Chapeau
@SHL0MS ! I love your Monet stunt.
Like my refusal of the Sony World Photo Award in 2023, it is an epistemic trap: You changed the label around an image and watched people and institutions reveal how they judge art under AI anxiety.
But you and I pointed the trap in opposite directions: I staged a boundary test, you staged a perception test.
When I entered “PSEUDOMNESIA | The Electrician”, an AI-generated image, into the Sony World Photography Awards, then refused the prize publicly, I wanted to accelerate the debate about what counts as photography.
SHL0MS did the inverse with “Inferior Image“: posting an actual Monet Water Lilies as a supposed AI-generated image, asked people to explain why it was inferior to a “real” Monet, and thousands complied, producing elaborate critiques of a real Monet under a false AI label.
My act said: the system is not ready - we need new categories, new language, and honest rules. I wanted to “speed up this debate.” And in addition to refusing the prize, I suggested to donate it to a Ukrainian photo festival.
SHL0MS’s act said: the viewer is not ready; people do not see first and judge second - they classify first and then invent reasons. Your “Inferior Image“ is a diagnosis of mass aesthetic suggestibility. And by minting the image as an NFT, you made the market controversy part of the work.
I attacked the category confusion between photography and promptography. SHL0MS attacked perceptual corruption: seeing versus believing.
My work depended on my skills in AI image making (yes, in Autumn 2022, this image was the most photorealistic you could get!).
SHL0MS’s work depends on attention design: choosing a Monet that was not instantly recognizable, phrasing the provocation, steering replies, collecting critiques, and structuring the viral discourse. He basically “prompted” humans instead of prompting an image model.
👉BUT:
We both used misattribution as a mirror: the real artwork is not only the picture. It is the reaction system around the picture. In old art-history language, both are post-Duchampian.
We both show that the crisis is not only technological. It is psychological. The image itself is no longer the whole evidence. The caption, platform, institution, category, and social mood now do enormous perceptual work. The eye has become a press secretary for the belief system.
Thank you for adding a smart conceptual work to the history of art.