So, my last blog post was about love. What better way to follow it than list all the things I hate?
No wait, I don't have enough time to write all that down. How about just one piece I really love to hate? And best of all, it's one of the ad industry's most loved & awarded projects.
As a patron of the Rijksmuseum (the Dutch National Collection) I was invited a few months ago to a special polo match on Amsterdam's Museumplein; a wide stretch of lawn flanked by the cultural highlights of Holland's Van Gogh Museum, Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum and the Concertgebouw. Covered with sand, surrounded by posh marquee tents and filled with people so powerfully posh they all looked like shabby-chic stable hands, we enjoyed canapes & cocktails while men on horses artfully bashed a ball about for a few chukkas.
All very pleasant really. Until we stumbled into a tent behind the goal posts where ING bank's 'The Next Rembrandt' was proudly on display.
Scoring two Grand Prix awards at this year's so-called Cannes Festival of Creativity this project has a LOT of fans.
I'm not one of them.
Of course, I can appreciate all the work that ad agency JWT Amsterdam (in co-operation with Microsoft, the Delft University of Technology, the Mauritshuis and the Rembrandt Museum) put in to crunching all the numbers needed to analyse 170,000 fragments of Rembrandt's works to make a rather good copy. But that's exactly my problem: it's a copy
A fake in fact.
Let's just put aside the fact that a major international bank has funded the creation of a FORGERY (and ALL that it says about the moral motivations of banks these days). Let's also put aside the fact that a Festival of CREATIVITY also awarded two of it's highest prizes to a COPY. Instead, let's focus on what this project IS. Nothing more than a souped-up parlour trick.
Basically, it's the Infinite Monkey Theorem: throw enough monkeys at enough typewriters and eventually they'll create the complete works of Shakespeare.
Except they won't. Replication is NOT creation. Data mining is different to mining for inspiration.
And the thing I hate the most: that those fuckers have the gall to call it 'The Next Rembrandt'. To claim this lifeless piece of shit that's got data geeks and art director's creaming themselves over is anything close to a REAL Rembrandt is a joke, a travesty, a fucking crime. It's like teaching a bear to ride a bike around a tawdry circus tent. It's demeaning to art lovers and debases us all.
What's next: teaching computers to mimic the avuncular tones of David Attenborough so we can hear him narrate nature docos long after he's become extinct himself? Computer generated Marylin Monroes selling everything from knickers to Snickers? Every time they throw poor old Norma Jean into another crass commercial people rightly erupt with outrage.
So why aren't people crying out against this imposter - trotted out like some pantomime horse at the Grand National?
What were esteemed institutions like the Rembrandt Museum & Mauritshuis thinking when they were asked to willfully abet a bank in making a fake? Because museums & art galleries are just as much in the strangle-hold of the banks as the rest of us. Bills to pay. Exhibitions to fund. I guess they're just as desperate to suck in support & sponsorship as much as art patrons can be sucked into watching pointless polo matches while sucking up Caipirinhas in under 10 seconds on a Sunday afternoon.
Money talks. And it talks shit. It says anything & everyone can be bought - at a price a lot less than what we'd care to admit.
And the thing that really got me, that made me lose my shit, raise my voice in the presence of minor members of the Royal house? After all the money the evil minds at ING threw at making this Frankenstein's monster they had the balls to stand not one but TWO security guards in front of this mockery to protect it. Protect a fake Rembrandt displayed on the lawn in front of the very museum that houses his De Nachtwacht. Mother fuckers. I was so outraged I would've thrown my mini-hamburger at them.
But it was just so damn delicious.