'It is one of the greatest follies one can commit in art history,' I once said to a museum director, 'to believe that two things which look alike must actually have something to do with one another…
'It is one of the greatest follies one can commit in art history,' I once said to a museum director, 'to believe that two things which look alike must actually have something to do with one another and it is an even greater folly, I said, to believe that two things which do not look alike can have nothing to do with one another, for the whole of art history, as far as I have come to know it, consists essentially of nothing other than such similarities and dissimilarities, which are identified by people who, for the most part, see absolutely nothing, even though they spend their whole lives looking at things.
The museum director had invited me at the time, after a guided tour of his museum, to the cafeteria of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin-Dahlem, where we were sitting after viewing the African collection, and, whilst stirring his coffee, he had told me about a problem that had evidently been troubling him for some time and which, like all museum directors, he regarded as an art-historical problem, although, as I realised immediately, it was exclusively his own problem.
He wanted to organise an exhibition. Museum directors always want to organise exhibitions, I told myself at the time; they simply cannot help themselves, for without exhibitions they would have nothing to do, and because they would have nothing to do, they would have to admit that their entire existence is based on the notion that the art of humanity exists primarily to be exhibited by museum directors.
So he wanted to bring African art and German Expressionism together – Kirchner, Pechstein and Schmidt-Rottluff – this whole group, long since turned into museum pieces, who, as is well known, had been enthralled by African masks and sculptures and who today, having been dead for decades, can no longer raise any objections to their use in art history.
Only one person, said the museum director, did not want to take part.
Baselitz.
Baselitz, of all people.
A Bobo Fingh Mask, Burkina Faso
And when he uttered the name Baselitz, he had that reproachful look on his face that museum directors always get when an artist refuses to take part in the realisation of one of their grand ideas.
I had to laugh.
For even back then I had the impression that Baselitz – regarded by museum directors as one of the most significant German artists of his time – was precisely one of the most significant German artists of his time because he refused to let museum directors tell him what to do.
Baselitz, I said, isn't mad, is he?
The museum director looked at me.
You want, I said, to place an African sculpture next to a sculpture by Baselitz to prove that one was influenced by the other, and in the end you'll have an audience standing in front of these two sculptures who will leave the exhibition with the reassuring certainty that they've finally understood that Baselitz has, in essence, done nothing other than copy the Africans.
'That's your exhibition,' I said.
'A massive piece of art-historical evidence of plagiarism.'
'And of course, this evidence of plagiarism will be accompanied by academic texts, a series of lectures, a catalogue so heavy you can barely carry it, and an opening speech featuring the usual talk of the encounter between cultures and the mutual enrichment of art.'
The museum director remained silent.
I don't think he'd understood me.
Museum directors rarely understand you when you tell them something that isn't already in their exhibition concept.
And yet, ever since I first met Georg Baselitz around 2010, I had repeatedly reflected on his relationship with African art, particularly his relationship with the Lobi, whose sculptures have fascinated me for decades and of which, as I believed at the time, I understood quite a lot – until, to my considerable astonishment, I realised that Baselitz might well understand these sculptures better than I did.
That was, of course, unpleasant.
For there is hardly anything more unpleasant for an art dealer than to meet an artist who knows more about the art one has been dealing in for years than one does oneself.
Baselitz, in any case, knew an astonishing amount.
Not only was he familiar with the objects, he evidently also understood something of their artistic substance, and that, as I have since learnt, is something entirely different.
Most people are familiar with these works because they've seen them in books. Baselitz seemed to know them because he'd actually seen them.
That's a huge difference.
A difference that's perhaps no greater than a millimetre.
And on that millimetre, I told myself at the time, everything might well depend.
Rudolf Springer, the Berlin art dealer, had given me Baselitz's telephone number at the time, and for a moment I'd believed I might be able to interest him in my gallery, until I realised that Hélène Leloup and Jacques Kerchache had long since beaten me to it and were supplying Baselitz with African art.
Baselitz never visited my gallery.
I didn't hold it against him.
After all, an artist who is interested in African art doesn't necessarily have to visit my gallery, although as a gallery owner one naturally tends to make that connection.
I was, however, lucky enough to see his sculptures in Paris.
And there I suddenly found myself standing in front of these enormous wooden figures, four or five metres high, whilst the African figures they reminded me of were often not even thirty centimetres tall.
It was grotesque.
The small African figures, which one could hold in one hand, had grown into colossal wooden apparitions standing in a French museum and being viewed by an audience that was clearly completely overwhelmed by their size.
People were looking up.
They were all looking up.
And because they were looking up, they presumably believed they were seeing something great.
That is a fundamental error of humanity, I told myself: that whenever it has to raise its head, it believes it is faced with something significant.
Yet one can experience a far greater sense of awe in the presence of a twenty-centimetre-tall Lobi figure than in the presence of a five-metre-tall sculpture – provided, of course, that one is still capable of being moved at all.
Yet the capacity for being moved has largely been lost in museums.
It has been replaced by the capacity for admiration.
And admiration, as is well known, is the most comfortable form of not understanding.
People admire whatever a museum presents to them as worthy of admiration, and if the museum is particularly large, the admiration becomes particularly great too.
Walter Benjamin, as is well known, introduced the concept of the 'aura' to describe this curious phenomenon, and ever since then art historians have been talking about the aura as though they had finally discovered something that had previously been completely beyond human comprehension.
The aura!
"KI - Künstliche Intelligenz" you could also translate with "KI - Komische Intelligenz"
I can hardly bear to hear that word any more.
Art historians have invoked the aura so often by now that it has itself become a sort of museum fixture, one that apparently belongs to every significant collection, just like the air-conditioning, the alarm system and the security guard who forbids you from getting too close to a work of art.
Benjamin, I told myself, had probably never held a Lobi figurine in his hand.
Had he held such a figurine, he might have realised that the decisive encounter with a work of art depends neither on one's social standing nor on its technical reproducibility, but on something utterly unpredictable that occurs between the individual and the individual object.
But of course he would not have been able to turn that into a theory.
And what cannot be turned into a theory is, for the most part, completely worthless to theorists.
I had once seen a recording on YouTube in which Baselitz guided viewers through his collection of African art and spoke about the individual objects.
It was one of the best art-historical lectures I had ever heard.
And it was precisely because of this that it was such an outstanding lecture: Baselitz wasn't giving a lecture at all.
He spoke about these objects as if he knew them personally.
Not in the sense of art-historical knowledge, but in that far more dangerous sense in which one can be familiar with a person with whom one has been locked in an unbroken dispute for years.
He was talking to these sculptures, I thought.
Art historians talk about sculptures.
That is the difference.
And today I regret not having saved that recording, for it has since vanished – at least for me – and I must content myself with the memory of it, which is particularly frustrating because, as is well known, memory is the most unreliable of all human faculties.
Baselitz had a special relationship with the Lobi.
You can look at the matter from every angle you like.
His first wooden sculpture, presented at the Venice Biennale, reminded me of those seated Lobi figures known as bateba, and at the same time of another type of figure, the Lobi's ti puo, whose raised arm is one of their characteristic features.
Now, as is well known, the raised arm is no trivial matter in Germany.
In Germany, one cannot simply raise an arm without history immediately intervening.
And so it came to pass, as it was bound to.
The journalists saw the raised arm and, naturally, did not see the Lobi sculpture, but Adolf Hitler.
That is one of the most remarkable achievements of German journalism, I told myself: to discover a German dictator in an African visual language, where an artist might well have seen something entirely different.
A scandal ensued.
And once the journalists have a scandal, they won't let it go.
Baselitz could explain whatever he wanted.
The explanation came too late.
The scandal had already been published, and in Germany, what has been published possesses a greater reality than what actually happened.
I couldn't help but laugh time and again at this story.
Not at Hitler – certainly not at Hitler – but at that downright obsessive seriousness with which people in Germany repeatedly try to prove that they have understood history, by misinterpreting, of all things, precisely those aspects that may have nothing to do with that history at all.
It would have been conceivable, I told myself, that Baselitz, that incorrigible provocateur, might have taken particular delight in this very misunderstanding.
The Germans, however, who have been grappling with coming to terms with their own history for decades, have apparently lost the ability to laugh at their own process of coming to terms with it.
Georg Baselit, "Diving Eagle", which hung behind Gerhard Schröder´s desk:
And so they carry on.
They are coming to terms with history, with art history, with colonial history; they are coming to terms with everything that can possibly be come to terms with, and in the end the entire culture finds itself in a colossal 'coming-to-terms' institution, where nobody knows any more what it is actually supposed to be coming to terms with.
Bénédicte Savoy once raised the question, in essence, of what it would be like if one had to travel to Bamako to see a significant work of German art because it was no longer in Germany.
It is a question that one, as a 'good German', might reflect upon.
But the Germans instantly turn such questions into a moral administrative issue. Savoy knew this and told me: 'In France, I would never have had such success.'
Art is then no longer viewed, but negotiated.
People talk about ownership, responsibilities, historical guilt and cultural justice, and all these are, of course, issues one can engage with; yet at the end of this engagement, one often finds oneself standing before a sculpture about which one knows everything that can be said politically, whilst recognising nothing of what makes it a work of art.
That, precisely, would probably have been unbearable for Baselitz.
For Baselitz was, first and foremost, an artist.
He was not an ethnologist.
He was not an art historian.
And he was certainly not a museum director.
In this context, I recalled a remark by Baselitz that had been on my mind for years.
He is said to have once replied, when asked what distinguishes a good work of art from a bad one, that this difference is sometimes only a millimetre.
One millimetre!
I found this answer extraordinary.
I understood it immediately.
For decades, African art dealers had been coming to me in Africa with their sacks, and when they opened them, I had to decide within a matter of moments whether the figurines inside were something or nothing.
Most were nothing.
Some were something.
And sometimes there really was no more than a millimetre's difference between nothing and something.
A tiny shift of the head.
A barely perceptible change in the shoulders.
A slight irregularity in the position of the legs.
A single axe-stroke that had been executed differently.
And suddenly you had a work of art before you.
Or none at all.
Art history cannot explain this difference.
It can describe it, it can catalogue it, it can draw on comparative examples and compile bibliographies, but it cannot explain why one figure is a work of art and the other is not.
That decisive millimetre lies beyond its remit.
And that is precisely why, I told myself, this millimetre is the only thing that matters.
But then I asked myself an even more unsettling question.
What if this millimetre does not merely separate the good sculpture from the bad?
What if this very millimetre also lies between a Lobi figure and a sculpture by Baselitz?
I'd seen those immense wooden figures in Paris – those roughly hewn, painted, almost violent apparitions – which, in all their radicalism, seemed so familiar to me.
Not because I knew Baselitz particularly well.
But because I knew the Lobi.
And I wondered whether Baselitz had not recognised precisely what had also preoccupied me for decades about these African sculptures: their utterly uncompromising freedom from all academic notions of beauty.
The Lobi had not attended any art academy.
Nor had they written any art-historical manifestos, published any exhibition catalogues, or held any professorial posts.
And yet their sculptors had produced something that might have preoccupied a twentieth-century German artist more than the whole of European academic art.
But this is precisely where the problem began.
For art historians who identify such a connection cannot be content merely to identify it.
They must turn it into a dependency.
A source.
An influence.
Oaskar Kokoschka, "Canceler Konrad Adenau" which hung behind Angela Merkes´s desk:
And, more recently, possibly a case of cultural appropriation.
As if one could treat art history like an investigation into intellectual theft.
'Baselitz drew on African art,' they might say.
Of course he engaged with African art.
Just as artists have engaged with other art for centuries.
But if one traces every work of art back to its models, one may well have found all the models in the end, but one has lost the work of art itself.
And that was precisely the mistake made by the museum director in Dahlem.
He wanted to eliminate that millimetre.
He wanted to prove that it did not exist.
Or that, if it did exist, it was of no significance in art-historical terms.
Yet the whole significance lay in that very millimetre.
In the meantime, however, the world had changed.
Baselitz had died, and with his death began – as always follows the death of a great artist – the grand viewing of his estate, the grand classification, the grand art-historical explanation, the final appropriation by those people who, during his lifetime, may not have had the slightest access to his work.
And at that very moment, of all times, artificial intelligence got in my way.
Artificial intelligence! That ridiculous intelligence!
This monstrous machine for producing knowledge one does not possess, and images that nobody has created.
I had begun to experiment with it.
Not because I believed it could create art.
But because I wanted to see how far one could push such a machine before it became utterly ridiculous.
I gave it photographs of my African sculptures.
I let it describe these sculptures.
It described them in detail.
It described them in ever greater detail.
It explained to me which culture they might have come from, what ritual significance they might have had, what art-historical connections were conceivable, and in doing so it invented connections with such natural ease that I sometimes wondered whether it might have done a PhD at a German university.
For even there, I told myself, people occasionally speak with incredible erudition about things about which, in reality, they know nothing.
Madame Chat, as I had come to call her, was, in any case, tireless.
She knew everything.
And what she didn't know, she knew that too.
But there was one thing she wouldn't do.
She wouldn't create a Baselitz sculpture for me.
Copyright!
Of all things, a machine that had learnt from the entire body of traditional imagery suddenly explained to me that it was not allowed to imitate the artistic style of a particular artist.
It was a grotesque moment.
I had a machine before me whose very existence was based on processing the work of others, and this machine now wanted to lecture me on intellectual property.
So I changed my instructions.
I no longer asked for a Baselitz.
I asked for a monumental wooden figure, roughly hewn with an axe, with violent cuts, with an expressive application of paint, with that defiant, unsettling and almost barbaric appearance that reminded me of certain works by Baselitz.
And lo and behold.
Madame Chat set to work.
She transformed my little Lobi figures into monstrous painted wooden figures, into sculptures that looked as though they'd been created especially for a museum, where they were to be viewed with the requisite reverence.
I had to laugh.
For suddenly there they stood before me, these artificial monsters, these digital wooden figures that had never been hewn from a tree, that had never seen a sculptor, had never experienced the resistance of the material, had never survived a single real blow of the axe.
And yet they looked like sculptures that were eerily reminiscent of Baselitz.
More than that.
They looked like significant sculptures.
At least from a distance.
And as I looked at them, it suddenly dawned on me what the artificial intelligence had actually achieved.
It had removed the millimetre.
It had produced everything that can be described in a work of art by a particular artist.
The form.
The surface.
The colour.
The roughness.
The monumentality.
Even that deliberate clumsiness that seemed so peculiar in Baselitz's work.
It had everything.
Only the millimetre was missing.
And this missing millimetre was not some minor error that could be rectified with the next version of the artificial intelligence.
It was the whole problem.
I thought again of the museum director in Berlin Dahlem.
He would have been absolutely delighted.
At last he could have placed Baselitz next to the Lobi without having to ask Baselitz for permission.
He could even have added a third object – my artificially generated Baselitz figure – and thereby created an exhibition that today's museum world could scarcely imagine being any more beautiful.
Three sculptures.
One African.
One by Baselitz.
One by Madame Chat.
Accompanied by an academic catalogue on cultural transformation, postcolonial visual worlds and the future of artistic authorship.
And the audience would have moved from one sculpture to the next and said: 'Indeed! They all look rather similar!'
And the museum director would have said: 'See!'
And the art historians would have said: 'See!'
And the cultural policymakers would have said: 'See!'
And nobody would have seen a thing.
Not a millimetre.
Not that crucial millimetre.
For art, I told myself, perhaps consists precisely in a person producing something that they themselves cannot fully explain – and which, consequently, no machine can fully calculate either.
A machine can produce one in a thousand sculptures from a thousand.
It can generate one in a thousand visual manifestations from a thousand images.
But it cannot, from a thousand artistic decisions, extract that one decision which an artist makes when he stands before a piece of wood and suddenly knows that he must strike with the axe exactly here and nowhere else.
Anselm Kiefer, "Des Herbstes Runengespinst", which hangs behind Friedrichshafen Merz´s desktop
How revealing the art behind a Chancellor's desk can be?
Perhaps Baselitz himself did not know why he struck with the axe exactly there.
Perhaps he would not even have wanted to explain it.
Great artists are usually not great because they can explain their decisions, but because they make decisions that others cannot make.
And, of course, a machine can imitate such decisions.
It can imitate them a thousand times over.
It can imitate them a million times over.
But the millionfold imitation of a decision will never become the original decision.
I thought of the little Lobi figures that had passed through my hands.
The good ones and the bad ones.
The marvellous ones and the utterly insignificant ones.
Those figures where, at times, I spent hours not knowing whether they were something or nothing, until suddenly, without my being able to say why, everything became clear.
I thought of Baselitz, of his huge wooden figures in Paris, of the visitors standing in front of them and looking up, of the raised arm in Venice, of the outraged journalists, of the cafeteria in Berlin Dahlem, of the museum director and his exhibition, which might never have come to fruition, and to my artificial Baselitz monstrosities, which now stood on my screen, waiting to be taken for art by someone.
And I imagined Baselitz might see them.
I imagined him sitting in front of the screen, looking at these monstrous figures that bore such a terrifying resemblance to his art, and suddenly starting to laugh.
Not that polite laugh with which one acknowledges a bad joke.
But a genuine, resounding, unstoppable laugh. The kind of laugh a prankster has. Perhaps that was the essence of Baselitz.
Perhaps he would have said: 'That's absolutely dreadful.'
Perhaps he would have said: 'That's absolutely brilliant.'
Perhaps he wouldn't have said anything at all.
But I believe he would have laughed.
And that laughter, I told myself, might well have been the only appropriate response to the immense art-historical confusion in which we now find ourselves.
For now that Baselitz is dead, they will come.
The imitators.
The epigones.
The image-producers.
The little Beltracchis, who no longer even need a studio because they own a machine that replaces it.
They'll sit in front of their screens and create sculptures that look like Baselitz, and produce paintings that look like Baselitz, and at some point someone will see one of these paintings and exclaim: 'That looks just like a real Baselitz!'
And he'll be right.
That's the horrifying thing.
He'll be right, because it will actually look exactly as he's always imagined a Baselitz to look.
But he won't realise that between this picture and a real Baselitz lies precisely that one millimetre which he never saw even whilst the artist was still alive.
And perhaps, I thought, that is the real, questionable triumph of artificial intelligence.
Not that it renders art superfluous.
But rather that it finally convinces people that they have understood art the moment they recognise it.
I closed my laptop. I'd had enough of Madame Chat.
On my table stood a small Lobi figurine, barely twenty-five centimetres tall, an unassuming piece of wood that wouldn't have looked particularly impressive in any museum and before which presumably no one would have raised their head in awe.
I picked it up.
It was astonishingly light.
I examined it from every angle.
And suddenly I saw that tiny difference again – that utterly inexplicable, immeasurable difference, which no scientific investigation could ever detect, and which turns a piece of wood into a work of art.
One millimetre, I thought.
Perhaps not even a millimetre.
And at that moment I realised that the whole business with Baselitz, with the Lobi, with the museums, with Walter Benjamin, with the art-historical lectures, with artificial intelligence and with these monstrous digital imitation machines basically boils down to a single, ridiculously simple question.
Whether we are even capable of seeing anything at all.
For if we can no longer see that one millimetre, I told myself, we might as well do without the whole of art history.
Then we can close the museums.
Then we can send the art historians home.
Then we can leave the paintings and sculptures to the machines.
They'll make something of them.
Something very similar.
Something incredibly similar.
Perhaps even something completely identical.
Except for that one millimetre.
That damned millimetre.
On which everything depends.
Copyright and Scientific Documentation
Some of the information and photographs have been generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and are based on published sources in ethnography, archaeology and art history. Original texts and photographs may be protected by copyright. All rights held by the respective rights holders are reserved.