Crossroads Roundup: Van Gogh "Brought to Life" with AI, Ancient Eggs, and Darwin's Library

Our favorite stories on art, archaeology, folklore, and more from this past week.

Welcome to the Crossroads Roundup! This is our weekly roundup of news related to history, art, archaeology, and anything else that our readers might enjoy. While many of our essays are free, the Crossroads Roundup is for paid subscribers only. If you haven’t already, you can sign up below to gain access to all essays, exclusive patron videos, and the Crossroads Roundup:

Wheatfield with Crows, Vincent van Gogh ca. 1890. Via the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

The Musée d’Orsay’s interactive exhibit “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, the Final Months” receives record-breaking attendance.

Beginning this past October, thousands of people have visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to see their special exhibit on the works that Vincent van Gogh produced in the final months of his life. “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, the Final Months” officially closed last week, and the museum has since released attendance numbers: a record-breaking 793,556 people visited the exhibit, with an average of 7,181 visitors per day.

The show focused on the final 70 days of van Gogh’s life prior to taking his own life at 37 years old—in this period, van Gogh produced 74 paintings in just 70 days. This particular exhibit used modern technology, including virtual reality and artificial intelligence, to create an interactive experience for guests… including bringing van Gogh “back to life” with AI.

As you can imagine, I have mixed feelings about this. This topic probably requires a longer essay, but there’s something unsettling to me about using AI to speak for the dead, especially someone whose life ended in such a violent, tragic way.

It’s one thing to create interactive experiences with the paintings themselves. One of the popular aspects of the exhibit included a virtual reality headset in which guests could “step into” van Gogh’s art and see it up close. I don’t see any harm in that, given you have the stomach for VR (it can make some people dizzy or nauseous). But the AI component?