Brian Sewell is back—sort of. The viper-tongued art critic left a trail of artists and curators seething and teary-eyed during his three-decade reign as art critic at London’s The Evening Standard. Sewell died in 2015 aged 84. Now his distinctive, discerning voice has been recreated and resurrected—via AI—for the newly rebranded London Standard magazine, out today.
The news website Deadline, which first reported the Sewell AI art clone, says that Sewell 2.0 will review the new Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery in London (Poets and Lovers, until 19 January). The London Standard’s interim chief executive, Paul Kanareck, confirmed in the Guardian that the new publication will include a one-off “experimental AI review by our legendary critic Brian Sewell… his estate are delighted”. How Sewell’s AI voice will be fabricated remains a mystery for now though (can ChatGPT really evoke Brian’s oft-impersonated plummy vowels?).
Before we leave, please savour some of Sewell’s most acerbic put-downs. “Any fool who can put paint on canvas or turn a cardboard box into a sculpture is lauded. Banksy should have been put down at birth,” said the critic in 2009.
Damien Hirst meanwhile was also the object of Sewell’s ire, casting his poison pen over the No Love Lost, Blue Paintings (2009). “In this the words most used and most superfluous are fuck and its derivatives—the fucking chair, fucking debris, fucking rectangle, fucking artist, fucking unbelievable. I take this as licence, for this occasion only, to declare this detestable exhibition fucking dreadful.” Ouch.
UPDATE: AI Brian Sewell’s review contains plenty of material which might have come from the mouth of the famed writer, including the biting intro: “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery is yet another insipid exercise in sentimental hagiography. This exhibition, which purports to explore the artist’s ‘intimate’ relationships through a series of portraits and floral studies, is in fact a shallow indulgence in romanticism—the worst kind, pandering to the emotions of the casual visitor while glossing over the profundities of Van Gogh’s art. It seems the National Gallery has decided to package him as the patron saint of unrequited love, his works reduced to greeting cards for the emotionally overwrought.”
