The Mauritshuis Museum has been embroiled in criticism and has reignited the debate: can AI generate “art”?
In one of the galleries Mauritshuis Museum One of the most recognizable paintings in the world is on display in the Netherlands. “The girl of the pearl” It is a portrait painted by Johannes Vermeer that shows a woman in three quarters with a pleasant expression and sparkly pearl earrings as a focal point. The work is easily recognizable by any art aficionado, but recently the museum has wanted give it a face lift.
The initiative “My Girl with a Pearl”promoted by the Mauritshuis Museum, invited artists from all over the world to send your own rendering of the legendary Vermeer painting. The museum wanted to encourage creativity, and as a reward for the effort of the applicants, it was exposing the best proposals in the place where we normally find the painting by the Dutch painter. The original work is currently on loan to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until June 4.
A work generated with AI sows controversy again
The initiative was a complete success, and more than 175 proposals they were selected to rotate in the exhibition area facing the public of the museum. The problem arose when the one that replaced the “Young Woman with a Pearl Earring” was an AI generated paintingphotographer’s work Julian Van Dieken. Dieken used Midjourney to generate an image that paid tribute to Vermeer, but to the artistic community that participated in the project he didn’t like anything for an AI-generated work to be on display in the museum.
The debate was reopened on social networks, with divided positions defending whether the art generated by AI could be considered art after all. Dieken wanted to downplay the matter in a recent Instagram postwhere he explains that he generated that image for fun and as a tributewithout any intention of disrespecting the rest of the applicants.
I didn’t create the image just for the contest, I did it for myself. The image I created with the help of AI and Photoshop, and was meant as a fun tribute as I love Vermeer’s work. As a photographer, I will always pursue that kind of detail, composition and quality of light, even if it is with the help of Artificial Intelligence”
With the new update of Midjourney V5imaging has broken a new barrier, and it is becoming increasingly difficult draw the line between what is real and what is not. This process is progressive, and the images generated by AI will become more and more complex, it will be up to us to embrace this technology to create a new art form or reject it completely in this field. The controversy is served.