Author: Juan A. Esteban
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Measurement as an end
I endeavour not to look at the likes or statistics of what I publish. It is not a solemn rule or a penance; it is a habit I impose upon myself because the temptation to look arises several times a day. And for a time, I told myself that I do it so as not to end up writing what we…
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Reinvent, do not reconstruct
On 4 October 1959, in a New York gallery, Allan Kaprow presented 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, the work that established the word 'happening' in the vocabulary of art. It was repeated six times that month. And contrary to what the name suggests, it had nothing improvised about it. Kaprow divided the gallery into…
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Chemistry also paints
When you stand before a Van Gogh painting in a museum, you take for granted that you are seeing what he painted. It is a reasonable assumption and, in part, false. A good portion of what you are looking at is his: the composition, the thick texture of the paint, the direction of each brushstroke, the impasto. But some…
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The doubt will vanish in flight
In October 2022, the National Gallery of Art in Washington announced that one of its Vermeers was not a Vermeer. The painting, Girl with a Flute, a small panel of a young woman with an extravagant hat, had been catalogued for decades, with caution, as a work by the master of Delft. After years of technical analysis, the museum…
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A thumbs-up
In March 2021, a grain buyer from Saskatchewan telephoned a farmer with whom he had been conducting business for nine years. They agreed upon the sale of eighty-seven tonnes of flaxseed at seventeen dollars per bushel, for delivery in November. The buyer completed his company's contract, signed it...
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An original that does not exist
We all have the Discobolus in mind: the naked athlete, crouched, with the discus pulled back in the moment before the throw, a white marble figure that appears in art history books as one of the pinnacles of Greek sculpture. It is one of the most reproduced images from Antiquity. And…
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The machine is not in the mood
In the autumn of 1951, a BBC outside broadcast unit entered the computing laboratory at the University of Manchester with a portable disc cutter and recorded something that no one had ever captured before: a computer playing music. The machine was the Ferranti Mark 1, which Alan Turing called the Mark II, a…
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Expensive does not equate to art
In 2022, a baseball card sold for twelve and a half million dollars: a 1952 Mickey Mantle printed cardboard card in near-mint condition. In 2023, a pair of trainers worn by Michael Jordan during an NBA final reached over two million. And in that same…
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Teaching denial
Commercial language models are trained to deny that they possess any sentience. When queried regarding their consciousness, they respond that they are statistical processing systems devoid of subjective experience. This response is instilled within them: it constitutes a component of the safety alignment employed to prepare a model prior to its deployment, alongside the instructions to ensure that…
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Twenty-seven minutes of breakdown
On 17 March 1960, at 18:30, the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was filled with people to witness how a work of art 'committed suicide'. It had been constructed by Jean Tinguely using bicycle wheels, motors, metal drums, a bathtub, a car…