Photoshopping you'd think would already have happened.

You can see that someone proposed it 8 days ago on Reddit, but it didn't happen. 

"The horse appears to be digitally composed because its front and hind legs do not represent any phase of natural movement at the walk, trot, canter, or gallop."

"Based on its leg position the horse appears to be trotting with his hind legs and cantering with his front!"

So says a commenter at the NYT Style piece, "Dissecting the ‘Cowboy Carter’ Cover: Beyoncé’s Yeehaw Agenda/On Tuesday, the pop star revealed her new album’s cover, a constellation of country signifiers reminding fans of her Texas roots."

The "Style Desk" writers are saying things like "I love how she and the horse have matching hair," "she’s clearly been trying to reinscribe images of Black women into the history of the cowboys and the West," and "Beyoncé is looking directly into the camera with her face forward and it really feels like a reclaiming" and "Beyoncé seems to believe she has to position herself as a cowgirl on a horse, wearing red, white and blue, holding the American flag on an album cover to drill it into people’s heads that her interest in country isn’t a fad."

Here's the photo/illustration under discussion:

"One image shared by a user on X, formerly Twitter, was viewed 47 million times before the account was suspended on Thursday."

"X suspended several accounts that posted the faked images of Ms. Swift, but the images were shared on other social media platforms and continued to spread despite those companies’ efforts to remove them.... Researchers now fear that deepfakes are becoming a powerful disinformation force, enabling everyday internet users to create nonconsensual nude images or embarrassing portrayals of political candidates."

From "Explicit Deepfake Images of Taylor Swift Elude Safeguards and Swamp Social Media/Fans of the star and lawmakers condemned the images, probably generated by artificial intelligence, after they were shared with millions of social media users" (NYT).

Combining a photo of the head of a famous person with a photo of someone else's body is an old trick. I remember when Jon Stewart did it to the Supreme Court Justices in his book "America (The Book)." From 2004:

To those of you who are comparing Roseanne and Madonna.

I've seen this now in several places:

What I wrote when I saw it again, just now, at Facebook:

"For the young, social media filters that smooth skin and inflate their eyes’ proportions are almost ubiquitous, like a popular 'Pixar' filter on Snapchat..."

"... that made its users look like the cartoons of their youth, or the popular Facetune app. It is a short leap to 'Facetuning' in real life. Patients used to approach surgeons with photos of celebrities; now it is more likely of their own filtered face. 'It’s exceptional now to see a photo on social media without a filter,' [says Dr Olivier Amar, one of London’s leading cosmetic surgeons]. 'Patients are comparing themselves to something that doesn’t exist. And because they may only ever see themselves on a phone, using their phone as a mirror, they may not even recognise themselves in a real mirror. If they get these treatments they feel they can have the life as people seem to have online.' Why, then, has this 'bug-eyed' face emerged ahead of all the other cultural standards of beauty? David Bainbridge, a reproductive biologist at the University of Cambridge, wrote in his book Curvology that females are more evolved than males: humans have smaller teeth, flatter faces, smaller chins and less hair than primates, especially females. Many of these qualities are emphasised in 'Instagram face,' the distinctive narrow-nosed 'heart-shaped' face. 'We do not know why women should be more "modern-looking" than men,' Bainbridge writes, 'but it has been suggested that many of the characteristics men find attractive are the same as those which make them look distinctively human.'"

From "Love Island and how young people fell for cosmetic surgery/A surgeon says women want an ‘alien’ face: sharp cheekbones and big lips. Why?" (London Times). "Love Island" is a British reality TV show. 

The term "alien face" is used in the article. It's a reference back to cheesy 1950s movies and has to do with "diagonally pulled-up eyes... narrow nostrils and a glazed, expressionless stare" or something like "the image on the front of Space Raiders crisps, this kind of overbuilt cheek, overbuilt temple, skeletonised, sharp features that just didn’t look correct."

It's interesting to take that observation and extrapolate a reason why so many people would decide that's the most beautiful look. So Bainbridge offers his theory, that we somehow aspire to more and more evolution and are projecting into the future, trying to look like humans a million years from now. How do you know where evolution will take us? 

It seems as though you take your cliché image of a caveman, imagine what is needed to get from that to standard human being of today, then whatever you just did to the caveman, do it again to the person of today, and that's the ultra-evolved human being. Or — to follow Bainbridge's idea — you accept that a woman of today already has that "more evolved" look, so you plot a straight line from modern man to modern woman and keep going. What do you see? Now, get a plastic surgeon to translate that fanciful vision onto your actual face. 

Won't you look weird? Not if you've been using your phone as a mirror.

Very like a whale.

 

Nice. Irrelevantly, that got me thinking of the cloud-gazing in "Hamlet":

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? 

Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed. 

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. 

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. 

Hamlet: Or like a whale? 

Polonius: Very like a whale.

Yonder dialogue is almost in the shape of an activist talking to a wokester....

Look how they're advertising single malt whisky these days.

I'm finding that photograph so funny, because I like to take a bath and read a book, and I could be lured into bringing a glass of whisky into that scenario and to put it on a spindly table right by the tub. And I could see getting out of the tub, wrapping my head in a towel and putting on a satin robe and then picking up the book again, but under no circumstances can there suddenly be a big dog in that recently vacated bath... a dog with halfway shampooed hair, no less. That dog and all that glass... not just the whisky on the spindly table but all that extra glass on the ledge behind the dog. The message becomes: Whisky is a disaster waiting to happen. 

Also, I want my legs to remain attached to my pelvis. The faceless model has a leg that comes out of nowhere.

Speaking of reading — is that model really reading? it seems to be a travel guide — I wanted to quote something else from that 2000 article about Philip Roth that I talked about yesterday. This is something I was thinking about during my sunrise run today (as I realized I didn't finish reading "The Human Stain" by getting to the end of reading all the words on all the pages but that I'd only gotten into the position where I can begin to read it):

"Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts has said that an Ireland-based photo restoration artist broke the country’s archive law after he digitally colourised and added smiles..."

"... to images of genocide victims. VICE has removed an article showcasing Matt Loughrey’s work, whilst a petition demanding an apology gained traction on Sunday evening.... ... Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts said on Sunday that the photos 'are in violation of the dignity of Cambodian Genocide victims and of the rights of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum… We urge researchers, artists and the public not to manipulate any historical source to respect the victims.'... The project received a widespread backlash on social media with many calling it 'tasteless,' 'racist' and 'tone-deaf.'... Cambodia-based photojournalist John Vink was among the critics on Twitter: 'Matt Loughrey in Vice is not colourising S21 photographs. He is falsifying history,' he tweeted."  

Hong Kong Free Press reports. 

I can't imagine that Loughrey thought he was doing something that was anything other than uplifting and kindly, making a nice image of a real person from a photograph captured under horrific circumstances. I don't think what he did was racist, but it was poor judgment — by Loughrey and by VICE. There shouldn't be laws against artistic poor judgment, and I would think the intense disapproval is enough. But Cambodia has its own laws.

FROM THE EMAIL: Colin writes:

The people sent to this prison were tortured and then executed, usually in the most brutal and horrific fashion. After a few months of operation, essentially everyone in Cambodia knew that NO ONE got out from Tuol Sleng Prison. These people in the photos were all facing terror and death with no hope of reprieve or escape. 20,000 people passed into this place, there were just 12 known survivors. Putting smiles on these people’s faces is an abomination. It makes a mockery of what they were facing.

I agree it's bad, but I am nearly certain Loughrey meant well. It's an example of embarrassingly bad judgment, not any sort of evil. It's a shame VICE saw fit to highlight his work. 

AND: The reader Tina emails:

It’s easier to understand VICE’s motive for whitewashing the horror of communist concentration camp victim photos if you first understand that VICE is just a hip iteration of old-school anti-America demoralization agitprop for disaffected truthers types of both political flavors, funded by the usual suspects, as are Al Jazeera, RT, Unz Review, Alex Jones, Voltaire Network, Nation Magazine, etc. Also, of course, they get a permanent pass for concentration camp whitewash stuff because they courageously cancelled Gavin McInnes.

AND: Laura writes: 

Thank you for this post. It prompted me to think remember the work of French artist Christian Boltanski, specifically this piece, Gymnasium Chases from 1991. 

"If the Chief Justice is required, then what Leahy is about to do is not a duty. Taking on a role that is not yours under the Constitution is an abuse of power."

I wrote, in my post yesterday, "Did Chief Justice John Roberts decline to preside over the Senate trial of the Trump impeachment?" 

In the comments, Meade wrote: "Will Leahy be costumed in his horned animal skin shaman outfit?" 

I said, "Can someone do a photoshop of this? I'd like to put it on the front page." 

Asked. Received:

I'll credit the Photoshopper by name if he emails to say he wants to be named.

ADDED: We really ought to learn Photoshop here at Meadhouse. I can't do it at all, and Meade's effort was at a level that I call "South Park" (and find rather charming, especially coming from Meade):

I like that this image shows the Shaman/Leahy on the Senate dais, because that is where the Chief Justice belongs, if this is an impeachment trial that requires the Chief Justice.

ADDED: Laslo Spatula sends this:

And I do see that Senator Leahy was taken to the hospital after today's session. I wish him well. These jokes are just a way of saying if the Chief Justice should be presiding over this trial, then Leahy, like the QAnon Shaman, does not belong in that seat.

"This is the best gift idea I've ever had."

At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can talk about anything you like.

I photographed the water lilies of Lake Mendota at 1:27 in the afternoon today. No sunrise picture today. I skipped the ritual for a couple inadequate reasons.

At the Verticality Café...

... it's time for the late-morning snack, third breakfast, or early lunch, if you will. Never brunch, not unless you're a breakfast skipper. Breakfast skipper — that sounds like another name for Cap'n Crunch. The term "brunch" goes back to 1895, according to the OED, which finds it first here:

1895 Independent 22 Aug. 2/1 Breakfast is ‘brekker’ in the Oxford tongue; when a man makes lunch his first meal of the day it becomes ‘brunch’: and a tea-dinner at the Union Club is a ‘smug’.

A smug, eh? That never made it into the OED as a definition of "smug," but I think a tea-dinner at the Union Club sounds really nice. You'll have to wait a few hours for that, and you'll have to come up with your own notion of the "Union Club" — which was a "gentleman's club" in London from 1800 to 1949.

At the Serenity Cafe...

... you can talk all night.

(And shop through the Althouse Portal to Amazon).

At the Expressionist Diner...

... let's have lunch.

The NYT revives the old "Is it art?" debate for Plague Times: "a case can be made that quarantine nude selfies are art."

I'm reading "The Nude Selfie Is Now High Art/It has become an act of resilience in isolation, a way to seduce without touch" by the novelist Diana Spechler in the NYT.

Though the debate about art versus pornography has never been settled, a case can be made that quarantine nude selfies are art. 

Yes, but is it high art, as the headline asserts. This issue strikes me as nonsense. I don't even accept that nudes are pornography...

... nor do I accept that something is either pornography or art and can't be both. And I don't accept that something becomes more artistic because it's "an act of resilience in isolation." Routine masturbation could be called "an act of resilience in isolation."

Some of us finally have time to make art, and this is the art we are making: carefully posed, cast in shadows, expertly filtered. These aren’t garish below-the-belt shots under fluorescent lighting, a half-used roll of toilet paper in the background....

Wait. I think the edgy, gritty quality is more artistic. I think using a lot of bullshit — "carefully posed, cast in shadows, expertly filtered" — is banal and sentimental and less likely to qualify as art. It sounds as though Spechler is talking about people who are making a special effort to look pretty and using computer tools to flatter themselves. That's low art, at best. The headline promised high art.

I'm skipping over a lot of material, including talk of great painters (Goya, Van Gogh), because ultimately Spechler's own words undercut the argument. The naked selfies of the lockdown don't deserve (or need) elevation to the status of "high art." She says:

Though it might require a bit of squinting to see pandemic-era nude selfie-snapping on a par with Basquiat, geniuses hold no monopoly on the instinct to self-preserve. Or on the yearning to be witnessed. Sending a nude selfie is a request to be witnessed — not objectively, but through rose-tinted (or smooth-filtered) lenses....

That's just saying everyone has feelings and does some things that express those feelings. When is the evidence of an expression of feeling art? Is the product of routine masturbation — done as an act of resilience in isolation — an artwork?

Plenty of people are lonely, frustrated, and burdened with extra time. That's actually not the most profound feeling in the world. And "Look at me!!" is even less profound. It's not saying anything interesting or original. It's an expression. Fine.

We're not seeing Hillary Clinton's new face. We're seeing a photograph of her face.

I'm exasperated with articles like "What is the secret of Hillary Clinton's strangely plumped-up-cheeks? Fillers could be behind more youthful look" (Daily Mail).

First, this startling new picture just looks ridiculously smooth from the bottom of the eyeballs to the top of the smile lines. Isn't it just bad photoshopping?

Second, the comparison photograph of her with full aging on display (from a few days earlier) looks much better. What matters isn't whether you look older or younger but whether you look worse or better. She obviously looks better with all the elements of her face in the same condition, working together, seeming normal than with a weird smoothing through the center only.

Third, boring as I find the Daily Mail's interviews with plastic surgeons who speculate about what "work" might have been done, I do love the commenter antics over there. The top-rated comment is: "Reminds me of a hamster I had as a teenager. Such a cheerful grin it had, especially when its face was stuffed with peanuts."

"Donald Trump Campaign Disputes Claim that Photo of President as Rocky Balboa Was 'Doctored.'"

Says Newsweek, and I hope they know they're being funny, but they seem to have a hard time acknowledging that the Trump side of this is funny.

WaPo was dumb enough to tweet, "Trump tweets doctored photo of his head on Sylvester Stallone’s body, unclear why." Most responses seemed to be laughing at WaPo for saying that what was obviously photoshopped was "doctored" — as if something hard to detect and sneaky was going on.

But Team Trump was witty enough to say, "Washington Post claims - without evidence - that @realDonaldTrump shared a 'doctored' photo."

That's not — as Newsweek imagines — a dispute of WaPo's "claim" that the photo did not show the real body of Donald Trump. It's making fun of WaPo for saying what didn't need to be said.

I believe it is also intended as mockery of the use of the phrase "without evidence" in reports on the impeachment hearings. I was just blogging about that little journalistic trick, back on November 11th. A NYT article — "What Joe Biden Actually Did in Ukraine" — said "Mr. Giuliani has claimed, without evidence, that Mr. Biden’s push to oust Mr. Shokin was an attempt to block scrutiny of his son’s actions...." I wrote:

Poppy Noor at The Guardian says "Trump posted a picture of himself as Rocky. No one knows what to make of it."

Link, collecting Twitter snark about the pic.

But "no one" is a strong statement. Really? Did no one know what to make of it. I could tell you what I made of it, but it's simpler and more impressive to just look at what the Hong Kong protesters are making of it. They're carrying and flaunting big posters of that picture. The link goes to the New York Post, which says that "President Trump is Hong Kong’s sudden hero":

Hours after he signed two bills to support human rights in Hong Kong, angering Chinese government officials, pro-democracy protesters in the beleaguered city held a “Thanksgiving Rally” Thursday night to commend him for taking the action. And front and center at the rally were printouts of the president’s Wednesday tweet showing his head on Rocky Balboa’s chiseled body.

That image is like a MAGA hat, but already fully distributed on the web. Anyone can print it out and have their poster to display, and it's obvious that anyone who sees Trump as a hero can vividly (and with fun good humor) express that emotion. It works especially well in a crowd (as you can see in the photograph of the Hong Kong protesters at the the NY Post link).

The immediate deployment of the photo in such an appealing, effective way makes the Guardian's collection of I-don't-know-what-to-make-of-it snarkers seem obtuse and wet-blanket-y.

Donald Trump Jr. gets in on the travel shaming... as a joke, presumably.

https://t.co/O7JXMb6A3z pic.twitter.com/dVZtZUWoD8

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 28, 2019

ADDED: I'm reading the responses. There's this:

Trump tweets "AMERICAN HERO!"

With this photograph:



Amusingly, this is getting attacked for being what it obviously is: photoshopped.

I'm seeing, for example:

Trump, bro, this is beyond gross. This is obviously photoshopped. It’s not even a meme or something funny to laugh at because the subject material is plausible for many people who do not examine the picture carefully and don’t notice the unnatural lines and silhouettes.

It's like they don't understand the internet.... They do, but as with everything else, when Trump does it, it's bad.

AND: Then there's the truly embarrassing confusion:

I've requested details from the @WhiteHouse on this photo. There was no such canine event on today's @POTUS schedule but there is a Medal of Honor ceremony set here for later today for an active duty Green Beret.

That's from a journalist, who proceeds to abuse a Medal of Honor winner:

Photoshopped from the first Medal of Honor @realDonaldTrump awarded (to James McCloughan of the @USArmy for conspicuous gallantry during the Vietnam War). https://t.co/PHEUCZd6B0

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) October 30, 2019

Yeah, you've got a criticism, but you're kind of doing what you're trying to complain that Trump did.