The 2022 exhibition The Art of Trending used daily topics from Twitter as the basis for images generated with DALL-E 2.
Presented by the Woods Art Institute in Hamburg, the project described itself as an exhibition curated by everyone and executed by artificial intelligence.
Current events converted into prompts
Subjects included the Italian elections, the Berlin Marathon, protests in Russia, rising energy prices, NASA’s DART mission, the GTA 6 leak and the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.
The resulting images were shared online and displayed on billboards in Germany. Because the source topics changed each day, the exhibition continuously added new work rather than presenting a fixed selection.
The process was not as automatic as the phrase “generated from hashtags” suggested. DALL-E 2 did not possess real-time knowledge of current events, meaning human organisers had to interpret the trend and compose more descriptive prompts.
Who was the artist?
The exhibition used that ambiguity as its central question. Social-media users selected the subjects collectively, curators translated them into language, and the AI system produced the images.
No single participant fully controlled the result, but human judgement remained present at every stage, including prompt writing, selection and public presentation.
The images also invited comparison with newspaper illustration and political cartoons, whose artists respond to current events through established visual skills and editorial choices.
The Art of Trending captured an early moment in the public debate over generative imagery. Its importance lay less in proving that AI could replace artists than in revealing how much human framing remained hidden behind the claim of automated creation.