Robot Art Critics Are Rolling into a Museum Near You

With a black bowler hat and a chiffon white scarf, Berenson certainly looks the part of a stuffy art connoisseur -- so long as you ignore the neural network poking out from his suit. Meet the Art Critic 2.0, built from gleaming metal and sleek sensors, with equal parts smarts and snob. The sage art critic once commanded considerable power in creative spheres, making or breaking an artist's career with a simple smirk of disapproval or a punishing review in next day's paper. But today, as the number of full-time art critics dwindles in newsrooms, a growing force of high-tech art experts is starting to pick up the slack by methodically decoding art's finest details. In Canada, the Roomba-esque kulturBOT snaps photos at exhibitions and uses an algorithm-powered "stream of consciousness" to tweet out the images with often nonsensical captions like "panting with love of danger" or "streaked with the nocturnal vibration."