Standing male by nude lucian freud

We have every (or almost every) indication to think that Lucian Freud made Standing Male Nude with his own hands. However, in accordance with this own wishes, this painting cannot be sold or exhibited as a Lucian Freud. Like every artist, Freud destroyed paintings that he rejected for one reason or another. We don’t need to know why – artists are allowed to do this. Choosing to put art into the world means choosing what is and is not your art. Freud also chose not to destroy paintings that, for similar reasons, he did not include as part of his oeuvre. A Freud painting no one will ever be able to see is just as conceptually destroyed as a Freud painting that no longer exists.

The peculiar thing about this “destroyed” Freud is that it has been “authenticated” as a Freud but no longer can fit into the world as a Freud painting. It will forever be “the disputed Freud painting.” There are others, and, honestly, I’m not going to do a better job than the New Yorker did of explaining the situation.

And the situation is the unique thing here. Attribution and authorship in AI generated art are thorny and unresolved, but in a way that is distinct from the thorny and unresolved attribution of this painting.

You could look at this case as a sort of distorted combination of Torres’s piece and Rauchenberg’s – a machine could not make this without first being able to make enemies, and it must be able to remove something from the world – specifically the art world – in a meaningful way.