Alejandra Frausto, Mexico’s secretary for culture, wrote an official letter to designer Carolina Herrera and her creative director, Wes Gordon, about a recent Herrera collection that Frausto described as “plagiarism”: “This is a matter of ethical consideration that obliges us to speak out and bring an urgent issue to the UN’s sustainable development agenda: promoting inclusion and making those who are invisible visible.” – The Daily Beast
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Why Is Google Street View Blurring The Faces On Philadelphia’s Murals?
“Of a random sampling of 30 Philly murals that included people, about three-quarters had some degree of facial blurring applied in Street View.” Why? According to a Google spokesperson, the technology that blurs the faces of actual people in Street View images “may be a little overzealous, likely because some of the faces appeared so life-like.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
A Choir For The Homeless Changes Lives In Rio De Janeiro
Streetwise Opera, the British company for people struggling with homelessness, founded the choir Uma Só Voz/With One Voice for the 2016 Olympics, and the city has kept it going. Two AFP reporters talk with members of the choir about what singing with the group has done for their lives. – Yahoo! (AFP)
Plagued By Construction Problems And Controversy, Berlin’s Humboldt Forum Postpones Opening
“The museum, one of Europe’s most ambitious and expensive current cultural projects, has been burdened … by accusations from academics and activists that it hasn’t done enough to determine the provenance of its objects that were acquired during the colonial era or to address whether it is appropriate to hold onto them. The opening of the permanent exhibition had already been delayed to 2020; the Forum was slated to open in stages, beginning with a temporary exhibition of ivory objects in November.” – The New York Times
Huge Number Of Works In East Germany’s Museums Were Stolen From Citizens: Report
“Starting in 1945, East German art owners fell victim to an array of inventive methods of expropriation. … In each of the four collections [studied], between 200 and 1,500 objects were discovered to have provenances suggesting they were unethically acquired, accounting for between 1% and 8% of their total inventories.” – The Art Newspaper
Worried About DeepFakes? How About CheapFakes?
Journalists, politicians, and others worry that the technological sophistication of artificial intelligence–generated deepfakes makes them dangerous to democracy because it renders evidence meaningless. But what panic over this deepfake phenomenon misses is that audiovisual content doesn’t have to be generated through artificial intelligence to be dangerous to society. “Cheapfakes” rely on free software that allows manipulation through easy conventional editing techniques like speeding, slowing, and cutting. – Slate
Rise Of The Fake Festivals
Over the past five years, ticket sales for Glastonbudget, Tribfest and The Big Fake Festival have seen a healthy increase, according to The Entertainment Agents’ Association, and there are now more than 30 outdoor music festivals in the UK showcasing tribute acts, such as Coldplace, Antarctic Monkeys, Guns2Roses, Stereotonics and Blondied. – BBC
By The Numbers: Picture Books In 2018 Were Less Diverse
Male characters continue to dominate the most popular picture books: a child is 1.6 times more likely to read one with a male rather than a female lead, and seven times more likely to read a story that has a male villain in it than a female baddie. Male characters outnumbered female characters in more than half the books, while females outnumber males less than a fifth of the time. – The Guardian
NYT’s Decision To Discontinue Political Cartoons Is Part Of Wider Trend
Some observers ascribe the paper’s apparent aversion to the reigning Sulzberger family’s alleged attitude that political cartoons, with their in-your-face messages and harsh caricatures of public officials, are “not Timesian” and “too middlebrow.” – The Daily Beast
America’s First Poster Museum Is Opening
How is it then that the US has never had its own poster museum? “We have a lot of cultural institutions in New York, and there’s a lot of competition between them,” Knight said. “Many of them have poster collections, but they use them as supplemental material. They don’t look at posters first. We think it’s really important to do that because it’s the bottom-up view of history as opposed to the top-down upper-echelon fancy art looking down.” – Hyperallergic