According to the art critic Arthur C. Danto, “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” Since 2014, Jonas Lund has been making abstract paintings using elements sampled from paintings by other emerging artists, optimized for market success. The morphing animations in “Smart Cut” are made out of images from this series that were not selected for production: works as part of the process, works as they were before they got “good,” left-over abstractions. Turned into animations, these discarded images—not art, according to Lund’s “artistic theory”—have been selected by a smart cut algorithm as the best ones and automatically pieced together.
