I was going to end my last post, “Against Compression,” with a coda about a fictional artist, but I decided the piece already placed enough demands on the reader’s patience. So here it is, a free-floating coda. Affix it to whatever you’d like.
The career of the contemporary French artist Jed Martin is a twisty one, full of incursions and recursions. (Michel Houellebecq chronicles them all in his 2010 novel The Map and the Territory.) As a boy, Jed would sit in his family’s garden and, under the intermittently watchful eye of his pretty babysitter, draw flowers with colored pencils. As a teenager, he began painting landscapes in a style reminiscent of Cézanne. In art school, he abandoned painting for photography. Soon he was taking simple but exquisitely detailed photos of everyday artifacts: forks, Pendaflex files, printer cartridges, nuts and bolts. He wanted to create “an exhaustive catalogue of the objects of human manufacturing in the Industrial Age.” The project consumed him for six years, and out of it came eleven thousand photographs, neatly stored as TIFF files on a single, small Western Digital hard drive.
The photos gained him a few admirers among his art school colleagues, but it was only after he shifted the focus of his lens from industrial goods to Michelin roadmaps that he found fame. In the tire manufacturer’s lovingly detailed maps of the French countryside, Jed discovered a world more ordered, more understandable, denser with information, than the one the maps portrayed and in which he lived. His first solo exhibition, underwritten by the communications department of the Michelin Corporation, caused a stir in the Paris art world.
The entrance to the hall was barred by a big panel, leaving two-meters-wide passageways at either side, on which Jed had displayed a satellite photo taken around the mountain of Guebwiller next to an enlargement of a Michelin Departments map of the same zone. The contrast was striking: while the photograph showed only a soup of more or less uniform green sprinkled with vague blue spots, the map developed a fascinating maze of departmental and scenic roads, viewpoints, forests, lakes, and cols. Above the two enlargements, in black capital letters, was the title of the exhibition: THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY.
The review in Le Monde was “ecstatic in its praise.”
But Jed grew bored of maps. He stowed his camera gear and went back to painting. In a kind of slow-motion frenzy of creativity that would last many years, he produced his acclaimed “Professions” series of oils, upwards of sixty large-scale portraits of people working at various jobs, blue collar and white. There was a butcher and a store manager, an architect and a prostitute, a “remote maintenance assistant.” Wealthy collectors bid up the value of the coldly beautiful works. Jed became very rich.
The most celebrated of the Professions canvasses was one of the last he painted. Titled Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology and subtitled The Conversation at Palo Alto, it portrayed the two aging entrepreneurs sitting in the living room of Jobs’s house in Silicon Valley. Gates, casually dressed and wearing flip-flops, looks relaxed and happy, a man enjoying his retirement and his money. Jobs, in the early stages of the disease that would kill him, appears pinched and withdrawn, an “embodiment of austerity.” The two men are playing a game of chess, which Gates appears to be winning.
Comments Houellebecq:
In certain pages of his autobiography, The Road Ahead, Bill Gates occasionally lets slip what could be considered total cynicism — particularly in the passage where he confesses quite plainly that it is not necessarily advantageous for a business to offer the most innovative products. More often it is preferable to observe what the competitors are doing (and there he clearly refers, without using the name, to Apple), to let them bring out their products, confront the difficulties inherent in any innovation, and, in a way, surmount the initial problems; then, in a second phase, to flood the market by offering low-cost copies of the competing products.
AI, it strikes me, applies the Gates model to the entirety of culture. Let writers and musicians and artists do the hard work of actually creating the original artifacts of culture. Then have the machine flood the market with low-cost copies, with cheap derivatives. I did some searching to see if Houellebecq had made any recent pronouncements about AI. I couldn’t find anything. So, for the hell of it, I asked Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, what Houellebecq might say about AI. Here’s what it came up with:
The machines had finally learned to speak, and predictably, they had nothing interesting to say. Claude, ChatGPT, Bard — these names floating through the digital ether like the brand names of antidepressants, promising relief from the fundamental problem of human existence: the need to think.
I watched my neighbors queuing at the coffee shop, each hunched over their phones, asking artificial intelligences to write their emails, plan their dates, explain their feelings back to them. The barista, a philosophy graduate drowning in student debt, served lattes to people who no longer needed to form coherent thoughts. There was something almost beautiful about this collective surrender to algorithmic mediation, the way a mass suicide might be beautiful if observed from sufficient distance.
Not perfect, but pretty damn good. Maybe the machines do have something interesting to say.
But back to Jed Martin and his Professions. In looking at Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology, the viewer’s eye, writes Houellebecq, is drawn not just to the two famous figures, one triumphant, the other tragic, but to a large window behind them, through which can seen “a landscape of meadows, of an almost surreal emerald green.”
Evening was falling, magnificently, in the explosion of a sun that Martin had wanted to be almost improbable in its orangey magnificence, setting on northern California, and the evening was falling on the most advanced part of the world; it was that too, that indefinite sadness of farewells, which could be read in Jobs’s eyes.