he Lahore Literary Festival 2024 drew a motley bunch of spectators. The crowds were a fine mix to observe, from the overtly sophisticated to the scholarly bedraggled. Apart from the panel discussions being held in the auditoriums, there were poetry circles in the lawns and musicians serenading the crowds in a peripatetic manner.

First on my itinerary was a talk by one of Europe’s leading curators, Dr Alejandro Vergara Sharp. Dr Sharp is a senior curator of Flemish and Northern European paintings at the extraordinary Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain.

He is an expert on the art of Rubens and the Flemish and Dutch art of the Early Modern period. The title of his session, What is quality in art? is also the title of his most recent work, published by Hannibal Books. During this illuminating session, Dr Sharp enlarged on the thesis of his book using various slides to illustrate what ‘good’ and ‘high quality’ art is. He spoke of how immaculate technique and a deeply individual artistic premise lent value to a work of art.

He quoted from Plato to support his argument and of how the latter wrote of “the things around us having a defining character” and how a successful work of art possesses “that which is had in the higher degree of something.”

He quoted Plato on the notions of beauty and how “beauty creates longing, makes us want to approach something.” In Dr Sharp’s view, “the goal of a painter is to make us think there is something where there is nothing” and of how “art is an illusion in that illusion is magic.”

After showing the audience a slide of the 1656 painting Les Meninas by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Baroque, he reflected on how there was “a sense of epiphany” in the painting.

The latter presents a room in the Royal Alcazar of Madrid during the reign of King Philip IV of Spain and depicts several figures from the Spanish court. The small figure of the five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa, enveloped by chaperones, maids of honour, a dog and two dwarfs, is central to the image.

In the shadowy background, Velázquez posits himself working on a canvas. This painting has been described as Velazquez’s supreme achievement. Dr Sharp described Les Meninas as an example of a work of art permeating an ‘ideal beauty’ and a sense of ‘realistic idealisation.’

Apart from Les Meninas, various examples of the work of great artists were analysed for the audience. Dr Sharp’s session left one with the feeling of having engaged with the work of the masters in an intimate, irradiating manner. His emphatic ways of seeing (to use a phrase coined by John Berger) are rightly influential in art history and art criticism.

Next on the roster was a conversation between brilliant poet Michael Cirelli, the founder of the US Youth Poet Laureate programme, and the famed David Sedaris, a Grammy Award-nominated American humourist.

Sedaris published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. Each of his four essay collections, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and When You Are Engulfed in Flames, have become New York Times best sellers.

His books have sold millions of copies. Sedaris is known for the autobiographical elements of his writing. His talk at the LLF was richly confessional and scintillatingly hilarious.

When asked about what he considered good material for his writing, Sedaris replied that everything was material for him. Wondering aloud, Sedaris said that if God forbid he develops cancer one day, he would buck himself up by reasoning that now “I get to write a cancer book.”

His observations on Pakistan elicited tremendous laughter from the crowd as he was struck by the dismally low number of women he saw on his visit to the Lahore Museum. Appalled at the primarily male citizenry on view at the monument, he conjectured, “Is it Man-day in Pakistan today?”

Hamid pressed upon how “it is valuable to be a human being;” on how literature is important because it is essentially about “two human beings coming together;” and on how no one wants to “fall in love with a machine.”

When asked by Cirelli, “If Pakistan is a poet’s dream, who is America the dream of?” Sideris deadpan replied, “America is the dream of a teenage boy for in the United States everything is geared towards a teenage boy” and of how his birthplace was a marvellous place for the burgeoning imaginations of the latter.

Speaking on the ban imposed on some of his books by the state of Florida, he said that “people in America are so dumb to think that their children are getting all their ideas from books - they’re getting all their ideas from TikTok” and that “they’re not reading books and saying that I’m going to become a revolutionary!”

Sidaris also noted the antics of Pakistanis on the roads as alarmingly humorous. He found it hard to believe that a family of five precariously stuffed onto one motorcycle were indeed sober and not under the effects of illicit substances.

The Flaneur and the city comprised a panel of Ms Marvel screenwriter and acclaimed poet Fatimah Asghar, Instagram influencer Bilal Hassan and the wonderful author Dur-e-Aziz Amna. Having long admired poet Fatima Asghar’s work, I looked forward to hearing her speak.

The panellists found common ground in their observations on nationhood, the politics of privilege in the context of inhabiting a city, notions of otherness and divisions of class and of how other writers in their firmament, have articulated their sense of freedom, or lack of freedom, while traversing divergent city-scapes.

Asghar spoke of how, as a writer, it was vital for her to suspend lazy categorisations of people in her work; of how it was essential to bear witness to the ‘roots’ of what makes us all ‘interconnected;’ and of how this connectivity leads to a more generative and fecund environment of discourse for creatives.

The session, Writing in the age of AI, brought together authors like Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, Hannah Dubgen and David Sedaris. Hamid was particularly eloquent on the controversial aspects of artificial intelligence writing apps and of how “the ability to express ourselves in words seems to be declining,” and how as “AI gets better and better, we are letting it not only do our writing for us but also our thinking for us.”

He noted how it leads to “a demise of certain kinds of thought in human society,” and engendering “increasingly intolerant and fragmented groups.” Analysing the importance of narrative for human societies, he said that most of “our personality is a set of stories we tell about ourselves” and that “our view of the world is a story we tell ourselves.”

He went on to describe the way the span of AI is pervasive, embodying a “computer-machine culture encountering human culture” and that “machine culture is a kind of binary culture, it’s built on zeroes and ones,” “it’s a sorting mechanism of sorts” and that “we humans are not quite like that, we are much less binary in how we think about things.”

Due to AI, “we can see a rise in binary thinking amongst human beings.” He said that extreme divisiveness over, for example, local politics can lead to people not speaking to one another and of how this kind of factious thinking is dangerous. Hamid went on to scrutinise how AI, by its very nature, impinges on the inherent value of being human.

Hamid pressed upon how “it is valuable to be a human being” and on how literature is important because it is essentially about “two human beings coming together” and on how no one wants to “fall in love with a machine.”

Sedaris noted how AI is “coming for the easy jobs, but it is also coming for all of our jobs” and how “there’s something essentially immoral about it.” “The people who are working on AI, I am just so disappointed in them as people. I mean, we were fine without AI, and I honestly don’t see the point of it; all it’s going to do is make people stupider.” “Maybe one day it will write my obituary, but thankfully I’ll be dead then.”

Ali spoke of her cursory navigation of AI and how she found its writing to be “fundamentally disappointing” with “hilarious results.” It could do a sort of ‘pastiche’ of great literary stylists but lacked the flesh and blood quality of genuine prose.

This vital and topical meditation on the insurgency of artificial intelligence left one with much to ponder over as the final day of the pleasurably eclectic LLF 2024 came to a resounding end.

The reviewer is a columnist and a senior contributing editor at The Aleph Review