The Art of Advent: Day Ten

By Polly Symington

As we approach our 2023rd Christmas, times are certainly a-changing. We crack out age-old traditions of Christmas trees, mistletoe, elves and Santa hats, but how exactly is our progressing world going to change our outlook on the festive season? For today’s instalment of the Art of Advent, we look to Cindy Sherman’s AI-generated Christmas images for a glimpse of how old clichés can be revived for the digital age.

Since 2019, Sherman has been using the AI platform Lensa to generate twisted portraits, a number of which she used to celebrate the holiday season in 2022. Though the artist has stated that she does not consider her Instagram posts to be artworks in and of themselves, she has nonetheless expressed that these AI experiments have undoubtedly inspired her continuing work.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Instagram images, 2022.

The garishly uncanny, twisted, and at times comical nature of these photographs is characteristic of Sherman’s work, which has long sought to discomfort the viewer by morphing the artist’s body into countless characters. In the case of these images, the shortcomings of AI can be seen in the duplicate pom-poms of a Santa hat, the drooping, contorted facial features of the women’s faces and the bizarrely contented expression of an old woman who, by my examination, appears to buried in snow from the torso down.

Though these images are treading new territory with the use of AI image generation, Sherman’s artistic DNA is still strongly communicated. Much like the comical expression and sloppily applied make-up in her 1990 photograph Mrs. Claus, the uncanny and imperfect visions of Christmas that Sherman provides here cause us to question both the imperfection of life, and the gaudy fun of it all.