Speaker
Description
Artificial intelligence has become an unexpected curator of global art. Tools such as ChatGPT, image generators, and search engines increasingly act as cultural institutions that reshape how artworks are perceived, classified, and archived. They decide, often invisibly, which works are seen, how they are described, and which narratives are amplified. Yet the databases behind these systems are far from neutral. Built largely from Euro-American collections, vocabularies, and scholarly conventions, they reproduce long-standing hierarchies of art history in which Western categories remain the default frame of reference. This digitally enforced hierarchy of visibility, privileging existing distributions of authority, is what I refer to as the Algorithmic Canon.
This paper examines what such a canon means for art histories that developed outside Western frameworks. Using nineteenth-century Qajar painting from Iran as an example, it explores how algorithmic systems absorb and reframe non-Western materials. It often appears stripped of its cultural and historical context; the interpretive knowledge needed to read its imagery is either absent or reduced to decorative surface cues. This process functions as a form of soft colonialism: an epistemic dominance maintained not by direct rule but through digital infrastructures of knowledge.
Although Qajar art forms the central case study, the implications extend more broadly. The paper argues that digital archives and AI systems, while offering new modes of access, also reassert older asymmetries of power by redefining what counts as legitimate or valuable art. Recognizing AI as a new arbiter of cultural value invites a critical rethinking of how global art histories are being rewritten and who participates in writing them.