Above: “Algorithm As Art” by Joan Biediger and “Modern Art” by Dennis Levy. Photos by Penny Meyer.

 Yes, But Is It Art?

By Jim DeRogatis

I daresay that many of those involved in this hobby have had a conversation like this a few times:

Observer: “Wow, that’s pretty amazing work!” The creator’s response, spoken or silent: “Yes, but is it art?”

As seen on this issue’s cover and in the pages that follow, two exhibitors at this year’s Miniature Figure Collectors of America Show displayed gold-medal-winning box dioramas that not only provide an emphatic “Yes!” to that question, but which offer profound commentaries on the nature of art itself circa 2024.

Let’s start with the very first box by Utah modeler Joan Biediger “Alogorithm As Art.” The compact, 1/32nd scale scene features the ominous shadow of a killer robot holding a severed head at right—Joan does love a bit of gore!—and an Artificial Intelligence-generated piece of art in the style of Salvador Dalí on a crumbling gallery wall at left, just above the severed head of Dalí himself. The heads of other victims draw us further into the scene: There’s Van Gogh, bleeding primary colors; Frida Kahlo, and, at the back of the scene, Pop Artist Andy Warhol.

What the heck is going on here, you might ask? But only after exclaiming, as I did, “Wow!”

Many of us know the term “alogorithm” from the allegedly helpful suggestions offered up by Netflix, Spotify, or Amazon about what we might want to watch, listen to, or read next. That’s just one of the simplest applications of Artificial Intelligence, which Joan is already seeing in her job as a cartographer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and which I see in my roles as a college professor (the machine-generated papers) and music critic (the machine-generated songs). A.I. may also one day cure cancer or solve the problem of global warming by running complex equations and creating mechanisms teams of the most brilliant scientists could never produce. But it likely will also create more of that term tech gurus use—“disruption”—eliminating even more jobs currently held by humans. When’s the last time you hailed a yellow cab, or called a travel agent, or checked out with a human cashier at the grocery store? Much more disruption is to come. Think of the Terminator—or worse.

Joan says she was inspired by the passionate debates about A.I. in the arts that have raged on the Facebook Sculpting Forum hosted by the Shiflett Brothers, enormously talented sculptors in the fantasy realm. They’re against art created by machines, not humans, if you haven’t guessed. But as Joan’s husband Barry says, like it or not, A.I. is already here and working its way further into every aspect of our lives by the minute, and no one can stop it.

Is the machine coming for the heads of creators in our hobby and other art forms? Joan’s diorama suggests it is, but is that all bad? She doesn’t say, and neither can we. That A.I.-generated Dalí painting is pretty darn cool.

 Above: Another shot of Joan’s mind-blowing box that I took at MFCA. Below—irony of ironies!—the warning a Facebook A.I. “bot” used to obscure a photo of the box that Penny Meyer posted there. Talk about Meta!

 Now for Dennis Levy’s latest box “Modern Art.” The sleek translucent white Plexiglass box with its round viewing window invites us into a scene in which a young female hipster contemplates a giant orange suspended midair, a pile of tires at the left, and a giant painting of an extended middle finger, along with a urinal and a photo of the same, at right, all illuminated by a skylight flooding the sleek, spotless white space with dazzling light.

Dennis is a friend, and I love him, but he’s dead wrong in the statement he tried to make about Modern Art: He intended that middle finger as a very Jersey “eff you” to the whole scene. He’s making a classicist’s argument— a painting of an apple should look like an apple—like Tom Wolfe’s 1975 polemic The Painted Word, and Morley Safer’s infamous 60 Minutes pieces in 1993 and 2012. (Both asked, “Yes, but is it art?”) Morley mocked dozens of artworks and scoffed at their prices on the market, which only multiplied many times over in the intervening years. I teach The Painted Word and show those clips in my Reviewing the Arts class, and like many of my students, while I also hate what Wolfe called “art speak” and agree with Morley about that charlatan Jeff Koons, blithely dismissing Jackson Pollock, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, and others—well, that’s just ridiculous.

That is, in my opinion. As I stress to my students, there is no “wrong” or “right” in assessing art; there’s only your emotional reaction and analysis, head and heart. The best critics back up their reactions with context, evidence, and insight. So, while I disagree with the statement Dennis tried to make, I love his box, and I think it makes the opposite argument to what he intended: I want to tour those galleries with that hipster girl! I love the giant orange! The pile of tires recalls “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.),” a mound of Italian candies that 60 Minutes snidely mocked and which is now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. Artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres was paying tribute to his lover, who slowly withered away and died from AIDs. I see the pile of tires that will never decompose as a statement in the opposite direction: Our planet is being choked to death by the garbage we throw away. And the urinal? Well, hooray for Duchamp and all of the surrealists, including Dalí! They challenge us to see the world differently, and maybe chuckle a bit.

If you ask me, there’s too little of that kind of creativity in our hobby. For all of the wonderful work on display at our shows, precious little of it makes us stop and say, “Wow, I’ve never seen that before!” Even less of it provokes the kind of thoughtful discussions and debates that Joan and Dennis prompted at MFCA. Both of them thought way, way outside the box—even though their scenes were set in boxes—and they have raised the bar for anyone who believes our work should challenge viewers, make them think and feel, and show them something new and original, not just gold-medal-level painting and sculpting. Consider the gauntlet thrown down!