I’m bullish about AI. All aesthetic snobs should be. In the war on man-made slop – still the most pressing threat – algorithms are an ally. After all, how much of the output of Netflix, Hollywood or Sony will retain its allure once AI is ventriloquising it to perfection? The qualities that have made popular art popular – legibility, fluency, tidiness – will surely be fatally tainted, perhaps even start to repel us. What we will crave instead is for culture to look and feel weird – opaque, messy, frangible. The experimental might even become box office.

Wishful thinking? Well if the Rewire music festival in The Hague is anything to go by – so rammed this year that it was actually rather unbearable – it might already be happening. And at this week’s Venice art biennale, the Vatican – which has a pretty decent track record on cultural commissioning – seems to have thrown in its lot with the contemporary esoteric, filling its much-hyped pavilion with a whole load of experimental composers.

Only untutored ears could have greeted such a half-baked idea with a standing ovation

Only untutored ears could have greeted such a half-baked idea with a standing ovation

Experimental music has regularly sought refuge in the art world: a state of affairs that has been a blessing and a curse. A blessing because the ideas incubated in these informal........

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