The Rijksmuseum’s recent Vermeer show was such a hot ticket that the museum’s schedule had to be rewritten. The great artistic center of the Netherlands was open till 11pm each night of the exhibition and they still sold out every timed ticket, with Johannes V. maniacs traveling from the far side of the world to thrill to the enigmatic kitchen scenes, seventeenth century urban landscapes, soft lighting, pretty white girls, luscious fabrics, etc.
It was pointed out in De Telegraaf that the tourists have gone wild for one Dutch master while relatively ignoring Amsterdam’s tremendous collections of Jan Steen and Frans Hals. Only one painter from this era is “moving the needle” in a mass market kind of way.
The unique preeminence of Vermeer in Dutch culture is totally deserved of course. His canvases are immediately accessible but they reward so much looking. There’s also a fun, speculative, “detective work” aspect to Vermeerology. Examining the artist’s intentions has become a very modern pastime since so much of his small-town life and artistic practice are poorly documented.
But so many of us were not able to make the trip, so we have to content ourselves with Stephen Fry’s charming videoguide on the Rijksmuseum website. Or with one of the above-named Dutch masters who don’t “play in Peoria.” Or better yet, we can make our own Vermeers with newfangled Large Language Model tools.
Why cram yourself into a packed salon to crane your neck at some colorful schmears from four hundred years ago when we can deploy today’s unassailably brilliant simulation technology to bring Vermeer to our very own desktop/phonescreen?
Mixing paint and stretching canvas is a drag. The thing is just to think of a few terms to prompt the image generator. To come up with something that Vermeer, limited as he was by his own analog horizons, never could have. Let’s pick up where that goon left off.
Of course I am kidding. The AI-generated Vermeers that I drummed up are absolute dogshit compared to “A Maid Asleep” or “Officer and Laughing Girl.” The quasi-photographic detail and deeply human intelligence in every square inch of a Vermeer are totally absent from any computer-generated facsimile.
Chucking Vermeer-ish words into an AI hole is a great example of how these tools can mimic a vibe but never be compelling. Sometimes they are charmingly incoherent:
In other instances they augur a kind of post-human departure from conventional reality. Which is the opposite of looking at an actual Vermeer. I made this one with the prompt “Vermeer feather belt shark.”
Speaking of mocking up our own Vermeer, Fiat Benelux heartily recommends Teller’s 2013 documentary Tim’s Vermeer, about a hobbyist who set himself to uncovering what kind of lens or quasi-photographic tool the master used to render such intense detail in paintings. Art history as infotech troubleshoot.
Further reading:
Johannes Vermeer, A Maid Asleep
“Tentoonstelling Vermeer in Rijksmuseum breekt alle records,” De Telegraaf, June 4, 2023.