Reviewed by Erin Dickey in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 10, no. 1 (Spring 2024),
https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.18990.
Curated by: ChatGPT, with support from Julia McHugh, Julianne Miao, Mark Olson, and Marshall N. Price. Irma Lopez, Alveena Nadim, Maddie Rubin and David Sardá provided research support.
Exhibition schedule: Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC, September 9, 2023–February 18, 2024
The exhibition Act As If You Are a Curator: An AI-Generated Exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University aimed to surface potential relations and frictions between cultural institutions and emergent artificial intelligence (AI) tools by prompting ChatGPT to curate an exhibition. For the exhibition, which comprised twenty-one objects, museum staff collaborated with Duke faculty and students to extract publicly accessible information pertaining to fourteen thousand objects from the museum’s collection database, to feed this dataset to a custom-trained ChatGPT interface, and to create a set of prompts to instruct the model in developing the exhibition theme, selecting and arranging objects, and writing interpretive text. Thus, Act As If You Are a Curator functions as a conceptual and critical sleeve for an exhibition-within-the-exhibition that ChatGPT titled Dreams of Tomorrow: Utopian and Dystopian Visions (fig. 1). This AI-generated exhibition purported to explore “themes of utopia, dystopia, the subconscious, and dreams through a diverse range of works of art.”