And He Pays for His Half of Dinner Too!

Note: Sometimes my posts start off kind of slow, but if you stick with them there's often a pretty good payoff at the end. This is one of those.

I find inspiration in the strangest places. Like right now I'm reading a book called Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It's about souls and consciousness and intelligence, which probably explains why I keep accidentally typing "An Eternal Golden Brain" and then snickering about it. That would be a cool James Bond movie. I can hear the sultry voice of Shirley Bassey singing the the theme now:

Pretty girl beware of this brain of gold
This brain is old. It's thinking of gold
Only gold. Thinking gold
It's thinking gold. Only gold
It thinks gold.

Or maybe Indiana Jones and the Eternal Golden Brain.

Anyway, the book explores how a work of art, such as a piece by Bach, encodes information, and intelligence decodes that information. An intelligent entity can, in a sense, "reverse engineer" meaning from a work of art, to ascertain the artist's style. "Perhaps," Hofstadter writes, "works of art are trying to convey their style more than anything else. In that case, if you could ever plumb a style to its very bottom, you could dispense with all the creations in that style (emphasis mine).

In other words, if you could really understand the work of Bach, you wouldn't need any of Bach's actual music. You'd know "what Bach was getting at" without having to listen to any of his music. I know, pretty cool, huh? All the profundity without having to listen to hours and hours of classical music.

This got me thinking. If you really could fully understand the "style" of an artist completely, then you could also produce new works of art "by" that artist, in the same way that if you had a complete of the DNA of a tyrannosaurus and sufficient resources, you could make a string of increasingly lousy box office behemoths.

Now I've never been a big Bach fan, but I can see the value of creating new works by certain great artists. For example, this is worth over $40 million:



That's FORTY MILLION DOLLARS.

Now I don't pretend to be an art expert, but compare that to this painting, created by a promising young German artist at the beginning of the 20th century:



Personally, I like the second one better, but curiously it's worth nowhere near $40 million. It's probably worth a hundred grand or so, but that's primarily because the artist went on to conquer most of Europe.

Whatever. The point is, the first painting, crappy as it is, is worth an assload of money for the same reason it was virtually worthless while the artist was alive: because it was painted by Vincent Van Gogh.

Imagine what a newly discovered (even relatively crappy) painting by Van Gogh would be worth. My mind reeled with the possibilities after reading that passage by Hofstadter. I was so consumed with the idea last night that I couldn't sleep. After tossing and turning for a few hours, I got up and descended to my underground laboratory, where I proceeded to build an automaton programmed with the painting style of Van Gogh. It took all night, but by morning I had produced the one and only Vincent Van Gogh Bot.

Capable of producing an original Van Gogh every 6 hours (plus drying time), the Van Gogh Bot is a modern marvel of mechanical ingenuity and expressionism. You simply fill it with paint, give it a subject, and press a sequence of random numbers on the front of the machine (the latter is not technically necessary, but it makes the whole business seem more Star Trek-ky), and voila! (Or, since the Van Gogh Bot is Dutch, daar!) Instant Van Gogh.

He started with a self-portrait:



I can't wait to see what he comes up with next. I'm going to be so rich.


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