On the Lost Canals of Vilnius


DALL·E 2022-07-21 17.39.32 – Detailed 1780 oil Painting of Vilnius street on Venetian canals with boats and bridge, Gediminas Hill in the background” by Bernardo Bellotto dutc
DALL·E 2022-07-19 15.02.59 – “Detailed oil Painting of Šventos Onos brick gothic church in 17th century Vilnius with Venetian canals” by Caneletto ultrarealistic 8k detailed prec
DALL·E 2022-07-19 15.05.31 – “Detailed oil Painting of 18th century Vilnius with Venetian canals” by Caneletto ultrarealistic 8k detailed precise museum quality
DALL·E 2022-07-19 15.04.58 – “Detailed oil Painting of 18th century Vilnius city center with Venetian canals” by Caneletto ultrarealistic 8k detailed precise museum quality
DALL·E 2022-07-19 15.02.05 – Detailed oil Painting of capriccio of street with brick gothic buildings lining both sides of a Venetian canal in 17th century Vilnius ” byCanaletto
DALL·E 2022-07-19 14.49.07 – Detailed oil Painting of the canals of 18th century Vilnius by caneletto
DALL·E 2022-07-19 15.08.20 – “Detailed oil Painting of 18th century baroque Vilnius church on Venetian canals with boatns” by Caneletto ultrarealistic 8k detailed precise museum q
DALL·E 2022-07-19 15.02.34 – Detailed oil Painting of capriccio of street with brick gothic buildings lining both sides of a Venetian canal in 17th century Vilnius ” byCanaletto
DALL·E 2022-07-19 14.48.55 – Detailed oil Painting of the canals of 18th century Vilnius by caneletto
DALL·E 2022-07-21 17.40.14 – Didžioji gatve Detailed 1740 oil Painting of 14th century brick gothic Vilnius street on Venetian canals with boats, Gediminas Hill in the backgroun
DALL·E-2022-07-28-16.14.59-Thomas-Cole-painting-of-17th-century-vilnius-street-with-brick-gothic-buildings-lining-both-sides-of-a-canal-in-1780-Vilnius-2
DALL·E 2022-07-19 14.49.02 – Detailed oil Painting of the canals of 18th century Vilnius by caneletto
DALL·E 2022-07-19 15.04.12 – “Detailed oil Painting of 18th century Vilnius cathedral with Venetian canals” by Caneletto ultrarealistic 8k detailed precise museum quality
DALL·E 2022-07-19 15.04.02 – Capriccio “Detailed oil Painting of 17th century Vilnius cathedral with Venetian canals” by Caneletto ultrarealistic 8k detailed precise museum qualit
DALL·E 2022-07-19 13.12.18 – Detailed oil Painting of the canals of 18th century Vilnius by caneletto
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There is a major revision of this post here.

Vilniaus Dinge Kanalai ​​​​​​​​
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Jau mes senai užmiršome kad XVI-XVIII amžiam, Vilnius buvo vadintas „Šiaures Venecija“ ne tik dėl to kad miestu architektūra būvu panaši bet gi ir Vilnius buvo kanalų miestas lyg kaip Venecija. Po Didžiojo Vilniaus gaisro 1610 metais, Kristupas Radvila Jaunasis liepė rekonstruoti miestą su Venecijos-tipo kanalais kad vėl tokio įvykio nebūtu. Vanduo buvo paimtas iš Vilneles upes. Šitas etapas baigėsi kai Rusai užėmė Vilnių ir bijant choleros, reikalavo gatves atgal atstatyti. Praėjusia savaite buvo malonu užtikti senus paveikslus senai užmirštame muziejaus fonde. ​​​​​​​​Žinoma, tas viskas užtruko daug laiko ir užmirštose kampose kanalai dar egzistavo iki pat pirmojo pasaulinio karo.

The Lost Canals of Vilnius

We have already forgotten that in the XVI-XVIII centuries, Vilnius was called “Venice of the North” not only because the architecture was similar but also because Vilnius was a city of canals, just like Venice. After the Great Fire of 1610, Prince Krzysztof Radziwiłł ordered the city be rebuilt with canals like Venice so that such an event would never happen again. Water was taken from the Vilnele river. This phase of the city’s history ended when Russia took over the city and, fearing cholera, demanded that the streets be put back. Of course, this took quite some time and the infill was not complete until the eve of World War I. The previous week in Vilnius, it was nice to run across old paintings from long-ago forgotten museum storage spaces.


DALL·E 2022-07-21 17.40.01 – Didžioji gatve Detailed 1780 oil Painting of 14th century brick gothic Vilnius street on Venetian canals with boats, Gediminas Hill in the backgroun
DALL·E 2022-07-21 17.40.22 – Didžioji gatve Detailed 1740 oil Painting of 14th century brick gothic Vilnius street on Venetian canals with boats, Gediminas Hill in the backgroun
DALL·E-2022-07-24-19.32.38-Detailed-oil-Painting-by-Canaletto-of-capriccio-of-17th-century-vilnius-street-with-old-buildings-lining-both-sides-of-an-iced-over-canal-in-17th-cent
DALL·E-2022-07-24-19.32.49-hyperDetailed-oil-Painting-by-Canaletto-golden-hour-lacquered-of-capriccio-of-17th-century-vilnius-street-with-old-buildings-lining-both-sides-of-an-i
DALL·E-2022-07-24-19.35.59-A-painting-of-a-street-of-old-brick-gothic-buildings-in-Vilnius-of-1720-with-a-working-Venetian-style-canal-running-down-the-middle.-2
DALL·E-2022-07-24-19.36.04-A-painting-by-Thomas-Cole-of-a-street-of-old-brick-gothic-buildings-in-Vilnius-of-1720-with-a-working-Venetian-style-canal-running-down-the-middle.-1
DALL·E-2022-07-28-16.14.55-Thomas-Cole-painting-of-17th-century-vilnius-street-with-brick-gothic-buildings-lining-both-sides-of-a-canal-in-1780-Vilnius-
DALL·E-2022-07-28-16.14.59-Thomas-Cole-painting-of-17th-century-vilnius-street-with-brick-gothic-buildings-lining-both-sides-of-a-canal-in-1780-Vilnius-
DALL·E-2022-07-28-16.14.59-Thomas-Cole-painting-of-17th-century-vilnius-street-with-brick-gothic-buildings-lining-both-sides-of-a-canal-in-1780-Vilnius-1
DALL·E-2022-07-28-16.14.59-Thomas-Cole-painting-of-17th-century-vilnius-street-with-brick-gothic-buildings-lining-both-sides-of-a-canal-in-1780-Vilnius-2
DALL·E-2022-07-28-16.17.19-Thomas-Cole-painting-of-17th-century-vilnius-street-with-brick-gothic-buildings-lining-both-sides-of-a-canal-in-1780-Vilnius-1
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Or so the story goes.

I’ve spent a bit of time this spring exploring Artificial Intelligence-driven image generators like Nightcafe Studio, Midjourney, and most recently Dall-E 2. These engines allow anyone to produce remarkably complicated and realistic (or surrealistic) images easily. These are the early days of image generators and the developments have been rapid. Clearly, the handwriting is on the wall for a variety of practices. Why use stock photography if any image you can want can be yours, royalty free, for a few dollars? Will we ever trust an image again? What will happen to pornography when physical bodies aren’t necessary anymore? Will video game environments be produced by Artificial Intelligences, based on prompts from developers, or will they be dynamically created on the fly? Figurative painting, in particular, seems all too easy to simulate and simulate well, but then I haven’t really understood the purpose of figurative painting for some time now. The sort of fan art and sci-fi fantasy scenes commonly found on DeviantArt and in Hot Topic stores are easily made by Dall-E 2 and its ilk. But quite obviously art, in its highest form—for example, conceptual art—can’t be made by such applications. Or can it?

If we see art as a constant research process exploring the boundaries of the human condition (and I am likely to argue such a thing in the second part of my post on Art and the Universal), we might begin with the observation that although image generators can’t purposefully do anything new conceptually, we can use them in conceptual ways. Returning from a week in Vilnius, I saw a friend tweet an image of London by Canaletto. This got me thinking about Canaletto’s famed capricci, fantastic images of Venice in which many of Andrea Palladio’s works from Vicenza (a town considerably inland from Venice) mysteriously appeared in Venice. Canaletto spent ten years in London, but his student and nephew, Bernardo Bellotto, who was also a painter and—confusingly enough—was also known as Canaletto, was even more itinerant, spending time painting in Dresden, Vienna, Turin, and Warsaw where he was appointed court painter to Stanislaw August Poniatowski, the last King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. After the massive destruction visited upon Warsaw by the Luftwaffe, Bellotto’s 26 panoramic vedute of the old city were used to help reconstruct the city center as a matter of “national honour.” The socialist government of the Polish People’s Republic argued that by turning back to the eighteenth century, they were reconstructing a pre-capitalist state, hence the reconstruction was not a bourgeois project and could proceed under the regime. By the 1960s, the city historian would claim that “the old town now looks as it used to long ago.” But, like his uncle, the second Canaletto enjoyed taking significant artistic license with his paintings and, compounding this, the authorities made decisions to depart from any previous epoch in Warsaw’s history. The resulting Warsaw center has itself become a built capriccio, a city that never was. In enshrining it in its World Heritage list in 1980, UNESCO called it an “outstanding example of a near-total reconstruction of a span of history covering the 13th to the 20th century.” (see more on Warsaw’s reconstruction here).

Over the thirty years that I have been visiting Vilnius, I have observed the city doing the same thing, albeit in a more piecemeal fashion. One day there is a ruin, a few years later a baroque building appears to have risen on the spot, although behind the façade is a hotel or an Internet startup. Most notable of these is the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania which had been demolished in 1801 but was rebuilt out of reinforced concrete from 2002 to 2018. In fact, Vilnius—like virtually all cities—is hardly static, but rather exists in a constant state of flux. Even now, there are threats to incorporate the city’s main icon—the Gediminas Tower—into a reconstruction of the long gone upper castle. The architect involved claims that since the original tower was only there stories tall, the current structure—rebuilt in 1933—is so inauthentic as to demand the long-gone structure be rebuilt.

Having often heard Vilnius compared to an Italian city and thinking of the nature of the Canalettian capriccio, I decided to produce the lost canals of Vilnius (perhaps also referring to the filled-in canals of Venice, California, or the missing canals of the planet Mars) in Dall-E 2. Hundreds of image generations later, I have a small selection of images for you of a city that only exists in the imagination, but that, given the propensity of cities to be remade to look like images, may yet one day come to pass.

On Art and the Universal, I

In his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger concluded that the avant-garde’s purpose is for art to sublate(assimilate) into life. In opposition to nineteenth century aestheticism that aimed to emphasize the autonomy of art from life, Bürger’s reading of the historical avant-garde—be it Dada, Surrealism, Productivism, Constructivism, or the Bauhaus—was that it aimed to break down the barrier between art and life, allowing the fullness of artistic expression to pass into all aspects of life.

For a large group of people in the developed world, this is now an everyday condition. Members of the creative class curate their lives around aesthetic choices, work and life are inseparable. Our lives are filled with intentional choices that express our individuality: we aspire to cook modernist cuisine, clean up with Marie Kondo, and obsess over the right boots and hat to go gardening in. STEM and maker culture are not opposed but inseparable: who doesn’t make their own jewelry or design their own body art these days, often using 3D modeling software and printers? Tens of thousands of people worldwide sit on Philippe-Starck-designed toilets every day. The workplace is a playground. Even after the recent plague, design festivals and biennales are a dime a dozen now. Go glamping in Marfa, spend an evening at the local sip ‘n paint, bring your friends to the immersive van Gogh. This curated life is thoroughly documented, to be posted on Instagram for the world to see.

In fairness, Bürger believed that by the 1950s, when avant-garde techniques from Dada and Surrealism had been incorporated into advertising and television (think Ernie Kovacs or Ray and Charles Eames’s films here), the aestheticization of everyday life had been complete and the avant-garde had been dealt a fatal blow. For Bürger, this is a false sublation, but I’m twice as old and jaded as I was when I first read the Theory of the Avant Garde and I don’t see how Bürger’s historical avant-garde could have ever been anything but a temporary reconciliation with an ultimate tragic end. The avant-garde was always a historically delimited moment. And if it’s fair to say that contemporary culture is thoroughly spectacularized, you would be right, but when a book on Constant Nieuwenhuys sells for $1,892 on Amazon, what is the spectacle anymore? Writing about Situationism has earned more than one professor tenure at a top university. Pinot Gallizio’s works, once sold by the yard, now sell for tens of thousands of Euros. The practices of Situationism have long since been absorbed by the spectacle. What is Dîner en Blanc® if not a Situationist practice? What is Situationism if not an excellent guerrilla marketing project?

That the Situationists or Fluxus chose to continue on with the neo-avant-garde was merely an after-effect. No doubt there is much truth there. The historical avant-garde is long dead and with it too the promise of art sublating into life.

Much of the art world has long abandoned any pretense of avant-gardism, embracing instead the idea of self-validation and value. Take NFTs, the realm of garish cartoon apes that have escaped from a Hot Topic store to scream “I am rich.” This is no different from the art at the very top of the market, touted as an investment vehicle that cuts out the vicissitudes of corporate ups and downs, skipping price/earnings ratios and dividends for an unabashed belief in inflation and the greater fool theory, but in reality act primarily as a signifier for extreme wealth and good taste (and often a front for money laundering).

Other forms of art and architecture use politics as a form of branding, taking a page from Debord’s idea of the Spectacle. Take the hyper-branded architecture of Rem Koolhaas, Bjarke Ingels, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro and their ilk, often presented by academic “critics” as somehow serving to liberate people (which I suppose means from architectural convention) or progressive (which is just baffling). 

These two positions—the idea of self-validation and branding—come together in art that espouses a political position or identity politics. Now the central point of the avant-garde had been to communicate political ideas and, especially after the Black Lives Matter and #metoo movements, there has been a burst of interest in the art world in such art. Yet, nobody has ever gone to an art gallery and come out a communist. Hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb collects art by Jean-Michael Basquait, Richard Prince, Mike Kelley, and Cindy Sherman, all of whom have been political art darlings of Leftist art critics and yet is a major donor to Right-wing causes as well as a supporter of the neo-fascist menace that occupied the White House from 2017 to 2021. He is merely one egregious illustration; ultimately one’s political position hardly matters. What does it mean to have an El Lissitzky on one wall and a Frida Kahlo on another? It signifies wealth and aesthetic appreciation, not political allegiance. What does it mean to demonstrate solidarity with an identity group? Why is one lauded for affirming one’s sexuality loudly in art, even if Mapplethorpean transgression can no longer demonstrate the shock of the new? All this merely demonstrates one’s virtue.

Many members of the bourgeoisie, unable to escape the deeply engrained notions of Protestantism, but questioning its superstitions, have replaced the delusion of original sin with the notion of “privilege.” Surrounding oneself with art that trumpets the identity of its maker is a way of assuaging this guilt, even if—as the notorious Whitney “Collective Actions” show demonstrated—political art’s functional purpose isn’t to change the structural condition that it critiques but rather to underscore and cement those very structural conditions. Nor is this new, notwithstanding the newness of the phrase “virtue signaling,” virtue and art have long been linked, initially through religion, later on through connoiseurship. And, of course, for many artists, the idea that art needs to be socially relevant assuages their own guilty consciousnesses for producing useless things for the rich.

And yet, as Peter Sloterdijk explained in his Critique of Cynical Reason, it’s the habit of such guilty consciousnesses to turn to cynical. The cynic (in the sense that Sloterdijk and I always speak of) is someone with an enlightened false consciousness, someone who knows that something is wrong but goes on doing it anyway. Having read critical theory in university, the modern cynic knows that what she or he is doing is wrong, but they do it anyway. Sloterdijk writes that this makes them “borderline melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can remain more or less able to work.” For Sloterdijk, once an individual has become cynical, his or her hope has been lost, abandoned for expediency. Take for example, the Marxist professor (a figure I met all too often in the university) who realizes that with Revolution endlessly deferred, the best thing they can do is to defend their academic position at all costs so they can continue preaching Adorno and Benjamin, even if that defense comes at the cost of cutting down rising faculty, avoiding any political activities outside the university, or looking upon staff as human beings worthy of consideration. Fascism—both interwar and present-day American and European fascism—is the ultimate result, of course, a politics based on brutal expediency, in which democracy must ultimately give way to a “politics of pure violence.”

There is, however, a choice that avoids the cynical, the choice of embracing the most degraded of all ideas in art today, that of “the universal,” and it may not be what many of you will think or find acceptable (although in private conversations, many of you have said that this is precisely what is necessary…). That possibility is the subject of Part II, which will come after an interregnum in which I get some work out there.