Porcelain

My prompt: Create an image of a skeleton drinking a cup of tea in the style of a Dutch oil painting, reminiscent of Johannes Vermeer’s work.

DALL-E description:

The scene depicts a skeleton seated at a table, elegantly drinking tea. The setting should resemble a 17th-century Dutch interior, with soft, natural lighting pouring in through a window, casting gentle shadows. The skeleton is dressed in period-appropriate attire, adding an air of sophistication. The table is adorned with a fine porcelain teapot and cup, and the overall ambiance is serene yet surreal, capturing the unique blend of realism and allegory typical of Vermeer’s era.

The above description is DALL-E’s generated description upon creating the enigmatic and alluring piece above, modelled after 17th-century Johannes Vermeer’s (1632-1675) style and oeuvre. The skeleton, in regal posture, sits at a small, square, draped table facing toward a window to the left of the composition. Their clothes consist of a dress and head turban, positing her as a female sitter. The palette for the image makes ubiquitous use of light golden-yellow, forest greens and a greyish beige. The most vibrant usage of these colours is found on her dress, with a deep green cinched petticoat that appears to be thick and leathery in texture, displayed through the wedged folds on her arms and then appears sturdy and rigid around her torso. A golden corset peeks through the petticoat’s V-shaped fastening with thick but wirey brown laces lined across it. Her shining cream-beige skirt looks to be silk, also rendered with gorgeous folds. Illuminating golden highlights at the base of the turban’s fabric are within the wool in the puffy cuffs of her undersleeves. An array of Chinese porcelain-like dishes are before her, including two large teapots that vary in shape, a small milk jug, a small decorative vase with a wheat-like dried arrangement protruding from it, and other vessels with less distinctive shapes or uses. The skeleton has nearly brought the handless teacup up to her closed teeth as if not intent on drinking it, tipping it gently, impossibly balancing the lower base of the cup on a pointed metal or porcelain spoon. A plume of white steam rises from the rim, testifying to the heat of the liquid in her cup. The composition places the viewer as if they are on the cusp of joining her at the table, standing in front of what appears to be a chair with its back against the left wall. Serenity, beauty and eeriness all act in tandem within the image’s atmosphere. In a playfully melancholic way, the skeletal figure can be said to symbolize the long-dead sitters depicted in 17th and 18th-century Dutch domestic scenes.

I was inspired to make my AI image due to my love for Netherlandish baroque oil painting, and specifically instructed to emulate the likeness of Vermeer’s work as it is renowned, could yield a more precise style from DALL-E, and because I am an avid fan of his work. Incorporating a skeletal subject was purely a comedic and absurd choice, which feels especially so in the context of it having a respite and drinking tea. I was lucky to achieve such a great result considering this was the first image DALL-E generated from my prompt, with no extra edits requested. Many elements in this work align with how Dutch Golden Age genre paintings were composed, and some visual clues appear to be directly inspired by Vermeer’s works.

Vermeer’s life and work were, and remain particularly elusive, and what is known of him today required sleuthing. He was an art dealer and a painter, and was twice “elected to the board of the Delft painters’ guild.”^[1] Vermeer painted very little in his time, with only 36 of his officially credited paintings remaining today.^[2] Both his biography and works “virtually disappeared from history”^[3] until French critic Théophile Thoré ‘rediscovered’ him and published a biography and catalogue on Vermeer in 1866.^[4] Prior to this, some of his paintings were sold under “names of painters that were much better known”^[5] and even had his work, The Art of Painting (1662) sold under Pieter de Hooch’s name in 1813, complete with a forged signature.^[6] As stated by the Rijksmuseum, Vermeer commonly depicted everyday scenes of daily “mundane” tasks.^[7] Much like other artists of his time, composition and placement were of great importance to the visual merit of the work. Objects were meticulously placed to inform viewers of the sitter’s duties or carry hidden allegories; such as the large map and set of pearls seen in Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (ca. 1663) that insinuate whoever wrote the letter she holds is a loved one at sea.^[8] Alluringly balanced daylight and its cast shadows attest to the visual merit of his work, producing a full-bodied contrast scale, best exemplified by the expert shading in The Love Letter (ca. 1669 – ca. 1670) that places the viewer in a shaded doorway looking at the subjects in the next room, enhancing the immersive feel of the work. Vermeer also commonly employed a limited palette for the majority of the surface of each piece, tactfully exercising the scale of each colour in concert with the contrast. Many properties of the above imitation are very accurate according to the conventions of 17th-century Dutch oil paintings, with certain exceptions. One such example would be the apparent photorealism of the image, as Vermeer and other Dutch painters were more stylistic in varied ways, with Vermeer specifically using softer brushwork and less fervent detail. While there are some other seemingly illogical or inaccurate elements to this image, they might very well be purposeful additions to the work as a result of imitating Vermeer’s works. These elements include the dried plant seemingly protruding from outside the spout of its vase, a ceramic pot next to it that is suspended despite not actually sitting on the windowpane, and the most notable is the teacup balanced upon the tip of her spoon. In an interesting turn of events, the lower part of her pearl necklace draped over her ribcage ambiguously seems to meld into her ribs. It has been observed by the Mauritshuis that the pearl earring in Vermeer’s infamous Girl With a Pearl Earring (1665) is also impossibly floating under her earlobe and is too large to be a legitimate pearl.^[9]. In addition, both sitters are fictional, and both wear head turbans, an accessory that Dutch women in this era would not have worn, which the Mauritshuis theorizes Vermeer included to make Girl With a Pearl Earring look ‘Oriental’ or ‘exotic.’ These similar qualities make it so one might not justifiably call these details ‘mistakes,’ provided they may have been a fully natural product of the Dutch paintings the image was referenced from. One might also derive contextual meanings based on how one would read an original Dutch Baroque painting. For example, one might infer she is in a domestic space based on how other domestic interiors are depicted in this period, how AI referenced Vermeer’s works that mainly represented domestic scenes and perhaps that the algorithm was taught to associate drinking tea in a home setting. Her pearl necklace and diverse tea set attest to her wealth and interest in foreign commodities, or the possibility that she has a male loved one working overseas like Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. The wall behind her is bare, which, is less so like Vermeer’s other works that have visuals on the wall that communicate extra messages, as seen by the maps and paintings in Women in Blue Reading a Letter and The Love Letter that enlarge a narrative beyond the surface level of the scene shown to us. Only a cut-off black picture frame is seen on the right side of the image, suggesting that DALL-E was indeed familiar with having a visual on the wall behind sitters, but may not have had an indication of what to insert.

To add a brief historical context, let us explore why 17th and 18th-century Dutch art has been such an enlarged epoch within art history. It was the Dutch Revolt (1560s-1648)^[10] against their Spanish-Iberian occupiers and owners, and the formation of an independent Dutch Republic (1588-1795)^[11] made up of the northern Netherlandish provinces that ushered in what 19th-century historians overarchingly labelled the ‘Dutch Golden Age.’ An outburst of economic profit, religious diversity and freedom, immigration, and artistic and scientific endeavours inspired such a name. Gradually the title crumbles under scrutiny as recent authors and scholars unearth the smothered narratives of slavery, domestic political strife, ongoing wars, epidemics, and the general hardships of non-European peoples outside the aristocracy and higher classes. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) and West India Company (WIC) were the foundation of this entire legacy, responsible for transporting slaves, global trade and the circulation of a myriad of ‘exotic’ and foreign objects. In other words, the cultural climate is rooted in colonialism, usurping cultural modes of production to reinforce their society above others to employ an image of superiority.

Perhaps the most significant case study within Skeleton Drinking a Cup of Tea is the porcelain dishes, or rather, what might be tin-glazed earthenware created to emulate the original Chinese ceramics. Such imitation work becomes a socio-politically rife subject in the context of the art world, especially considering the imitators are European and acting upon vehement materialistic and capitalistic demands. Upon its introduction to Europe in the early 16th century, Europeans were transfixed by porcelain’s many impressive, combined properties, such as its hardiness, thinness, shininess and smooth exterior that allowed for easy cleaning.^[12] The West India Company (VOC) alone was responsible for importing tens of millions of pieces into Europe, and as expressed by Professor of Art History and author Dawn Odell, porcelain and its traditional visuals became synonymous with Dutch domestic interiors and Dutchness overall.^[13] In many instances, porcelain was inserted into many Dutch still lives amongst other foreign imported objects, fixing porcelain as a Dutch possession. Europe struggled to ascertain the recipe for creating porcelain, however, eventually, the Dutch were able to create a suitable imitation: Faience, or tin-glazed earthenware was adjusted to mock the look and feel of porcelain, albeit it did not have the aforementioned finer qualities, as earthenware was “heavier … and more prone to chipping.”^[14] Delft was quick to open many factories and produce new, innovative designs of dishware and decorative objects. Similarly, while the Dutch copied the colours and designs of the paintings on Chinese porcelain, eventually they incorporated “imagery from a number of media, including intaglio print, written texts, and oil painting.”^[15] Odell states that by the end of the 17th century to the early 18th century, Earthenware and its designs had shifted from being understood as a Chinese cultural product and transformed into pieces that symbolized Dutch culture and Dutch domestic interiors. Earthenware consumption had greatly decreased by the 17th century and was later picked up in 19th-century America as an homage to Dutch 17th-century domestic life and apparently “was part of a larger effort, as Annette Stott has argued, to identify with the seventeenth-century Dutch who colonized North America and to give American history material form.”^[16] Today, any visual culture containing blue linear-focused designs, especially that of floral imagery that sits atop a white background is fairly recognizable in Western circles as an established art style associated with ceramics. The two AI-generated images below are my own meta images created using Skeleton Drinking a Cup of Tea. Figure 4 was made by requesting DALL-E render Skeleton into an illustration on a traditional Chinese porcelain teacup, and then Figure 5 was the product of another request to picture yet another skeleton drinking a cup of tea out of the same teacup within Figure 4. In a shocking turn of events, DALL-E demonstrated a similar devotion to popular trends and consumerist mass production by incorporating Katsushika Hokusai’s infamous woodblock print, The Great Wave (ca. 1830-32) on the cup at the forefront of the image.^[17]  

Donna Haraway, in her influential essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, states that

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of “Western” science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.^[18]

Haraway’s excerpt accurately describes the modern-day person and our relationship to technology, it is no longer man vs. machine as popular media would have us believe, but rather man as machine and machine as man. DALL-E is remarkably closer to a human than one might initially think. It was brought into being by human creators and is used to extend human expression and behaviours; trained by technicians to make textual and visual associations, having to ‘learn’ the many mixed gestures and the ambiguity of language and visuality to produce a coherent product for its human collaborators upon request. However, these ‘human’ behaviours are informed by institutional Western structures, which is how AI relates itself so well with its users. Art critic and author Ben Davis writes on the impersonality of AI art generation despite the “potential for mass instant personalization”^[19] in his book Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (2022), where he associates the rise and popularity of AI with corporate systems that keep audiences engaged with convenience and immediate stimulation. DALL-E was taught to favour capitalistic patterns, not engaging intrinsically with the abstract meanings of artistic content but rather employing calculated textual and visual associations to make a valuable product.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s (1929-2007)^[20] text Simulation and Simulacra (1981) centers around how the West’s obsession with visuality and proliferation of imagery. In summary, Baudrillard observed that the West’s production and consumption of visual culture has resulted in such a grand simulacrum that any new visuals can be perceived as simulations of already existing visual culture. As such, simulation, as in intentional reproductions, can no longer be categorized as inauthentic or as a lesser version of some ‘original’ entity. This makes definitions and differentiations between the two concepts overwhelmingly ambiguous, and thus, individuals cannot completely distinguish between the two. In Baudrillard’s own words, “[we] are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason.”^[21] In turn, due to the overwhelming power and presence given to images in society, they are now the drivers of epistemological experience, and the images are the real. Baudrillard’s theories contain many implications for AI’s intersection with the art world. AI algorithms can be considered keepers and immense simulacra propagators within Western visual culture as their usage progresses. This begs the question of how visual culture will have changed interpretations as the relationship between signifier and signified becomes increasingly muddled through the influx of AI art. The simulacra to come of AI art will complicate debates on how to define artistic authorship or whether that may be defined at all, the autonomy of art or lack thereof with the commodification of digital imagery, and how the precession of AI simulacra will change reality. One can only speculate the answers to these questions as it is also a matter of social reaction and the manner in which the art world will embrace AI. What can be said with reasonable certainty is that AI art will continue expanding on the parameters of hyperreality, drastically transforming the way our world consumes and interprets visual planes.

Artist Biography 

Maya Norgaard (she/her) is an emerging artist and art historian based in Ottawa, Ontario and a third-year Major in Art History at the University of Ottawa, currently seeking to minor in Anthropology. Her style and works range vastly in style and medium, dabbling in embroidery, digital art, acrylic paint, graphite, pen, and alcohol markers, displaying her works online under the brand name Northern Gardens Art. Previously, Norgaard has designed tattoos, business logos and other marketing images for local clientele, helped to market UOttawa’s 2023 student-led exhibition “Planting Roses in January,” and was commissioned by UOttawa to make her “Boxed In” sculpture inspired by the E21 Symposium, “Artificial Intelligence in 21st Century Education” of 2018 which was unveiled at the 2019 Symposium “Edutainment in a Creative Era” hosted at Collège La Cité. Norgaard has a special interest in Dutch Golden Art, nineteenth-century European art history and Ancient Egyptian lore and art, and in her spare time loves to watch horror movies and play video games.