Exhibition making is constrained by logistics: space, time, and the laws of physics; contacts, politics, and money. There are artists and lenders to convince, bills to be paid. Status is important in securing work. Artists, galleries, and collections make judgement calls about where their work is placed. Everyone wants to enhance their reputation, their cultural capital.

It’s easy to put works in conversation in a slide lecture or reproduced in a book. It’s another thing to bring them together in a room. Art works tend to be more-or-less unique things, which have to be sourced, transported, insured, invigilated, and returned. Here’s a great example …

One of art history’s classic cause-and-effects, compare-and-contrasts, is the pairing of Titian’s Venus d’Urbino (1538) from the Uffizi in Florence and Manet’s Olympia (1863) from the Musee D’Orsay in Paris. Manet knew the Titian, though perhaps not in the flesh. He was riffing on it, updating it, 325 years later, replacing a goddess with a prostitute. The point is made in so many slide lectures and art history texts as to have become a cliché. However, the works themselves had never shared a wall.

So it was shocking to step into the exhibition Manet in Venice in the Doge’s Palace in 2013, during the Venice Biennale, and see these two unique works finally brought together in the flesh. As they are roughly the same size and proportions, it looked like the classic two-projector art-history comparison. It looked great, obvious, but as a curator I was too aware of the epic negotiation and complexity involved in making this juxtaposition of priceless works happen. 
•

If you haven’t seen Presence—the Olafur Eliasson show at Queensland Art Gallery—go immediately. It’s great to see Eliasson’s works presented with confidence, at scale. Ten out of ten. When I went again the day after Boxing Day, the place was crawling with punters, especially the epic Lego table. I wrote a short account of that work when we showed it in Demented Architecture at City Gallery Wellington in 2015. Click here. Olafur Eliasson: Presence, Gallery of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, until 12 July.
•

In the past, we looked to religion to tell us what to do. In Duccio’s time, our art was all icons and altarpieces. However, we would become increasing secular and enlightened. In 1882 Nietzsche wrote: God is dead and we killed him. Once we killed external authority, we had to invent our own rules, to work out what to do for ourselves, to take responsibility, create our own morality, find our own way. That lead to doubt and disruption, existentialism, and to modern and contemporary art, art based on questions not on answers.

We’re now entering a new epoch. AI. We’re creating superintelligent machines that will think better than we can, that will guide us, make decisions for us, and answer our prayers—that will be close to authoritative. Having long since killed god, we are now effectively creating a new god—one that can create images of us and for us. Will contemporary art survive? Perhaps we won’t need artists to come up with audacious new images and ideas anymore. How could they compete with the abundant creativity of AI? If AI does it better, will it make human endeavour and insight seem superfluous?

If contemporary art doesn’t survive, perhaps contemporary art museums will, not to present new art, but to present contemporary art as a thing of the past—answering to a nostalgia for a time when artists felt compelled to struggle, to create new ideas and images, new forms of thought and feeling—a time when human creativity and agency mattered. Perhaps contemporary art will become like ancient art is for us now, something we want to connect with through our humanity, despite being historically estranged from it. 

I asked ChatGPT to picture archaeologists excavating Duchamp readymades. It produced the image above. Interestingly it got the date of Fountain wrong, unprompted, making Duchamp a contemporary of Duccio. Was this error or insight?
•