According to one 2017 study, museum visitors on average spend about 27 seconds looking at a work of art, which is barely enough time to squint, nod thoughtfully, and move on. But if you ask AI artist Refik Anadol about how long people spent with Unsupervised, the controversial artwork he showed at the Museum of Modern Art in 2022, he’d say he got people’s attention for much longer—about 38 minutes per person, to be precise.
To make the work, Anadol fed AI metadata related to more than 138,000 works owned by MoMA and let the system reinterpret the museum’s art history as a continuous flow of morphing abstractions. Think van Gogh dissolving into Monet dissolving into de Kooning dissolving into… What’s that saying about too many cooks spoiling the broth, again?
On 60 Minutes, Anadol described his approach in poetic terms. “When I think about data as a pigment,” he said, “it doesn’t need to dry. It can move in any shape, any form, any color, and texture.” He added that the effect is “trippy,” because artists are always asking what lies beyond reality. When interviewer Sharyn Alfonsi asked whether the whole thing was just a party trick, Anadol pushed back. This, he said, is a new place we have never been before.
The work was an extraordinary hit, according to Glenn Lowry, then the director of MoMA. Visitors lounged on couches in the lobby. Some danced. Many filmed and most posted.
Anadol has become a darling of the tech world, and parts of the art world have followed. Some of his AI works have sold for more than $1 million at auction.
Critic Jerry Saltz probably wishes history didn’t pan out this way.
In a 2023 review for New York magazine, Saltz described the installation as a “massive techno lava lamp” and likened it to a “half-million-dollar screensaver.” On 60 Minutes, he acknowledged that AI will be art one day. But right now, he said, much of what we see is “an average of averages.” He also rejected the idea that the crowds proved anything.
Molly Crabapple, a New York-based artist and author called AI training the greatest art heist in history, argued on 60 Minutes that algorithms are built on scraped images without consent. “When we talk about art heists typically, we’re talking about one painting being taken from a museum, two, three. They stole billions and billions of images,” she told Alfonsi.
Anadol said he now works only with what he calls ethically sourced datasets and insists he treats AI as a collaborator. The aim, he says, is for a 50–50 split between human and machine.
The question hovering over the whole episode is this: When a machine remixes humanity’s visual archive, is it art? Anadol would say we are discovering a place we have never been before. Saltz would say we have been here before. It just used to be called a lava lamp.
