Free Art Frees Art at the SUNY Oswego Campus—March 6, 2026

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It’s been a long, harsh winter. Time for a comfort zone realignment. I brought a load of paintings over to the local university and set up an exhibition of free art. I knew I couldn’t outdo The Camden Market Free Art Man, but this wouldn’t stop me from making an “ass out of myself” effort in this one horse town. Fortunately, the students were loving the concept. I would have run out of paintings if I didn’t have to close up shop after lunch to attend a TEDx talk in the same building. My painting “Conformity Noise” was to be featured in a talk about A.I. The speaker, Dr. Damian Schofield, put it up on the big screen and asked for a show of hands from those who liked it. Most of the people in the auditorium raised their hands. Then he said he was fibbing, and the painting was actually A.I. generated with a prompt for it to make a Ron Throop painting out of 40 he uploaded. He asked for a show of hands again. Very few people liked it. The basic premise of his lecture was how A.I. is here to stay whether we want it here or not. And he predicts a tsunami of computer art drenching earth in the near future. It will be up to the individual to seek the real thing, if that’s what he or she wants, but it won’t really matter. The “art” will speak for itself. According to Dr. Schofield, if A.I. made a movie with his favorite actor, Jimmy Stewart, then it wouldn’t matter to him if it was a real actor acting, or not.

I bet it would matter to Jimmy Stewart.
It certainly matters to me.

I’ll have more to say about that in a future post:)

Toward the end of the talk he told the audience that the painting actually was a Ron Throop piece.

Everyone liked it again.