Tag: 02.18.19

Fakes Everywhere – It’s Just About Impossible Now To Figure Out What’s Real

Fakery is gushing in from everywhere and we’re drowning in it. “Deepfake” videos mash up one person’s body with someone else’s face. Easy-to-use software can generate audio or video of a person saying things they never actually uttered. Even easier? Fake clicks, fake social media followers, fake statistics, fake reviews. A gaggle of bots can create the impression that there’s a lot of interest in a topic, to sway public opinion or to drive purchases. It is even a breeze to create a fake newspaper online. – Wired

“Telegraph” Gaffe: Louvre Affirms Its Hope to Display the Elusive Leonardo “Salvator Mundi”

Seemingly the go-to journalist for scholars seeking to debunk the painting’s attribution to Leonardo da Vinci, Darya Alberge wrote about “an apparent snub from the Louvre in Paris, which is understood to have cancelled plans to display Salvator Mundi in its major Leonardo exhibition.” But a passage, tacked on at the end of her article, seems to contradict that statement. – Lee Rosenbaum

Portrait of a good bad guy

Edward G. Robinson was Hollywood’s first major art collector, and in 1939 he and his (first) wife and son had a family portrait done in pastels by Edouard Vuillard. La famille d’Edward G. Robinson “passed to his former wife” (i.e., in the divorce settlement) and seemed to have disappeared, but Terry has tracked it down. – Terry Teachout

The “Most Bananas Artistic Undertaking Of This Century”?

Rachel Donadio: “To DAU’s producers and editors, and some of its celebrity-artist guests, the project has become a vibrant creative and intellectual community, even a way of life. To anyone outside it, the project can seem unwelcoming. I’ve spent many long hours visiting DAU since it opened here on January 24, and I’ve found the films at turns maddening, boring, and pornographic. I’ve never encountered a project whose monumental, megalomaniacal ambitions are so dramatically at odds with the uneven final product. Although maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s all a big metaphor for the Soviet Union.” – The Atlantic

The Former Dancer Who Brought The Joy (And Big Success) Back To Gymnastics

“I know what it’s like to have to go through puberty in a leotard,” said Kondos Field, a former professional ballerina who had little experience in gymnastics instruction when she joined the UCLA program nearly four decades ago. “I know what it’s like to have disordered eating. I know what it’s like to have to go out there by yourself.” – The New York Times

How A Teenager’s Lecture On The US Constitution Made It To Broadway

“Much as Hamilton gave America’s founding a progressive cool factor and became the quintessential Obama-era musical, [Heidi Schreck’s] What the Constitution Means to Me captures the mood of a time when institutional protections feel shockingly vulnerable and the country is getting an unwelcome crash course in constitutional arcana. (How many Americans knew about the emoluments clause before November, 2016?)” – The New Yorker

Joan Acocella: How New York City Ballet Was Brought Down To Earth (An Epic And Chilling Account)

“People trying to assess Peter Martins’s career should keep in mind that, in the history of ballet, he had what was probably the worst case, ever, of big shoes to fill. Balanchine was an artist on the order of Bach or Tolstoy, in the sense that he had a long career, an enormous range, and a kind of poetic force that made people, when they saw his ballets, think about their lives differently, more seriously. If, at the end of time, anyone ever congratulates us on being the human race, he will be one of the prime exhibits. By contrast, Peter Martins, however beautifully he danced, was, at best, a middling choreographer, until, in the late eighties, perhaps under the strain of being compared with Balanchine night after night, he became something worse, a very pissed-off person.” – The New Yorker