I have always thought the worst thing about paintings is their static nature. That really is the main shortcoming of the form, isn’t it. Mona Lisa is so still. Whistlejacket – that near life-size George Stubbs masterpiece – is unrealistically motionless for a horse. Completely unbelievable for the famously jittery creatures. And the one thing that Edgar Degas clearly did not understand about ballerinas is that they’re supposed to dance, not just stand there in functional rigor mortis.
We have the technology to create moving images now – the movies, duh – so why bother look at all this leaden canvas weighed down with oil paint, blobby and lifeless?
Well, thank goodness for the people down at Imaginae Studios and their Art Awakens project: now you can watch Edvard Munch’s The Scream in “film form”, three minutes of the tortured figure – all blue and abstracted and AI – walking under that burnt orange sky until finally contorting into the painting’s final form. The hand-on-face, melodramatic scream we all recognise.
Talk about a solution to a problem that never existed. Or an answer to a question that no one asked. But don’t worry: there is far more of where that came from. Next on the hit list is Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. And if the listless, isolated despair of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks doesn’t quite do it for you, don’t worry: soon you will be able to watch the four sad figures move too.
The CEO of Imaginae Studios, James Duffen, defended his iconoclasm in the Times of London, saying: “If people want to keep art in galleries, I don’t think many people will see it unfortunately. And if you’re a lover of art like we are, you want as many people to really experience the joy and the sorrow of all these artworks.” Or, as the Times reports, this is all an effort to make art “more accessible” to Gen-Z and the world.
I want to take him up on both parts of his defence, in order.
First, on all the art in galleries that “no one sees”? It took me under five minutes to compile the following information. Footfall of the Louvre, Paris: 8.7 million in 2024. Footfall of the National Gallery, London: 4.1 million in 2025. Footfall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 5.7 million in 2025. Footfall of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: 2.5 million in 2024. Footfall of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence: 5.3 million in 2024. Do you want me to keep going? Because I could. But I suspect I have made my point.
Second, on bringing art to the masses? Everything about this project smacks of the bigotry of low expectations: a belief that the young, the working class or the culturally disenfranchised would only be interested in Munch if his paintings moved. How patronising to think that “accessibility” should take this form. This has nothing to do with populist “art for all” values. It is a cynical exercise, preying on the instincts of people with bad taste, who frankly don’t deserve it.
But fine. Art is reprinted on tea towels, mugs and T-shirts and flogged cheaply to credulous tourists. Indeed, that is a time-honoured tradition. Is this so different? I hear you, I hear you. But I think it is different – because it disrupts the fundamental nature of the original work, taking it just too far from the piece’s original mission. Who is Duffen to interpret Munch’s Scream like this? To recreate an imagined scene before the work’s conclusion? And to involve artificial intelligence (AI) in the process – stripping away Munch’s physical involvement in the creative process?
Cultural vandalism is a grievous charge and therefore entirely appropriate to deploy here. Duffen calls himself an art-lover, but I cannot think of someone with a looser grip on the sanctity of art. I think of a few who come close: the children who threw soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in protest at global warming. But at least they had a point and, in spite of their shoddy tactics, a worthy one. The protesters who toppled the statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston in 2020? They believed in something, too. And I would stop quite short of calling that statue art in any case.
In 1972, a 33-year-old man called Laszlo Toth leapt over a flimsy barrier protecting Michelangelo’s Pietà and attacked the pair – that’s Jesus slumped in the arms of his mother Mary, rendered in Carrara marble – with a hammer. Mary lost her nose and her elbow in the incident. And now, you may have noticed, the statue is behind thick, hammer-proof glass. But Toth launched his attack falsely believing he was the messiah. So I think we can probably chalk that one up as a medical episode.
These people at Imaginae are presumably in full control of their cognitive faculties, so we can’t even give them that excuse. Though I do wish this stunt had a similar outcome – the erection of some kind of digital, hammer-proof glass to keep Munch and Hans Holbein safe from the vandals.
To adapt, slightly, the great Kenneth Clark’s over-quoted phrase about civilisation: No, I don’t know precisely what it is. I can’t define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it. And it sure as hell is not this.
