How to Read a Painting
sheets.works
sheets.works
The classic guide to writing interpretive exhibit labels is Beverly Serrell's book [1].
TFA has very little content and a terrible LLM stench. I work in this field, so I was attracted to the clickbait title. My advice is not to read TFA, just read a summary of Serrell's book if you can't get the book itself.
[1] Exhibit Labels, Beverly Serrell, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024 edition.
We don't only encounter art in a museum. I think there's some value for most people to understand that you can develop some kind of framework for evaluating art.
Hopefully, people don't take the questions in the article as prescriptive (or the only way), but just as an example until they better understand their own tastes.
Or just understanding that art is very rarely exactly what it seems.
The problem with this LLM-driven thing is that the person who did it seems to have as shallow an understanding of art as the LLM, or has chosen a level of terseness that belittles even the LLM's grasp of famous paintings.
I am a bit cynical about all of this but I do find that occasionally an LLM has told me something about my own creative work (photography) that is unexpected. I don't know that I understand how one can point an LLM at paintings this famous and get such minimal insight from it, given how much must be in the training set.
True, but the TFA's first line reads:
Most of us walk through museums reading the little labels and nodding.
To your point, yes, one can learn to appreciate art, but the TFA is far from useful for this purpose, too.
As it is, the generated prose telling you how to appreciate art is ghoulish.
"The eight questions" but they aren't questions
"Watch it work once". What what work once?
1. Have a rough rubric around areas of knowledge and where I'm strong/weak
2. Every day an agent builds a ~30min task + short answer question and slacks it to me. Tasks are designed to have minimal AI writing and pull primary sources / courseware. Easy to do in downtime or during my commute.
3. Answers are picked up from Slack, are scored against the rubric, and progress is tracked day over day which influences the task for the next day.
Stack is dead simple, scheduled Claude Cowork task + state in Obsidian + Slack for messaging. Happy to share more details if people are interested but easy to replicate from the above.
One of the things it's opened my eyes up to is the sheer volume of high quality works/analysis/videos/courseware available online. You really don't need AI to process this, but it's helpful to have a wrapper that identifies/points you to the resources that will be the most helpful for you.
I restore paintings as a hobby! It is not easy to get into. Watch Julian Baumgartner on YouTube. He carefully never tells you what glue, resin or solvent he is using. The appreciation this has given me for the paintings is phenomenal. I have been mostly restricted to removing varnish to date. AMA. I have lived the opportunities for research it has given me. I work on scrap paintings from charity shops or fb marketplace, if that scares you less.
I've done some art handling (transporting from collectors to galleries). One collector asked me if her painting could be touched up a bit. We didn't provide that kind of service (^_^')
They end up on my wall. I figured that I would rather have originals that were not quite to my taste than prints of Pre-Raphaelite masters that are a shadow of the real thing. I still have plenty of wall space. When I run out of room I'll move some on. I can scarcely lose out financially! I plan to get in with some dealers for their junk later on.
Learning to remove varnish is a fun thing. It would be very easy to ruin the painting, but fingers crossed it has not happened yet! Each painting is a whole new challenge, with different varnishes and paints.
My next victim has some tiny holes that need patching, which will be a whole new avenue! A never ending hobby
What a fabulous eccentric hobby to develop. I don't know you but I am fully happy for you that you've found this for yourself :-)
FWIW my own eccentric hobby is that I've decided to make my own art lenses for my cameras — simple lenses (meniscus lenses or doublets) in basic barrels that I 3D print with the right specifications to focus properly. One of the rabbit holes it sent me down is how the earliest lens designers figured out where the aperture goes — including a chap who designed a lens for work in a camera obscura, before photography. You know you have a niche hobby when you are reading academic research.
I also find it helpful to avoid labeling art as “bad” and instead say “I do not yet understand this work, but someday I might”. I didn’t get that Winogrand book at first, had I written it off I would have missed out. I still don’t get Cy Twombly, but I hope to figure his paintings out someday.
The more art you look at, the better you get at looking at art!
The "insights" about Mona Lisa are shallow and quite telling.
What did the crowd miss? What did the AI miss?
No props? One of the most significant things people don't notice — and of course neither did this AI — is she's wearing a veil. And a very particular kind of veil with a very particular connotation.
All that AI guff about what people miss when they stand in front of it, all that suggestion that you zoom in and look, and not even the slightest nudge to look at her hair and forehead.
The gall!