adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Art

Glaze protects art from prying AIs

Published

 on

The asymmetry in time and effort it takes human artists to produce original art vs the speed generative AI models can now get the task done is one of the reasons why Glaze, an academic research project out of the University of Chicago, looks so interesting. It’s just launched a free (non-commercial) app for artists (download link here) to combat the theft of their ‘artistic IP’ — scraped into data-sets to train AI tools designed to mimic visual style — via the application of a high tech “cloaking” technique.

A research paper published by the team explains the (beta) app works by adding almost imperceptible “perturbations” to each artwork it’s applied to — changes that are designed to interfere with AI models’ ability to read data on artistic style — and make it harder for generative AI technology to mimic the style of the artwork and its artist. Instead systems are tricked into outputting other public styles far removed from the original artwork.

The efficacy of Glaze’s style defence does vary, per its makers — with some artistic styles better suited to being “cloaked” (and thus protected) from prying AIs than others. Other factors (like countermeasures) can affect its performance, too. But the goal is to provide artists with a tool to fight back against the data miners’ incursions — and at least disrupt their ability to rip hard-worked artistic style without them needing to give up on publicly showcasing their work online.

Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at University of Chicago, who is the faculty lead on the project, explained how the tool works in an interview with TechCrunch.

300x250x1

“What we do is we try to understand how the AI model perceives its own version of what artistic style is. And then we basically work in that dimension — to distort what the model sees as a particular style. So it’s not so much that there’s a hidden message or blocking of anything… It is, basically, learning how to speak the language of the machine learning model, and using its own language — distorting what it sees of the art images in such a way that it actually has a minimal impact on how humans see. And it turns out because these two worlds are so different, we can actually achieve both significant distortion in the machine learning perspective, with minimal distortion in the visual perspective that we have as humans,” he tells us.

“This comes from a fundamental gap between how AI perceives the world and how we perceive the world. This fundamental gap has been known for ages. It is not something that is new. It is not something that can be easily removed or avoided. It’s the reason that we have a task called ‘adversarial examples’ against machine learning. And people have been trying to fix that — defend against these things — for close to 10 years now, with very limited success,” he adds. “This gap between how we see the world and how AI model sees the world, using mathematical representation, seems to be fundamental and unavoidable… What we’re actually doing — in pure technical terms — is an attack, not a defence. But we’re using it as a defence.”

Another salient consideration here is the asymmetry of power between individual human creators (artists, in this case), who are often producing art to make a living, and the commercial actors behind generative AI models — entities which have pulled in vast sums of venture capital and other investment (as well as sucking up massive amounts of other people’s data) with the aim of building machines to automate (read: replace) human creativity. And, in the case of generative AI art, the technology stands accused of threatening artists’ livelihoods by automating the mimicry of artistic style.

Users of generative AI art tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney don’t need to put in any brush-strokes themselves to produce a plausible (or at least professional-looking) pastiche. The software lets them type a few words to describe whatever it is they want to see turned into imagery — including, if they wish, literal names of artists whose style they want the work to conjure up — to get near-instant gratification in the form of a unique visual output reflecting the chosen inputs. It’s an incredibly powerful technology.

Yet generative AI model makers have not (typically) asked for permission to trawl the public Internet for data to train their models. Artists who’ve displayed their work online, on open platforms — a very standard means of promoting a skill and, indeed, a necessary component of selling such creative services in the modern era — have found their work appropriated as training data by AI outfits building generative art models without having been asked if that was okay.

In some cases, individual artists have even found their own names can be used as literal prompts to instruct the AI model to generate imagery in their specific style — again without any up-front licensing (or other type of payment) for what is a really naked theft of their creative expression. (Although such demands may well come, soon enough, via litigation.)

With laws and regulations trailing developments in artificial intelligence, there’s a clear power imbalance (if not an out-and-out vacuum) on display. And that’s where the researchers behind Glaze hope their technology can help — by equipping artists with a free tool to defend their work and creativity from being consentlessly ingested by hungry-for-inspiration AIs. And buy time for lawmakers to get a handle on how existing rules and protections, like copyright, need to evolve to keep pace.

Transferability and efficacy

Glaze is able to combat style training across a range of generative AI models owing to similarities in how such systems are trained for the same underlying task, per Zhao — who invokes the machine learning concept of “transferability” to explain this aspect.

“Even though we don’t have access to all the [generative AI art] models that are out there there is enough transferability between them that our effect will carry through to the models that we don’t have access to. It won’t be as strong, for sure — because the transferability property is imperfect. So there’ll be some transferability of the properties but also, as it turns out, we don’t need it to be perfect because stylistic transfer is one of these domains where the effects are continuous,” he explains. “What that means is that there’s not specific boundaries… It’s a very continuous space. And so even if you transfer an incomplete version of the cloaking effect, in most cases, it will still have a significant impact on the art that you can generate from a different model that we have not optimised for.”

Choice of artistic style can have — potentially — a far greater effect on the efficacy of Glaze, according to Zhao, since some art styles are a lot harder to defend than others. Essentially because there’s less on the canvas for the technology to work with, in terms of inserting perturbations — so he suggests it’s likely to be less effective for minimalist/clean/monochrome styles vs visually richer works.

“There are certain types of art that we are less able to protect because of the nature of their style. So, for example, if you imagine an architectural sketch, something that has very clean lines and is very precise with lots of white background — a style like that is very difficult for us to cloak effectively because there’s nowhere, or there are very few places, for the effects, the manipulation of the image, to really go. Because it’s either white space or black lines and there’s very little in between. So for art pieces like that it can be more challenging — and the effects can be weaker. But, for example, for oil paintings with lots of texture and colour and background then it becomes much easier. You can cloak it with significantly higher — what we call — perturbation strength, significantly higher intensity, if you will, of the effect and not have it affect the art visually as much.”

How much visual difference is there between a ‘Glazed’ (cloaked) artwork and the original (naked-to-AI) art? To our eye the tool does add some noticeable noise to imagery: The team’s research paper includes the below sample, showing original vs Glazed artworks — where some fuzziness in the cloaked works is clear. But, evidently, their hope is the effect is subtle enough that the average viewer won’t really notice something funny is going on (they will only be seeing the Glazed work after all, not ‘before and after’ comparisons).

Glaze: Difference between cloaked artwork and originals

Detail from Glaze research paper

Fine-eyed artists themselves will surely spot the subtle transformation. But they may feel it’s a slight visual trade-off worth making — to be able to put their art out there without worrying they’re basically gifting their talent to AI giants. (And conducting surveys of artists to find out how they feel about AI art generally, and the efficacy of Glaze’s protection specifically, has been a core piece of the work undertaken by the researchers.)

“We’re trying to address this issue of artists feeling like they cannot share their art online,” says Zhao. “Particularly independent artists. Who are no longer able to post, promote and advertise their own work for commission — and that’s really their livelihood. So just the fact they can feel like they’re safer — and the fact that it becomes much harder for someone to mimic them — means that we’ve really accomplished our goal. And for the large majority of artists out there… they can use this, they can feel much better about how they promote their own work and they can continue on with their careers and avoid most of the impact of the threat of AI models mimicking their style.”

Degrees of mimicry

Hasn’t the horse bolted — at least for those artists whose works (and style) have already been ingested by generative AI models? Not so, suggests Zhao, pointing out that most artists are continually producing and promoting new works. Plus of course the AI models themselves don’t stand still, with training typically an ongoing process. So he says there’s an opportunity for cloaked artworks which are made public to change how generative AI models perceive a particular artist’s style and shift a previously learned baseline.

“If artists start to use tools like Glaze then over time, it will actually have a significant impact,” he argues. “Not only that, there’s the added benefit that… the artistic style domain is actually continuous and so you don’t have to have a predominant or even a large majority of images be protected for it to have the desired effect.

“Even when you have a relatively low percentage of images that have been cloaked by Glaze, it will have a non-insignificant impact on the output of these models when they try to generate synthetic art. So it certainly is the case that the more protected art that they take in as training data, the more these models will produce styles that are further away from the original artist. But even when you have just a small percentage, the effects will be there — it will just be weaker. So it’s not an all or nothing sort of property.”

“I tend to think of it as — imagine a three dimensional space where the current understanding of an AI model’s view of a particular artist — let’s say Picasso — is currently positioned in a certain corner. And as you start to take in more training data about Picasso being a different style, it’ll slowly nudge its view of what Picasso’s style really means in a different direction. And the more that it ingests then the more it’ll move along that particular direction, until at some point it is far enough away from the original that it is no longer able to produce anything meaningfully visible that that looks like Picasso,” he adds, sketching a conceptual model for how AI thinks about art.

Another interesting element here is how Glaze selects which false style to feed the AI — and, indeed, how it selects styles to reuse to combat automated artistic mimicry. Obviously there are ethical considerations to weigh here. Not least given that there could be an uptick in pastiche of artificially injected styles if users’ prompts are re-channeled away from their original ask.

The short answer is Glaze is using “publicly known” styles (Vincent van Gogh is one style it’s used to demo the tech) for what Zhao refers to as “our target styles” — aka, the look the tech tries to shift the AI’s mimicry toward.

He says the app also strives to output a distinctly different target style to the original artwork in order to produce a pronounced level of protection for the individual artist. So, in other words, a fine art painter’s cloaked works might output something that looks rather more abstract — and thus shouldn’t be mistaken for a pastiche (even a bad one). (Although interestingly, per the paper, artists they surveyed considered Glaze to have succeeded in protecting their IP when mimicked artwork was of poor quality.)

“We don’t actually expect to completely change the model’s view of a particular artist’s style to that target style. So you don’t actually need to be 100% effective to transform a particular artist to exactly someone else’s style. So it never actually gets 100% there. Instead, what it produces is some sort of hybrid,” he says. “What we do is we try to find publicly understood styles that don’t infringe on any single artist’s style but that also are reasonably different — perhaps significantly different — from the original artist’s starting point.

“So what happens is that the software actually runs and analyses the existing art that the artist gives it, computes, roughly speaking, where the artist currently is in the feature space that represents styles, and then assigns a style that is reasonably different / significantly different in the style space, and uses that as a target. And it tries to be consistent with that.”

Countermeasures

The team’s paper discusses a couple of countermeasures data thirsty AI mimics might seek to deploy in a bid to circumvent style cloaking — namely image transformations (which augment an image prior to training to try to counteract perturbation); and robust training (which augments training data by introducing some cloaked images alongside their correct outputs so the model could adapt its response to cloaked data).

In both cases the researchers found the methods did not undermine the “artist-rated protection” (aka ARP) success metric they use to assess the tool’s efficacy at disrupting style mimicry (although the paper notes the robust training technique can reduce the effectiveness of cloaking).

Discussing the risks posed by countermeasures, Zhao concedes it is likely to be a bit of an arms race between protective shielding and AI model makers’ attempts to undo defensive attacks and keep grabbing valuable data. But he sounds reasonably confident Glaze will have a meaningful protective impact — at least for a while, helping to buy artists time to lobby for better legal protections against rapacious AI models — suggesting tools like this will work by increasing the cost of acquiring protected data.

“It is almost always the case that attacks are easier than the defences [in the field of machine learning]… In our case, what we’re actually doing is more similar to what can be classically referred to as a data poisoning attack that disrupts models from within. It is possible, it is always possible, that someone will come up with a more strong defence that will try to counteract the effects of Glaze. And I really don’t know how long it would take. In the past for example, in the research community, it has taken, like, a year or sometimes more, for countermeasures to to be developed for defences. In this case, because [Glaze] is actually effectively an attack, I do think that we can actually come back and produce adaptive countermeasures to ‘defences’ against Glaze,” he suggests.

“In many cases, people will look at this and say it is sort of a ‘cat and mouse’ game. And in a way that may be. What we’re hoping is that the cycle for each round or iteration [of countermeasures] will be reasonably long. And more importantly, that any countermeasures to Glaze will be so expensive that they will not happen — that will not be applied in mass,” he goes on. “For the large majority of artists out there, if they can protect themselves and have a protection effect that is expensive to remove then it means that, for the most part — for the large majority of them — it will not be worthwhile for an attacker to go through that computation on a per image basis to try to build enough clean images that they can try to mimic their art.

“So that’s our goal — to raise the bar so high that attackers or, you know, people who are trying to mimic art, will just find it easier to go do something else.”

Making it more expensive to acquire the style data of particularly sought after artists may not stop well-funded AI giants, fat with resources to pour into value extractivism — but it should put off home users, running open source generative AI models, as they’re less likely to be able to fund the necessary compute power to  bypass Glaze, per Zhao.

“If we can at least reduce some of the effects of mimicry for these very popular artists then that will still be a positive outcome,” he suggests.

While sheer cost may be a lesser consideration for cash-rich AI giants, they will at least have to look to their reputations. It’s clear that excuses about ‘only scraping publicly available data’ are going to look even less convincing if they’re caught deploying measures to undo active protections applied by artists. Doing that would be the equivalent of raising a red flag with ‘WE STEAL ART’ daubed on it.

Here’s Zhao again: “In this case, I think ethically and morally speaking, it is pretty clear to most people that whether you agree with AI art or not, specific targeting of individual artists, and trying to mimic their style without their permission and without compensation, seems to be a fairly clearly ethically wrong or questionable thing to do. So, yeah, it does help us that if anyone were to develop countermeasures they would be clearly — ethically — not on the right side. And so that would hopefully prevent big tech and some of these larger companies from doing it and pushing in the other direction.”

Any breathing space Glaze is able to provide artists is, he suggests, “an opportunity” for societies to look at how they should be evolving regulations like copyright —  to consider all the big picture stuff; “how we think about content that is online; and what permissions should be granted to online content; and how we’re going to view models that go through the internet without regard to intellectual property, without regard to copyright, and just subsuming everything”.

Misuse of copyright

Talking of dubious behavior, as we’re on the topic of regulation, Zhao highlights the history of certain generative AI model makers that have rapaciously gobbled creatives’ data — arguing it’s “fairly clear” the development of these models was made possible by them “preying” on “more or less copyrighted data” — and doing that (at least in some cases) “through a proxy… of a nonprofit”. Point being: Had it been a for-profit entity sucking up data in the first instance the outcry might have kicked off a lot quicker.

He doesn’t immediately name any names but OpenAI — the 2015-founded maker of the ChatGPT generative AI chatbot — clothed itself in the language of an open non-profit for years, before switching to a ‘capped profit’ model in 2019. It’s been showing a nakedly commercial visage latterly, with hype for its technology now riding high — such as by, for example, not providing details on the data used to train its models (not-so-openAI then).

Such is the rug-pull here that the billionaire Elon Musk, an early investor in OpenAI, wondered in a recent tweet whether this switcheroo is even legal?

Other commercial players in the generative AI space are also apparently testing a reverse course route — by backing nonprofit AI research.

“That’s how we got here today,” Zhao asserts. “And there’s really fairly clear evidence to argue for the fact that that really is a misuse of copyright — that that is a violation of all these artists’ copyrights. And as to what the recourse should be, I’m not sure. I’m not sure whether it’s feasible to basically tell these models to be destroyed — or to be, you know, regressed back to some part of their form. That seems unlikely and impractical. But, moving forward, I would at least hope that there should be regulations, governing future design of these models, so that big tech — whether it’s Microsoft or OpenAI or Stability AI or others — is put under control in some way.

“Because right now, there is so little regard to ethics. And everything is in this all encompassing pursuit of what is the next new thing that you can do? And everyone, including the media, and the user population, seems to be completely buying into the ‘Oh, wow, look at the new cool thing that AI can do now!’ type of story — and completely forgetting about the people whose content is actually being subsumed in this whole process.”

Talking of the next cool thing (ehem), we ask Zhao if he envisages it being possible to develop cloaking technology that could protect a person’s writing style — given that writing is another creative arena where generative AI is busy upending the usual rules. Tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT can be instructed to output all sorts of text-based compositions — from poetry and prose to scripts, essays, song lyrics etc etc — in just a few seconds (minutes at most). And they can also respond to prompts asking for the words to sound like famous writers — albeit with, to put it politely, limited success. (Don’t miss Nick Cave’s take on this.)

The threat generative AI poses to creative writers may not be as immediately clear-cut as it looks for visual artists. But, well, we’re always being told these models will only get better. Add to that, there’s just the crude volume of productivity issue; automation may not produce the best words — but, for sheer Stakhanovite output, no human wordsmith is going to be able to match it.

Zhao says the research group is talking to creatives and artists from a variety of different domains who are raising similar concerns to those of artists — from voice actors to writers, journalists, musicians, and even dance choreographers. But he suggests ripping off writing style is a more complex proposition than some other creative arts.

“Nearly all of [the creatives we’re talking to] are concerned about this idea of what will happen when AI tries to extract their style, extract their creative contribution in their field, and then tries to mimic them. So we’ve been thinking about a lot of these different domains,” he says. “What I’ll say right now is that this threat of AI coming and replacing human creatives in different domains varies significantly per domain. And so, in some cases, it is much easier for AI to to capture and to try to extract the unique aspects of a particular human creative person. And in some components, it will be much more difficult.

“You mentioned writing. It is, in many ways, more challenging to distil down what represents a unique writing style for a person in such a way that it can be recognised in a meaningful way. So perhaps Hemingway, perhaps Chaucer, perhaps Shakespeare have a particularly popular style that has been recognised as belonging to them. But even in those cases, it is difficult to say definitively given a piece of text that this must be written by Chaucer, this must be written by Hemingway, it just must be written by Steinbeck. So I think there the threat is quite a bit different. And so we’re trying to understand what the threat looks like in these different domains. And in some cases, where we think there is something that we can do, then we’ll try to see if we can develop a tool to try to help creative artists in that space.”

It’s worth noting this isn’t Zhao & co’s first time tricking AI. Three years ago the research group developed a tool to defend against facial recognition — called Fawkes — which also worked by cloaking the data (in that case selfies) against AI software designed to read facial biometrics.

Now, with Glaze also out there, the team is hopeful more researchers will be inspired to get involved in building technologies to defend human creativity — that requirement for “humanness”, as Cave has put it — against the harms of mindless automation and a possible future where every available channel is flooded with meaningless parody. Full of AI-generated sound and fury, signifying nothing.

“We hope that there will be follow up works. That hopefully will do even better than Glaze — becoming even more robust and more resistant to future countermeasures,” he suggests. “That, in many ways, is part of the goal of this project — to call attention to what we perceive as a dire need for those of us with the technical and the research ability to develop techniques like this. To help people who, for the lack of a better term, lack champions in a technology setting. So if we can bring more attention from the research community to this very diverse community of artists and creatives, then that will be success as well.”

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Art

Nick Cave on love, art and the loss of his sons: ‘It’s against nature to bury your children’ – The Guardian

Published

 on


Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity. He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland, who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life. The twins are not related to Cave. His wife, the fashion designer Susie Cave, came across them one day, discovered they were ceramicists and thought they would be able to help him complete his project. It adds to the eeriness of it all.

Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs (Into My Arms, Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files), screenwriter (The Proposition) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

Cave studied art in Melbourne in the mid-70s before being chucked off his degree course. He reckons he was too fascinated by the subject for his own good. He spent all his time talking about art to the older students and didn’t find the hours to do the actual work. Now, he is making up for lost time.

300x250x1

We are at the headquarters of Susie’s business, where she makes and stores the beautiful dresses she designs as The Vampire’s Wife. For now, it’s doubling as Cave’s studio. He gives me a tour of the 17 ceramic figurines, which will be exhibited at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels next month. The pieces are stunning in a creepy, Cave-esque way, all blood-curdling pastoral idylls. But it’s as a series that they are most powerful. The sculptures, inspired by Staffordshire “flatback” ceramics from the Victorian era, forge a shocking and deeply personal narrative.

Initially, we see the devil as a child – a cute little lad, dimple-cheeked in a white jumpsuit sitting next to a red monkey. “Look at his little face,” Cave says, lovingly. We see the devil getting up to erotic mischief with a sailor, then ecstatic with his first love. “I’m extremely happy with this one,” Cave says. “His impish pleasure and her just drained of life.”

We see the devil going to war in a field of flowers, wading through a field of blood and skulls on his return, getting married. Then the series takes a traumatic turn. “This is The Devil Kills His First Child,” Cave says. “It’s a little Isaac and Abraham thing. Then he’s separated from the world. Life goes on. Then he dances for the last time.” And now we are at the final piece. “He bleeds to death. He’s found washed up and the child is forgiving him, leaning out to him with his hand.”

It’s impossible to know how to respond when Cave reaches the story’s conclusion other than to gulp or weep. After all, this is a man who has lost two sons over the past nine years. In 2015, 15-year-old Arthur died after taking LSD for the first time and falling from a cliff near his home in Brighton. In 2022, 31-year-old Jethro, who had schizophrenia, died in Melbourne. Death and grief have informed all of Cave’s work since Arthur died. But this takes it to another level.

We say goodbye to the Cave twins, who continue painting pubic hair in gold lustre on the devil’s first love. “We’ll see you, guys! Slave away, my children!” Cave says.

Liv smiles.

“I’m already dressed like a Victorian child’,” Dom says.

“A pint of stout for lunch!” Cave says.

We move into Susie’s office to chat. It’s dark, gothic, a dream home for bats. He whips off his lab coat to reveal an immaculate three-piece suit and sits behind the desk. Before I sit down, I ask if I can do something I have wanted to do for the best part of a decade. I reach over the desk and clumsily hug him.

“Aaah, man! Here, let me stand up.” The last time we talked was 16 years ago. He was making a video that featured Arthur and his twin brother, Earl, who were then seven, gorgeous and already musical (Arthur was playing drums, Earl guitar).

Cave became famous as one of the bad boys of rock – a ghoulish junkie with a feral live act, equally fixated by the Bible and Beelzebub. But he is one of the nicest people I have met. In 2008, I turned up knowing sod all about him. I tell him that he was so generous with his time and nonjudgmental about my ignorance. “Really?” he says, surprised. “That’s good to know. I tend to have a low opinion of myself back then. I see a cutoff point around the death of my first son of a change of character. But it’s not as black and white as I thought.”

Every Cave story seems to begin with a death. Take the origin of the figurines. He went into the studio to start work on them the day his mother, Dawn, died. He had planned to start on that date – 15 September 2020 – for a while. “Susie made me go. She said: ‘Get there and do your work.’” He adored Dawn – she had always stood by him, no matter what trouble he was in. (The day his father died in a car crash, she was called to the police station to bail out 19-year-old Cave after he had been charged with burglary.)

Did he have any idea what he wanted to create in the studio? No, he says, but there was an inevitability about the subject. “Even when I’m trying to use art to escape certain feelings and sorrows I have, everything just seems to fall into the slipstream of the loss of my son. And even when I was glazing these, Jethro died, so it’s like …” He comes to a stop. “What I’m trying to say is these losses are just incorporated into the artistic flow and they move in a direction that is beyond your capacity to rein in. They’re just sitting at the end of everything you do. In the end, the ceramics are a story about a man’s culpability in the loss of his child, and addressing that in a way I wasn’t really able to do with music. That’s what happened without any intention.”

Does he feel culpable for the death of his sons? “I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die.” He comes to another abrupt stop, almost as if he is dictating notes. “Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children.”

He returns to the final figurine. “You have this hollowed-out old man with a little child, possibly a dead old man, dead in a pool of tears – a biblical flood of tears, shall we say – and the little child is reaching down in forgiveness. It’s called The Devil Forgiven.” He smiles. “I hope this isn’t too abstract, too woo-woo. Art has a way of bringing to you the things you need to know. It feels to me that art knows what’s going on more than the artist knows what’s going on.”

Does he feel culpable because drugs were involved in Arthur’s death? “There could be some element of that, yep. Look, these things are in our DNA, they’re inherited. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Arthur, who was just a young boy. It’s not like he was into drugs … On a fundamental level, it’s against nature to be burying your children. And there can’t help but be feelings of culpability.”

Cave believes he is emerging from his losses a different man. He has a point. It is hard to imagine the old Cave curating the Red Hand Files, a website in which he invites fans to ask questions about anything they want, many of them profoundly personal.

Soon after Arthur’s death, the family moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years: “We were triggered too much by things. We were just down the road from where it happened.” Everybody seemed to know what had happened to Arthur, because it was so widely reported, but he says that ended up being a positive. “I was forced to grieve publicly – and that was helpful, weirdly enough. It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.”

He was overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. “I had letter after letter addressed to ‘Nick Cave, Brighton’. It was a really extraordinary thing. And that attention, and sense of community, was extremely helpful to me. I think people are usually just on their own with these sorts of things. Susie met somebody whose son had died seven years previously and she still hadn’t spoken to her husband about it. These people are utterly alone and maybe full of rage. So I can’t overstate that I’ve been in an extraordinarily privileged position in that respect.”

Did his experience of bereavement help after Jethro died? “Yes. It really helped, because I knew I could get through. I’d been through it.” Did he feel cursed? “No. No, I don’t feel cursed, no.” He says it would be wrong to talk publicly about Jethro – he didn’t meet Jethro till he was seven and their relationship was complex; although they became close, it would be disrespectful to his mother, who brought him up. (Cave’s first two children, Luke and Jethro, were born 10 days apart to different women.)

Cave says one way in which he has changed is that he appreciates life more. In the past, he has described learning to live again, refinding happiness, as an act of defiance. But he no longer thinks it’s an appropriate word. “Defiance has a fuck-you element to the world; we’re not going to let it get us down. That sounds a little too heroic now. I’m pretty simple-minded about things. It says something to my children who have died that I can enjoy my life now. It’s what they would want. I think it’s a softer relationship we have to the world now.”

Rather than a two-fingered salute to fate, it goes back to culpability and his Christian (if questioning) faith. “Look, this is extremely difficult to talk about, but one of the things that used to really worry me is that Arthur, wherever he may be, if he is somewhere, somehow understands what his parents are going through because of something he did, and that his condition of culpability is not dissimilar to mine. And I think that’s the reason behind a lot of what I do. It’s to say it’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, but we’re OK. We’re OK. I think Susie feels that, too.”

He stresses that he is not just talking about his personal tragedies. “What’s it saying to all those who’ve passed away in their multitudes if we lead lives where we’re just pathologically pissed off at the world? What does it say to those who have left the world to be in a perpetual state of misery and fury and depression and cynicism towards the world? What legacy are they leaving if that’s how we manifest the passing of that person?”

He thinks people sometimes misunderstand what he is saying about loss. It’s not that there is more joy in his world than there was – far from it. But when it comes, it tends to be more intense. “Joy is something that leaps unexpectedly and shockingly out of an understanding of loss and suffering. That’s how Susie and I are. That’s in no way saying we’re not affected, or we’ve somehow gotten over it, or we’ve had closure or even acceptance. I think closure is a dumb thing. Even acceptance is, like: ‘Just give it a few years and life goes back to how it was.’ It doesn’t happen. You’re fundamentally changed. Your very chemistry is changed. And when you’re put back together again, you’re a different person. The world feels more meaningful.”

He knows plenty of people disagree with him. “I get people, mothers particularly, occasionally saying: ‘How dare you suggest there is joy involved in any of this?’ People are so angry, and they have every right to be enraged by the fucked-up cosmic mischief that goes on, and it’s deeply unfair. But it’s not personal. It feels like it is, but it’s just the vicissitudes of life.”

Cave feels he is misunderstood in another way, after saying recently that he has always been “temperamentally” conservative and attacking the “self-righteous belief” and “lack of humility” of woke culture. This has led some to assume he is supping with the “alt-right”, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Conservatism is a difficult word to talk about in Britain, because people immediately think of the Tories. But I do think small-C conservatism is someone who has a fundamental understanding of loss, an understanding that to pull something down is easy, to build it back up again is extremely difficult. There is an innate need in us to rip shit down, and I’m personally more cautious in that respect without it being a whole political ideology that surrounds me.”

Is he a Tory? “I’m not a Tory, no.” Has he ever been? “No. No, I’ve never voted Tory.” And is he really anti-woke? “The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”

He hates dogma, whether religious or political. His work has always embraced uncertainty. “People don’t like me to say this, but I do feel it’s in my nature to constantly be redressing the balance of my own ideas about things. My mother was exactly the same – she always saw the other side. It was incredibly frustrating. You’d be angry about something and she’d go: ‘Yes darling, but …’”

Like his mother, he has never shied away from the trickiest “buts”. When he talks about his appalling loss, he also knows he has been lucky. Not only has he been able to express his grief in his work, but it has also fed his creativity. Even at its bleakest, he has found it cathartic. “Making art is in itself the great expression of joy and optimism, in my view. That’s why we need it. Music, art, reminds us of our fundamental capacity to create beautiful things out of the fuckeries of life. Even when I’m making The Devil Kills His First Child, I’m not depressed, I’m like: ‘Wow! Look at the head!’ It’s a joyful occupation, no matter what. And when I’m singing a very sad lyric, it doesn’t mean I’m sad inside.”

The forthcoming Bad Seeds album is the first thing he has created since Arthur’s death that isn’t “set through a lens of loss”. He is funny when talking about his work – so angsty and uncertain early in the process, almost messianic by the end. “The new album is really good. It’s really strong. Great songs,” he says.

Similarly with The Devil – A Life. He has got over the doubts and now he is buzzing with self-belief. Is he nervous about the exhibition? “No, I’m excited. I think the ceramics are really good and really strange.” But he feels unusually protective towards his figurines and the story that they tell. “These guys feel extraordinarily vulnerable. They are vulnerable little things, and they are saying something deeply personal.”

Nick Cave: The Devil – A Life is at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels from 5 April to 11 May

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Art

Appreciating Richard Serra, who made us giddy and afraid. – The Washington Post – The Washington Post

Published

 on


Richard Serra made modern sculpture exciting. He did it by creating the feeling that it might fall on you.

Facetious as that may sound, it’s somewhere near the heart of what made Serra, who died Tuesday at 85, both a wonderful artist and intermittently vulnerable to accusations that he was a bully.

If you don’t find his works beautiful, you could easily hate them for being ugly, imposing and in-your-face. But attitudes toward modern art — even minimalist sculpture — changed enormously over Serra’s lifetime, and he personally played a role in converting millions of people to the possibilities of abstract sculpture. After years of operating as an edgy, uncompromising avant-gardist, he began to make things that, losing none of their toughness — and only growing in ambition — were undeniably seductive, dazzlingly original and just very cool.

300x250x1
End of carousel

I don’t know what he was like to work with, but as an artist, he was no bully. Rather, he was a physicist. He wanted you to know, and to feel in your bones, that weight isn’t just a thing — it’s a force. It’s mass times acceleration.

As such, it carries an inherent threat.

Sculpture, for Serra, wasn’t just something over there — passive and separate. It was right here, all around us. And it wasn’t just active, it was involving.

A pioneer of process art, Serra loved verbs — action words like twist and roll — and spent part of his early career thinking about materials in terms of what he could do with them (as opposed to what they would become once things had been done to them).

But he also came to love nouns. And you can’t talk about Serra without tossing around big heavy nouns — words that most of us would never otherwise use but which make you feel suddenly tough just uttering. Cor-Ten steel and antimonial lead, for instance.

Serra used antimonial lead (an alloy that makes soft lead very hard) for “One Ton Prop” (1969), a key piece from his early mature period. The sculpture was four pieces of lead leaning against each other like the walls of a card house. No welding. No plinth. Nothing propping them up except each other.

“One Ton Prop” proposed a strange — and strangely intimidating — new way to think of sculpture. It was physical — emphatically so. But it was also psychological. It involved you in ways that had nothing to do with stories or sentimentality but that somehow went beyond pure form. “One Ton Prop” — like a lot of Serra sculptures — was about as ingratiating as a sewer cover, but it induced fear and giddy excitement, and you wanted to linger with it.

Most people’s favorite Serras — and mine too — are the ones he made after “One Ton Prop.” For the enormous, bending, exquisitely balanced sculptures he called Torqued Ellipses, he used Cor-Ten steel. Sometimes used for the prows of ships, Cor-Ten is weathering steel, protected from corrosion, that changes color in the open air. There, it takes on seductive shades of orange and textures as rich and streaky as the surface of Gerhard Richter paintings.

The colors and textures (and the spiderwebs and other marks of the organic world they can play host to) are important. They pull you in to the sculptures’ surfaces, even as you’re conscious of your body’s relationship to something that is overwhelmingly large — almost too big to grasp, and definitely too big to explain.

Engaging with them reduces the brain to the status of a six-year-old tugging at the sleeve of an adult with a checklist of unanswerable questions: How do these things stay upright? How were they made? How did they even get here?

The engineering behind Serra’s late works was indeed mind-blowing. But the pleasure of his greatest creations is afforded by a sensation of the mind giving up, and the body yielding. He dealt out stimulants to sublimity like a croupier dealing aces.

Serra was a practitioner — I would say the greatest — of what was sometimes called “walk-in modernism.” That’s to say, you don’t just admire his sculptures from afar. You walk into and out of them. Looming over you, they close in on you, then veer away from you. And they make you conscious of time as you make your way through, along or around them.

They sometimes induce vertigo. But they’re also remarkably liberating. You can come out of them with feelings of secret and victorious expansion, as if you were Theseus after slaying the Minotaur.

Serra’s sculptures fulfilled the primary purpose of minimalist sculpture — making you acutely self-conscious of yourself in relation to the thing you’re looking at or walking around. But they did something more. They challenged and seduced with psychology and undeniable emotion. They turned nouns into verbs, things into actions, and stray thoughts into lasting feelings.

Placed outdoors, they aren’t merely sculptures, of course. They do double duty as architecture, landscape design, urban planning. Ways of ordering space, in other words, often on a large scale.

It’s true that some of Serra’s outdoor sculptures prevent you getting from A to B, and that this has sometimes proved controversial. In the art world, an air of legend lingers like romantic fog over the “Tilted Arc” affair. Serra’s rude division of an open plaza in Manhattan with an enormous, hostile-looking steel arc, 120 feet long and twice the height of most humans, was one of the last moments of meaningful tension between public opinion and an uncompromising artistic avant-garde. In the end, the work came down.

Works like “Tilted Arc” made it easy to dislike Serra for being domineering. I can appreciate that line of thought, and I’m happy that there are other kinds of art, keyed to transience and delicacy, art with a light and poetic touch. But I love what Serra achieved. In fact, I’m in awe of it. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, at Glenstone, at SF MoMA and in St. Louis — in so many places around the world — Serra’s adamantine sculptures act on you. And they activate everything around them. Life quickens in their presence. We have lost a great artist, but we have not lost that quickening.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Art

For Richard Serra, Art Was Not Something. It Was Everything. – The New York Times

Published

 on


When Richard Serra died yesterday, I flashed back nearly 30 years to a morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking with him and with his wife, the German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf, at Jackson Pollock’s splash and drip painting from 1950, “Autumn Rhythm.”

We had decided to meet as soon as the museum opened, when the gallery, at the far end of the Met, would still be empty. Taking in the painting, Serra had the air of a caged lion, pacing back and forth, moving away, to see it whole, then back in to inspect some detail.

“We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history,” he said. Which was Serra’s bottom line — in his case, nudging sculpture into new territory. Why else be an artist? This was how he thought. Old-school. Old Testament. For him, art was all or nothing.

300x250x1

Of course he wasn’t alone in his thinking among American artists of his generation, the offspring of postwar American power and arrogance, of titans like Pollock.

That said, not many artists accomplished what he set out to do, in the process seeing public perception of his work flip 180 degrees.

All these decades later, a wide swath of the public today continues to be baffled and occasionally galled by Pollock, just as it didn’t get Serra for years. “Tilted Arc,” the giant steel sculpture by Serra, was still a fresh wound when we visited the Met. Public officials had removed it from a plaza outside the courthouses in Lower Manhattan in 1989. Fellow artists objected to the removal, but office workers who ate their lunches in the plaza implored City Hall. They saw it as an intrusion, an ugly wall, dividing their precious open space. Serra still wore his fury like a badge of honor.

“I think if work is asked to be accommodating, to be subservient, to be useful to, to be required to, to be subordinated to, then the artist is in trouble,” he said.

It was now two decades later and thousands of his adoring fans filled an auditorium in Brazil. He and I had flown to Rio to do a public talk. The audience had come to hear the lion roar. By then, he and his voice had softened. But not his message.

He compared art with science. You don’t advance science by public consensus, he said. Then he described the time he had splashed molten lead against the wall and adjoining sidewalk of a museum in Switzerland, an act that so appalled uptight Swiss residents that the work was removed after only a few hours.

He was thumbing his nose at the stuffy sanctity of the museum, he explained, claiming the side of the building as part of his sculpture, and at the same time swapping industrial materials like lead, steel and rubber for the traditional tools and conventions of his craft, like marble, pedestals and clay.

Around the same time, he lifted up the edge of a sheet of discarded rubber scavenged from a warehouse in Lower Manhattan, making a kind of tent, balanced just so — a topography, implying action. He wasn’t trying to make something crowd-pleasing or familiar or beautiful, he recalled. It wasn’t beautiful. It was an experiment.

Was it art?

That was the question.

It was the same question Pollock raised when he painted “Autumn Rhythm.” Pollock had also stalked the canvas, as it lay on the floor of his Long Island studio. He prowled its edges with sticks, dripping and ladling paint. Lines in the picture recorded his choreography.

“Autumn Rhythm” was a pure abstraction, depthless, describing only itself, not an image of anything else — a floating field of wild, exquisite tracery that viewers would need to navigate and decipher for themselves. Even Pollock wasn’t sure what it signified.

Pollock “had to have remarkable faith that the process would lead to fully realized statements,” Serra said. “After all, he didn’t know where he would end up when he started.”

Serra had started his meteoric career as a volcanic presence in the downtown art scene of the 1960s, which today has the bittersweet whiff of a faded Polaroid. It was a cobblestone and cast-iron version of Russia in the 1910s, driven by ego and revolution. Serra occupied a loft with the sculptor Nancy Graves without running water that cost about $75 a month and he fell into a community of ingenious and groundbreaking composers, dancers, writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists, among them Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Spalding Grey, Michael Snow, Chuck Close, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer. The list goes on. Cheap rent, available real estate and restlessness. The cocktail of urban creativity and change.

“There was a clear understanding among us that we had to redefine whatever activity we were doing,” is how Serra described the scene to the crowd in Rio.

By then, a global public had come to adore his elliptical mazes of twisted Cor-Ten steel, the culmination of his sculptural pursuits. They were democratic adventures, depending on what you brought to them. A moviemaker once told me that walking through them reminded him of an unspooling film, with twists and turns leading to a surprise ending. A writer on the Holocaust once likened their high walls to pens.

I always found them to be serious fun. They concentrate the mind, stirring fear and anticipation, changing inch by inch, step by step. Serra magically transforms folded, tilting walls of rolled steel into what can almost resemble planes of melted wax. Passages, like caves or canyons, narrow and looming, suddenly open onto clearings. When Serra was given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, one of the most spectacular shows of the current century, I found a trio of half-naked sunbathers reclining on the ground inside “Torqued Ellipse IV,” which occupied a patch of the museum’s garden.

So what changed over the years to bring the public around?

I’m not sure it was Serra, who stuck to his guns. There is a work by him called “1-1-1-1,” from 1969, which consists of three tilting steel plates held erect by a pole resting on top of them, itself stabilized by a fourth plate teetering on its end. It looks scary and precarious, but the balancing act can also remind you of Buster Keaton.

It used to be described as obdurate and menacing. But that is not, I don’t think, how Serra ever saw his work. After the MoMA retrospective, I passed a late summer afternoon in Italy, watching Serra patiently, quietly accompany my older son, who was still in grade school, around the ancient temples at Paestum. Serra spoke, as if to an adult, about the swell of the weathered columns, the weight of the stones, the way the stones balanced on top of one another and held each other up. For him, sculpture distilled to its essential qualities — mass, gravity, weight, volume — was our shared language and legacy, an eternal poem to which great artists add their contributions over the centuries.

“I don’t know of anyone since Pollock who has altered the form or the language of painting as much as he did,” he told me back in that gallery with “Autumn Rhythm.” “And that was, what, almost half a century ago?”

It’s hard to think of artists who have done more than Serra over the last half century to alter the form and language of sculpture.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending