This week, the anonymous artist SHL0MS posted a cropped Claude Monet painting of Water Lilies, framing it as AI-generated and asking their followers to describe what made it inferior to the real thing. More than 600 responses poured in with confident takes citing a lack of impasto, unnatural reflections, and a loss of soul. SHL0MS then minted the image, which sold for just over $42,000.

For the writer and curator Anika Meier, SHL0MS’s Inferior Image sits squarely within the lineage of early internet art, whose proponents would playfully hijack systems in an era before NFTs commodified digital art. When Miltos Manetas initiated a new movement, Neen, at Gagosian Gallery in 2000—hiring young geniuses to play video games and do nothing else—he was staking a claim about what art could be, building something that might fail and, sure enough, ultimately fractured. The question SHL0MS’s work poses is whether provocations have now become products.

For T.J. Demos, the subject of our second interview of the week, truly radical practices are capable of giving sensory form to justice and imagining more livable futures. As ever, like the art world, Right Click Save remains a collision zone for different forms of cultural critique.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

SHL0MS’s Inferior Image is a radical gesture for our time because it exposes the AI zeitgeist using one of art history’s safest images. SHL0MS posted a Monet Water Lilies painting on X, declared it AI-generated, and asked people why it was inferior to a “real” Monet. Thousands responded. Painters, critics, and AI skeptics analyzed the work’s aesthetic qualities without realizing they were looking at an actual Monet. The image didn’t change, only the label.

What interests me is that the work sits within a longer history of internet art. Artists such as Vuk Ćosić of the early net.art movement used the internet as an artistic medium long before social media existed. They worked with provocations, interventions, pranks, and hoaxes, even declaring the death of net.art themselves. They stole websites, hijacked systems, and questioned institutions, technology, and power structures while configuring the internet as a space for artistic experimentation.

Three decades on, SHL0MS’s Inferior Image renews the provocative spirit of net.art for the age of AI. It no longer asks whether AI can produce convincing images but reveals how quickly context reshapes perception once something is labeled “AI”, with the audience becoming an unwitting part of the performance. 

— Anika Meier is a writer and curator specializing in digital art. Read her new interview with SHL0MS.