Mark Zuckerberg’s wife statue joins bad art of the rich and famous

Bad sculptures — truly bad sculptures — are different, often wonderfully so.

Think of the extraordinary sculpture of Cristiano Ronaldo that was unveiled at Madeira airport in 2017, or of the carved wooden statue of Melania Trump unveiled in her hometown in Slovenia in 2019. You try to get your head around them. You look for a raison d’être, an underlying aesthetic philosophy, some coherent explanation. But you look in vain.

I think we can give Mark Zuckerberg credit and suggest that he, too, has a sense of humor about the sculpture he recently unveiled of his wife, Priscilla Chan.

The sculpture by Daniel Arsham, a brand-friendly New York-based artist with his own fashion line, is really bad — but it’s interestingly bad. When you look at it, it just sort of collapses in your brain, like a bouncy castle pierced by a falling tree branch.

When I say “unveiled,” I don’t mean Zuckerberg drew back a curtain or, with a magician’s flourish, yanked away a giant satin cloth. I mean he posted a photograph to Instagram (his company’s social media platform). The photo shows Chan standing in front of the sculpture. She is wearing a cozy-looking Offhours Homecoat and sipping from a turquoise cup. The cup is the same color as her skin in the sculpture (and also the base, which looks like a puddle of spilled paint).

“Bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife,” reads Zuckerberg’s caption.

Swipe and a brief video shows the sculpture close-up before panning back to show the full extent of the shiny chrome cloth that billows behind Chan’s figure. It suggests nothing so much as the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The video is accompanied by a snippet of song: “Sending all my love to you …”

So the whole thing — from the color-matched mug to the cheesy music and the caption — is cute, funny, self-aware. Hats off!

The jokes have rained down, which I imagine Zuckerberg has welcomed. True, some have joked meanly about the sculpture constituting an expensive manifestation of couples’ therapy. Others have riffed on funny comparisons to the turquoise-skinned Na’vi humanoids living on Pandora in the “Avatar” films.

My glancing take on Zuckerberg’s “zuck” Instagram account (where this post appeared) is that he uses it to burnish his image (which is always, let’s face it, a little scuffed) and at the same time, to promote Meta’s products.

He seems to want to prove to anyone who might be interested that he is not a humorless STEM guy, while at the same time acknowledging (good-humoredly) that he probably is such a guy — which is almost endearing.

A couple of posts before the one revealing Arsham’s sculpture, Zuckerberg can be seen using his own face to promote a new feature on Meta AI. He explains how it works: You take a few photos of yourself, wait for them to upload, then type in a prompt. “Imagine me as a gladiator,” for instance. “Imagine me in a boy band.” “Imagine me wearing a huge gold chain.” “Imagine me as a streetwear designer in LA.”

The AI does its job, with results that are mildly amusing.

Did Arsham use Meta AI for his sculpture? Probably not. But it has that look, doesn’t it? “Imagine Priscilla Chan as a native of Pandora in the guise of the goddess Nike.” Something along those lines. I suspect that’s why the idea of it appealed to Zuckerberg.

The result, I can imagine him telling Arsham, is “really cool.” But it’s also utterly arbitrary. The arbitrariness is what makes it bad. It’s also what makes the vast majority of art generated by AI bad.

A lot of life (maybe all of it) really is pointless and arbitrary. But humans (I will venture to say) developed art to suggest the ways in which it might not be. Art — like love, like religion — is a human invention. Its deepest purpose is to subdue death and contain the chaos, waywardness and brutal indifference of the world around us. (If you’re wondering whether beauty has a role, of course it does. That’s what beauty is — a container of chaos, alloyed to a love of life.)

It’s true that some very important 20th century artists (Marcel Duchamp, for instance) deliberately embraced chance and randomness in ways that could be said to anticipate the arbitrariness of AI. But in Duchamp’s case, that’s because he had just seen the world fall apart. As an artist, he was drawn to the idea that life had meaning and purpose. But as a human — as a witness to reality — he felt compelled to acknowledge the almost overwhelming evidence that it didn’t.

AI-generated art isn’t disturbed or even mildly ruffled by this dynamic. It isn’t exercised by the idea that life might or might not have meaning, because it isn’t human. Therefore it can’t care. The algorithms create an illusion of meaning (“Oh, wow, it’s almost as if it knows what I want!”). But its deeper premise is randomness, pointlessness, vacancy. Nothing fundamentally matters to an algorithm.

Arsham’s sculpture of Chan has a special, 3D-printed, gorgeously fabricated look. If you’re into technique (how did he do that?) and finish, it’s super impressive. But it’s also arbitrary, just like the feature on Meta that allows Zuckerberg to imagine himself as “a streetwear designer in LA.”

And so the question is: Is this what most sculpture, or indeed most art, will look like in the future? Given the endless possibilities of AI, is this where we’re all headed?

It’s an amazing thought, on the one hand: You just have to imagine something and AI will (more or less) give it to you.

But if absolutely anything is possible, how amazing, or funny, or even just briefly cool will AI-generated views of the world continue to seem? What will happen when the large language models begin to feed on their own output? Will the results get more interesting, because they’re weirder, or less, because they’re even less human?

And here’s the other thing I’m wondering: Will we panic in the face of this new iteration of meaningless, or will we rally?

Will the rise of AI make us want to encounter authentic, handmade art again; art created by specific individuals working from their own unique and necessary premises — above all, the gorgeous, consoling conviction that our lives have meaning and that the chaos might be contained? Or will we let ourselves be reduced to scrolling and swiping and repeating “Cool,” “Nice!” and “Oh wow,” until the little zaps of serotonin finally splutter out?

Ashley Fetters Maloy contributed to this article.