When Frida Met Claude

By Peter Springett · 17 July 2026

"So visiting the Friticarlo exhibition in London and noting down a few ideas."

That was me on the opening day of Frida: The Making of an Icon at Tate Modern, muttering into my phone like a man dictating a shopping list. But voice-to-text in a crowded gallery is not a precise art. Claude's reply came back straight away: "Quick clarification: do you mean the Frida Kahlo exhibition?"

Yes, I did. And yes, Claude does speak in M dashes.

Why I started talking to my phone

Let’s back up. It's a good exhibition, one of those blockbuster shows built to pull in thousands of visitors. But here's what you discover once get past the queue. It's less about Frida Kahlo's paintings and more about the people who influenced her, and the people she influenced. I like going to galleries. But I'm not an artist, and I know little or nothing about Kahlo. Even less about the Kahloverse, comprising dozens of photographers, painters and poster-makers threaded through the show.

Options for this artistically challenged visitor? The exhibition has an app, yours for the modest sum of about £5. Penny-pinchers can stick with the usual panels and room introductions. Some of this was helpful. But both come with one script, pitched at the average gallery visitor, whoever you are.

So I opened a chat with Claude and carried on round the exhibition, half-visitor, half-madman.

An exercise in polite shaming

I didn't want to photograph a painting and ask, "Who painted this? What year?" That's the audio guide with extra steps. Instead I'd look at something, form an idea and ask Claude what it thought. In hindsight these questions were obtuse, snortworthy, and downright dumb. But Claude doesn’t judge, right?

Some examples from the actual chat.

I stopped at a painting of a woman surrounded by skeletons, dancers and butterflies, and asked what it had to do with Kahlo. Claude offered a reading, then asked me for the label. I read the wall: Rosa Rolanda. That name unlocked the good stuff: an American-born artist who married into Mexican modernism and moved in Kahlo's circles.

Then a 1978 portrait of Kahlo by an artist called Fuentes. I asked whether it was homage or appropriation. Claude guessed he was probably Mexican and read the red outline around her face as a kind of halo. Wrong. So I fed it the first name from the label: Juan R. Fuentes, a Cuban political poster artist, and the whole reading flipped. The red line wasn't a halo. It was the language of revolutionary poster art.

By the end, I was joining the dots.  Kahlo constructed her own image so that she made herself repeatable, in her own art, that of others and the dozens of licensed products that bear her portrait. As if to make that point, the final room includes Frida Tequila, Frida kitchen towels and Frida jewelry.  There are even Frida Kahlo Crocs in a display case.

What didn't artwork

Now the honest bit.

The dictation was a mess all afternoon. Frida Kahlo came out as "Friticarlo", then "Carlo", then "carno". Tracey Emin became "Tracy Amman". Claude decoded it every time, but I was the weak link in my own system.

Claude needed me more than the future-of-AI crowd might like to admit. Without the artist names from the wall labels it misread the Fuentes portrait entirely. I wasn't receiving wisdom from a machine, and I was doing a lot of the heavy lifting myself.

At one point I sent the same photo twice. Claude pointed this out, politely, like a friend watching you push a pull door.

And Claude still blows too much smoke. "Brilliant find." "Great question." "Your piece writes itself now." By the end I'd stopped trusting the praise, which is a problem. If everything I said was brilliant, how would I know when something actually was?

Muttering is still the future

What I was doing looked clunky and felt clunkier. Typing and reading on a phone, in a crowd, occasionally saying "no, KAHLO" out loud. Earphones would have smoothed it. A pair of AI glasses will smooth it further, eventually.

But the truth is this. You can now walk into an exhibition knowing very little, bring your curiosity and your mistakes, and have a conversation that meets you at your level rather than the audio guide's.

There she is again

But the best review of the exhibition came from a toddler. She'd just been wheeled out of the show and into the gift shop where Kahlo's face was stacked on mugs, tote bags, fans and boxed figurines. From the comfort of her push chair she pointed and said: "There she is again."

Five words. No app. She'd understood the whole curation-commercial angle better than me and my mate Claude. And she can't read yet, let alone converse with a chatbot.

I needed a long conversation with a machine to get to roughly the same place. But I got there, mispronunciations and all. And I enjoyed the walk far more for having someone to talk to.