Lost in The Mix

I read with interest today that the former London Evening Standard - now The London Standard and a weekly rather than daily publication - is to run a one-off, AI-generated piece of criticism in the style of the late Brian Sewell; former art critic of the Standard from 1984. It's difficult to surmise just what Sewell - he of the arch, strangled RP vowels ['posher than the Queen'], would have made of it. No doubt he would have protested publicly at the crassness of the idea, whilst being secretly amused at the notion: the customary reactionary acerbity of his pronouncements were often I suspect a deliberate goading of his audience for effect; something I can attest to personally. Back in the mid 1980s, the then recently appointed Standard critic was invited by us to speak at an AGM of the Association of Artists & Designers in Wales [blog posts passim] somewhere in Mid-Wales, deep in the heart of Cymru Cymreig.

Curiously, he accepted the engagement. I say curiously, because it couldn't have been for the money as the appearance fee could not have been more than a token plus expenses, and it couldn't have been for a love of Welsh culture, least of all Welsh visual art. In short, my recollection of the event is one of this enormously affected London art critic surrounded by a cabal of [mostly] socialist Welsh painters and sculptors, gleefully insulting anything and everything that those present practiced and represented. That the whole affair was carried through with good humour, wry smiles and much amusement generally is testimony to the mutually ironic motivations of our inviting him in the first place, and his accepting the gig in the second. I somehow doubt that the artificial, resurrected Sewell will rise to that level of comedic subtlety, as his frankly quite often unpleasant views on just about anyone and anything since his beloved Poussin were tempered by a barely-disguised tongue in cheek, which I fear will be lost in translation by the machine...