism." My own work could hardly be called major, but I do wonder: at the base of every minor work of art, is there a, you know, smaller pile of barbarism? A lump of barbarism? A skosh?

There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.

I have to wonder: maybe I'm not monstrous enough. I'm aware of my own failings as a writer-indeed I know the list to a fare-thee-well, and worse are the failures that I know I'm failing to know- but a little part of me has to ask: if I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?

Every writer-mother I know has asked herself this question. I mean, none of them says it out loud. But I can hear them thinking it; it's almost deafening. Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That's the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: Is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.

Jenny Offill gets at this idea in a passage from her novel Dept. of Speculation -a passage much shared among the female writers and artists of my acquaintance: "My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him."

I mean, I hate licking stamps. An art monster, I thought when I read this. Yes, I'd like to be one of those. My friends felt the same way. Victoria, an artist, went around chanting "art monster" for a few days.

The female writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: "I wish I had a wife." What does that mean, really? It means you wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.

In a way, I'd been asking this question privately, for years, of a couple male writer friends I believe to be actually great. I write them both charming emails, but really I am always trying to find out: how selfish are you? Or to put it another way: how selfish do I need to be, to become as great as you?

Plenty selfish, I learned as I observed these men from afar. Lock-the-door-against-your-kid-while-you're-working selfish. Work-every-day-including-Thanksgiving-and-Christmas selfish. Go-on-book-tour-for-weeks-at-a-time selfish. Sleep-with-other-women-at-conferences selfish. Whatever-it-takes selfish.

*

One recent evening, I was sitting in the chaotic, book-strewn living room of a younger writer and her husband, also a writer. Their kids were tucked into bed upstairs; the occasional yawp floated down from above.

My friend was in the throes of it: Her three kids were in grade school and her husband had a full-time job while she tried to carve out her career freelancing and writing books. A cloud of intense literary ambition hung over the house like a stormy little micro-climate. It was a work night; we all should've been in bed. Instead we were drinking wine and talking about work. The husband was charming to me, by which I mean he laughed at all my jokes. He was tightly wound and overly alert, perhaps because he was not having success with his writing. The wife on the other hand was having success-a lot of success-with her writing.

She mentioned a short story she'd just written and published.

"Oh, you mean the most recent occasion for your abandoning me and the kids?" asked the very smart, very charming husband.

The wife had been a monster, monster enough to finish the work. The husband had not.

This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always. The female monster is Doris Lessing leaving her children behind to go live the writer's life in London. The female monster is Sylvia Plath, whose self-crime was bad enough, but worse still: the children whose nursery she taped off beforehand. Never mind the bread and milk she set out for them, a kind of terrible poem unto itself. She dreamed of eating men like air, but what was truly monstrous was simply leaving her children motherless.

*

Maybe, as a female writer, you don't kill yourself, or abandon your children. But you abandon something, some nurturing part of yourself. When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children's homework left unchecked, parents left untelephoned, spousal sex unhad. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.

Sure, I possess the ordinary monstrousness of a real-life person, the unknowable depths, the suppressed Hyde. But I also have a more visible, quantifiable kind of monstrousness-that of the artist who completes her work. Finishers are always monsters. Woody Allen doesn't just try to make a film a year; he tries to put out a film a year.

For me the particular monstrousness of completing my work has always closely resembled loneliness: Leaving behind the family, posting up in a borrowed cabin or a cheaply bought motel room. If I can't detach myself entirely, then I'm hiding in my chilly office, wrapped in scarves and fingerless gloves, a fur hat plopped upon my head, going hell-for-leather, just trying to finish.

Because the finishing is the part that makes the artist. The artist must be monster enough not just to start the work, but to complete it. And to commit all the little savageries that lie in between.

My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That's not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant. It might sound as though I'm conflating two things-male predators and female finishers-in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.

*

Hemingway's girlfriend, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn't think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. "A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being." (Well, I guess she would know.) She's saying if you're a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it. In a way, this is a feminist revision of all of art history; a history she turns with a single acid, brilliant line into a morality tale of compensation.

Either way, the questions remain:

What is to be done about monsters? Can and should we love their work? Are all ambitious artists monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]
*An earlier version of this article stated that Soon-Yi was a teenager under Woody Allen's care

Claire Dederer is the author of the memoir Love and Trouble. She's at work on a book about the relationship between bad behavior and good art.

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What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?

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They did or said something awful, and made something great. They are monster geniuses, and I don't know what to do about them.

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Researchers believe that artificial intelligence may allow us to speak to other species.

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Researchers believe that artificial intelligence may allow us to speak to other species.

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Can artificial intelligence allow us to speak to another species?

Ah, the world! Oh, the world!

-"Moby-Dick."

David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. "It was a dream," he recalled recently. "I didn't know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do."

Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans.

While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special "shark's eye" camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green; fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.

"I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?" he told me.

In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. This piqued Gruber's curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.

The world's largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey-generally squid-in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation.

One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. Goldwasser, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales' exchanges.

"It was not exactly a joke, but almost like a pipe dream," Goldwasser recollected. "But David really got into it."

Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein. Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of A.I. at Oxford.

"This sounded like probably the most crazy project that I had ever heard about," Bronstein told me. "But David has this kind of power, this ability to convince and drag people along. I thought that it would be nice to try."

Gruber kept pushing the idea. Among the experts who found it loopy and, at the same time, irresistible were Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard, and Daniela Rus, who runs M.I.T.'s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Thus was born the Cetacean Translation Initiative-Project CETI for short. (The acronym is pronounced "setty," and purposefully recalls SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) CETI represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.

"I think it's something that people get really excited about: Can we go from science fiction to science?" Rus told me. "I mean, can we talk to whales?"

Sperm whales are nomads. It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles. But scattered around the tropics, for reasons that are probably squid-related, there are a few places the whales tend to favor. One of these is a stretch of water off Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles.

CETI has its unofficial headquarters in a rental house above Roseau, the island's capital. The group's plan is to turn Dominica's west coast into a giant whale-recording studio. This involves installing a network of underwater microphones to capture the codas of passing whales. It also involves planting recording devices on the whales themselves-cetacean bugs, as it were. The data thus collected can then be used to "train" machine-learning algorithms.

In July, I went down to Dominica to watch the CETI team go sperm-whale bugging. My first morning on the island, I met up with Gruber just outside Roseau, on a dive-shop dock. Gruber, who is fifty, is a slight man with dark curly hair and a cheerfully anxious manner. He was carrying a waterproof case and wearing a CETI T-shirt. Soon, several more members of the team showed up, also carrying waterproof cases and wearing CETI T-shirts. We climbed aboard an oversized Zodiac called CETI 2 and set off.

The night before, a tropical storm had raked the region with gusty winds and heavy rain, and Dominica's volcanic peaks were still wreathed in clouds. The sea was a series of white-fringed swells. CETI 2 sped along, thumping up and down, up and down. Occasionally, flying fish zipped by; these remained aloft for such a long time that I was convinced for a while they were birds.

About two miles offshore, the captain, Kevin George, killed the engines. A graduate student named Yaly Mevorach put on a set of headphones and lowered an underwater mike-a hydrophone-into the waves. She listened for a bit and then, smiling, handed the headphones to me.

The most famous whale calls are the long, melancholy "songs" issued by humpbacks. Sperm-whale codas are neither mournful nor musical. Some people compare them to the sound of bacon frying, others to popcorn popping. That morning, as I listened through the headphones, I thought of horses clomping over cobbled streets. Then I changed my mind. The clatter was more mechanical, as if somewhere deep beneath the waves someone was pecking out a memo on a manual typewriter.

Mevorach unplugged the headphones from the mike, then plugged them into a contraption that looked like a car speaker riding a broom handle. The contraption, which I later learned had been jury-rigged out of, among other elements, a metal salad bowl, was designed to locate clicking whales. After twisting it around in the water for a while, Mevorach decided that the clicks were coming from the southwest. We thumped in that direction, and soon George called out, "Blow!"

A few hundred yards in front of us was a gray ridge that looked like a misshapen log. (When whales are resting at the surface, only a fraction of their enormous bulk is visible.) The whale blew again, and a geyser-like spray erupted from the ridge's left side.

As we were closing in, the whale blew yet again; then it raised its elegantly curved flukes into the air and dove. It was unlikely to resurface, I was told, for nearly an hour.

We thumped off in search of its kin. The farther south we travelled, the higher the swells. At one point, I felt my stomach lurch and went to the side of the boat to heave.

"I like to just throw up and get back to work," Mevorach told me.

Trying to attach a recording device to a sperm whale is a bit like trying to joust while racing on a Jet Ski. The exercise entails using a thirty-foot pole to stick the device onto the animal's back, which in turn entails getting within thirty feet of a creature the size of a school bus. That day, several more whales were spotted. But, for all of our thumping around, CETI 2 never got close enough to one to unhitch the tagging pole.

The next day, the sea was calmer. Once again, we spotted whales, and several times the boat's designated pole-handler, Odel Harve, attempted to tag one. All his efforts went for naught. Either the whale dove at the last minute or the recording device slipped off the whale's back and had to be fished out of the water. (The device, which was about a foot long and shaped like a surfboard, was supposed to adhere via suction cups.) With each new sighting, the mood on CETI 2 lifted; with each new failure, it sank.

On my third day in Dominica, I joined a slightly different subset of the team on a different boat to try out a new approach. Instead of a long pole, this boat-a forty-foot catamaran called CETI 1-was carrying an experimental drone. The drone had been specially designed at Harvard and was fitted out with a video camera and a plastic claw.

Because sperm whales are always on the move, there's no guarantee of finding any; weeks can go by without a single sighting off Dominica. Once again, though, we got lucky, and a whale was soon spotted. Stefano Pagani, an undergraduate who had been brought along for his piloting skills, pulled on what looked like a V.R. headset, which was linked to the drone's video camera. In this way, he could look down at the whale from the drone's perspective and, it was hoped, plant a recording device, which had been loaded into the claw, on the whale's back.

The drone took off and zipped toward the whale. It hovered for a few seconds, then dropped vertiginously. For the suction cups to adhere, the drone had to strike the whale at just the right angle, with just the right amount of force. Post impact, Pagani piloted the craft back to the boat with trembling hands. "The nerves get to you," he said.

"No pressure," Gruber joked. "It's not like there's a New Yorker reporter watching or anything." Someone asked for a round of applause. A cheer went up from the boat. The whale, for its part, seemed oblivious. It lolled around with the recording device, which was painted bright orange, stuck to its dark-gray skin. Then it dove.

Sperm whales are among the world's deepest divers. They routinely descend two thousand feet and sometimes more than a mile. (The deepest a human has ever gone with scuba gear is just shy of eleven hundred feet.) If the device stayed on, it would record any sounds the whale made on its travels. It would also log the whale's route, its heartbeat, and its orientation in the water. The suction was supposed to last around eight hours; after that-assuming all went according to plan-the device would come loose, bob to the surface, and transmit a radio signal that would allow it to be retrieved.

I said it was too bad we couldn't yet understand what the whales were saying, because perhaps this one, before she dove, had clicked out where she was headed.

"Come back in two years," Gruber said.

Every sperm whale's tail is unique. On some, the flukes are divided by a deep notch. On others, they meet almost in a straight line. Some flukes end in points; some are more rounded. Many are missing distinctive chunks, owing, presumably, to orca attacks. To I.D. a whale in the field, researchers usually rely on a photographic database called Flukebook. One of the very few scientists who can do it simply by sight is CETI 's lead field biologist, Shane Gero.

Gero, who is forty-three, is tall and broad, with an eager smile and a pronounced Canadian accent. A scientist-in-residence at Ottawa's Carleton University, he has been studying the whales off Dominica since 2005. By now, he knows them so well that he can relate their triumphs and travails, as well as who gave birth to whom and when. A decade ago, as Gero started having children of his own, he began referring to his "human family" and his "whale family." (His human family lives in Ontario.) Another marine biologist once described Gero as sounding "like Captain Ahab after twenty years of psychotherapy."

When Gruber approached Gero about joining Project CETI, he was, initially, suspicious. "I get a lot of e-mails like 'Hey, I think whales have crystals in their heads,' and 'Maybe we can use them to cure malaria,' " Gero told me. "The first e-mail David sent me was, like, 'Hi, I think we could find some funding to translate whale.' And I was, like, 'Oh, boy.' "

A few months later, the two men met in person, in Washington, D.C., and hit it off. Two years after that, Gruber did find some funding. CETI received thirty-three million dollars from the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collaborative whose backers include Richard Branson and Ray Dalio. (The grant, which was divided into five annual payments, will run out in 2025.)

The whole time I was in Dominica, Gero was there as well, supervising graduate students and helping with the tagging effort. From him, I learned that the first whale I had seen was named Rita and that the whales that had subsequently been spotted included Raucous, Roger, and Rita's daughter, Rema. All belonged to a group called Unit R, which Gero characterized as "tightly and actively social." Apparently, Unit R is also warmhearted. Several years ago, when a group called Unit S got whittled down to just two members-Sally and TBB-the Rs adopted them.

Sperm whales have the biggest brains on the planet-six times the size of humans'. Their social lives are rich, complicated, and, some would say, ideal. The adult members of a unit, which may consist of anywhere from a few to a few dozen individuals, are all female. Male offspring are permitted to travel with the group until they're around fifteen years old; then, as Gero put it, they are "socially ostracized." Some continue to hang around their mothers and sisters, clicking away for months unanswered. Eventually, though, they get the message. Fully grown males are solitary creatures. They approach a band of females-presumably not their immediate relatives-only in order to mate. To signal their arrival, they issue deep, booming sounds known as clangs. No one knows exactly what makes a courting sperm whale attractive to a potential mate; Gero told me that he had seen some clanging males greeted with great commotion and others with the cetacean equivalent of a shrug.

Female sperm whales, meanwhile, are exceptionally close. The adults in a unit not only travel and hunt together; they also appear to confer on major decisions. If there's a new mother in the group, the other members mind the calf while she dives for food. In some units, though not in Unit R, sperm whales even suckle one another's young. When a family is threatened, the adults cluster together to protect their offspring, and when things are calm the calves fool around.

"It's like my kids and their cousins," Gero said.

The day after I watched the successful drone flight, I went out with Gero to try to recover the recording device. More than twenty-four hours had passed, and it still hadn't been located. Gero decided to drive out along a peninsula called Scotts Head, at the southwestern tip of Dominica, where he thought he might be able to pick up the radio signal. As we wound around on the island's treacherously narrow roads, he described to me an idea he had for a children's book that, read in one direction, would recount a story about a human family that lives on a boat and looks down at the water and, read from the other direction, would be about a whale family that lives deep beneath the boat and looks up at the waves.

"For me, the most rewarding part about spending a lot of time in the culture of whales is finding these fundamental similarities, these fundamental patterns," he said. "And, you know, sure, they won't have a word for 'tree.' And there's some part of the sperm-whale experience that our primate brain just won't understand. But those things that we share must be fundamentally important to why we're here."

After a while, we reached, quite literally, the end of the road. Beyond that was a hill that had to be climbed on foot. Gero was carrying a portable antenna, which he unfolded when we got to the top. If the recording unit had surfaced anywhere within twenty miles, Gero calculated, we should be able to detect the signal. It occurred to me that we were now trying to listen for a listening device. Gero held the antenna aloft and put his ear to some kind of receiver. He didn't hear anything, so, after admiring the view for a bit, we headed back down. Gero was hopeful that the device would eventually be recovered. But, as far as I know, it is still out there somewhere, adrift in the Caribbean.

The first scientific, or semi-scientific, study of sperm whales was a pamphlet published in 1835 by a Scottish ship doctor named Thomas Beale. Called "The Natural History of the Sperm Whale," it proved so popular that Beale expanded the pamphlet into a book, which was issued under the same title four years later.

At the time, sperm-whale hunting was a major industry, both in Britain and in the United States. The animals were particularly prized for their spermaceti, the waxy oil that fills their gigantic heads. Spermaceti is an excellent lubricant, and, burned in a lamp, produces a clean, bright light; in Beale's day, it could sell for five times as much as ordinary whale oil. (It is the resemblance between semen and spermaceti that accounts for the species' embarrassing name.)

Beale believed sperm whales to be silent. "It is well known among the most experienced whalers that they never produce any nasal or vocal sounds whatever, except a trifling hissing at the time of the expiration of the spout," he wrote. The whales, he said, were also gentle-"a most timid and inoffensive animal." Melville relied heavily on Beale in composing "Moby-Dick." (His personal copy of "The Natural History of the Sperm Whale" is now housed in Harvard's Houghton Library.) He attributed to sperm whales a "pyramidical silence."

"The whale has no voice," Melville wrote. "But then again," he went on, "what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living."

The silence of the sperm whales went unchallenged until 1957. That year, two researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution picked up sounds from a group they'd encountered off the coast of North Carolina. They detected strings of "sharp clicks," and speculated that these were made for the purpose of echolocation. Twenty years elapsed before one of the researchers, along with a different colleague from Woods Hole, determined that some sperm-whale clicks were issued in distinctive, often repeated patterns, which the pair dubbed "codas." Codas seemed to be exchanged between whales and so, they reasoned, must serve some communicative function.

Since then, cetologists have spent thousands of hours listening to codas, trying to figure out what that function might be. Gero, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on vocal communication between sperm whales, told me that one of the "universal truths" about codas is their timing. There are always four seconds between the start of one coda and the beginning of the next. Roughly two of those seconds are given over to clicks; the rest is silence. Only after the pause, which may or may not be analogous to the pause a human speaker would put between words, does the clicking resume.

Codas are clearly learned or, to use the term of art, socially transmitted. Whales in the eastern Pacific exchange one set of codas, those in the eastern Caribbean another, and those in the South Atlantic yet another. Baby sperm whales pick up the codas exchanged by their relatives, and before they can click them out proficiently they "babble."

The whales around Dominica have a repertoire of around twenty-five codas. These codas differ from one another in the number of their clicks and also in their rhythms. The coda known as three regular, or 3R, for example, consists of three clicks issued at equal intervals. The coda 7R consists of seven evenly spaced clicks. In seven increasing, or 7I, by contrast, the interval between the clicks grows longer; it's about five-hundredths of a second between the first two clicks, and between the last two it's twice that long. In four decreasing, or 4D, there's a fifth of a second between the first two clicks and only a tenth of a second between the last two. Then, there are syncopated codas. The coda most frequently issued by members of Unit R, which has been dubbed 1+1+3, has a cha-cha-esque rhythm and might be rendered in English as click . . . click . . . click-click-click.

If codas are in any way comparable to words, a repertoire of twenty-five represents a pretty limited vocabulary. But, just as no one can yet say what, if anything, codas mean to sperm whales, no one can say exactly what features are significant to them. It may be that there are nuances in, say, pacing or pitch that have so far escaped human detection. Already, CETI team members have identified a new kind of signal-a single click-that may serve as some kind of punctuation mark.

When whales are resting near the surface, their exchanges can last an hour or more. Even by human standards, sperm-whale chatter is insistent and repetitive. "They're talking on top of each other all the time," Gero told me.

A snatch of dialogue recorded between two members of Unit R runs as follows. (Both Roger and Rita are adult females.)

Roger: 1+1+3
Rita: 1+1+3, 1+1+3
Roger: 9I
Rita: 1+1+3
Roger: 10I
Rita: 1+1+3, 1+1+3
Roger: 11I
Rita: 1+1+3
Roger: 10I, 11I, 1+1+3
Rita: 1+1+3

The "conversation" continues along much these same lines, until Rita finally changes her tune:

Rita: 1+1+3
Roger: 12R, 10I, 10I, 9I, 9I
Rita: 9I, 8I

Not long ago, suffering from writer's block, I asked ChatGPT if it could rewrite "Moby-Dick" from the whale's perspective. The chatbot began modestly. "As an A.I. language model, I can certainly attempt to rewrite a small excerpt," it told me. Then it launched into what it titled "Moby-Dick-The White Leviathan's Tale."

In Moby-Dick's "Moby-Dick," the plot turned on an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Some other whale had gnawed off Ahab's leg; the white whale was as innocent as the driven snow.

"My heart was one of peace, my spirit one with the rhythm of the currents," ChatGPT wrote:

I knew not of the vendetta forming against me, for I was but a creature of instinct, a guardian of the seas. But Captain Ahab's thirst for vengeance loomed large, and I became the object of his undying rage. The scar he bore from a previous encounter with my kind had branded me as his ultimate adversary. In his eyes, I represented a force of nature that defied his understanding, a living enigma of the ocean's might.

In paragraph seven, I was surprised-and excited-to see the whale/bot allude to the problem of interspecies communication:

Deep within the abyss of the sea, I pondered the futility of the captain's quest. I longed to communicate with him, to show him that my kind, too, had emotions and families to protect. But the language barrier between our worlds remained an insurmountable chasm.

As anyone who has been conscious for the past ten months knows, ChatGPT is capable of amazing feats. It can write essays, compose sonnets, explain scientific concepts, and produce jokes (though these last are not necessarily funny). If you ask ChatGPT how it was created, it will tell you that first it was trained on a "massive corpus" of data from the Internet. This phase consisted of what's called "unsupervised machine learning," which was performed by an intricate array of processing nodes known as a neural network. Basically, the "learning" involved filling in the blanks; according to ChatGPT, the exercise entailed "predicting the next word in a sentence given the context of the previous words." By digesting millions of Web pages-and calculating and recalculating the odds-ChatGPT got so good at this guessing game that, without ever understanding English, it mastered the language. (Other languages it is "fluent" in include Chinese, Spanish, and French.)

In theory at least, what goes for English (and Chinese and French) also goes for sperm whale. Provided that a computer model can be trained on enough data, it should be able to master coda prediction. It could then-once again in theory-generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn't understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT.

Currently, the largest collection of sperm-whale codas is an archive assembled by Gero in his years on and off Dominica. The codas contain roughly a hundred thousand clicks. In a paper published last year, members of the CETI team estimated that, to fulfill its goals, the project would need to assemble some four billion clicks, which is to say, a collection roughly forty thousand times larger than Gero's.

"One of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communication using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets," the team wrote.

In addition to bugging individual whales, CETI is planning to tether a series of three "listening stations" to the floor of the Caribbean Sea. The stations should be able to capture the codas of whales chatting up to twelve miles from shore. (Though inaudible above the waves, sperm-whale clicks can register up to two hundred and thirty decibels, which is louder than a gunshot or a rock concert.) The information gathered by the stations will be less detailed than what the tags can provide, but it should be much more plentiful.

One afternoon, I drove with Gruber and CETI's station manager, Yaniv Aluma, a former Israeli Navy SEAL, to the port in Roseau, where pieces of the listening stations were being stored. The pieces were shaped like giant sink plugs and painted bright yellow. Gruber explained that the yellow plugs were buoys, and that the listening equipment-essentially, large collections of hydrophones-would dangle from the bottom of the buoys, on cables. The cables would be weighed down with old train wheels, which would anchor them to the seabed. A stack of wheels, rusted orange, stood nearby. Gruber suddenly turned to Aluma and, pointing to the pile, said, "You know, we're going to need more of these." Aluma nodded glumly.

The listening stations have been the source of nearly a year's worth of delays for CETI. The first was installed last summer, in water six thousand feet deep. Fish were attracted to the buoy, so the spot soon became popular among fishermen. After about a month, the fishermen noticed that the buoy was gone. Members of CETI's Dominica-based staff set out in the middle of the night on CETI 1 to try to retrieve it. By the time they reached the buoy, it had drifted almost thirty miles offshore. Meanwhile, the hydrophone array, attached to the rusty train wheels, had dropped to the bottom of the sea.

The trouble was soon traced to the cable, which had been manufactured in Texas by a company that specializes in offshore oil-rig equipment. "They deal with infrastructure that's very solid," Aluma explained. "But a buoy has its own life. And they didn't calculate so well the torque or load on different motions-twisting and moving sideways." The company spent months figuring out why the cable had failed and finally thought it had solved the problem. In June, Aluma flew to Houston to watch a new cable go through stress tests. In the middle of the tests, the new design failed. To avoid further delays, the CETI team reconfigured the stations. One of the reconfigured units was installed late last month. If it doesn't float off, or in some other way malfunction, the plan is to get the two others in the water sometime this fall.

A sperm whale's head takes up nearly a third of its body; its narrow lower jaw seems borrowed from a different animal entirely; and its flippers are so small as to be almost dainty. (The formal name for the species is Physeter macrocephalus, which translates roughly as "big-headed blowhole.") "From just about any angle," Hal Whitehead, one of the world's leading sperm-whale experts (and Gero's thesis adviser), has written, sperm whales appear "very strange." I wanted to see more of these strange-looking creatures than was visible from a catamaran, and so, on my last day in Dominica, I considered going on a commercial tour that offered customers a chance to swim with whales, assuming that any could be located. In the end-partly because I sensed that Gruber disapproved of the practice-I dropped the idea.

Instead, I joined the crew on CETI 1 for what was supposed to be another round of drone tagging. After we'd been under way for about two hours, codas were picked up, to the northeast. We headed in that direction and soon came upon an extraordinary sight. There were at least ten whales right off the boat's starboard. They were all facing the same direction, and they were bunched tightly together, in rows. Gero identified them as members of Unit A. The members of Unit A were originally named for characters in Margaret Atwood novels, and they include Lady Oracle, Aurora, and Rounder, Lady Oracle's daughter.

Earlier that day, the crew on CETI 2 had spotted pilot whales, or blackfish, which are known to harass sperm whales. "This looks very defensive," Gero said, referring to the formation.

Suddenly, someone yelled out, "Red!" A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.

Then a new head appeared among them. "Holy fucking shit!" Gruber exclaimed.

"Oh, my God!" Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn't sure anyone ever had.

As one, the whales made a turn toward the catamaran. They were so close I got a view of their huge, eerily faceless heads and pink lower jaws. They seemed oblivious of the boat, which was now in their way. One knocked into the hull, and the foredeck shuddered.

The adults kept pushing the calf around. Its mother and her relatives pressed in so close that the baby was almost lifted out of the water. Gero began to wonder whether something had gone wrong. By now, everyone, including the captain, had gathered on the bow. Pagani and another undergraduate, Aidan Kenny, had launched two drones and were filming the action from the air. Mevorach, meanwhile, was recording the whales through a hydrophone.

To everyone's relief, the baby began to swim on its own. Then the pilot whales showed up-dozens of them.

"I don't like the way they're moving," Gruber said.

"They're going to attack for sure," Gero said. The pilot whales' distinctive, wave-shaped fins slipped in and out of the water.

What followed was something out of a marine-mammal "Lord of the Rings." Several of the pilot whales stole in among the sperm whales. All that could be seen from the boat was a great deal of thrashing around. Out of nowhere, more than forty Fraser's dolphins arrived on the scene. Had they come to participate in the melee or just to rubberneck? It was impossible to tell. They were smaller and thinner than the pilot whales (which, their name notwithstanding, are also technically dolphins).

"I have no prior knowledge upon which to predict what happens next," Gero announced. After several minutes, the pilot whales retreated. The dolphins curled through the waves. The whales remained bunched together. Calm reigned. Then the pilot whales made another run at the sperm whales. The water bubbled and churned.

"The pilot whales are just being pilot whales," Gero observed. Clearly, though, in the great "struggle for existence," everyone on board CETI 1 was on the side of the baby.

The skirmishing continued. The pilot whales retreated, then closed in again. The drones began to run out of power. Pagani and Kenny piloted them back to the catamaran to exchange the batteries. These were so hot they had to be put in the boat's refrigerator. At one point, Gero thought that he spied the new calf, still alive and well. (He would later, from the drone footage, identify the baby's mother as Rounder.) "So that's good news," he called out.

The pilot whales hung around for more than two hours. Then, all at once, they were gone. The dolphins, too, swam off.

"There will never be a day like this again," Gero said as CETI 1 headed back to shore.

That evening, everyone who'd been on board CETI 1 and CETI 2 gathered at a dockside restaurant for a dinner in honor of the new calf. Gruber made a toast. He thanked the team for all its hard work. "Let's hope we can learn the language with that baby whale," he said.

I was sitting with Gruber and Gero at the end of a long table. In between drinks, Gruber suggested that what we had witnessed might not have been an attack. The scene, he proposed, had been more like the last act of "The Lion King," when the beasts of the jungle gather to welcome the new cub.

"Three different marine mammals came together to celebrate and protect the birth of an animal with a sixteen-month gestation period," he said. Perhaps, he hypothesized, this was a survival tactic that had evolved to protect mammalian young against sharks, which would have been attracted by so much blood and which, he pointed out, would have been much more numerous before humans began killing them off.

"You mean the baby whale was being protected by the pilot whales from the sharks that aren't here?" Gero asked. He said he didn't even know what it would mean to test such a theory. Gruber said they could look at the drone footage and see if the sperm whales had ever let the pilot whales near the newborn and, if so, how the pilot whales had responded. I couldn't tell whether he was kidding or not.

"That's a nice story," Mevorach interjected.

"I just like to throw ideas out there," Gruber said.

"My! You don't say so!" said the Doctor. "You never talked that way to me before."

"What would have been the good?" said Polynesia, dusting some cracker crumbs off her left wing. "You wouldn't have understood me if I had."

-"The Story of Doctor Dolittle."

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ( CSAIL), at M.I.T., occupies a Frank Gehry-designed building that appears perpetually on the verge of collapse. Some wings tilt at odd angles; others seem about to split in two. In the lobby of the building, there's a vending machine that sells electrical cords and another that dispenses caffeinated beverages from around the world. There's also a yellow sign of the sort you might see in front of an elementary school. It shows a figure wearing a backpack and carrying a briefcase and says " NERD XING."

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL (pronounced "see-sale"), is a roboticist. "There's such a crazy conversation these days about machines," she told me. We were sitting in her office, which is dominated by a robot, named Domo, who sits in a glass case. Domo has a metal torso and oversized, goggly eyes. "It's either machines are going to take us down or machines are going to solve all of our problems. And neither is correct."

Along with several other researchers at CSAIL, Rus has been thinking about how CETI might eventually push beyond coda prediction to something approaching coda comprehension. This is a formidable challenge. Whales in a unit often chatter before they dive. But what are they chattering about? How deep to go, or who should mind the calves, or something that has no analogue in human experience?

"We are trying to correlate behavior with vocalization," Rus told me. "Then we can begin to get evidence for the meaning of some of the vocalizations they make."

She took me down to her lab, where several graduate students were tinkering in a thicket of electronic equipment. In one corner was a transparent plastic tube loaded with circuitry, attached to two white plastic flippers. The setup, Rus explained, was the skeleton of a robotic turtle. Lying on the ground was the turtle's plastic shell. One of the students hit a switch and the flippers made a paddling motion. Another student brought out a two-foot-long robotic fish. Both the fish and the turtle could be configured to carry all sorts of sensors, including underwater cameras.

"We need new methods for collecting data," Rus said. "We need ways to get close to the whales, and so we've been talking a lot about putting the sea turtle or the fish in water next to the whales, so that we can image what we cannot see."

CSAIL is an enormous operation, with more than fifteen hundred staff members and students. "People here are kind of audacious," Rus said. "They really love the wild and crazy ideas that make a difference." She told me about a diver she had met who had swum with the sperm whales off Dominica and, by his account at least, had befriended one. The whale seemed to like to imitate the diver; for example, when he hung in the water vertically, it did, too.

"The question I've been asking myself is: Suppose that we set up experiments where we engage the whales in physical mimicry," Rus said. "Can we then get them to vocalize while doing a motion? So, can we get them to say, 'I'm going up'? Or can we get them to say, 'I'm hovering'? I think that, if we were to find a few snippets of vocalizations that we could associate with some meaning, that would help us get deeper into their conversational structure."

While we were talking, another CSAIL professor and CETI collaborator, Jacob Andreas, showed up. Andreas, a computer scientist who works on language processing, said that he had been introduced to the whale project at a faculty retreat. "I gave a talk about understanding neural networks as a weird translation problem," he recalled. "And Daniela came up to me afterwards and she said, 'Oh, you like weird translation problems? Here's a weird translation problem.' "

Andreas told me that CETI had already made significant strides, just by reanalyzing Gero's archive. Not only had the team uncovered the new kind of signal but also it had found that codas have much more internal structure than had previously been recognized. "The amount of information that this system can carry is much bigger," he said.

"The holy grail here-the thing that separates human language from all other animal communication systems-is what's called 'duality of patterning,' " Andreas went on. "Duality of patterning" refers to the way that meaningless units-in English, sounds like "sp" or "ot"-can be combined to form meaningful units, like "spot." If, as is suspected, clicks are empty of significance but codas refer to something, then sperm whales, too, would have arrived at duality of patterning. "Based on what we know about how the coda inventory works, I'm optimistic-though still not sure-that this is going to be something that we find in sperm whales," Andreas said.

The question of whether any species possesses a "communication system" comparable to that of humans is an open and much debated one. In the nineteen-fifties, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner argued that children learn language through positive reinforcement; therefore, other animals should be able to do the same. The linguist Noam Chomsky had a different view. He dismissed the notion that kids acquire language via conditioning, and also the possibility that language was available to other species.

In the early nineteen-seventies, a student of Skinner's, Herbert Terrace, set out to confirm his mentor's theory. Terrace, at that point a professor of psychology at Columbia, adopted a chimpanzee, whom he named, tauntingly, Nim Chimpsky. From the age of two weeks, Nim was raised by people and taught American Sign Language. Nim's interactions with his caregivers were videotaped, so that Terrace would have an objective record of the chimp's progress. By the time Nim was three years old, he had a repertoire of eighty signs and, significantly, often produced them in sequences, such as "banana me eat banana" or "tickle me Nim play." Terrace set out to write a book about how Nim had crossed the language barrier and, in so doing, made a monkey of his namesake. But then Terrace double-checked some details of his account against the tapes. When he looked carefully at the videos, he was appalled. Nim hadn't really learned A.S.L.; he had just learned to imitate the last signs his teachers had made to him.

"The very tapes I planned to use to document Nim's ability to sign provided decisive evidence that I had vastly overestimated his linguistic competence," Terrace wrote.

Since Nim, many further efforts have been made to prove that different species-orangutans, bonobos, parrots, dolphins-have a capacity for language. Several of the animals who were the focus of these efforts-Koko the gorilla, Alex the gray parrot-became international celebrities. But most linguists still believe that the only species that possesses language is our own.

Language is "a uniquely human faculty" that is "part of the biological nature of our species," Stephen R. Anderson, a professor emeritus at Yale and a former president of the Linguistic Society of America, writes in his book "Doctor Dolittle's Delusion."

Whether sperm-whale codas could challenge this belief is an issue that just about everyone I talked to on the CETI team said they'd rather not talk about.

"Linguists like Chomsky are very opinionated," Michael Bronstein, the Oxford professor, told me. "For a computer scientist, usually a language is some formal system, and often we talk about artificial languages." Sperm-whale codas "might not be as expressive as human language," he continued. "But I think whether to call it 'language' or not is more of a formal question."

"Ironically, it's a semantic debate about the meaning of language," Gero observed.

Of course, the advent of ChatGPT further complicates the debate. Once a set of algorithms can rewrite a novel, what counts as "linguistic competence"? And who-or what-gets to decide?

"When we say that we're going to succeed in translating whale communication, what do we mean?" Shafi Goldwasser, the Radcliffe Institute fellow who first proposed the idea that led to CETI, asked.

"Everybody's talking these days about these generative A.I. models like ChatGPT," Goldwasser, who now directs the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, at the University of California, Berkeley, went on. "What are they doing? You are giving them questions or prompts, and then they give you answers, and the way that they do that is by predicting how to complete sentences or what the next word would be. So you could say that's a goal for CETI -that you don't necessarily understand what the whales are saying, but that you could predict it with good success. And, therefore, you could maybe generate a conversation that would be understood by a whale, but maybe you don't understand it. So that's kind of a weird success."

Prediction, Goldwasser said, would mean "we've realized what the pattern of their speech is. It's not satisfactory, but it's something.

"What about the goal of understanding?" she added. "Even on that, I am not a pessimist."

There are now an estimated eight hundred and fifty thousand sperm whales diving the world's oceans. This is down from an estimated two million in the days before the species was commercially hunted. It's often suggested that the darkest period for P. macrocephalus was the middle of the nineteenth century, when Melville shipped out of New Bedford on the Acushnet. In fact, the bulk of the slaughter took place in the middle of the twentieth century, when sperm whales were pursued by diesel-powered ships the size of factories. In the eighteen-forties, at the height of open-boat whaling, some five thousand sperm whales were killed each year; in the nineteen-sixties, the number was six times as high. Sperm whales were boiled down to make margarine, cattle feed, and glue. As recently as the nineteen-seventies, General Motors used spermaceti in its transmission fluid.

Near the peak of industrial whaling, a biologist named Roger Payne heard a radio report that changed his life and, with it, the lives of the world's remaining cetaceans. The report noted that a whale had washed up on a beach not far from where Payne was working, at Tufts University. Payne, who'd been researching moths, drove out to see it. He was so moved by the dead animal that he switched the focus of his research. His investigations led him to a naval engineer who, while listening for Soviet submarines, had recorded eerie underwater sounds that he attributed to humpback whales. Payne spent years studying the recordings; the sounds, he decided, were so beautiful and so intricately constructed that they deserved to be called "songs." In 1970, he arranged to have "Songs of the Humpback Whale" released as an LP.

"I just thought: the world has to hear this," he would later recall. The album sold briskly, was sampled by popular musicians like Judy Collins, and helped launch the "Save the Whales" movement. In 1979, National Geographic issued a "flexi disc" version of the songs, which it distributed as an insert in more than ten million copies of the magazine. Three years later, the International Whaling Commission declared a "moratorium" on commercial hunts which remains in effect today. The move is credited with having rescued several species, including humpbacks and fin whales, from extinction.

Payne, who died in June at the age of eighty-eight, was an early and ardent member of the CETI team. (This was the case, Gruber told me, even though he was disappointed that the project was focussing on sperm whales, rather than on humpbacks, which, he maintained, were more intelligent.) Just a few days before his death, Payne published an op-ed piece explaining why he thought CETI was so important.

Whales, along with just about every other creature on Earth, are now facing grave new threats, he observed, among them climate change. How to motivate "ourselves and our fellow humans" to combat these threats?

"Inspiration is the key," Payne wrote. "If we could communicate with animals, ask them questions and receive answers-no matter how simple those questions and answers might turn out to be-the world might soon be moved enough to at least start the process of halting our runaway destruction of life."

Several other CETI team members made a similar point. "One important thing that I hope will be an outcome of this project has to do with how we see life on land and in the oceans," Bronstein said. "If we understand-or we have evidence, and very clear evidence in the form of language-like communication-that intelligent creatures are living there and that we are destroying them, that could change the way that we approach our Earth."

"I always look to Roger's work as a guiding star," Gruber told me. "The way that he promoted the songs and did the science led to an environmental movement that saved whale species from extinction. And he thought that CETI could be much more impactful. If we could understand what they're saying, instead of 'save the whales' it will be 'saved by the whales.'

"This project is kind of an offering," he went on. "Can technology draw us closer to nature? Can we use all this amazing tech we've invented for positive purposes?"

ChatGPT shares this hope. Or at least the A.I.-powered language model is shrewd enough to articulate it. In the version of "Moby-Dick" written by algorithms in the voice of a whale, the story ends with a somewhat ponderous but not unaffecting plea for mutuality:

I, the White Leviathan, could only wonder if there would ever come a day when man and whale would understand each other, finding harmony in the vastness of the ocean's embrace. ♦

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Researchers believe that artificial intelligence may allow us to speak to other species, Elizabeth Kolbert writes.

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When I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in early June, a fabulous drag cabaret was in full swing. Across seven small screens and a large wall projection, a rotating cast of performers in an array of bold looks danced and lip-synced their hearts out to banger after banger. Highlights included Freedom! 90by George Michael, Five Yearsby David Bowie and Beyoncé's Sweet Dreams.

Then the whole thing started again. And again. But this wasn't just a video installation running on a loop: it was an elaborately engineered deepfake. Between each song, the performers underwent a kind of metamorphosis, melting down into amorphous masses of pixels and then re-forming with new faces and figures. For these AI-generated drag kings and queens, life really is a cabaret.

The Zizi Show, by the London-based artist Jake Elwes, is the centrepiece of the V&A's new suite of galleries devoted to photography. It's a topical display, given the current buzz around artificial intelligence. There are now publicly available AI tools capable of producing not just drag cabarets but also award-winning photos, film scripts and newspaper articles (not this one, I promise). The latest version of the text generator ChatGPT was recently proved able to pass a legal bar exam. Meanwhile, corporations and states are also relying on artificial intelligence for uses as varied as medical diagnostics, the automotive industry and drone warfare.

Jake Elwes's Zizi & Me: Anything you can do (I Can Do Better), 2020. Part of the artist's ongoing Zizi project, performances by deepfakes made from real drag queens. Photograph: Jake Elwes

Techno utopians have welcomed such advancements, but many others are warier. Concerns span from the hyperspecific to the existential, from practical issues such as disinformation, privacy and consent to Black Mirror-esque threats of machines replacing humans.

Against this backdrop, artists have started using AI critically in ways that Silicon Valley evangelists would never expect. While AI systems are widely figured as "black boxes" whose internal operations are unknowable even to their creators, these artists turned DIY programmers have been making works that help us to think more clearly about the uses and limits of a technology that sometimes appears worryingly boundless.

At the Science Gallery in London, the AI: Who's Looking After Me? exhibition presents a range of projects that explore how developments in the technology are already affecting our lives. "AI is not a new thing," the gallery's director, Siddharth Khajuria, tells me. "All the hype around things like ChatGPT means we aren't necessarily looking at how it's currently being used in healthcare, border control, dating applications."

Fast Familiar's Looking for Love, 2023.The installation asks users to train a chatbot to understand romantic partnership, so it can create a matchmaking algorithm. Photograph: © George Torode.

Looking for Love(2023),an installationby a group of theatre-makers and artists called Fast Familiar, prompts us to consider whether a machine will ever know how it feels to experience love. A chatbot asks the user to provide information that will help it understand romantic partnership, so it can create the perfect matchmaking algorithm. When I spoke to it this summer,the chatbot asked me to select the squares containing "love" in a Captcha-style grid of images, the kind where you normally have to identify all the bicycles or boats to prove that you're not a robot. My options included a cluster of juicy red raspberries, a still from the hit romance film The Notebook, and a slab of mincemeat shaped into a heart. Suddenly, the absurdity of attempting to teach a computer to recognise a concept as elusive as love was palpably clear.

Another display, Cat Royale(2023) by the Brighton-based art group Blast Theory, presents a video recording of an experiment in which three felines - Ghostbuster, Pumpkin and Clover - spent 12 days interacting with a robotic arm in a specially designed environment. In the recorded footage, we see the arm offering various treats and gamesto the cats. Throughout these activities, the happiness of the cats is measured by both a designated human observer - who used scoring methods developed by expert researchers - and an AI trained on thousands of video clips of cats. The robot then tweaks its suggested activities accordingly.

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Artists have started using AI critically in ways that Silicon Valley evangelists would never expect

After watching the video, viewers are invited to fill out a survey about which domestic care responsibilities they would be willing to outsource to AI. Underlying the experiment is the question: can an AI system be trusted with important duties given that - as Blast Theory's co-founder Matt Adams says in an introduction to the project - "these systems are not intelligent"? Rather, Adams suggests, "they are essentially data-processing machines that incorporate existing biases and distortions about the world and regurgitate them at enormous force".

These "existing biases" have troubling implications. The 2020 documentary Coded Bias shows artist and researcher Joy Buolamwini putting a series of facial recognition algorithms that are regularly used by law enforcement agencies to the test. She wanted to know why they fail to accurately "see" darker-skinned faces, and discovered that this was because the data on which the facial recognition systems were trained contained a limited range of skin tones and face structures. People of colour were therefore at greater risk of being misidentified as criminals - as is the case with traditional policing methods. The poster for Coded Bias shows a haunting image of Buolamwini in a white mask, all the better for the AI to see her with.

Ironically, the promoters of emerging tech are usually keen for artists to take up these tools. As Khajuria explains: "There's a desire to 'mainstream' these technologies, and a way to do that is through the cultural sector." Sometimes, he adds, companies will sponsor exhibitions on the condition that their shiny new gadgets are used in some way.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's Pollinator Pathmaker, 2021.Originally seen at the Eden Project, Ginsberg's installation harnesses AI to conserve local ecosystems. Photograph: LAS Art Foundation/ Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

But what if AI could be wrested from corporate forces, and more equitable systems developed? This possibility is what motivated Elwes to begin their work with drag and AI. The artist, who uses gender-neutral and male pronouns, noticed that computers struggled to recognise people with trans and gender-nonconforming identities - a consequence of the lack of diversity in the data being fed into AI systems.Elwes tells me they wanted to work out how to "reclaim this oppressive technology to uplift and celebrate our queer community". So they began to stage photoshoots with drag kings and queens, and then trained AI systems on new data made up of the images and video footage. Crucially, the performers were paid for their time and signed consent forms outlining the conditions under which their likenesses could be used in future.

"As an artist, you're in a unique position where you can take a step back and look at something critically, and it doesn't need a purpose or a function. You have the space to think about alternative ways of using the technology," says Elwes.

This sentiment is echoed by fellow London-based artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, who first presented the AI-assisted Pollinator Pathmaker at the Eden Project in Cornwall in 2021 (further iterations have since appeared in London and Berlin). Collaborating with horticulturalists and scientists, the artist devised an algorithm to create garden planting schemes that support the maximum number of bees, butterflies and other pollinators for every square foot.

"I like to use technologies to understand why we make them and to identify issues that conventional uses might not identify," Ginsberg tells me. The idea behind Pollinator Pathmaker was to harness a technology - which, like anything that requires computational power and hardware, has a non-trivial carbon footprint - for the benefit of the environment. "It's also a perverse way to reflect on our preference in modern society for innovation rather than preservation and conservation," says Ginsberg.

Of course, we can't yet know whether the AI hype will turn out to be a bubble, like the clamour over so many other technologies before it. But, in the meantime, perhaps artists who are using the technology as both their medium and their subject can help to illuminate what otherwise may seem like a terrifyingly black box.

This article was amended on 15 August 2023. An earlier caption for the Jake Elwes film said it was titled Zizi and Me, 2023. In fact the image shown is from Zizi & Me: Anything you can do (I Can Do Better), 2020, which is not featured in the Zizi Show at the V&A.
AI: Who's Looking After Me is at the Science Gallery, London, to 20 January.

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Meet the artists reclaiming AI from big tech - with the help of cats, bees and drag queens

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AI's potential is huge and terrifying. But a new generation of artists is starting to find new uses for the technology, as well showing its many limitations

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Artist asks British Museum to return Assyrian treasure to Iraq 

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Artist asks British Museum to return Assyrian treasure to Iraq 

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Rakowitz’s contemporary interpretation of an Assyrian winged bull, known as a lamassu, decorated in tins of date syrup, appeared on the plinth in Trafalgar Square from 2018 to 2020.

He has tentatively agreed to gift the sculpture to Tate Modern on the basis that it shares custody with Iraq. But, as part of the deal, he said that the British Museum should return one of its two Assyrian lamassu sculptures, which were discovered in Nineveh by the Victorian archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard.

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The Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz has proposed in a letter to the British Museum that it return one of its ancient Assyrian treasures to Iraq in exchange for the donation of his fourth plinth sculpture to the UK.

Rakowitz's contemporary interpretation of an Assyrian winged bull, known as a lamassu, decorated in tins of date syrup, appeared on the plinth in Trafalgar Square from 2018 to 2020.

He has tentatively agreed to gift the sculpture to Tate Modern on the basis that it shares custody with Iraq. But, as part of the deal, he said that the British Museum should return one of its two Assyrian sculptures, which were discovered in Nineveh by the Victorian archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard.

Rakowitz said returning one of these treasures would help replace a 700BC lamassu, which had stood at the Nergal Gate in Nineveh. It was left in place by Layard but deliberately destroyed by Islamic State fighters in a raid on Mosul Museum in 2015. Rakowitz's proposal is expected to be on the agenda of a visit to London next month by Iraq's new minister of culture, Ahmed Fakkak, when he is expected to be given a tour of the British Museum.

In a letter to the British Museum, setting out his bargain, Rakowitz said: "As I pondered my gift to the nation of Great Britain, I began to fantasise that it could be attached to a second gift: the return of one of the British Museum's lamassu to the country of Iraq, to replace what was destroyed by Daesh [or Islamic State]".

The letter went on: "Given all that has been destroyed in Iraq, and the intersection of that destruction with the west's insatiable appetite for the objects of the east while not always, if ever, extending that concern to its people, this return of an original would be more than just restitutive. It would be restorative."

Rakowitz said the British Museum initially dismissed the idea when he first suggested it in 2020. He was told the museum had helped to produce replicas of the originals. Rakowitz said: "I thought to myself, this is fucking insane. Where's the dignity of sending back these things that are basically a husk of the original."

But since then other experts at the museum have been more sympathetic, Rakowitz claimed. He said: "I've had a generally good relationship with some of the people in the British Museum, who are not ventriloquised by the overall attitude that things can't go back. The discussions and demands are about breaking through some of the language that protects these objects and institutions."

Rakowitz said Tate Modern was also lobbying behind the scenes to try to make it happen. He said: "The Tate informally agreed that they would put pressure on the British Museum to return one of the lamassu. The leadership of the Tate was very sympathetic to it."

When he approached officials in Iraq's foreign ministry about exhibiting his sculpture, Rakowitz said they were keen to see the ancient lamassu returned to Iraq.

"They loved the lamassu," he said referring to his work, "but they also didn't want to let the United Kingdom off the hook, and that they wanted the real ones back. London now have one lamassu too many so one of them needs to go back to Iraq."

Eleanor Robson, a professor of ancient Middle Eastern history at University College London, said the British Museum appeared to be softening its stance on returning treasures to the country of their origin, amid discussions about the future of Parthenon marbles. "The mood music seems to be changing," she said.

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Robson, who is also chief investigator at the Nahrein Network on post-conflict cultural recovery in Iraq and the host's of Fakkak visit, said: "The refurbishment of Mosul museum is very high on his agenda - it was very badly damaged by Daesh. There's a lot of planning about what might go inside it. One possibility is that Michael's lamassu might come and visit. It will be for the minister to decide."

It is unclear whether the minister will press for the original lamassu to be returned to Iraq.

Robson added: "It's good that we've got people like Michael, coming to stir things up and getting the debate going."

The British Museum would not commit to handing back either of its lamussu to Iraq, but did not rule out loan deals. A spokesperson said: "We were closely involved in supporting Iraqi requests for replica lamassu for the exterior of the university library in Mosul and, more recently, the Basrah Museum, where we have been working in partnership for over a decade. Future collaborations may well include cooperation on exhibitions and loans, which the museum would welcome."

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Artist asks British Museum to return Assyrian treasure to Iraq in swap

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Sculptor Michael Rakowitz says he will give his fourth-plinth bull to Tate Modern if Iraq can share custody

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alfway through my interview with the co-founder of DeepMind, the most advanced AI research outfit in the world, I mention that I asked ChatGPT to come up with some questions for him. Mustafa Suleyman is mock-annoyed, because he's currently developing his own chatbot, called Pi, and says I should have used that. But it was ChatGPT that became the poster child for the new age of artificial intelligence earlier this year, when it showed it could do everything from compose poetry about Love Island in the style of John Donne to devise an itinerary for a minibreak in Lisbon.

The trick hadn't really worked, or so I thought - ChatGPT's questions were mostly generic talking points. I'd asked it to try a bit harder. "Certainly, let's dive into more specific and original questions that can elicit surprising answers from Mustafa Suleyman," it had trilled. The results still weren't up to much. Even so, I chuck one at him as he sits in the offices of his startup in Palo Alto on the other end of a video call (he left DeepMind in 2019). "How do you envision AI's role in supporting mental health care in the future," I ask - and suddenly, weirdly, I feel as if I've got right to the heart of why he does what he does.

"I think that what we haven't really come to grips with is the impact of ... family. Because no matter how rich or poor you are, or which ethnic background you come from, or what your gender is, a kind and supportive family is a huge turbo charge," he says. "And I think we're at a moment with the development of AI where we have ways to provide support, encouragement, affirmation, coaching and advice. We've basically taken emotional intelligence and distilled it. And I think that is going to unlock the creativity of millions and millions of people for whom that wasn't available."

It's not what I was expecting - AI as BFF - but it's all the more startling because of what Suleyman has already told me about his background. Born in 1984 in north London to a Syrian father and English mother, he grew up in poverty and then, when he was 16, his parents separated and both moved abroad, leaving him and his little brother to fend for themselves. He later won a place at Oxford to study philosophy and theology, but dropped out after a year.

"I was frustrated with it being very theoretical. I was an entrepreneur at heart. I was running a fruit juice and milkshake stall in Camden Town while I was at Oxford. So I was coming back through the summer to make money because I was completely skint. And I was also doing the charity at the same time." (Suleyman, although a "strong atheist", was helping a friend set up the Muslim Youth Helpline, designed to make counselling and support available to young Muslims in a culturally sensitive way.) "So it was kind of three things simultaneously. And it just felt like I was doing this ivory tower thing when really I could be making money and doing good."

Organisms will soon be designed and produced with the precision and scale of today's computer chips

Now 39, he's still not in touch with his dad, and lives alone in California. Reflecting on what he hopes AI can offer - "a boost to what you can do, the way that you feel about yourself" - he says: "I certainly didn't have that. And I think that many don't." But is interaction with a chatbot a realistic replacement for companionship, support, even love? It's hard not to find the idea a bit chilling. "It's not intended to be a substitute. But that doesn't mean it's useless. I think it can fill in the gaps where people are lacking. It's going to be a tool for helping people get stuff done. Right? It's going to be very practical."

This is one aspect of the sunlit uplands of AI; the shadow side is largely what preoccupies Suleyman in his new book, written with the researcher Michael Bhaskar and ominously titled The Coming Wave. Even if you have followed debates about the dangers of artificial intelligence, or just seen Black Mirror, it's a genuinely mind-boggling read, setting out the ineluctable forces soon to completely transform politics, society and even the fabric of life itself over the next decade or two. I tell Suleyman that it's "sobering". "I mean, that's a polite way to put it," he says. "And, you know, it was hard to write - it was gut wrenching in a way. And it was only because I had time to really reflect during the pandemic that I mustered the courage to make the case. And, obviously, I hope I'm wrong."

Me too. The Coming Wave distils what is about to happen in a forcefully clear way. AI, Suleyman argues, will rapidly reduce the price of achieving any goal. Its astonishing labour-saving and problem-solving capabilities will be available cheaply and to anyone who wants to use them. He memorably calls this "the plummeting cost of power". If the printing press allowed ordinary people to own books, and the silicon chip put a computer in every home, AI will democratise simply doing things. So, sure, that means getting a virtual assistant to set up a company for you, or using a swarm of builder bots to throw up an extension. Unfortunately, it also means engineering a run on a bank, or creating a deadly virus using a DNA synthesiser.

The most extraordinary scenarios in the book come from the realm of biotech, which is already undergoing its own transformation thanks to breakthroughs such as Crispr, the gene-editing technology. Here, AI will act as a potent accelerant. Manufactured products, Suleyman tells us, could one day be "grown" from synthetic biological materials rather than assembled, using carbon sucked out of the atmosphere. Not only that, but "organisms will soon be designed and produced with the precision and scale of today's computer chips and software". If this sounds fanciful, it's just a bit further along a trajectory we've already embarked on. He points out that companies such as The Odin are already selling home genetic engineering kits including live frogs and crickets for $1,999 (£1,550). You can even buy a salamander bioengineered to express a fluorescent protein for $299 - though when I visit the website, they're out of stock.

Glow-in-the-dark pets aside, many of these developments hold enormous promise: of curing disease, charting a way through the climate crisis, creating "radical abundance", as Suleyman puts it. But four aspects of the AI revolution create the potential for catastrophe. First, the likelihood of asymmetric effects. We're familiar with this in the context of warfare - a rag-tag band of fighters able to hamstring a powerful state using guerrilla tactics. Well, the same principle will apply to bad actors in the age of AI: an anonymous hacker intent on bringing down a healthcare system's computers, say, or a Unabomber-like figure equipped with poison-tipped drones the size of bees.

Second, there's what Suleyman terms hyper-evolution: AI is capable of refining design and manufacturing processes, with the improvements compounding after each new iteration. It's incredibly hard to keep up with this rate of change and make sure safeguards are in place. Lethal threats could emerge and spread before anyone has even clocked them.

Then there's the fact that AI is "omni use". Like electricity, it's a technology that does everything. It will permeate all aspect of our lives because of the benefits it brings, but what enables those benefits also enables harms. The good will be too tempting to forgo, and the bad will come along with it.

Mustafa Suleyman outside the offices of his company Inflection AI in Palo Alto, California. Photograph: Winni Wintermeyer/The Guardian

Finally, there's "autonomy". Unique among technologies so far in human history, AI has the potential to make decisions for itself. Though this may invoke Terminator-style nightmares, autonomy isn't necessarily bad: autonomous cars are likely to be much safer than ones driven by humans. But what happens when autonomy and hyper-evolution combine? When AI starts to refine itself and head off in new directions on its own? It doesn't take much imagination to be concerned about that - and yet Suleyman believes the dangers are too often dismissed with the wave of a hand, particularly among the tech elite - a habit he calls pessimism aversion.

He likes to think of himself as someone who confronts problems rather than rationalising them away. After he left Oxford he worked in policy for the then mayor of London Ken Livingstone, before helping NGOs arrive at a common position during the Copenhagen climate summit. It wasn't until 2010 that he got into AI, creating DeepMind with the coding genius Demis Hassabis, the brother of a school friend, and becoming chief product officer. DeepMind's mission was to develop artificial general intelligence, AI with human-like adaptability. Four years later it was acquired by Google for £400m, making Suleyman and his colleagues unimaginably rich.

For a while DeepMind's efforts seemed nerdy and abstract. It tried to beat people at board games. Among its achievements was using AI to thrash the champion Go player Lee Se-dol. But it was always about more than that ( Hassabis recently said: "I've always been interested in the nature of the universe, nature of reality, consciousness, the meaning of life, all of these big questions. That's what I wanted to spend my life working on"). In 2020, it unveiled a program that could figure out the structure of proteins, one of the most fiendish problems in science. Painstaking research over many decades had described the shape of about 190,000 of these complex molecules - which include insulin and haemoglobin - information that's vital for understanding how they function, and coming up with targeted drug treatments. By 2022 DeepMind had worked out another 200m.

There's a narrow corridor between the danger of dystopian authoritarianism and this catastrophe caused by openness

But given omni-use and the havoc that AI might be about to wreak, does Suleyman ever feel guilty about the part he's played in its development? No, because he sees technological change as arising from the "collective creative consciousness". "That's not a way of disowning responsibility. It's just an honest assessment: very rarely does an invention get held in a kind of private space for very long." At the same time, he does believe he can nudge the sector towards greater social public-spiritedness. "What I've always tried to do is attach the idea of ethics and safety to AGI. I wrote our business plan in 2010, and the front page had the mission 'to build artificial general intelligence, safely and ethically for the benefit of everyone'." He reckons this early stand set the tone. "I think it has really shaped how a lot of the other AI labs formed. OpenAI [the creator of ChatGPT] started as a nonprofit largely because of a reaction to us having set that standard."

The Coming Wave is partly an effort to continue this role of shaping and bolstering the industry's conscience. In it, he sets out 10 strategies for the "containment" he sees as being necessary to keep humanity on the narrow path between societal collapse on the one hand and AI-enabled totalitarianism on the other. These include increasing the number of researchers working on safety (including "off switches" for software threatening to run out of control) from 300 or 400 currently to hundreds of thousands; fitting DNA synthesisers with a screening system that will report any pathogenic sequences; and thrashing out a system of international treaties to restrict and regulate dangerous tech.

Given the range of terrifying scenarios he has sketched out, Suleyman comes across as relatively optimistic. For the moment, at least, there's a sympathetic administration running the most powerful government in the world. Last month he was invited to the White House alongside Amazon, Microsoft and Google to sign up to an oversight regime, albeit a voluntary one. Given tech's poor record at self-regulation, this may seem a little underpowered. But he's reassured the Biden administration is alive to the problem. "I would say that they're taking the threat very seriously. And they are making a lot of progress on it." How does he think that would go under Trump if he wins again? "How do I think it would go under Trump?" He gets the giggles. "I mean, you know ... that's American politics."

For Suleyman, the only powers realistically capable of acting to contain AI are states, and despite the gallows humour, he's deeply worried about how fragile they are becoming. This doesn't seem very Silicon Valley, somehow, at least as represented by the likes of Ayn Randian radicals such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. "I mean, I couldn't disagree more with their politics. I'm extremely against them, if I'm extreme about anything. I think this idea that we need to dismantle the state, we need to have maximum freedom - that's really dangerous. On the other hand, I'm obviously very aware of the danger of centralised authoritarianism and, you know, even in its minuscule forms like nimbyism. That's why, in the book, we talk about a narrow corridor between the danger of dystopian authoritarianism and this catastrophe caused by openness. That is the big governance challenge of the next century: how to strike that balance."

"I think we're in a generational transition at the moment," he continues. "There's the existing leaders who are in their mid-50s, have spent 25 years in Silicon Valley and risen up through the ranks either as founders or executives. And they have an outlook which is probably closer to the libertarian tendency. So Zuck [Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook] and Larry and Sergey [Page and Brin, the co-founders of Google]. But there's this new crop leading AI companies, like Sam [Altman, CEO of OpenAI] and myself. And I think that we've been talking about the potential dangers for a long time."

Navigating the politics of running a company hasn't always been easy for this new generation. And to some extent Suleyman now finds himself at the margins of it. In 2019 he took a "break" from DeepMind, and in 2021 the Wall Street Journal revealed he had been stripped of management responsibilities at the company because of complaints about his style. He apologised and told the paper that he "accepted feedback that, as a co-founder ... I drove people too hard and at times my management style was not constructive".

When I bring it up he seems unfazed, or maybe just practised at answering the question. "This was five years ago now. I was young, super hard-charging, very driven, working 14 hours a day. And it's intense. You know, you just get better. You learn from these things." For what it's worth, Suleyman comes across to me as friendly and open - confident and clear but not pompous. Working under him, of course, may be a different experience. But he does seem to have a genuine desire to do good. As for DeepMind, he says he doesn't miss it, being less interested in fundamental research than putting things into production - like his chatbot, Pi, which is designed to be friendlier and more supportive than ChatGPT - a "hype man" as he puts it. And he doesn't seem to have fallen out with Hassabis: "We always have dinner when either one of us is in Palo Alto or London."

Isn't he worried The Coming Wave's grim predictions will just set off another round of dismissals - that pessimism aversion he talked about? "The book is a provocation," he says. He wants attention for his containment plan, and suggestions to improve it. Does that mean we shouldn't take his warnings at face value? "I think the cool thing about what I'm doing is that I'm predicting something. And I think a lot of people don't have the courage to predict things. I don't think I'm wrong, but we do have time to intervene." It sounds as though, having seen one version of the future, he's desperately trying to change the timeline, like a real-life Marty McFly. "Exactly," he laughs. Let's hope he's not too late.

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar is published by Bodley Head on 7 September (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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'I hope I'm wrong': the co-founder of DeepMind on how AI threatens to reshape life as we know it

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From synthetic organisms to killer drones, Mustafa Suleyman talks about the mind-blowing potential of artificial intelligence, and how we can still avoid catastrophe