by Julian White
In LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum building (BCAM—and not to be confused with The Broad) the space to the right and directly accessible upon entering now hosts bad digital art on heavy rotation.
Currently, Diffuse Control, 2025, by Beeple et al has taken up residency in the room. It consists of three stacked and rotating cubes made of video screens playing audience-curated images from the museum’s collection which are then manipulated by an AI algorithm. It could literally be in any hotel lobby (probably most at home in Vegas though) announcing programming events interspersed with photographs or video of the ocean, fields of daisies, or showgirls. Or maybe just a screensaver.
It is eye-catching—as are most videos and/or light shows—and it is rotating, so that’s pretty novel—but it isn’t eye-keeping. You see it, you go “Oh it’s things like this” and you move on with life.
LACMA’s website states that Beeple’s “work seeks to dissolve boundaries between artist and audience, making the creative act a shared experience.”
One could say the piece asks us to consider the question of who, exactly, is the artist? Beeple? AI programmers? The audience? The database of images? The collective of human cultures that produced them? But more pressing than who is responsible is the question of why anyone would want to be. What Diffuse Control proves is just how dull a high level of technical sophistication married to a medium level of conceptual sophistication can be. We do indeed participate in the blobs, zig-zags and subpsychedelic gradients, and yet they suck. Is the opportunity to participate in this sucking a gift? The art is “participatory” in the same sense that a GOP primary in a gerrymandered South Carolina district is “democracy.”
An arguably more interesting question is how long it will take this kind of imagery to overtake the much less expensive versions of itself which currently enable and decorate the extravagance industry. Will Caesars Palace soon house virtual fishtanks where guests can mix and morph the fish using the faces of anyone on the casino floor? Will Disney allow kids to finally meld Goofy and Pluto into one grotesque anthropodog? Will it feel any different than any other video game? Or will life itself slowly begin to feel like one?
Image: Staff