MoMA Acquires Refik Anadol’s Popular Generative Artwork ‘Unsupervised’
MoMA Acquires Refik Anadol’s Popular
The Museum of Modern Art has acquired artworks by two major digital artists, Refik Anadol and Ian Cheng.
The Anadol piece, Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA (2022), is a generative artwork that uses the museum’s visual archive to produce a machine-learning model that interprets and reimagines images of artworks in MoMA’s collection. The work went on view late last year and was recently extended through October 29.
Since going on view, the piece has drawn sizable crowds. Critics have eyed the work with suspicion, with New York’s Jerry Saltz comparing it to a lava lamp. But Lloyd Wise, in Artforum, defended the work for the way it dialogued with modernism.