Ive been looking at paintings a lot lately, and started to wonder, what would the old masters like Rembrandt make of new technology: trains, cars, TV

Old Masters, New Technology | Bill Wadge's Blog

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2024-04-16 16:30:13

Ive been looking at paintings a lot lately, and started to wonder, what would the old masters like Rembrandt make of new technology: trains, cars, TV etc? In particular, what would they make of computers and smart phones. How would they portray them in their paintings?

Recently I subscribed to the latest Stable Diffusion (impressive) and spent many happy hours typing in prompts and admiring the results. One very productive exercise is to take a subject S and an artist A and enter the prompt, “painting of S by A”. Often the results are amazing.

It’s a nice picture of a waterfall, and it looks like a Cezanne. But it’s not, Cezanne never painted it. It’s what’s called a pastiche, a knock-off of Cezanne.

Nevertheless I think the average reader would be unable to give an argument that it’s not a genuine if lesser-known Cezanne painting. Of course an expert would be familiar with Cezanne’s catalog and would realize this isn’t in the catalog. Maybe there are subtler clues but I don’t see them.

But now we’re in a position to guess the approaches of the old (and no so old) masters, To get an idea of what computers mean to Rembrandt, I typed “painting of a computer by Rembrandt” and got