Review of: Antoni Ziemba, The agency of art objects in Northern Europe 1380–1520, Peter Land [Berlin], 2021.

In light of the fact that Ziemba has built his book on the backs of scholarship for the 30 years prior to 2017, I would like to try an experiment. I would like to feed all of the literature from his bibliography into a hopper, and then add the articles that Academia.edu would hoover up with the keywords “art objects Northern Europe Netherlands Germany France 1380-1520,” and then run it all with an AI program. The script would be programmed to digest the literature, organise it by theme, and then generate an output in the form of a text 120,000 words long with 400 images. Which would be more useful for students? Has AI progressed sufficiently that it could outpace Ziemba at his own game?