IS ARTWORK INTELLIGENT?

ARTREVIEW
DECEMBER 3, 2025

“Echoes of Tenen’s ideas emerged a week later at a forum titled ‘Matter of Intelligence’ organised by the Vera List Center, at New York’s New School. The keynote lecture by philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘AI and Madness: On the Disalienation of the General Intellect’, examined the mechanisation of intelligence via psychometrics, a subject Pasquinelli explored in his book The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (2023) to show that AI does not model the human brain so much as it models stratified labour and social relations. Intelligence, as Pasquinelli conceives of it in his book, signifies the measurement, disciplining and surveillance of labour. It comprises, as he stated in his lecture, “the institution of public education” and “the spontaneous know-how of the working class”. According to this view, one would gain less from criticising AI-IAE than from observing how the intelligence of a system like the artworld – with its complex social division of labour – produces forms of knowledge that alienate even its insiders.”

“How, in this sense, might ‘language against intelligence’ sound? Perhaps like parody, à la (question–repeat–failure–record) (2025), a lecture-performance by artists Sandra Erbacher and Ruth Estévez that took place at the Vera List Center Forum the morning after Pasquinelli’s keynote. Here, the performers took up the subject of intelligence by conducting research on women such as Carrie Buck and Britney Spears who’d had their rights stripped on account of their perceived aptitude. Throughout the performance, Erbacher and Estévez volleyed invasive questions excerpted from archival documents, trial transcripts, press clippings and IQ tests across a table: “Are your parents living?” “Could you still live with them?” “Can you feed yourself or do you prefer to be fed by others?” Their mutual interrogation was intermittently paused when old-timey instruction videos for visualising the ‘perfect human’ and implementing mnemonic techniques were projected on screens in the lecture hall and rapidly devolved into pointed absurdities: “How many buttons do you have on your jacket?” “Do we want to perform a test that everybody can pass?” “How should a normal person be compared to another normal person?”

–Jenny Wu