How Google created pop culture magic with the art selfie craze
WHEN Google’s art selfie craze went mega-viral on the weekend, a moment of pure pop-culture magic unfurled before our eyes.
As most people know by now, Google’s Arts and Culture smartphone app matches your selfie to a portrait in a museum collection in the Google Cultural Institute’s database.
By Wednesday, it was a phenomenon. Who wasn’t wasting precious work time texting and posting pictures of themselves matched to obscure 18th-century portraits of cravat-wearing aristocrats with weird facial hair?
Maybe not you. But I know I was. And it was just my second day on the job.
Who would have predicted that a perfect pop moment in 2018 would involve millions of people poring over obscure portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hendrick Goltzius and thousands of other artists whose earnest efforts more often languish in storage?
That’s the beauty of it for the Google Cultural Institute, which purports to use technology to spread the good news about art and cultural heritage. Never have so many portraits been seen by so many in so short a time. (Museum directors across the country are enduring sleepless nights this week as they try to figure out how they can hitch a ride on the craze.)
But for the rest of us, the phenomenon is more interesting - and more fun - than any putative good that might come of it.
Has any single app - or any single function on an app - ever hit so many sweet spots of the zeitgeist all at once?
What’s great about the art selfie craze is that it efficiently harnesses other, less blatant, but still very zeitgeisty tributaries to the culture: irony in the face of high art; camera-conscious vanity; the obsession with statistical measurement.
But the secret spice of the experiment’s success, which reportedly took even the Google Cultural Institute by surprise, might be the soft, reassuring comedy of failing, of falling short.
After all, few of these matched portraits really do look much like their selfie originals. Google admits as much with its percentage ratings.
Sixty-four per cent of my glibly smiling face, I can tell you, matches a portrait attributed to Nicolaas Pieneman (never heard of him) in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Which presumably means 36 per cent of me doesn’t.
When I repeat the experiment, trying to look as much as possible like a distorted Francis Bacon portrait, it says my closest match is William Hogarth’s portrait of an orotund, wig-wearing William Fitzherbert in the Art Gallery of South Australia.
At any rate, the 32 per cent left over is enough to remind me that at least part of me is unique. — Washington Post