Volume I: Over 100 London and Berlin exhibition reviews and interviews by Habib William Kherbek published between 2010 – 2019
Volume II: Reviews written by generative artificial intelligence trained on volume I with essays on the potential impact of generative AI on art criticism
In Volume II Kherbek’s ‘source’ material has been reworked, or rather ‘re-trained’; the body of Volume I serves as the training set for a newly generated algorithmic art(ificial) critic.
Volume II Introduction
A review is always a conversation. You’re in conversation with your subject which, in almost every case, is saying something. As you write, formulating a question or response, what the work says will start to change. There’s at least a change of emphasis, even when the message stays the same, or else all you can do is describe. The real joy of a review is when the slow, deliberate responses of the reviewer are met with truly unexpected responses from the assumed-to-be static object.
Entropia is an archive of many things, 10 years of reviews, exhibitions, artworks and artworlds that are now mostly gone, some that are all but forgotten. It’s also a personal archive, and as such a portrait of the author who, in the introduction and the subtitle, admits to learning to write (about art) in public. There’s a slightly forced informality to the earliest reviews but in later writing this becomes something much less self-consciously personal, following trails of literary, philosophical or musical references that appear in or are surfaced by the works.
I was in the London artworld for almost all of the time the book covers – as an artist, curator, technician, tour-guide, caterer – and it’s nice to find a positive sentence about something I did among the 300+ pages of reviews, yet it’s rare to find an exhibition I actually saw. To read about people and places that are familiar but that I didn’t experience directly is the most tickly kind of nostalgia. The exhibitions covered in the book are neither exhaustive or especially focused: it’s a single path through northern Europe’s galleries and museums in the twenty-teens, published and printed as self-defence against the link rot of contemporary digital journalism. For that reason it’s a shame we’re not given more context, commentary or reflection: the gossip, opinions and marginalia that, at the time, weren’t fit to print. These texts were of course originally presented in conversation with other reviews and essays, micro and macro news events on social media timelines; here they’re only in conversation with each other. Even an index – artists, galleries, cities, media – would help the reader makes sense of what’s here. Instead we’re given a second volume of reviews written using generative artificial intelligence trained on volume one. There’s still familiar names and places, but nothing I feel I might have just forgotten about: John Cage is alive, and a painter, and black. These are, to misquote the writer Neil Gaiman, critique-shaped strings of characters, where form is just a parameter, while style is a probabilistically determined relationship based on statistical deviations in a multidimensional matrix. While a critique without an object might be a chance for ideas to really be in conversation with themselves, critique without a critic collapses discourse into monologue. Information, the chance to shape something, is slowly lost to entropy. The text-generator might make claims to insights about ‘modern London’ – “galleries a bit like water tubes, tubes almost magically transiting one another but somehow managing a completely new form at once” – but your time would be much better spent trying to having a meaningful conversation with a painting, rather than a machine.
by John Hill
Entropia vols. I & II are available to buy from Abstract Supply
