Metropolitan Mixtape: April 2025

Alternative visions

Apr 26, 2025

Ken Kiff: The National Gallery Project

: To The Hales Gallery in Shoreditch to have a look at the exhibition there of Ken Kiff’s The National Gallery Project (before nipping round the corner to look at boiler suits in Labour and Wait, naturally).

The project is a series of paintings, charcoals and drawings in which Kiff responds to works in The National Gallery. For instance this:

Is a version of Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape by (the workshop of) Joachim Patinir:

The exhibition, which is great (and frankly, the perfect size for an art exhibition, being only about a dozen works in total), prompted two thoughts.

One was about the canard – so often trotted out by AI enthusiasts – that LLMs, in ingesting huge amounts of material and then producing output based on those inputs, are learning in the same way as humans do. That they are behaving as human artists do, in learning from the historical corpus of art and deriving from it.

This is arrant nonsense, of course. A human artist, especially a professional, trained artist, is acutely aware of all the cultural and historical valances of the work they look at and the work they produce. And they do more than synthesise: they invent. In responding to that piece by Patinir, Kiff completely transforms it, not just in medium but in meaning, turning it from that strange Renaissance of devotional image, decorative landscape and artistic skill into a twentieth century image of uncertainty and mystery.

There is, moreover, the matter of taste; that Kiff chose this picture and chose to reproduce it at least in part, one suspects, for aesthetic reasons, for reasons that might be hard to articulate sensibly and which arise from a purely individual meld of personality and experience.

This, though, suggests another reason why that silly parallel should be eschewed. Because why would we want AIs to be remotely human? Why would we expect them to be? Surely the real promise of the technology is not in replicating what humans might do, but to produce works we never could. Alien art, that’s what we want, the tastes of non-human intelligence, the dreams of electric sheep.

The show also made me think about copyright. The AI techbros have a point, albeit a small one. Everything is, after all, a remix. Art is always in conversation with its culture. Indeed it is often not even the work of a single individual; witness that ‘workshop of’ Joachim Patinir in the attribution of the painting Ken Kiff reworked.

Our notion of copyright is founded on a canard of its own: that artistic work is sui generis, the work of a lone, Bohemian genius completely uninfluenced by his (always his) culture or the work of others. Moreover it is increasingly used by corporations and streaming platforms to restrict artistic work and protect their own profits.

But the original goal of copyright – to protect the work of artists so they could earn a damn living using their talents instead of driving buses and writing poetry in the evening (see Paterson, below) – is a good one, surely. A great deal of the fury that has met the wholesale LLM theft and appropriation of creative work is that it is being done by overpaid twerps in gilets who have created nothing apart from toxic workplaces and bad PowerPoints.

Sadly, the parable of the sower begins to look like it was about the advent of AI: “For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.” (Matthew, 13:12)

You could do your little bit to remix culture by sharing this piece

A month in the country

Rowan Davies

: After shock and bargaining comes – if not acceptance – a stage of reconstruction. (Yes, this is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s ‘seven stages of grief’ and yes, we know they have no intrinsic ordering.) When even Nate Silver — neither an avowed political progressive nor a noted hysteric – thinks Trump’s second term features ‘extremely aggressive’ abuses of executive power, those of us who can do sod all about it must simply find things to do with our hands. Which is how, this month, we’ve found ourselves watching a suite of modern European films.

This wasn’t, at first, a deliberate attempt to ignore the cultural hegemon across the Atlantic. It was just that I’d seen The Teacher’s Lounge (2023) recommended somewhere, and I’ve been a big fan of Leonie Benesch’s face since we watched the first season of Babylon Berlin, so we thought we’d give it a go. What’s the worst that can happen? You spend a fiver on a not-very-good German film? Girlfriend, we recently spent two hours watching The Town (2010) with Ben Affleck. We are used to coping with disappointment.

But the thing we both noticed is that The Teacher’s Lounge is ethically ambiguous in a way that feels intrinsically European. I’m talking about Europe Europe now, not the geographical Europe that includes the UK; the Europe of multilingualism and agonising over border controls, the Europe of far-right governments and open historical wounds. Benesch plays an idealistic young teacher in a self-consciously boho, majority-white German school that is thrown into chaos when a child with Turkish heritage is accused of stealing. You might think you know where this is going but you almost certainly don’t, which is one of the things that makes it so enjoyable. Suffice it to say that by the end, you don’t know who is in the wrong and who is in the right; or, more accurately, you suspect that everyone is a bit of both.

While the UK has capitulated fully to US culture over the last ten years, skipping along in its wake and trying to get its attention, Europeans have remained at a greater distance. My theory is that — at least in part — this is not because they’re better than us, but because of the hard mental pause attendant on translating ‘cuck’ or ‘BIPOC’ into Dutch. I reckon that pause gives an opportunity to ask an important question, which is: ‘Do we have to do this bullshit?’ I can’t say for sure, because if it wasn’t about Brexit I wasn’t paying attention, but perhaps Europeans have not spent the last ten years screaming flaccid in-group slogans at each other. Or, at least, not the same flaccid in-group slogans that have preoccupied the Anglosphere. And a change is as good as a rest.

Our next stop was Paris for The Goldman Case (2023), a claustrophobic legal drama. This makes it sound like an Aaron Sorkin film when it is anything but; sure, there’s a lot of talking, but the dialogue is about the experience of guilt and the meaning of culpability and the bounds of privacy and the fungibility of personal association. It is the Frenchest thing you have ever seen, enlivened by great performances and breathtaking hair, all of it on men. And this, of course, is not a legal system that we understand; not a single statement is objected to or overruled, the lawyers exchange playground insults, and the spectators amuse themselves by shouting and throwing things. The whole thing is a reconstruction of the real-life murder retrial of a French far-left activist, Pierre Goldman, whose case was a cause celebre in France in the ‘70s, and you’ve absolutely never heard of him, have you? Neither had we.

Now on a roll, we turned to Nr. 24, a biopic of Norwegian resistance hero Gunnar Sønsteby. You’ve (probably) never heard of him either (he wasn’t involved in the Telemark raid). But you know how resistance war hero movies go, right? 25% pluck, 25% tension, 25% torture and 25% Brad Pitt/Kirk Douglas/Keira Knightley giving it the eyes. Well, not in this case; at least, not entirely. Nr. 24 is, in a lot of ways, exactly what you’d expect, but the narrative structure – in which the aged Sønsteby is giving a talk to some high school students – introduces something entirely unexpected: a long meditation on whether or not it was justified for resistance heroes to kill Nazi collaborators. Tobias and I were so astonished at the great moral weight attached to this question that we kept having to pause the film and check with each other that we hadn’t misunderstood something. For Brits and Americans reared on triumphalist war stories, the moral righteousness of killing Nazi collaborators is, like, page 1 of the booklet. But then we realised: it’s not so easy to evince certainty about this stuff if your great-grandmother was shot in the head because she had a mediocre fuck with Fritz in a hedgerow in 1943.

And then we were off to Iceland for Godland (2022), in which a Danish priest travels to nineteenth century Iceland and is driven insane. This is a proper Art Film and has an awful lot of Photography in it. Thankfully there is also a fairly dynamic plot, again shot through with moral ambiguity. Acts of violence, so routinely used for catharsis in British and American films, are sudden and inexplicable and frightening. Nobody is really morally good apart from a fabulous young girl, Ida, and that’s only because she’s not yet old enough to be anything else. (The moral seriousness of children and young people was a running theme in all of these films.)

So there you have it: our interesting month with our European cousins. If you’re becoming increasingly irritable with the infinite scroll of insufferable sludge on the Amazon Prime home page, give it a go. After all, it’s when you’re in that ‘well YOU fucking pick something then’ state that you end up paying to watch The Town. Save yourself while you have the chance.

Also in this month’s viewing

Paterson (2016): Had to watch the very stupid Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker for the piece on Sapphire and Steel, so this was the antidote. A Jim Jarmusch movie about a bus-driving poet played by Dark Lord of the Sith Kylo Ren. Calm, charming and a preferable performance from Adam Driver in this one.

September 5 (2024): We fell down a Munich Olympics-shaped rabbit hole this month, which included Spielberg’s lacklustre Munich (2005). September 5, though, was very watchable. The ABC sports crew covering the 1972 Munich Olympics find they are suddenly covering a hostage crisis instead. Featuring Leonie Benesch (again) as a German translator shoehorned into the film so there was at least one woman with a speaking part.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948): Joan Fontaine as a woman who falls in love with a rakish musician (Louis Jourdan) and devotes her life to him, even though he never realises she even exists. Absolute banger of a classic Hollywood weepie, adapted from a Stefan Zweig story, with lots of lovely back-lot Austria and everyone doing a different accent.

Ford v Ferrari (2019): Car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and British driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) build the GT40 and win Le Mans. Been meaning to watch this after David Cairns was complimentary about it. As usual with Cairns, he was right. I am not usually that interested in grown-ass men making brrm-brrms go ZOOM! but this actually held my attention.

You can see Tobias’s Letterboxd profile here: https://boxd.it/2lT6f

Playlist

This month’s playlist: ten stand-out tracks that Tobias has enjoyed this month.

The playlists are all on Spotify.

Heartbreak - Tune-Yards. A new single from Tune-Yards, that’s always good news and this is a cracker.

Calling England Home - Anthony Joseph. This popped up unexpectedly when I was at the gym and absolutely did the job of distracting me from the misery of the exercise.

Up A Tree (Went This Heart I Have) - Cotton Jones. I thought this was Jim Morrison for a brief moment, but fortunately way less pompous.

Spike Island - Pulp. You didn’t really think I wouldn’t have been listening to the new Pulp single on repeat did you?

Emperor Tomato Ketchup - Stereolab. Well, if we’re flashing back to the ‘90s, we might as well add some Stereolab, surely?

The Penguin - Raymond Scott. I’ve been listening to my 1940’s playlist this month, so my Spotify recommendations have featuring a lot of period jazz.

Disseminated - Soul Coughing. Then I realised that ‘The Penguin’ was sampled by this Soul Coughing track. ‘90s flashback, remember?

Discover Tokyo - Shuta Hasunuma. Perhaps we could all do with calming down for a moment.

How Is The Weather In Paris? - Alain Romans. I was discussing Jacques Tati with friend of The Metropolitan Finbar Hawkins the other day and was reminded of a showing of M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953) at the BFI that turned out to be packed with half term grandparents and grandchildren, all of whom, 8 to 88, spent the next hour and a half in stitches. Joy.