The Getty Museum Acquires Its First A.I.-Generated Artwork
“Cristian en el Amor de Calle” by Costa Rican artist Matías Sauter Morera will appear in the museum’s upcoming exhibition, “The Queer Lens: A History of Photography”
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Two young Latino men wearing embellished blue jackets appear to stare directly at the viewer in Cristian en el Amor de Calle, a piece created by artist Matías Sauter Morera. The image looks like a photograph—but it wasn’t made with a camera. Instead, Sauter Morera used artificial intelligence and photo editing tools to generate the striking work.
Cristian en el Amor de Calle will appear in “The Queer Lens: A History of Photography,” an upcoming exhibition at the Getty Museum. The Los Angeles institution recently acquired the piece, marking the first time it has purchased an A.I.-generated photograph for its collection, reports Artnet’s Adam Schrader.
The Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica announced the acquisition in an Instagram post. Paul Martineau, who is curating the upcoming exhibition and serves as the Getty Museum’s photography curator, later confirmed the purchase to Artnet.
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Sauter Morera is a Costa Rican artist who splits his time between Berlin and Costa Rica. He created Cristian en el Amor de Calle as part of a series called Pegamachos, which reimagines a period in the 1970s when “straight cowboys on the Guanacaste Coast ‘secretly’ hooked up with young gay men from the city,” per the Instagram post.
Sauter Morera is a photographer, and he initially considered using a camera to produce the images in Pegamachos. But given the secrecy of pegamachos culture, he didn’t want to risk exposing the identities of his subjects. So, he turned to A.I. instead.
The series “serves as a platform to address various issues shaping the identity of the gay community,” according to the Photographic Arts Council LA, which hosted a virtual conversation with Sauter Morera last year. “It raises questions about social gender expectations, freedom of expression, relationships between gay men and the historical invisibility of LGBTQ+ individuals”
For his part, Sauter Morera does not consider the works in Pegamachos to be photographs. “That is part of the concept,” he tells Artnet. “I view A.I. as a creative medium in itself, distinct from photography.”
Martineau says that the Getty Museum did not have any ethical concerns about acquiring Cristian en el Amor de Calle because Sauter Morera uses “hundreds of commands and choices that take months to perfect,” he tells Artnet.
“A.I. is just one element that Sauter Morera incorporated into his complex working method,” he adds.
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In recent years, critics have argued that A.I image and text generation tools will harm artists, whose works are sometimes used without permission to train A.I. models. When Craig Krull Gallery announced the news of Cristian en el Amor de Calle’s acquisition on Instagram, some commenters chimed in to express their opposition.
“Training and stealing/minimizing art made [by] humans isn’t really what art is all about, is it?” one user wrote.
Meanwhile, proponents have insisted that A.I. can help artists become more efficient and creative. They also view A.I. as another tool, like a camera, that artists can use to bring their vision to life.
Craig Krull, the gallerist who represents Sauter Morera in the United States, says A.I. is just the “latest cause of growing pains” in photography’s evolution.
“People bemoaned the death of the medium with the coming of the digital age,” Krull tells Artnet. “We learned to make photographs without film; now we are learning to make photographs without a camera.”
“The Queer Lens: A History of Photography” will be on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles from June 17 to September 28.
